show what a lucky escape we all had, then, doesn’t it?’ she mocked rather bitterly, recalling—as no doubt Jemma was recalling—the headline on Mrs Clough’s daily newspaper which had said, DANVERS BROTHERS SWAP BRIDES IN SENSATIONAL LOVE TUSSLE!
What a joke, Shaan thought bitterly. And what a pack of lies for the sake of a catchy headline. Rafe didn’t love her, and Madeleine had never been his bride!
She was now Piers’ bride, though, Shann recalled dully. The article had said so: ‘Piers Danvers married Madeleine Steiner only an hour after he should have been marrying Shaan Saketa’.
Which meant that Piers must have been planning to let her down long before he bothered to tell her he no longer wanted her.
There had been more in the article, but Rafe had happened to walk into the kitchen then, and snatched the newspaper away from her. His black fury at Mrs Clough for bringing it into his house had been enough to turn the other woman white, while Shaan had just sat there shuddering in sick disgust at the depths of Piers’ deceit.
‘Do you think you’ll have time to pick something suitable out for me to wear tomorrow?’ she asked Jemma now, dragging her mind away from the only moment since this had all begun when she had been in real danger of breaking free from this numbing shock she was hiding behind.
Rafe had stopped her; he had bodily lifted her off the kitchen chair and marched her into his study, then dumped her down in front of a PC, switched it on and shoved a handwritten twenty-page document in front of her. ‘You can type, can’t you?’ He’d mocked her look of bewilderment. ‘So—type. I need it by lunchtime.’
‘Yes, of course I will.’ Jemma’s voice seemed to reach her from some totally alien place outside her muddled thought patterns. ‘But I wish you’d take a little time out to think about this before doing it,’ she added worriedly. ‘You could be jumping straight out of the frying pan into the fire—have you thought of that?’
Of course she had. When Rafe gave her the chance to think for herself, that was. And that had definitely not been yesterday, when he’d heaped piles of work on her, she recalled ruefully.
But thinking didn’t help. Nothing helped. She simply did not care what happened to her. So, ‘I love him,’ she claimed, the reality of the words meaning nothing to her any more. ‘He’s what I want. Don’t spoil it for me, Jemma.’
‘All right.’ Jemma’s sigh was long-suffering but her manner softened a little when she added, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
* * *
Jemma’s choice was a Mondi suit in the severely tailored style that particular design house had made its own in recent years. The skirt was daringly short and needle slim, and the matching jacket moulded Shaan’s slender figure to low on her hips and was fastened with gold military buttons to match the military braiding around the sleeve-cuffs and the collar. There was no blouse. The fitted style of the jacket left no room for a blouse, and the shortness of the skirt seemed to add an alarming length to her slender legs, which were encased in the sheerest white silk.
‘Too short?’ she asked Jemma pensively, giving a self-conscious tug at the skirt-hem.
‘Are you joking?’ Jemma scoffed, standing beside Shaan to view the finished product in the full-length mirror. ‘Rafe’ll need holding back when he sees you in this. You look fabulous, Shaan,’ she added softly. ‘Utterly stunning.’
But Shaan didn’t feel stunning. She felt as if she was looking at a total stranger. As if that girl, with the big brown empty eyes and jet-black hair swept sleekly away from her face into a silken knot on the crown of her head, was someone else entirely.
In fact the only thing she did recognise, which said it really was herself standing there, was the fine gold chain around her throat, with its heart-shaped locket suspended from it, which held photographs of her parents’ beloved faces.
Cold fingers tremored up to gently touch the familiar locket, and suddenly tears were flooding to blur out the reflection.
‘Why the tears?’
With a small start she blinked the moisture away, long lashes flickering down and upwards as she brought her gaze into focus on Jemma’s grave face in the mirror.
‘I thought brides were allowed to be weepy,’ she parried.
‘Sure,’ Jemma agreed. ‘They’re even allowed to look all pale and tantalisingly ethereal.’ Her voice was loaded with mockery. ‘All you have to do now is smile and I might even begin to believe that you really want this.’
‘Don’t,’ Shaan pleaded hoarsely, hooding her too revealing eyes. ‘Don’t probe, Jemma. I don’t think I’m up to it right now.’
‘Why?’ her best friend demanded. ‘Because you know deep down inside that this—marriage, for want of a better word for it,’ she tossed off tartly, ‘won’t stand up to scrutiny?’
Shaan’s heart fluttered in her breast—the first sign she’d had for days that life actually still existed inside her—as a moment’s desperation welled up.
Her lashes flickered again, and a brief glimpse of that desperation revealed itself to Jemma. On a gasp, she spun Shaan around to give her a small shake. ‘For goodness’ sake!’ she said fiercely. ‘What the hell is really going on here?’
The bedroom door opened, and as if Rafe could actually sense that Shaan’s courage was beginning to fail her he walked arrogantly into the room, his silver-hard gaze flashing from one tense female face to the other.
Shaan went hot, then cold, staring at him through a hazy mist which wasn’t entirely due to her lingering tears. Rafe was wearing a simple dark business suit over a plain white shirt and dark silk tie. Nothing special. Yet there was something about him—the red rose he wore in his lapel maybe—which seemed to make a statement of possession in itself, that trapped the air in her lungs and sent a prickling sense of awareness tripping though her.
‘Shaan, you look beautiful,’ he murmured brusquely. ‘Shall we go?’
Like a woman in a trance, she nodded mutely and walked obediently towards him, feeling Jemma’s silent, pleading, helpless protest following behind her in urgent waves but unable to stop herself.