Marriage of Convenience

Chapter Fourteen

'When you told me you were firing me I thought it was because you were the type of man who meant to keep his wife at home, looking after the children.' No way was she going to let him know the way she really felt—betrayed, used, as far as ever from having his love. Her role was to be the amenable, totally sensible wife, pulling with him, never against him, never letting him know by word or action how desperately she craved the commitment of his love.

'But I do.' His soft answer left her gasping, but he amended, 'But not quite in the way you imagine. When the children do arrive we'll turn a room here into an office for you, install a computer link-up with Dexter's head office, and you can do most of your work from home. No problem. You'll have a nanny, of course, but we'll both make time to be with the children—that's where the house in the country will come in. A place for holidays, weekends, that sort of thing. Fair?'

She nodded, unable to meet his eyes in case he saw the pain there and wondered... Oh, he was being fair, doing everything possible to make their life together with a success, and if she didn't love him she might feel the marriage was perfect. But she did love him, more than life, and his calculated manipulation of their future, of the assets she'd brought to this marriage, made her feel cold, cold and lonely.

But she nodded, 'Very fair,' and finished her drink. 'I hope Uncle Charles and Sam approve our intentions,' she added drily, flinching when he told her, 'I've already consulted them.' She had been living in a fool's paradise, the last person to know of his intentions. His brain must have been working overtime ever since she'd mentioned those shares in conjunction with her proposal of marriage.

She hardly heard him when he said, 'Your uncle's firmly behind the idea of your joining Dexter. So is Sam but only, I must warn you, because he can't see any way out of the near shambles he's created.'

'Then there seems nothing further to say,' she told him, surprising herself by the equable tone she achieved, and he countered, 'I've often wondered why didn't you join Dexter when you got your degree?'

'Sam.' she said, containing her misery. 'I couldn't accept the idea of him treating me like a backward junior clerk. Apart from being pompous, he's the type who thinks that being male automatically makes him superior in every degree to a mere female.' And I've discovered that he hates me, which will make working with him almost intolerable, she thought. But Theo wasn't ever going to hear about that, so she added, 'Not to worry, you now own as many shares as he and his father between them, and that, if nothing else, makes me his equal.'

And to her astonishment Theo grinned lazily, stretching, cat-like, in his chair. 'You have a finer mind by far, determination and guts, not to mention all that exquisite packaging. The poor guy's going to have to resign himself to taking a very inferior back seat indeed!'

Almost, she felt flattered. But he was simply seeing her as a brain, a means of pulling Dexter Securities in which, of course, he had a vested interest—together again. He wasn't seeing her as a wife, a woman to be loved.

'I think I'll go up, I'm very tired,' she excused herself, hoping to get out of there before her misery began to show through, and she had reached the door before his voice stopped her, and she turned to see him leave his chair, come over to her.

'You don't mind? It might not seem so from where you're standing, but I don't want to push you into doing something you don't want to do.' The character lines on either side of his mouth indented wryly and he touched the side of her face with a slowly moving finger, his eyes sober. She almost flinched away from his touch because the meaning behind it was shallow. She craved the depths of emotion, not the shallows. But she smiled, shaking her head.

'Of course, I don't mind. It's the sensible thing to do.' And she watched his face change, assume the blank poker player's mask again. That mask always worked well in his business dealings and had always amused her because she knew how the mind behind the mask was working. But now, when he said, 'And you always do the sensible thing. Quite right, Freya,' she didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or not. It was one thing to understand how his mind worked in his dealings in the City, quite another to understand his motives, his feelings, in the arena of their marriage. And that night, for the first time, she pretended to be deeply asleep when he came to their bedroom.