Catherine Spencer - The Marriage Experiment

“Uh-huh. I’m just not finding this platonic angle as easy to deal with as I thought it would be, that’s all.”

“And you think I am?” Grant pulled his chair closer and took her hands in his. “You think I’m enjoying not being able to make love to you? Do you know how many cold showers I’ve taken in the last week? How often I’ve been tempted to change the rules and just carry you off to some quiet inn for the weekend?”

“Would it be such a mistake to do that, Grant? The time for subterfuge ended the night we pledged to try to resurrect our relationship.”

“Not ‘relationship,’ Olivia,” he said. “What we’re trying to revive is the love. So, yes, it would be a mistake. On the other hand…” He grinned, that devilish, disarming grin she’d never been able to resist. “I’m not made of stone….”

CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin romances. Within two months she changed careers, and she sold her first book to Harlequin in 1984. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus a dog and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

GRANT saw Olivia before she noticed him. Or, more precisely, he saw her legs, because her face was hidden under the brim of a cream straw hat extravagantly ribboned in gold.

He’d have recognized those legs anywhere. Long and lusciously smooth as silk, they’d wrapped themselves around his waist too often for him not to know their every curve as intimately as he knew the back of his own hand.

Still, he was unprepared for his reaction to them again, all these years later. Arrhythmia was something he diagnosed in other people, not himself, and for his heart to behave so erratically at the sight of his ex-wife—or her limbs—was absurd. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been expecting to see her, after all. He had come prepared.

She stood chatting with a guy who looked exactly like the kind of man her father would approve of. Nicely anemic and thoroughly tame. A ventriloquist’s dummy, with Sam Whitfield no doubt literally putting the words into the poor guy’s mouth.

Circling the tail-end of the receiving line, Grant waited until Olivia’s date went off to refill her glass, then came up behind her and, just loudly enough for her to hear him over the buzz of other voices, murmured, “Hello, sweet face.”

She reacted just as he’d hoped she would, spinning around so fast she almost fell out of her high-heeled pumps. “Grant?” she gasped, in a way that would have had him diagnosing respiratory distress if she’d been his patient.

“Olivia,” he replied, working overtime to keep his own breathing under control. From a distance, she’d looked the same as always, but, up close, he saw that she’d changed.

It wasn’t so much that she’d aged. She was still only twenty-eight—hardly in her dotage, after all. But her posture and the tilt of her head as she regarded him told him that not much remained of the eager, insecure girl he’d met and married eight years before. She would have looked at her feet and blushed. Fiddled with her hair or her pearls, and run her tongue nervously over her lower lip. But, recovering herself quickly, this latest model stared back at him as though daring him to blink in her direction.

Blink, hell! He stood there transfixed. She’d always had lovely eyes. Large and luminous, they were that particular shade of hazel able to switch from soulful brown to exotic green practically at will. But since he’d last seen her she’d learned to accentuate them with make-up. Not that she looked painted or anything, but someone had taught her to shape her brows into a more delicate arch, and to emphasize her long, fine lashes with mascara, so that the effect was not merely pretty but distractingly gorgeous. As for her mouth…

He tried to swallow inconspicuously, no easy feat given that his Adam’s apple seemed to have swelled to the size of a watermelon.

Her mouth, he decided, looked like a freshly picked strawberry. Ripe and sweet and delicious. And he found himself remembering the first time he’d kissed her and how she’d tasted of summer and innocence. He couldn’t have sworn to it, but he’d been pretty damned sure his was the first tongue to have slid past those lips and explored that naive mouth.

She obviously wasn’t indulging in similar nostalgia. “How are you, Grant?” she said, her manner, like her voice, as polite and chilled as the French Chablis her father favored.

“Great,” he croaked. “And you?”

“I’m…very well.” Briefly, she pressed her lips together, the way women do when they’ve just put on fresh lipstick. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Well, Justin and I go back a long way, further even than you and I. He wanted me here to help celebrate his wedding and I was happy to do whatever it took to make the day enjoyable.”

“The way you enjoyed our wedding day?”

The irony in her tone caught Grant off-guard, flinging memories at him with such faithful attention to detail that he was forced to question how successful he’d been at closing the door on the past.

A simple garden wedding hadn’t been good enough for Sam Whitfield’s daughter. Hell, no! Nothing but a grandiose church affair would suffice, with the scent of gardenias and lilies suffocatingly heavy in the air.

The pews had been packed, mostly with strangers who’d lifted their noses in the air like a pack of suspicious pedigree dogs investigating the mongrel in their midst. Parked at the altar, Grant had stared at his face, grotesquely reflected in the shine of his new shoes, and wondered what the devil he was doing in that place, with those people, when there were so many other things he’d rather have been doing and so many ambitions remaining unfulfilled.

For one insane moment, he’d debated escaping while there was still time to call his life his own, but no sooner had the thought entered his mind than the organist had paused dramatically, then rolled full bore into Wagner’s “Bridal March” when, in fact, “Send in the Clowns” might have been more appropriate.

Meeting Olivia’s skeptical gaze now, he chose the most neutral reply he could come up with on short notice. “Our wedding was more formal.”

“And you hated every minute of it.”

“Yes,” he said. “All those lilies reminded me of a funeral, but this…” He nodded at the scene around them: at the flower-decked arbor where the bride and groom had exchanged vows, at the swaying lilacs and the linen tablecloths lifting gently in the breeze, at the children racing up and down the lawns. Children had not been invited to the Whitfield-Madison nuptials for fear that they might disrupt things. “This I could have handled.”