Merger By Matrimony

‘I think what Derek means is that I’ve only skimmed the surface of the proposal you had in effect with my uncle. He doesn’t want to see me taken advantage of.’

‘I should think not!’ Derek sounded horrified.

‘Oh, nothing could be further from my mind.’ His low laugh was not reassuring. In fact, it just upped the tempo of her already skittering pulses. ‘So now we all understand each other. I’m not about to take advantage of your client, Derek, so you can leave us alone for a while to discuss matters in privacy.’ There was a hard edge to his voice now, although his body was still relaxed and his smile didn’t falter.

‘It’s all right, Derek,’ she said, releasing him from his state of nervous tension before he exploded all over his pristine mahogany desk. ‘I can take care of myself. If I need you, I can always give you a shout.’

‘This is all highly unorthodox,’ he faltered, fumbling with his tie and frowning disgruntledly but standing up anyway.

Callum shot him a soothing look from under his dark lashes. At least Destiny, watching him covertly, suspected that it was meant to be soothing. In reality, it just seemed to make Derek even more jittery. Or maybe that was the intention. She’d never had any opportunity to see first-hand how power, real power, worked. She was learning fast.

Her body was rigid with tension as the door closed behind her buffer and Callum slowly positioned his chair so that he was completely facing her now.

She looked at him steadily. For the second time in as few days, she felt utterly disadvantaged in what she was wearing. It had never really occurred to her that the highly coloured clothes she’d brought over with her would make her stand out like a sore thumb in a country where everyone—certainly everyone in the Wilson legal firm—seemed to be attired in shades of black, brown or navy blue. No wonder the man thought that she was a push-over.

‘What’s Derek told you about me?’ he drawled, linking his fingers together on his lap and stretching out his long legs in front of him, so that they were very nearly touching hers, which she had tucked protectively under her chair.

‘That you were on the verge of consolidating a bid for my uncle’s company. That it all fell apart when he died.’

‘That all?’ He cocked his head to one side, as though listening for something she couldn’t hear.

‘What more is there?’ she asked politely.

‘No character assassination?’

‘I’m not in the habit of repeating other people’s personal opinions,’ she said calmly.

‘No, I can understand that. It would be a disaster in a compound of only a handful of people.’

‘How do you know…?’

‘I made it my business to find out before you came over here. Forearmed is forewarned, as the saying goes.’ Actually, he had done nothing of the sort. His mention of a compound had been an inspired guess and he wasn’t quite sure what he’d been hoping to achieve with his distortion of the truth. He suspected, darkly, that it was a desire to provoke some sort of reaction from her. He was accustomed to people responding to him, focusing on every word he had to say. He could feel niggling irritation now at his staggering lack of success in that department. She looked back at him with those amazing sea-green, utterly unreadable eyes.

‘I hadn’t expected you to have such a good grasp of English,’ he said bluntly, veering away from the topic, watching as she tucked some hair behind her ears.

Destiny hesitated, uncertain at the abrupt ceasefire. ‘My parents certainly always spoke to me in English, wherever we happened to be. They always thought that it was important for me to have a good grasp of my mother tongue. Of course, I speak Spanish fluently as well. And French, although my German’s a bit rusty.’

‘Isn’t that always the case?’ he said drily, and she glanced at him, surprised at his sudden injection of humour. With a jolt of discomfort, she realised that, although he had not chosen to display it, there was humour lurking behind the sensual lines of his mouth and she hurriedly averted her eyes.

‘There are a number of French workers on the compound, but our German colleagues have been more sporadic so I haven’t had the same opportunity to practise what I’ve learnt.’

‘You’ve studied?’

That brought her back to her senses. Just when an unwelcome nudge of confusion was beginning to slip in. Did the man think that she was thick? Just because her lifestyle had been so extraordinary?

‘From the age of two,’ she said coolly. ‘My parents were obsessive about making sure that my education didn’t suffer because of the lifestyle they had chosen. Sorry to disappoint you. Now, getting back to business, I’m not qualified to agree to anything with you. I still have to see the company, meet the directors…’

‘Do you know why Felt Pharmaceuticals has been losing money over the past five years?’ he cut in, and when she shook her head he carried on, with no attempt to spare her the details. ‘Shocking mismanagement. Cavalier and ill-thought-out overinvestment in outside interests with profits that should have been ploughed back into the company, interests that have all taken a beating…’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I made it my business to know.’

‘Just like you made it your business to find out about me before I came over here?’

He didn’t like being reminded of that little white lie and he uncomfortably shifted in his chair. ‘Unless you’ve taken a degree course in business management, you might not be aware that taking over a company requires just a touch of inside knowledge on the company you’re planning to take over.’

‘That’s common sense, not business management know-how,’ Destiny informed him, riled by the impression she got that he was patronising her.

He swept aside her input. ‘For the past five years old Abe, miserable bastard that he was, was bedridden and had more or less been forced to hand over control to his directors—who are good enough men when being told what to do, but on their own wouldn’t be able to get hold of a pint of beer in a brewery.’

‘What was the matter with him?’

‘What was the matter with whom?’ One minute mouthing off at him with cutting efficiency, the next minute looking like a vulnerable child. What the hell was this woman all about? He had known enough women in his lifetime not to be disconcerted by anything they said, did or thought, for that matter, but Destiny Felt was succeeding in throwing him off balance. How could someone be forthright and secretive at the same time? He nearly grunted in frustration. ‘He had a stroke and never really recovered,’ Callum said. ‘Of course, he remained the figurehead for the company but his finger was no longer on the button, so to speak.’

‘At which point you decided to break into the scene, once you’d checked out where the weak spots were,’ she filled in, reading the situation with the same logical clarity of thought that she’d inherited from both her parents.

‘It’s called doing business.’

‘Business without a heart.’

‘The two, I might as well warn you, in case you’re foolhardy enough to stick around, don’t go hand in hand.’ He hadn’t felt so alive in the company of a woman for as long as he could remember. He sincerely hoped that she stuck around, just long enough for him to enjoy the peculiar sparring they were currently establishing that was so invigorating, but not long enough to thwart his plans. His eyes drifted from her face to the swell of her breasts jutting out against the thin dress and he drew his breath in sharply.

Dammit, he was engaged! He shouldn’t be looking at another woman’s breasts, far less registering their fullness, mentally stripping her of her bra. The thought felt almost like a betrayal and he glared at her with unvoiced accusation that she had somehow managed to lead his mind astray.

‘Why did you call him a miserable bastard?’

‘You won’t be able to revive the company, you know,’ he said conversationally, standing up and prowling through the office, casually inspecting the array of legal books carefully arranged in shelves along one wall, then moving behind the desk to the picture window and idly gazing through it. ‘You haven’t the experience or the funds. My offer is wildly generous, as Abe would have been the first to admit.’ He turned around to look at her, perching against the window ledge. ‘Wait much longer and you’ll end up having to sell anyway, for a song, so it’s in your interests to give it up sooner rather than later. And then you can get back to your jungle, where you belong. It’s a different kind of jungle here. One I don’t imagine you’ll have a taste for.’

‘This is more than just business profit for you, isn’t it?’ Destiny said slowly. ‘You speak as if you hated my uncle. Did you? Why? What was he like?’

‘Use your imagination. What sort of man wills his fortune to someone he’s never met?’

‘I was told that it was because I was his only blood relation. I gather he had no children of his own. He and my father weren’t close, but I was his niece.’ It had been a straightforward enough explanation from Derek, but Callum’s words had given her pause for thought. Abraham Felt, after all, had never met her. He and her father had maintained the most rudimentary of contact over the years. Surely in all that time he should have filled his life with people closer and dearer, to whom his huge legacy would have been more fitting?

‘He left it all to you because Abraham Felt was incapable of sustaining friendships.’

‘He had hundreds of wives, for goodness’s sake!’

‘Four, to be exact.’

‘Well, four, then. He must have shared something with them.’

‘Beds and the occasional conversation, I should imagine. Nothing too tricky, though. He was noted for his contempt for the opposite sex.’

‘How do you know that? No, don’t tell me, you made it your business to find out. I’m surprised you have time to do any work, Mr Ross, since you seem to spend most of it ferreting out information on my uncle and his company.’

For a split second, Callum found himself verbally stumped by her sarcasm. Oh, yes. He had to confess that he was enjoying himself. How on earth the depths of a Panamanian forest had managed to satisfy this woman, he had no idea. She was sharp. He wondered what life on this compound of hers really was like. Having spent his entire life in concrete jungles, he wondered whether a close community in the middle of nowhere might not be a hotbed of conversations stretching into the wee hours of the morning. Not to mention sizzling sex. After all, what else was there to do? For years and years on end? Cut off from civilisation and surrounded by hostile nature?