Falling for her Convenient Husband

‘And that covers the last eight years?’ he queried sceptically.

He halted, and she halted with him, and all at once they were facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes. Her heart suddenly started to go all fluttery, so that she had to turn from him to get herself together. She supposed she had always known that this, ‘the day of reckoning,’ would come.

She took a deep breath as she recognised that day was here. ‘What you’re really asking,’ she began as they started to stroll on again, ‘is what was the real reason my father wanted me married and single again with all speed?’ She was amazed that, when she was feeling all sort of disturbed inside somehow, her voice should come out sounding so even.

‘It would be a good place to begin,’ Nathan murmured.

He was owed. Owed more than that she just tell him about herself. And he, she realised, wanted the lot. ‘I’m sure you’ve guessed most of it,’ she commented. She glanced over to him, and caught the slight nod of his head.

‘I was too desperate in my need to save the company to look for hidden angles in your father’s offer. But as I started to take on board that I’d been had, I began to probe deeper. And, while I still didn’t know “what”, it didn’t take a genius to realise—too late,’ he inserted, ‘that there had to be some other reason why your father wanted you in and out of a marriage in five minutes.’

That ‘too late’ made her wince. But she was honest enough to know that it was justified. ‘You were quicker at picking that up than me,’ she remarked, remembering how it had been that night. ‘That’s why you let my father believe an—er—annulment was out of the question, wasn’t it?’

‘It was the first time I’d seen him with you. It was pretty obvious from the way he spoke of and to you that an annulment was more important to him than simply doing a father’s duty and watching out for you. His prime concern, clearly, was that annulment.’ Nathan shrugged. ‘As enraged as I was, the question just begged to be asked—if he was so uncaring, why was he going to such extraordinary lengths to help his daughter gain ten percent of her inheritance.’

‘You knew that there must be some other reason?’

‘By then every last scrap of my trust in the man had gone. It didn’t take long for me to see that, shark that he is, there had to be something in it for him.’

It should, she supposed, have upset her to hear her father referred to as a shark, but what Nathan Mallory was saying was no more than the truth. My word, was he telling the truth! ‘There was,’ she had to agree. Now that she was in possession of the true facts of her grandfather’s will, she was totally unable to defend her father. And since the man she had married had been the one to have suffered most, she did not see how—or why for that matter—she should try to defend her father’s atrocious actions either. ‘There was something in it for him,’ she confessed quietly. ‘Something he had no chance to claim should I stay married.’

Nathan looked down at her as they ambled along. ‘You’re not going to leave it there, I hope?’ he enquired evenly.

For a few seconds Phelix struggled with a sense of disloyalty to her father. But he had long since forfeited any right to her loyalty. And Nathan wasowed! ‘My father had plans that would never come to fruition if that annulment did not take place,’ she said at last. ‘But you’d realised that, hadn’t you?’

‘Sensed, more than knew,’ Nathan replied, but asked sharply, ‘Did you know in advance—?’

‘No!’ she protested hotly, not wanting to be tarred by the same disreputable brush as her father. ‘I didn’t so much as suspect…I’d not the smallest idea. I was still totally in the dark the next morning, when Henry Scott came to the house with some paperwork he needed to go through with my father. When my father was hung up with some business on the phone, I made Henry some coffee. Grace, our housekeeper, wasn’t back,’ Phelix vividly recalled.

‘She’d had the previous night off—she’d been to the theatre.’

‘You remember that!’

‘I have forgotten absolutely nothing about that night!’ Nathan said grimly.

Her heart did a peculiar kind of flutter. She had lain in her bed. He had cradled her close. ‘Er—Grace is still with us. She should have retired ages ago, but… Anyway.’ Phelix strove to get back to what they were saying, and came abruptly down to earth when close on that memory she thought of her father returning home that night. ‘I was a bit down—still coming to terms with my mother’s sudden death, and— Well, anyway, Henry—with the patience of a saint, I have to say—dragged from me what had happened.’

‘You told him you’d got married?’ Nathan’s tone had sharpened.

‘There’s no need to sound so tough! I was very upset over the way you had been treated! I told him my father had defaulted on some money he’d promised a businessman—er—who was down on his luck—to marry me. But I never said who the man was, and I never would. Nor, you can be sure, would my father.’

Nathan nodded. ‘So you told Henry Scott that you’d married, and why?’ he prompted.

‘And I’m glad I did,’ she answered. ‘Henry’s got a shrewder head than me. He asked if I’d seen my grandfather’s will. I hadn’t, of course. So Henry then asked me what the letter from my grandfather’s solicitors had said.’

‘But you hadn’t received any letter from them,’ Nathan stated.

‘You’re shrewder than me too,’ she commented.

‘You were standing too close to the picture to see it as Henry Scott and I see it.’

‘I suppose you’re right. Anyhow—’ she broke off. ‘I must be boring you with all of this.’

‘Don’t you dare stop now,’ Nathan ordered. ‘I’ve waited eight years to hear this!’

Phelix flicked him a sharp look. Oh, my, was he owed! ‘I’m—er—trying not to be too disloyal to my father here…’ she began—and had her ears scorched for her trouble.

‘Good God, woman!’ Nathan snarled fiercely, halting in his stride. ‘You think that man deserves your loyalty?’ Phelix stopped walking too and looked up into Nathan’s angry grey eyes. ‘For his own ends—whatever they were—he used you! In doing so he thereby gave up all right to any loyalty from you!’ But suddenly then Nathan seemed to pause in his anger, somehow seeming to collect himself, and he was much less angry when, quietly, he promised, ‘You have my word, Phelix, that whatever it was your father was up to I won’t broadcast it.’