Read Merger By Matrimony for Free Online

restaurant, she’d discovered that Abraham Felt had helped Derek when he had first struck out, decades previously, on his own. No wonder he was so protective of her and so unofficially antagonistic towards Callum Ross!
    Walking into the glass monument to wealth further shredded her nerves.
    â€˜You’ll get used to it,’ Derek murmured staunchly at her side, as they got into the elevator and glided up to the third floor. Destiny doubted it.
    â€˜You wouldn’t say that if you were in my shoes,’ she murmured back, thinking that in my sandals would have been a more appropriate description. Three months previously she and her father had made the nine-hour trek to Panama City and had spent two days shopping for essentials, but somehow London was a great deal more daunting than the country she had learnt to love. However, come hell or high water, she would buy some clothes in the morning. Derek had established a bank account for her and she had arrived in England with more money than she had seen in a lifetime at her immediatedisposal. Whether she liked it or not, she would have to get rid of her ethnic garb and conform.
    â€˜You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,’ Derek told her, as the elevator doors slid open. ‘Just get a feel for the people, for the company. You already know what the state of their profit and loss column looks like, so to speak, but you can put it all into real perspective once you’ve met the people in charge.’
    Four hours later, Destiny thought that that was easier said than done. All the directors had been there, except the one she was most curious to meet, her stepcousin, and their reactions had run the gamut from suspicion, to relief that she had not summarily announced that she would be selling, to wheedling as they brought out their individual reports and regaled her with why she shouldn’t abandon the ship.
    They were all men in their late fifties, on the verge of retirement, and she’d inappropriately recalled Callum’s scathing description of them as a pack of old fools when Tim Headley had patted her hand and attempted to excuse four years of misguided management under the heading of ‘going through a bad patch.’
    â€˜I shall go home and read all this,’ she had said wearily, as three o’clock had rolled into four, then five, then six. It had been a further hour and a half before she had finally managed to leave and had been told by a beaming Derek that she had done really well. Buoyed them up. Given them that little injection of hope they needed.
    Her head was throbbing when she at last made it back to her house, for which she felt an inordinate rush of fondness as it contained the two things she wanted most. A well-stocked fridge and a bed.
    She’d not managed to attack the first when her telephone rang and she heard a breathless, girlish voice down the end of the line.
    â€˜Who is this?’ she demanded, cradling the telephone between shoulder and head as she fumbled to undo the front fastening buttons of her dress.
    â€˜Stephanie. I should have been at the meeting this afternoon, but…somehow my appointments overran…’
    Destiny stopped what she was doing and held the telephone properly.
    â€˜Anyway, I thought that perhaps we could meet for supper this evening? You could come to my apartment—actually, I only live about ten minutes’ drive away from you…?’
    â€˜Well…’ The thought of slotting in one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle that had become her life was too enticing to resist. ‘If you tell me where you are…can I walk to you? No?… How do I get a taxi?… Yes, right… Well, give me about forty-five minutes and I’ll be there… Right, yes, that’s fine… Yes, I do know what Chinese food consists of… Okay, fine, bye.’
    As she inspected her wardrobe, selecting the least colourful of her dresses, she