My Favorite Hero: Rafe Knighton

----- Original Message -----
From: Rafe Knighton
To: Bamako Field Office
Sent: Tuesday, May 09 3:17 PM
Subject: Big changes

Hey, guys

Good to hear from you the other day - glad to know you haven't forgotten me entirely!  Africa seems a long way away from London.  I'm missing the people and the heat and light.  I'm even missing you lot, which just goes to show how desperate I am for some decent company!

I've been back in London a couple of months now, and it's all very different.  Being Chairman and Chief Executive isn't all it's cracked up to be!  A lot of the time I seem to be doing less than I did out in the field - at least there when I helped set up a micro-finance project I felt as if I was doing something useful.  (Yeah, yeah, don't tell me ... you're all weeping into your beer for me!) But seriously, my father's death doesn't seem to have changed anything except for me.  The Knighton Group is a well-oiled machine which functions perfectly just as it did when he was alive, and it's obvious everybody wants to carry on exactly as they've always done.  I'm not prepared to just rubber stamp decisions, though. Knightons have run the company for four generations now, and I'm not going to be the one who lets go of the reins.  I've got my own ideas about what we should be doing, but a lot of the time it's like banging my head against the proverbial brick wall trying to get things done differently. If the Board had their way, I'd just turn up to sign on the dotted line every now and then.  They're all smiles on the surface, but they clearly think my degree in economics was bought for me by my father and they refuse to take me seriously, which I am finding just a lee-ee-ee-tle frustrating!  

Ah, well, I suppose I can't blame them.  I DID waste a few years living down to my dear old dad's expectations, but working in  Africa has changed me.  It's only now that I'm realising how much.  The trouble is that nobody else seems to recognise it.  As far as the Board is concerned, I'm a perpetual playboy, and I get the feeling the rest of the staff see me as someone who has to be indulged.  Everyone's very friendly, of course.  I've only met one person who disapproves of me thoroughly and isn't afraid to show it - never mind that I'm Chief Executive and she's a lowly temp!  Perversely, I have decided to make her my new assistant - and no, it's not what you think.  Miranda isn't my type at all (although I have to admit that she has spectacular legs).  She's prim and proper and buttoned up tight,  but the first time I met her she was swearing at a photocopier and the next time she was handing out canapés at some book launch, wearing a mask and a kind of cat suit that made the eyes (and everything else) boggle, so I'm thinking there may be more to her than meets the eye.  

Anyway, enough of Miranda.  I'm making some big changes in my life and I wanted you guys to be the first to know.  I've decided to get married.  

Have you picked yourselves up off the floor and stopped laughing yet?  Then I'll go on.  

I'm tired of being the Playboy, or  ‘Britain's most eligible bachelor' (stop sniggering).   I feel sure that if I settled down with a nice wife, everyone would find it easier to take me seriously.  There's just one little problem: I can't find a wife.  It isn't nearly as easy to find someone to marry as you'd think.  God knows, I don't buy into the fairy tale, and I'm not looking for ‘true love' (perish the thought) and it's not even as if I have an impossible checklist - quite the opposite, in fact.  I don't want a supermodel or some vapid celebrity.  I just want a nice, interesting, serious woman who won't bore me after five minutes ... and if she's got a supermodel's legs, then obviously that would be a bonus!

The trouble is that I never meet women like that at the parties I'm invited to at the moment, so I'm going to change my image.  I've employed Miranda to organise a ball with a dual purpose.  First, it's going to raise funds for all the projects out there, so I'll be giving her your contact details and telling her to get in touch.  If you hear a crisp British voice on the phone, that'll be Miranda.  See if you have more success with her than I have!  I don't mind a sprinkling of glamour, but I want Miranda to invite the kind of people I don't usually get to meet, so if you know of anyone in your partner organisations in London who'd like to come, let her know and she can arrange tickets.  Surely there's someone out there who'd like to be Mrs Knighton??

Anyway, I'd better get on.  I've got a board meeting in a few minutes, and then it'll be time for a planning session with Miranda.  I did wonder if I'd made a big mistake asking her to organise a ball, which is, after all, supposed to be fun, but she seems efficient and I'm sure she'll be good on the details.  It's just a pity she's so uptight.  She could be really pretty if she relaxed and let herself go.  She'll be all business at this meeting, but I'm determined to make her smile.  That could be even harder than finding someone to marry, but as you know, I've never been one to resist a challenge!

Cheers

Rafe 

Learn more about this hero in "Cinderella's Wedding Wish" by Jessica Hart,
available now from Harlequin Romance!

About The Author:

Jessica’s earliest dreams were about sitting on a sand dune in the Sahara, working in the Outback, hacking her way through a jungle or bouncing along a dusty track in a battered old Land Rover rather than writing a book. Her itchy feet took her from Afghanistan to Australia, from Algeria to Belize, and Cameroon to Indonesia, with various stops
en route, and she loved it all.

Because she was always thinking about where she wanted to go next, she never quite managed a proper career. Instead, she had a haphazard series of jobs around the world. Her last “proper” job was on the foreign news desk of a national newspaper. Before that, she was on expedition in West Africa, cooked on an outback cattle station, taught
English as a foreign language, was production assistant for a theater company, a research assistant for a publisher of restaurant guides and filled in the gaps between by working as a secretary, waitress, chambermaid and dishwasher. Regular readers will probably recognize how often she has drawn on her wide but lowly working experience for inspiration when it comes to setting and plot!

Now Jessica leads a rather more staid existence, dividing her time between city life in York and a country cottage in Wiltshire, where her partner, John, lives. This involves a lot of driving up and down the motorway, which takes up a lot of time. After nine years of research, Jessica finally completed a Ph.D. on York’s later medieval and early modern streets in 2004, but still never seems to have enough time to get everything done. When she’s not writing romance, she is usually busy doing something connected with food—cooking, meeting friends for a drink, eating, gossiping over coffee, etcetera—or walking her Westie, Mungo, but she also loves history and gardening and reading and
travelling, and there are still times, too, when she yearns for wider horizons.

Jessica has written over forty-five Harlequin Romance novels, and won the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA Award for the best traditional romance in 2005. In 2006 she was awarded the Romance Prize for the best category romance by the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association, and is short-listed for the same award in 2007. You can find out more about Jessica at her Web site: www.jessicahart.co.uk.

Dee Tenorio
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."