‘Beautiful,’ he murmured.
Tell me about it, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t, didn’t dare say anything in case the wrong thing popped anxiously out.
So the twist his mouth gave said he had misread her silence. ‘Forgiveness, my darling, is merely one sweet smile away,’ he drawled as he walked towards her.
‘But you have nothing to forgive me for!’ she protested, glad now to use her voice.
‘Throwing me out of your bed does not require forgiveness?’ An eyebrow arched, the outfit, the coming occasion, turning the human being into a pretentious monster that made her toes curl inside her strappy gold shoes. With life, that was what they curled with. Life.
I love this man to absolute pieces. ‘You left voluntarily,’ she told him. ‘In what I think you would describe as a sulk.’
‘Men do not sulk.’
But you are not just any man, she wanted to say, but the comment would puff up his ego, so she settled for, ‘What do they do, then?’
‘Withdraw from a fight they have no hope of winning.’ He smiled. Then on a complete change of subject, he said, ‘Here, a peace offering.’ And he held out a flat package wrapped in black silk and tied up with narrow red ribbon.
Expecting the peace offering to be jewellery, the moment she took possession of the package she knew it was too light. So…what? she asked herself, then felt her heart suddenly drop to her slender ankles as a terrible suspicion slid snakelike into her head.
No, she denied it. Evie just would not break such a precious confidence. ‘What is it?’ she asked warily.
‘Open it and see.’
Trembling fingers did as he bade her, fumbling with the ribbon and then with the square of black silk. Inside it was a flat gold box, the kind that could be bought at any gift shop, nothing at all like she had let herself wonder, and nothing particularly threatening about it, but still she felt her breath snag in her chest as she lifted the lid and looked inside.
After that came the frown while she tried to work out why Hassan was giving her a box full of torn scraps of white paper. Then she turned the top one over, recognised the insignia embossed upon it and finally realised what it was.
‘You know what they are?’ he asked her quietly.
‘Yes.’ She swallowed.
‘All three copies of the contract are now in your possession,’ he went on to explain anyway. ‘All evidence that they were ever composed wiped clean from Faysal’s computer hard disk. There, it is done. Now we can be friends again.’ Without giving her a chance to think he took the gift and its packaging back from her and tossed it onto the bed.
‘But it doesn’t wipe clean the fact that it was written in the first place,’ she pointed out. ‘And nor does it mean it can’t be typed up again in five short minutes if it was required to be done.’
‘You have said it for yourself,’ Hassan answered. ‘I must require it. I do not require it. I give you these copies for ceremonial purposes, only to show you that I do not require it. Subject over, Leona,’ he grimly concluded, ‘for I will waste no more of my time on something that had only ever been meant as a diversion tactic to buy me time while I decided what to do about Sheikh Abdul and his ambitious plans.’
‘You expect me to believe all of that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ It was a coldly unequivocal yes.
She lifted her chin. For the first time in days they actually made eye contact. And it was only as it happened that she finally began to realise after all of these years why they avoided doing it when there was dissension between them. Eye contact wiped out everything but the truth. The love truth. The need truth. The absolute and utter total truth. I love him; he loves me. Who or what else could ever really come between that?
‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she whispered.
It almost dropped him like a piece of crumbling stone at her feet. She saw the shock; she saw the following pallor. She watched his eyes close and feared for a moment that he was actually going to faint.
For days he had been waiting for this moment, Hassan was thinking. He had yearned for it, had begged and had prayed for it. Yet, when it came, not only had he not been ready, the frightened little remark had virtually knocked him off his feet!
‘I could kill you for this,’ he ground out hoarsely. ‘Why here? Why now, when in ten short minutes we are expected downstairs to greet a hundred guests?’
His response was clearly not the one she had been expecting. Her eyes began to glaze, her mouth to tremble. ‘You don’t like it,’ she quavered.
‘Give me strength.’ He groaned. ‘You stupid, unpredictable, aggravating female. Of course I like it! But look at me! I am now a white-faced trembling mess!’
‘You just gave me something I really needed. I wanted to give you something back that you needed,’ she explained.
‘Ten minutes before I face the upper echelons of Arabian society?’