Remarried In Haste. Sandra Field

Чтение книги онлайн.

      PROLOGUE

      “IT’s time you go and see your wife, Brant.”

      The rounded beach stone Brant had been idly playing with slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor. The noise it made seemed disproportionately loud, jarring his nerves. He bent to pick it up and said coolly, “I don’t have a wife.”

      Equally coolly, Gabrielle said, “Her name’s Rowan.”

      “We’re divorced. As well you know.”

      Gabrielle Doucette was leaning back in her seat, her legs slung carelessly over one arm of the chair; her bundled black hair and deep blue eyes were very familiar to him, as was her ability to look totally relaxed in tense situations. “Sometimes,” she said, “a divorce is just a legal document, a piece of paper with printing on it. Nothing to do with the heart.”

      “I was legally separated for a year, and I’ve been divorced for fourteen months,” Brant said tightly. “In all that time I’ve neither heard from Rowan nor seen her. Her lawyer sent back my first batch of support checks with a letter that told me, more or less politely, to get lost. The letter with the second batch was considerably less polite. All of which, to my mind, indicates something a little more significant than a mere legal document.”

      Gabrielle stared thoughtfully into her glass of wine; they had eaten bouillabaisse, which was her specialty, and had moved from the table to sit by the window of her Toronto condominium, which overlooked the constant traffic of the 401. “On her part, maybe.”

      “On mine, too.” Brant tipped back his glass, draining it. “When are you going to produce the delectable dessert I know you’ve got hidden away somewhere in the refrigerator?”

      “When I’m ready.” She smiled at him, a smile of genuine affection. “You and I were thrown together for eight months under circumstances that were far from ordinary—”

      “That’s the understatement of the year,” he said; the stinking cells, the oppressive heat, the inevitable illnesses to which they’d both succumbed had been quite extraordinarily unpleasant. Not to say life-threatening.

      “—Yet you never fell in love with me.”

      He opted for a partial truth; he had no intention of telling her certain of the reasons why he hadn’t fallen in love with her, they were entirely too personal. “I knew you weren’t available,” he said. “You still haven’t gotten over Daniel’s death.” Daniel had been her husband of seven years, who’d died in a car accident before Brant had met Gabrielle.

      “True enough.”

      He looked around the stark and ultramodern room. “Besides, I don’t like your taste in furniture.”

      She chuckled. “That, also, is true. But I think there’s another reason. You didn’t fall in love with me because you still love Rowan.”

      Brant had seen this coming. Keeping his hands loose on the stem of his glass, he said, “You’re missing out by being a labor negotiator, Gabrielle—you should be writing fiction.”

      “And how would you feel if you heard Rowan was about to remarry?”

      His whole body went rigid; for a split second he was twenty-six years old again, back in Angola that sultry evening when a live grenade had arched gracefully through the air toward him and his feet had felt like lumps of concrete. He rasped, “Is she? Who told you?”

      Gabrielle smiled again, a rather smug smile. “So you do care. I thought you did.”

      “Very clever,” Brant said, making no attempt to mask his anger; he and Gabrielle had long ago passed the point of being polite to each other for the sake of outward appearances.

      “It’s bound to happen sooner or later,” Gabrielle continued placidly. “Rowan is a beautiful and talented young woman.”

      “What СКАЧАТЬ