The Marriage Trap Read online

  Startled, she wasn’t sure what to say. What she had told him was certainly enough. But it wasn’t the whole story, and now she wasn’t surprised that he had sensed it. Before tonight she wouldn’t have said anything. Not anything revealing anyway. But tonight things were different. They had taken another look at each other during the last twenty-four hours. They had been tested. They had survived.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t mind.’ His voice was soft and sleepy. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘A bedtime story?’ she teased lightly.

  ‘Why not?’ His tone turned wry. ‘Unless you have a better idea of how to spend the time.’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly, but she was grateful that his frame of mind was improving. If he could start making sly innuendoes again, he was getting back to normal at least.

  His laugh was dry and self-deprecating. ‘I thought not.’ He shifted. She could hear the rustle and creak of the hammock in the near darkness. ‘So, are you going to tell me or not?’

  She hadn’t explained much to him before. Only that it had been imperative that she find her parents. The whys hadn’t been important. But now she found herself telling him more about them, about Uncle Leander, about how she felt she needed to provide for their future.

  He listened quietly, prompting her when she stopped and accepting, unlike Clarke, that she felt she had a duty to do it.

  ‘Your parents’ keeper?’ Aidan’s voice was quiet, almost inaudible over the sound of the tree frogs.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Shouldn’t it be the other way around?’

  ‘Not at my age,’ Courtney assured him quickly. ‘I don’t want them running my life.’

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She swayed slightly in her own hammock, remembering.

  ‘Most parents do.’ She heard him shift slightly in his hammock. It was slung between two trees only about a foot and a half from hers. The night had gone dark and the fire still burned low, but she felt cocooned with him, enveloped in their own tiny world—just the two of them. And oddly safe.

  ‘Not like mine,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Most parents cosset their children. Cherish them. Protect them.’

  ‘Yours didn’t?’

  She gave a dry little laugh. ‘In the long run, I suppose they did. They cared about my immortal soul. But whether or not I survived the day… well…’ She tipped her head back, staring up into the darkness of the forest canopy. ‘When I was little, they used to use me as a buffer between themselves and the hostile tribes we sometimes encountered.’

  ‘What!’ The sleepiness changed to outrage.

  ‘It made sense, of course,’ she told him quietly, justifying for him what she had had a hard time justifying for herself. ‘It was supposed to be non-threatening to the tribe. I mean, you send a little girl in first and you show you’re coming in peace, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course, but my God…’ The hammock jerked as he sat up and scowled at her.

  ‘I didn’t realise it at first. I mean, I was pretty little. But when I did, later on, I got scared.’

  It was the first time he had heard her sound as small and Bo-Peep-like as she had looked the first time he met her. She sounded forlorn almost. In spite of himself, he was touched. He understood, too. ‘I know what you feel like, being used.’

  Courtney turned her head and considered him. He had lain back down again, but he was lying now so that they faced each other. In the glow of the embers she could barely make out his face. But the seriousness of his expression was obvious, as was the sincerity of his words. ‘Your parents used you, too?’

  ‘Not my parents.’ He sounded bitter. ‘My wife.’

  The words cut her, but she didn’t speak, just waited, sensing more to come. Aidan moved restlessly, clearing his throat.

  ‘She wasn’t my wife at first, though,’ he went on. ‘She was a girl I knew. A girl I dated.’ Another pause. ‘Slept with.’ The last two words came on a harsh exhalation of air.

  Courtney felt a dull pain somewhere in the region of her heart. It was rather like the pain she had felt yesterday evening when she contemplated Aidan spending the night with one of the Indian women. She had forced it out of her mind then, and she tried to ignore it now. Whoever this woman was, Aidan had no fond memories of her. But she probably went a long way towards explaining just why he was the way he was.

  ‘Her name was Shanna,’ he went on in a monotone. ‘She was going to Radcliffe while I was at Harvard Law.’ So he was every bit the Boston Brahmin she had thought he was.

  ‘She was dating my room-mate, Danny. They had a falling out. She came and cried on my shoulder. I was such a sap I listened. I got infatuated, in fact. She was little, delicate—’ Courtney could almost imagine the grimace in the dark ‘—looked a hell of a lot like you actually.’

  ‘I won’t say thanks.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t a compliment.’

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’

  ‘But at the time I thought she was great. I didn’t know why Danny disagreed, but I was glad he did. I wanted her for myself. And she seemed to want me.’ There was a long pause. ‘What she wanted was my money.’

  ‘You were rich?’ It wasn’t as incongruous as it sounded on first hearing. She could imagine Aidan Sawyer in pinstripes and rep ties, starched shirts and cufflinks. Harvard Law might be a million light years from what he was doing now, but Courtney was willing to bet it took the same toughness to get through it.

  ‘My dad was. Is,’ he corrected. He sighed and rolled on to his back, folding his arms behind his head. ‘And so is Shanna now.’

  ‘What happened?’

  His mouth twisted in a bitter smile. ‘The standard. We slept together. She said she was pregnant. She didn’t just tell me. She made a point of telling my parents, too. Announced it at the family Sunday dinner. The only time I’ve ever seen my mother at a loss for words. But not for long.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. The edict came down from on high that very afternoon. Sons of Ethan Sawyer did not have bastard children. I had a responsibility to Shanna. To my unborn child.’ He said the word responsibility exactly the way he had said it when he had told her he wouldn’t take responsibility for her. There was a better than even bet the two were related, she thought. Imagine that.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked him softly.

  ‘What do you think?’ His voice was harsh. ‘I was expected to do “the right thing” and marry her.’

  ‘They forced you?’

  She felt more than saw him shrug. ‘You couldn’t really call it that. At the time I didn’t care. I guess I thought I loved her. And she seemed to be just the right sort of ornament for a Boston lawyer to have on his arm. So we got married.’

  Something large, a tapir perhaps, crashed through the brush not far away. But for once Courtney hardly noticed. Her attention was entirely on the man lying in the hammock next to hers. ‘It didn’t work out?’ she ventured finally.

  ‘No.’

  She was half-way afraid he was going to say that and nothing more. She could feel him struggling, could taste his bitterness, and wanted to share it.

  Finally he spoke again. His voice was hard-edged, cutting. ‘She wasn’t even pregnant. She had—’ and here the bitterness dripped from his voice ‘—“made a mistake”, she said. There was no mistake. She wanted a rich husband and I was the sucker she chose. And the hell of it is, I was too dumb even then to toss her out on her ear. I had been brought up on that “marriage is for ever” crap. I thought we’d just make the best of it. I never told my parents what she had done. And she just said it was a miscarriage. They always thought she was a saint.’ He snorted. ‘Then she really did get pregnant.’

  Courtney held her breath. She heard Aidan suck in his. His whole body seemed clenched, radiating tension. She wanted to reach out, to touch him, to give him release.

  ‘She had
an abortion.’ The bitterness turned to momentary anguish. Then, as abruptly as it had entered his voice, it vanished and he said dully, ‘She didn’t want children, she said. She only wanted the good life, wealth and whatever it could provide. She just used me to get it. I left her then. I packed it in and left them all.’

  ‘That’s when you came to Boca Negra?’ Courtney asked him softly.

  ‘That’s when,’ Aidan confirmed. ‘To be my own man. Not tied down by anyone. Not to be used. No more traps for me. Never again.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Courtney understood his feelings better than he could have imagined.

  Two of a kind, we are, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep at last. She felt an uncanny empathy towards Aidan Sawyer. Two of a kind.

  But the next morning she changed her mind.

  When she awakened, he was already up and stomping around, being his normal irascible, obnoxious self. At first he grumbled about how long it took her to comb her hair and then he asked the heavens again why he had ever let her manipulate him into doing this anyway. The man who had shared his painful past with her just hours before might never have existed at all. She couldn’t figure him out.

  ‘Hurry up,’ he growled at her when she was still trying to untangle her damp hair.

  ‘I am hurrying,’ she assured him calmly, still hoping to see a return of the man she had discovered in him last night. ‘What’s wrong? Do you think there are hostile Indians on our tail still? Or another jaguar?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Aidan said darkly, hands on hips. He glared at her as if everything wrong in the world were her fault. ‘Indians, miners, jaguars and God knows what else.’

  Courtney frowned. ‘Do you really think the tribe would get angry because we left? Would that man who… who…’ She couldn’t quite get the words out. ‘Would he say?’

  ‘Not likely.’ Aidan dismissed the idea. ‘I suspect he wouldn’t want it generally known that he’d tried and failed—especially given the chief’s “respect” for you.’

  Courtney threw her comb at him. ‘Rat.’

  ‘Impatient rat,’ he agreed, tossing the comb back. ‘Get a move on. We’ve got plenty of ground to cover today. Since we did leave without an explanation, I would just as soon not be anywhere close enough for them to stumble on.’ So saying, he turned on his heel and headed for the boat.

  Courtney stared after him, unsure what to make of his behaviour.

  ‘Come on,’ she heard him holler again a few moments later. So, gathering up her gear, she went after him.

  His mood didn’t improve substantially during the course of the morning. He didn’t say much beyond the odd comment about a bit of flora or fauna they were passing. A personal remark never crossed his lips. She found herself feeling slightly bereft, then told herself that was nonsense. She ought to be grateful for small favours. Crabby though he was, he didn’t go out of his way to annoy her quite as much as he had. And he didn’t seem to delight in criticising her as thoroughly either. At least not with the same bitter edge to his words that she had felt so often before. So perhaps the sense of peace that she had felt between them briefly last night wasn’t totally a product of her imagination.

  She didn’t spend much time dwelling on it, anyway, because some time after they stopped for lunch, they ran into a lone Indian who didn’t vanish into the forest the moment they laid eyes on him. Courtney felt a stab of fear, but Aidan shook his head.

  ‘Not the same tribe,’ he told her in an undertone, then cut the engine and called out to him. The man pointed at Courtney, shouting something back.

  Aidan’s eyes widened. ‘He knows who you are.’

  Courtney stared. ‘He said…?’

  ‘He said, “Is that the missionaries’ daughter?” ’

  Courtney shook her head, disbelieving. It didn’t make sense. But if Aidan said it, it must be true. He wouldn’t have any reason to lie about it. ‘Does he know my parents?’

  Aidan shouted the question at the man on the bank. His answering nod was obvious to both of them, but just to make sure Aidan turned to her and said, ‘It won’t be long now.’

  She swivelled around to look at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a member of the tribe where your parents are living.’

  ‘Are they…’ She felt a moment of panic. Unspeakable thoughts that she had refused to acknowledge before surfaced now and wouldn’t be denied. If he knew her, perhaps he was looking for her. Perhaps something really had happened to them that had prevented them from writing. ‘They are all right, aren’t they?’

  ‘They’re fine,’ Aidan assured her. ‘Hale and hearty, I would guess. At least he didn’t say they weren’t.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That we ought to reach them before sundown.’ He squinted at his watch. ‘About three hours or less, by my estimation.’

  Courtney swallowed hard, then licked her lips which felt suddenly dry even in the Amazonian humidity.

  ‘And that they’re expecting you.’

  Her jaw dropped. ‘How could they be?’

  Aidan shrugged. ‘Who knows? That’s what he said, though.’

  Courtney frowned. Expecting her? Missing her, perhaps? The possibility intrigued her. A smile began to play at the corners of her mouth. Perhaps they really did miss her. Perhaps they were talking about her, hoping she would turn up to visit them. The smile grew broader for a moment, then uncertainty crept in and the smile faded.

  Aidan tipped his head to one side and considered her like a doctor diagnosing a patient. ‘Nervous?’ he asked. ‘Feeling a bit like the prodigal daughter?’

  Courtney shrugged. ‘I haven’t squandered the family fortune at least.’

  ‘No. They’re going to do that themselves if you don’t stop them, aren’t they?’

  She nodded reluctantly. ‘It could happen.’

  ‘You won’t let it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But they might kill the fatted calf for you just the same,’ he said encouragingly.

  She wouldn’t have bet on it. But the Indian had said they were expecting her. And now he had disappeared into the forest again, most likely headed towards the village to share the news of her arrival. So maybe… just maybe… they would. Where her parents were concerned she could rarely predict what they would do.

  ‘Would yours?’ she asked Aiden. ‘If you went home?’

  ‘I’m not going home,’ he said bluntly. ‘Ever.’ And he cut in the engine again, drowning out any further conversation, letting her know in no uncertain terms that what he had said last night was not to be discussed again.

  ‘Did you tell them you were coming?’ he asked her later, obviously dwelling on the question of her being expected as much as she was.

  ‘I wrote them letters,’ she replied. ‘Tons of letters. All about Uncle Leander and all that.’

  ‘But they didn’t answer?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. And I never wrote and said I was coming. I didn’t take the time.’

  ‘Strange,’ Aiden commented.

  ‘Yes.’ Courtney agreed with that. It didn’t make sense.

  At least then it didn’t.

  It began to early that evening as they rounded a bend in the river and heard a shout. A small Indian boy jumped up and down, waved, then turned and ran off into the jungle as quick as his legs would carry him. Moments later he reappeared, followed by three Indian women, an Indian man, and a white woman.

  ‘Mother!’

  Marguerite Perkins was a sprightly woman with hair now grey that had once been as blonde as her daughter’s. She wore it long and coiled up on top of her head in a braid and it made her look like a schoolgirl. And she sounded as eager as a schoolgirl on the first day of summer holidays when she called, ‘You came!’ and ran to meet her daughter at the water’s edge. ‘Daddy said you would!’ she added triumphantly.

  Courtney was perplexed. ‘Daddy said…?’ But she didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence because her
mother was hauling her out of the boat and into her arms, wrapping her in a hug that was surprisingly strong for such a bird-like woman. Then she held her daughter out at arm’s length and smiled.

  ‘Just look at you. Such a beauty! Rob will be so pleased.’

  ‘Who’s Rob?’ Courtney asked, her confusion growing.

  But her mother hooked her arm through her daughter’s, then glanced over her shoulder at Aidan, still in the boat. ‘Come along now, you too,’ she said to him. Then turning once more to her daughter she continued, ‘Oh, I’m just so glad you finally got here!’

  ‘Mother, I—’ But Courtney’s protests went unheeded. Marguerite had a firm grip on her hand and was hauling her along a narrow path inland from the river. She had no real choice but to allow herself to be hauled, managing only to spare a backward glance at Aidan who gave her a grin and mouthed, ‘The fatted calf?’

  She gave him a bewildered look in return. It certainly sounded like it. How unusual. The only other times she could remember arriving in the village where her parents were living, when she was young enough to have still been away at school, they had scarcely seemed to notice her return. Things were, perhaps, looking up.

  But she still wanted to know who this Rob her mother had referred to was. And why would he care if she were a ‘beauty’ or not? She gazed around curiously as she was tugged along on the monologue of her mother’s enthusiasm.

  The village wasn’t much different from the one she and Aidan had stolen out of in the middle of the night the day before. It was like enough, in fact, for Courtney to glance around with a touch of apprehension, wary of: anyone who might deign to smile at her or, worse, wink. But it seemed everyone was smiling, chattering, laughing. They were all obviously enormously pleased to see her.

  ‘I wondered if you’d come,’ Marguerite said to her as she led Courtney through the closest hut and out into the round in the centre of the village. ‘I thought you might not. Or I thought you might not get the letter.’

  ‘What letter? I didn't get any letter,’ Courtney said. ‘That’s why I’m here. Because of Uncle Leander.’