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.

The Marriage Experiment

Catherine Spencer

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

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.”

“Rubbish! You didn’t want any kind of wedding, and especially not to me.”

“Not true, Olivia,” he said, picking his way through a minefield of truth to find an answer that would be acceptably cordial without compromising his integrity. “You were an unforgettably beautiful bride.”

“And a disastrous wife. Don’t bother denying it, Grant. We both know our marriage was a mistake. We didn’t agree on a single thing.”

“Your memory’s either very short or very convenient,” he said, surprised at how ticked off he was at the way she just shovelled their marriage aside as if it had been of no more consequence than a dust ball. “The sex was magnificent.”

She almost blushed then. Just a hint of peach suffused her pale and flawless skin. But her gaze, like her voice, remained annoyingly steady. “You didn’t need to marry me to have that, though, did you, Grant? You got that after just three dates.”

“You make it sound as though I had my wicked way with a reluctant virgin, when we both know that wasn’t the case. Virgin you undoubtedly were, honey, but the word ‘reluctant’ doesn’t exactly spring to mind when I remember how eagerly you—”

“I was nineteen,” she cut in, a tiny crack marring the surface of her polish at his crass reminder. “Young and innocent enough to believe that love and sex always went hand in hand and were strong enough to survive anything.”

“Anything but your father,” he said, snagging a couple of flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter and handing one to her.

The edge in her voice could have sawn through steel when she replied, “Leave my father out of this, Grant.”

“Pity you didn’t feel that way eight years ago, Olivia,” he said, tipping the rim of his glass against hers. “Perhaps if you had, instead of our standing here now exchanging trite unpleasantries, we’d be looking for a way to sneak off and enjoy a little afternoon delight.”

The ventriloquist’s dummy chose that moment to return, thus sparing Olivia having to weather more damage to her image as the perfectly-in-control divorcee facing off with her obnoxious ex. “Oh, I see someone already brought you another drink, Pussycat,” he warbled, his pale blue eyes swinging from her heightened color and fixing themselves suspiciously on Grant. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Henry Colton, a very good friend of Olivia’s.”

It was a combination of things—her snotty hauteur, the man’s proprietary attitude, the “pussycat” business—that stirred Grant to further mischief. “I’m Grant Madison, former lover and ex-husband of Olivia’s.”

“Grant!” Olivia sort of snuffled into her glass and aspirated on her champagne.

Relieving her of the drink, he thumped her gently between the shoulderblades and smiled affably at Henry Colton. “So tell me, Henry, exactly how do you define being a woman’s ‘very good friend’?”

“You don’t have to answer that question, Henry,” Olivia spluttered. “It happens to be none of Grant’s business.”

“It’s all right, Olivia, I’ve got nothing to hide.” Squaring his perfectly tailored shoulders, Henry stretched his neck as if he hoped that would bring his height up to six feet and put him more or less on a par with Grant’s six-two. “We met at the bank. I’m the manager of Springdale Savings and Loan, you know—”

“I didn’t know,” Grant said. “Should I have?”

Olivia shot him a glance, part-pleading, part-loathing. “Please don’t do this, Grant!”

“I’m merely being polite, sweet face,” he said, massaging her shoulder soothingly. Her cream dress was sleeveless and held up by wide straps which dipped to a fetchingly low neckline. Even if he’d wanted to, he could hardly have avoided contact with her warm, smooth skin. “Go on, Henry. I’m fascinated.”

Henry was fascinated, too—at the way Olivia’s ex was openly pawing her. Visibly trying not to stare at Grant’s trespassing hand, he cleared his throat. “She sought me out when she was looking for sponsors for one of her fundraising efforts.”

“Sought you out?” Grant tried to hide his snigger in a cough. Sam Whitfield deserved a medal for the job he’d done on this candidate!

Undaunted, Henry plowed on. “Neither of us was seeking a relationship at the time but…” He looked fixedly at the hand draped casually over Olivia’s shoulder and a spark of something approaching outrage colored his voice. “How shall I put it to give you a clearer picture? There was a meeting of minds, as it were. We connected—strongly—and the rest, as they say, is history. We are an item. It’s as simple as that.”

The only simple thing around here is you, pal! Grant thought, unable to take the man seriously. “Funny how things happen sometimes, isn’t it?” he said. “You think you’ve got life neatly figured out and, wham! In the blink of an eye, everything changes.”

“When the right woman comes along, it’s worth the upheaval,” Henry declared so smugly Grant almost upchucked.

“And Olivia certainly knows how to generate upheaval,” he said.

She didn’t drive her high heel into his foot as she stepped past him but it wasn’t for want of wishing she could. Talk about giving a guy the evil eye!

“Henry,” she purred, sidling up to him and laying a manicured hand on his arm, “would you be a dear and get me a glass of water? Something around here is giving me a headache.”

“Of course, Pussycat,” he meowed back.

She watched as he wove a path among the other wedding guests, a small, serene smile on her face. “What a perfect ass you still are, Grant Madison,” she cooed venomously.

“People don’t change, Olivia,” he said, wondering how long she could keep up with the china doll act, “no matter how hard others try to make them. I’d have thought it was a lesson too well learned for you to have forgotten it, considering how hard you tried—and failed—to shape me to fit your idea of what a husband should be.”

“This might come as a crushing blow to your ego, Grant, but very little of the ten months we spent together is engraved on my memory. The seven years since have been more than enough time to erase you completely. That being the case, your harking back to our marriage is about as futile as sifting through cold ashes in the hope of stirring up a fire. Furthermore,” she finished, giving her facial muscles a real work-out in order to preserve that phony smile, “you surely didn’t come all the way back here just to dig up a past we both know is better left buried.”

“You’re right, sweet face. Autopsies never did hold much fascination for me. I’m far more interested in the living than the dead. So tell me, what’s new with you since we parted company? Do you still live with Daddy? Does he monitor your every move? Is he grooming Henry to become the next Mrs. Olivia Whitfield? And is old Henry good in the sack?”

That wiped the smile off her face! “I have my own place, my own life and, as Henry already made perfectly clear, he and I are just friends,” she spat, splashes of angry color flaring across her cheeks.

“You mean to tell me,” he exclaimed, rearing back in feigned astonishment, “that he hasn’t—that the pair of you don’t—? Olivia, why the hell not? Can’t he manage it? Because if that’s a problem, there’s treatment available that’s rumored to be amazingly successful. Not that I’ve got personal knowledge, you understand, but I do keep up with the medical journals and—”

“Oh, shut up!” she practically wept, her composure collapsing like a house of cards. “Just shut up and go away!”

Since he’d been needling her precisely in the hope of stripping away all the lacquered perfection that made up this new Olivia Whitfield, success should have tasted sweet. Instead, it left a bitter taste on his tongue and filled him with a strange remorse. None of the things he’d thought he wanted—to have the last word, to be the one who walked away and left her standing—were nearly as tempting as the urge to wrap his arms around her and hold her close the way he had in the early days, when love was new and a kiss could work miracles.

Fortunately, a less welcome ghost from the past barreled onto the scene and put paid to any such nonsense. “So it is you,” Sam Whitfield huffed, panting to a standstill in front of him and glaring at him from eyes embedded in too much florid flesh. “I was hoping I’d been mistaken. What persuaded you to slither back into town?”

“Same thing that brought you out from under your personal rock, Sam. Attending a wedding.”

“Is that a fact? And how soon will you be leaving again?”

“Not for quite some time.”

Sam assumed his familiar bulldog stance, legs planted a yard apart, jaw thrust forward pugnaciously. “I wouldn’t have thought even you had the brass nerve to stay where you’re so clearly not wanted. We’ve got a fine, well-staffed hospital here, and we don’t need the likes of you hanging around, so take my advice, Dr. Madison, and go back to wherever it is you came from.”

The chance to inflict a little torture on the man Grant despised above all others was too delicious to squander. Savoring every moment, he said, “But you do need me, at least for a while.”

“What in the name of Hades are you talking about?”

“I’m standing in as Justin Greer’s locum while he and Valerie are away on their honeymoon. I’m going to be in your face every day for the next two months, Sam, running his practice. Naturally, I assumed you already knew that, seeing you’re chairman of the hospital board and a take-charge kind of guy.”

Sam turned faintly purple. “You’re delusional, Madison. I would never sanction any move that allowed you to cross the town limits, let alone set foot inside Springdale General again.”

“Well, gee, Sam, then someone else must have okayed it when you weren’t looking. Maybe you were on the ninth hole with your good buddy John Polsen at the time?”

It was a bone of contention that had lain buried for over eight summers, but it still raised Sam’s hackles. Grant’s internship hadn’t been more than a month old when a freeway accident had swamped the emergency unit with casualties. One of them had happened to be John Polsen and, although his injuries hadn’t been serious, Sam had pulled rank and had him bumped to the head of the line for treatment.

Brash, and as politically naive as they came, Grant had done what no one else had dared do: told the chairman of the board to stick to what he knew best—managing the hospital budget—and to leave the medical decisions to those who could recognize one end of a stethoscope from the other.

The fact that Sam had been indisputably in the wrong hadn’t altered the fact that he’d been publicly humiliated by a lowly intern. The new Dr. Madison had needed to be taken down a peg or two, and Grant had known from then on that he didn’t have a hope of serving his residency at Springdale. From that day forward, Sam had seen to it that Grant always wound up at the end of whatever line he chose to stand in.

Rubbing the man’s nose in the fact that he’d been out-maneuvered yet again by his old upstart of an enemy gave Grant a special kind of satisfaction now. In his view, no amount of punishment he could dole out would ever even the score between him and Olivia’s father. The bitterness ran too deep. On both sides.

“Even with the ink on your diploma barely dry you were an arrogant bastard, and nothing’s changed, obviously,” Sam growled. “It’s no thanks to you that John Polsen didn’t die, the day they brought him into Emergency.”

“Bull, Sam!” Grant said cheerfully. “John Polsen’s like you—too mean to die.”

“Stop it, both of you!” Olivia begged, observing the old warhorse fearfully. “For heaven’s sake, Grant, can’t you see my father isn’t a well man? This kind of strain is bad for his heart.”

Too many sixteen-ounce steaks, after-dinner ports and foot-long cigars are the real culprit in that department, Grant could have told her. But there was a limit to everyone’s tolerance for stress and Olivia had clearly reached hers. Her eyes were dark with worry and she slipped her arm part-way around the old man’s girth as tenderly as a mother. “Don’t upset yourself,” she told him soothingly. “It isn’t worth it. He isn’t worth it.”

“Maybe you should find him a seat in the shade,” Grant offered, a little alarmed himself at Sam’s stertorous breathing and the sweat suddenly popping out on his brow.

The glare she flung at him would have stopped traffic. “I hardly need you to tell me how to take care of my father. In fact, given the circumstances, you’re the last person I’d turn to for advice.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and inclined his head at the crowd lined up at a buffet groaning under the weight of lobster mayonnaise, cracked Dungeness crab, prawns in aspic, smoked turkey and roast beef. “But you’d be doing him a favor if you steered him away from all that rich food.”

Not deigning to acknowledge what she surely knew was a sound recommendation, she carted Sam off to a table set in the shade of a grand old oak, and plunked him down in a chair. Shortly after, Henry Colton joined them. What a sight they made, with him fawning all over the old man and practically drooling on her, Sam sitting there like a king holding court, and Olivia, the ever-dutiful daughter, anticipating her father’s every need and waiting on him hand and foot.

Collaring Justin, who happened to stroll past at that moment, Grant nodded at the trio. “Do you see anything wrong with that picture?”

Justin didn’t miss a beat. “Apart from the fact that you’re no longer in it, you mean?”

Grant snorted and muttered a satisfyingly obscene expletive. “I hardly think I’ve been missed! But there’s something sadly lacking in a twenty-eight-year-old woman whose idea of high living is to act as handmaiden to her tyrant of a father.”

“Yeah.” Justin nodded. “So what do you propose to do about it, pal?”

“Me?” Grant grimaced. “Not a blasted thing!”

“Why not? Isn’t that why you really came back to Springdale?”

Incensed, he snapped, “You know very well it’s not!”

But Justin was no more the type to back away from a scrap than Grant himself was. “Come off it, Grant! I agree you’re doing me a favor by covering my practice while I’m away, but would you have been so eager to stand in if it were anyone else—or, more to the point, anywhere else? Admit it, you’ve got another, less altruistic reason for being here. So what’s on that private agenda of yours? Going another ten rounds with Sam Whitfield for the sheer hell of it—or trying once more to wean Olivia away from him?”

An hour ago, Grant could truthfully have declared Sam the hands-down winner. That the situation had changed, however, wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to anyone. Deeming ambiguity the better part of discretion, he merely grinned at Justin and raised his glass in a mocking toast. “Let’s just drink to marriage, pal,” he said. “May the honeymoon never end.”

Up to her neck in bubbles, Olivia lay back in the soaker tub, rested her head against the inflatable pillow, and wallowed in the scented warmth of the water. Gradually, the tension seeped out of her limbs, eased away by a languor that crept along her shoulders and up the back of her neck. Only when a slight ache swept the length of her jaw did she realize she’d been clenching her teeth for longer than was good for her, or them.

Of course, she knew why she’d been coiled tight as a spring. She’d behaved like a complete idiot at the wedding. By now, everyone else in town probably knew it, as well. And the reason could be succinctly summed up in two words: Grant Madison.

To say that she’d gone into shock at first sight of him scarcely began to describe the jolt to her system. Her father wasn’t the only one who’d run the risk of cardiac arrest. She’d felt pretty close to it herself, the way her heart had literally thundered to a stop before resuming an erratic rhythm and banging wildly against her ribs. But that was nothing compared to what had happened later, after the sun had gone down behind the hills and left the garden dappled in purple shadows.