Bonds of Matrimony

A Harlequin

OTHER

654-CHERRY BLOSSOM CLINIC 1071-SPICED WITH CLOVES

1758—THE CRESCENT MOON 1780—THE TOWER OF THE WINDS 1807—THE TREE OF IDLENESS 1844—THE BEADS OF NEMESIS 1888—THE BONDS OF MATRIMONY

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by

ELIZABETH HUNTER

HARLEQUIN BOOKS Toronto

WINNIPEG

Original hard cover edition published in 1975 by Mills & Boon

Limited.

© Elizabeth Hunter 1975

SBN 373-01888-6 Harlequin edition published June 1975

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

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Printed in Canada

When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut.

Rabindranath Tagore: Gitanjali LXIII

(Bengali 1912)

I

CHAPTER ONE

He wasn't at all what she had been expecting.

He was not so tall for one thing, and the sensitive look to his mouth that she had thought she had seen in his photograph might have been there, but she was now much more conscious of the strength of his face and the tough way in which he carried himself, not someone who could be easily bent to her purposes at all.

'Mr. Carmichael?' she inquired. 'You are Mr. Carmichael, aren't you?'

He turned his head and looked at her. If he had had any manners at all, she thought, he would have stood up straight and not gone on leaning against the bar. She licked her lips, meeting the self-assured look in his eyes with a feeling of uncertainty.

'Yes, I'm Benedict Carmichael,' he confirmed.

She felt a spurt of anger as she realized that he wasn't going to help her by acknowledging that he knew who she was, let alone why she had come.

'I'm Hero Kaufman.' There was a lengthy silence while he waited for her to go on. 'May we go and sit over there?' she suggested, her confidence somewhat dented by the way he was casually looking her over.

He straightened up slowly. 'Anything you say, Miss Kaufman.'

Hero lowered herself into one of the leather chairs in the furthest corner of the bar of the hotel and prayed that nobody she knew would come in until this agonizing moment was over. Mr. Carmichael threw himself into the chair beside her and lit himself a cigarette. He didn't offer her one and she had none of her own, but she would have given anything just then to have had one, to blow a smoke screen between them as a defence against those piercing eyes of his. He bent his head a little to flick the match he had used into an ashtray and she was surprised to notice that his hands were badly scarred across the palms and fingers.

'Well?' he said.

She started. 'It's a simple business proposition, Mr., Carmichael. If you're willing to - to oblige me, you would find it very much worth your while - financially at least. I

- er - I understand that's important to you — '

'You shouldn't believe all you hear, Miss Kaufman,' he drawled.

She coloured. 'But why else should you be willing-?'

'Who said I was?'

This was worse than anything she had imagined. 'I thought—' She shrugged her shoulders. 'You wouldn't be here if you weren't interested!' she burst out defiantly. 'I know more about you than you think!'

He raised his eyebrows. 'Then you must know how easy it is to rouse my curiosity,' he said with a smile. 'I wanted to see you for myself. I suppose you know that what you're suggesting is completely immoral —'

'I don't see that it is!'

'Then you must be stupid, Miss Kaufman. Still, you're more attractive than I'd expected. I shouldn't have thought you'd have any difficulty in finding a husband without having to buy him, or are you too stupid for that

to have occurred to you?'

Hero stared at him, as much astonished as she was angry. No one had ever thought her stupid before, and they certainly wouldn't have told her so if they did!

'How dare you?' She frowned at him. Didn't he know how much it had cost her to keep her appointment with him? She thought she would have disliked him, whatever he had been like, but he was far more difficult to handle than she had been led to believe. 'You don't understand,' she added, 'I don't want a husband, I want a nationality. British nationality!'

'What's wrong with your nationality?' he returned.

'I — I haven't really got one,' she confessed. 'I thought I was British. I thought we were all British, my parents and I, but we aren't. It didn't matter when they were alive, but they were killed recently.' She blinked, unwilling to let him see that thinking about them could still affect her badly. 'It matters very much to me to be British. I'm not even Kenyan, you see. I'm nothing! My father was officially German, because his father was a German from Tanganyika. He had been there from the time that Tanganyika was a German colony - before the First World War. My mother's parents were Greek. They kept a hotel up country somewhere.'

'Where are they now?'

'They're dead. They died before I was born. I think they were killed by the Mau-Mau, but I don't really know much about them. My mother didn't talk about them much because they hadn't wanted her to marry Father. They quarreled about it and she never saw much of them after that. Father was a lot older than Mother, you see.'

Mr. Carmichael drew thoughtfully on his cigarette.

'What about his parents?' he asked.

'My grandfather tried to join the Army in the war. They took him at first, but then they discovered that he was technically a German. They were interning everyone who had enemy connections at that time, but my grandfather thought that he and my grandmother would go mad if they were shut up for years, so he did what a lot of Germans did at that time and simply disappeared into the bush. After the war most of them came back and took up whatever they'd been doing before, but my grandparents never came back. My father made inquiries about them, but they were never found. In time they were presumed to be dead and my father inherited their farm. He sold it and moved to Kenya when he married my mother.'

'And you're all alone?'

'Yes.' She had already decided she wouldn't marry him anyway, even if he were agreeable. She didn't like him. She didn't like anything about him.

'But why leave Kenya?' he probed. Would he never be through asking questions? Her motives had nothing to do with him! Either he was prepared to marry her and take her to England, giving her the right to live there before he divorced her, or he was not!

'I can't manage the farm by myself,' she said abruptly.

'Why not? I thought women could do anything

these days?'

Hero threaded her fingers together, picking at her nails. A flake of varnish came loose and she looked down at it with annoyance. She liked her hands to look nice, even though it had been a constant battle lately when she had been doing much of the milking and feeding herself.

'The farm is miles from anywhere. I was waiting for the Government to take it over. The compensation would have been enough to get me to England and I thought the price of the animals would have set me up in something there. Now they're the price I'm willing to pay to be British.'

Mr. Carmichael lit himself another cigarette. 'Impractical as well as immoral,' he remarked. 'What do you intend to do now when you get to England?'

She dug around in her handbag, spreading a creditable number of certificates on the arm of his chair, her hands quivering with indignation.

'You see, I'm not completely stupid! I shall work for my living like everyone else.'

He picked up her last school report and read it with interest. 'All right,' he said, 'so you did well at school — '

'Not only at school. I did well at the Agricultural Centre too.'

'So you did. But as you can't afford to buy a farm in England and most people there don't employ land-girls, knowing about tropical diseases in cattle isn't going to be of much use to you.'

Hero glowered at him, quite overcome by her dislike for him. 'Farm accountancy is my specialty, as you would have seen if you'd taken the trouble to

look.' She pressed a further certificate into his hands. 'I'm a fully qualified accountant. Or don't they use accountants in England either?'

'Probably,' he agreed. 'I use one myself sometimes when I think I'm paying too much tax.'

Hero took a deep breath. 'If you marry me I'll do your accounts free,' she offered, 'even after we're free of one another!'

'Hmm,' he said. 'I still don't see why you can't find yourself a husband some other way.' He sat forward in his chair and put a hand under her chin, turning her face this way and that. 'You're not bad looking at all. Rather a good mixture - Greek fire and Germanic ice!'

'Which is more than I can say for you!' she flashed at him, tossing her head to be free of his restricting touch.

'You seem keen enough to marry me,' he reminded her.

'Because I want to be British. I wouldn't marry you otherwise, not for a million pounds !'

'I see,' he said. 'Well, you're more likely to suffer if you dislike me than I am. True, it might grow rather wearing to have you round the house for long if you can't bring yourself to be pleasant to me — '

'I'm sorry,' she broke in. 'I -I didn't mean anything personal about not wanting to marry you. I don't want to marry anyone! If you do marry me, of course I should be pleasant to you. It wouldn't be for very long anyway, so it would be worth it. I mean, you needn't see me again after you've taken me to England. I wouldn't expect anything more from you!'

He stubbed out his cigarette without answering, calling to the African steward with a flick of his fingers.

'What will you have to drink?' he asked her.

'I don't drink,' she said.

'One gin and tonic and one tomato juice,' Mr. Carmichael told the waiting African. He felt in his pocket for a few coins and balanced them, one on top of the other, on the arm of his chair, while he waited impatiently for the drinks to be brought to him.

Hero watched him, feeling more and more inadequate as she did so. 'Mr. Carmichael, what brought you to Kenya?'

His eyes glinted under his thick eyelashes. 'I liked the sound of it.' He tossed the coins up in the air and caught them again with all the neatness of a professional juggler. 'How soon would you expect to go to England?'

'How soon?' she repeated. 'What do you mean?'

'Immediately? In a year? In two years' time?'

'I'd like to go soon,' she answered. 'But I don't have to go immediately. I'd be prepared to fit in with your arrangements. It would - look better, don't you think, if we'd been married for a few months? And I don't think we can get a divorce immediately I set foot in England. I meant to get it all clear before I came to see you, but I don't know who to ask. It was bad enough having to find someone who— Well, you know, most men seem to be married or have someone in mind, and you seemed the only one who needed — ' She broke off, chewing her lip between her teeth. He wouldn't like to be reminded that he was so short of money that if he were to get back to England himself he would need someone to pay his fare. Men, she knew, didn't like to be known to be unsuccessful and that Benedict Carmichael most certainly was! Her friend Betsy would never have pointed him out to Hero if he hadn't been the next best thing to a Destitute British Subject. Hero felt a sudden irrepressible giggle inside her. Her mother, she remembered, had once been on a committee that had dealt with such people, but that had been before Kenya had become an independent country. All the same, it was hard to see that her mother would have liked Mr. Carmichael any more than she did.

The African brought the drinks and the coins exchanged hands. Hero checked her thoughts with a start. It wasn't cheap buying drinks in Nairobi. Perhaps she should have offered to pay for them herself? But then, when she came to think of it, there was nothing cheap about the way Benedict Carmichael dressed either. His trousers were plainly tailored to his own measurements and his shirt was undoubtedly expensive. Indeed, she suspected that it was a one-off job, designed and created for its owner, which was just as well, for not many people would have dared to have worn it.

'Mr. Carmichael, why were you prepared to meet me?' she asked in chilly tones.

'Oh, I don't know. Betsy likes you, and she doesn't like many of her own sex, and that made me curious. Also, I wouldn't mind a bit of land out here and it isn't easy to come by with Africanization going on. Besides, it's one way of acquiring a wife and it's time I married — '