Page 85 of Bad Luck Bride

“With three hotels to your credit, I doubt it. How did you do it? What got you started? And even with the money from my father, how did you ever afford it?”

“Oh, well, that last question’s easy. After I landed in Cape Town, I spent the first year just exploring, trying to determine where I wanted to settle and what I might want to do. I had my education as a mining engineer, so I thought at first I’d get myself hired on with some British mining firm, but somehow, I just didn’t fancy it. So I wandered through South Africa for a bit, looking for the right opportunity. I toured some of the mines at Kimberly, and De Beer offered me a job, but I didn’t want to be a cog in their wheel. I did safari work in East Africa for a while, then I wandered through Rhodesia. It was there that I stumbled onto a gold mine. And I mean that literally. I’d like to brag that it was my extensive education in mining that led me to it, but no. It was just instinct. When I saw the terrain, I just had a feeling there was something there.”

She eyed him dubiously. “A feeling?”

“Yes,” he said firmly. “A feeling of knowing, of… destiny. It’s hard to describe, but it’s just a certainty that something important is happening, and I’d best pay attention.” He paused, tearing a hunk of bread off the loaf between them and smearing it with butter. “I’ve had it a few times in my life.”

Suddenly, his hands stilled, and he looked up, meeting her eyes across the table. “I had it the first time I ever saw you.”

“Me?” Kay stared in astonishment. “You did?”

“I did. I looked across that ballroom, and saw your face, and I had that feeling.”

“My face?” Kay shook her head, bemused. “My round, freckled face? The one Delilah Dawlish deemed round as a ginger biscuit and equally unremarkable?”

“I love ginger biscuits, I’ll have you know, so forget what the Dawlish woman said. Besides, I am a far better judge of feminine beauty than she will ever be. Have you ever looked at the woman? Face like a rocking horse.”

Kay laughed at that. It wasn’t true, of course, not really, but she enjoyed hearing it just the same.

“Anyway,” he said, setting aside the butter knife and piling ham and cheese onto his bread, “it’s not fashionable standards of beauty that make a woman attractive. It’s about what a man feels when he looks at her.”

He paused, his eyes meeting hers across the table, and something in their turquoise depths made her catch her breath. “I looked at you, and I knew somehow that knowing you was going to hurt like fun.” He smiled a little. “And I was right. It hurt like hell in the end, but the fun was worth every bit of the pain.”

Kay stared at him, too astonished to think of a thing to say.

“Anyway,” he went on, resuming his previous light, teasing tone, “what did you think when you saw me?”

Recovering, she picked up a piece of bread and butter. She couldn’t tell him how she’d felt—how her knees had gone weak, and her wits had vanished. She couldn’t tell him of the panic she had felt as he’d crossed that ballroom, or how the moment he’d taken her in his arms, she’d fallen in love with him. She could only tell him one part of the truth. “I’m not sure I thought anything,” she said.

“Ouch.”

“No, no,” she said, laughing a little. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that I was too stunned to do much thinking, especially when you walked over to me.” She wriggled on her seat, not quite sure how to put it. “You see, men as good-looking as you—”

“Wait,” he ordered, cutting her off. “You think I’m good-looking? I seem to recall you saying something completely different the day I proposed to you.”

Caught out, she tossed her head. “I only said that because I was still angry with you about that kiss,” she muttered. “I didn’t reallymeanit. Besides,” she added as he began to smile, “you are good-looking and you know it and you don’t need me to validate that opinion.”

“No, no, I really think I do,” he said, setting aside his half-eaten sandwich and leaning forward to prop an elbow on the table and rest his chin in his hand. “Tell me more.”

She tried to give him a quelling look, but it hardly had the desired effect because she couldn’t quite hide her smile. “My pointis that men who look like you don’t usually ask girls like me to dance. I was too shocked to do much thinking.”

He frowned. “If you say one more word to disparage yourself, I will dump my wine over your head,” he told her. “I hate it when you do that.”

She smiled, remembering. “You always did hate that. Still, there’s no denying my looks aren’t what anyone would deem swoon-worthy, and I wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination a social success. But let’s stop arguing about my looks. I want to hear the rest. You had this feeling about that land… so, did you buy it?”

“I ordered a surveyor’s report, and what I saw was favorable, so I put together an investment group, and we bought it. I used the money from your father and my savings from my safari work to buy my shares. I also roped in Simon as one of the investors. He was in the army and was stationed there at the time, and we’d become friends. We both invested every cent we had, and it paid off. We hit an enormous vein, and within four years, all six of us had made a bloody fortune.”

He paused to take another bite of his sandwich, then went on, “But then the mine petered out, and we closed it down. Simon had gotten out of the army by then, and he decided to go back to England, and I went back to being a wanderer. Back up through East Africa, and then I caught a boat out of Mombasa, sailed the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, and ended up in Egypt. The first time I took a trip up the Nile, I fell in love with it. The sky seems endless and the sunsets are like nothing you’ve ever seen. They take your breath away. And to be sailing along, and all of a sudden, you come across enormous pyramids thousands of years old, just sittingthere along the bank. In Egypt, you trip over history with every step. It’s amazing.”

“It must be,” she murmured. “I’ve never been any further away than the Isle of Wight.” She felt a wistful little pang as she spoke, and she half expected him to remind her that she could have seen it—could still see it—if she’d accepted either of his proposals.

But he didn’t remind her of that, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he merely said, “Well, travel is much harder for a woman to do on her own than it is for a man.”

He ate the last bite of his sandwich, brushed crumbs from his fingers, sat back with his wine, and went on, “Anyway, coming into Cairo, I saw this tract of land right on the river, very close to the British Consulate, and I had that feeling again, so I bought it. And that’s where I built my first hotel.”

“Why a hotel, particularly?”

“Simon had told me a great deal about the hotel trade—he’d been raised in it, you see—and something about it appealed to me. And Britain was in charge of Egypt by then, so Cairo was packed with British tourists who were having a devil of a time finding proper accommodations. The British, you see, want to see the world, but they also want the world to be British.”

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