‘Hoot?’ he repeated. His voice shook.
She made the mistake of looking at him.
He was laughing at her! It was the final humiliation. She turned and ran for the nearest door, found herself standing in a long wide hallway with a pale wood floor and walls painted pale blue. Where to now? Which door next? she asked herself frantically. Any door, she decided, and sped across the hall’s width to the nearest one, opened it, fell inside, then closed it behind her.
It was a blue and ivory bathroom. She could not believe her one bit of good luck. With fumbling fingers she pulled her skirt up over her hips and fastened the zip. No bra, she realised, no stockings nor panties. The stretchy black top covered her naked breasts. Her nipples stung as the fabric slid across them; sparks of awareness set her teeth on edge. She pulled on the jacket and tugged it ruthlessly across her front. Then she turned to leave, caught sight of herself in a mirror and was suddenly left suspended by what she saw. Her eyes were so dark she could see no hint of gold anywhere; her mouth was swollen and pulsing and red. Her hair needing brushing. She looked wild and wanton. Cheap and easy! One kiss and you fall on him, she accused that hateful face.
Now she had a son to go home to and face, knowing what she had been doing here with his father. Nausea leapt to her throat. She spun, wondering dizzily where her bag had gone. She decided it didn’t matter; she could walk home if necessary—anything so long as she could get out of here!
She tugged the door open to find him standing there waiting for her. He’d pulled on a robe, a dark blue thing that covered hardly anything. A blanket of awareness attacked each sensitised erogenous zone. ‘Get out of my way,’ she said through clenched teeth.
‘You are not going anywhere.’ A big shoulder made contact with the door frame. ‘We agreed terms.’
‘Terms?’ She blinked. Narrowed eyes held hers with a warning glint. In a vague part of her mind she remembered words being spoken. ‘Accept my intentions,’ and, ‘So be it.’ Then he’d licked her mouth and—
‘Oh, dear God,’ she breathed.
‘You remember?’ he mocked. ‘Well, that makes it easier.’
‘I want to go home.’ She was pale now; she could actually feel her skin turning cold and thin.
‘Later,’ he agreed, and a hand came out. ‘Don’t you want to put these on?’
He held her stockings, her bra and her panties, flimsy pieces of black silk and lace threaded through long, very male fingers that gave shamelessness a whole new edge.
But Rafiq hadn’t finished with her yet—not by a long way. ‘I have no objection to you choosing a ring without these on, you understand.’ His dark-toned voice was remorseless. ‘In fact I think it would be rather excitingly decadent to kn
ow that only you and I know you wear nothing beneath that smart suit. But the stockings, maybe, to protect your legs from the cold weather?’
‘Ring?’ she repeated. ‘You were serious about the ring?’
Big and dark, lean and hard, he wore the face of an Arabian warlord in no mood for compromise. ‘I was serious about everything,’ he confirmed with silken emphasis. ‘My possession of your body, the ring—my son. We will greet him as a single unit, marry with him at our side, and become a family.’
A family eight years too late. Some family, Melanie thought as the whole wretched debacle came tumbling down upon her head. Her legs went weak and she turned to lean against the inner edge of the door frame. Determined not to cry, she closed her eyes and covered her mouth with a hand.
Watching her lose the will to fight him had the odd effect of tearing at the seams of his heart. On a sigh that rid him of mockery, he tossed the scraps of silk aside. ‘I do not think you cheap and easy,’ he uttered grimly. ‘If anything I think it is I who is guilty of being both of those things,’ he admitted, with just enough bite to let his bitterness show. ‘But we will put the past in abeyance and speak for now. And now demands that we pool our resources, for our son’s sake.’
‘You haven’t even met him yet, and you’re planning his life for him.’
‘But I know him,’ he declared. ‘I know what it feels like to have only one parent. What it can do to his head to know that the other parent does not seem to care if he lives or he dies. I have been there before him.’ It was tense, tight statement of grim factuality. ‘He bleeds inside. He will bleed no longer.’
‘William loved him.’
If she’d meant to hurt by saying that, then she’d succeeded. Rafiq stiffened away from the door frame. ‘My half-brother, Hassan, loves me without question. But he could not be the mother I never met or fill the hole in my heart left by her.’
With that he turned and walked back into the bedroom, not liking how much of himself he had just revealed and liking even less the way that Melanie followed him when he now wished to be alone.
A familiar feeling, he noted with a tense flexing of his shoulders.
‘Who was she?’
The question placed a bitter taste in his mouth. ‘A Frenchwoman—Parisian,’ he drawled with bite. ‘Very dark, very beautiful, very much out to catch herself a rich Arab with the oldest tricks known to man.’ He turned to look at her and saw a different kind of beauty standing in his bedroom doorway. A soft golden beauty—but the same flawed beauty nonetheless.
Okay, he argued with himself as he moved over to the bank of wardrobes that filled one wall. So Melanie had not blackmailed him with the child they’d made together—still was not doing that, he was forced to concede since it was he who was using the blackmail here. But she had seen her chance of marrying wealth and had been prepared to forfeit her childhood sweetheart for it.
Shame that he’d had to discover her duplicity, he thought angrily. Shame he had not married her anyway on a desire to punish her for the rest of her life. At least he would have known his child then, would have seen him grow big in her womb as Hassan was seeing his child grow. He would have been there at his son’s birth, and would have loved him so much he would never have needed to know those bleak, dark little moments in life when rejection could tear at the soul.
‘When she discovered that my father was already married, and his wife pregnant, she was not pleased.’