‘Tuna? Oh, great!’ At once he was her little boy again, all beaming smiles and bouncing energy that had him leaping from the chair to land neatly on the faded carpet. He came towards her with a jaunty little stride—then stopped, the smile fading from his face as he turned to look at Rafiq. ‘You won’t go while I’m upstairs, will you?’ he said cautiously.
‘No, I won’t go,’ Rafiq promised him.
‘Great,’ Robbie said again, then grinned widely. ‘Great!’ he repeated, and was running out of the room, leaving two adults with a fallout he would never understand in a million years.
The moment they were alone Rafiq turned his back on her, broad shoulders like rods as he stared down at the map. ‘I will never forgive you for this,’ he breathed harshly.
‘Won’t forgive me for what?’ she took the challenge head-on.
‘This!’ he rasped, waving a hand across the spread map. ‘He knows more about Rahman than I know about it! He can plot a track across the desert from one of my homes to another!’ he stated harshly. ‘And he has learned it all from another man!’
‘William—’
‘Yes, William!’ he incised, then gave his big shoulders a shrug, as if to rid them of whatever it was that was sitting on them. ‘I think it is time you told me about William Portreath,’ he demanded tightly.
Tension spun through every tight syllable, bitterness and anger and—yes, Melanie realised there was a burning jealousy for the love and affection Robbie felt for William.
CHAPTER SEVEN
RAFIQ did not know what he was feeling. He tried grabbing in a lungful of air in effort to control himself, but he was way past the point of controlling anything. The last hour had been heaven and hell wrapped in one package. He had never felt such instant attachment to another human being, and all that person could talk about was William Portreath.
He turned to glare at Melanie. She was standing in the doorway looking wary and stubborn, and it was clear she did not want to have this kind of discussion with him.
‘Please,’ he ground out from his chest like the rattle of a pistol.
With a little jerk she swung the door almost shut behind her, her fingers still clutching at the handle and her shoulders straight and tense.
‘Okay,’ she agreed reluctantly. ‘What is it that you want to know?
His teeth gritted at the reluctance, and his chest clenched at the rebellious expression on her beautiful face. But he had a right to know, dammit! ‘Exactly what was William Portreath to you?’
‘If you’d read my papers you would know what he was,’ she returned. ‘William was my great-uncle on my mother’s side. He made his fortune travelling the world as a diamond merchant before coming back to England to retire.’
Her left hand appeared from behind her back and she glanced down at the diamond ring circling her finger. So did Rafiq, and he felt his skin prickle when he remembered the safety deposit box listed in her assets; it was packed full of diamonds that could probably kill the sparkle in the ones she wore on her finger.
‘You were his only beneficiary,’ he said, as if that had anything to do with all this. It didn’t. He was just linking one thought with another.
‘I didn’t know that until he’d died,’ Melanie made clear. ‘In fact I did not even know of William’s existence until my twenty-first birthday, when a letter arrived from Randal’s firm informing me that I was William’s heir and he would like to meet me,’ she explained. ‘So I agreed to come here to see him, and found myself faced with this crabby old eccentric.’ An odd little smile softened the defiance from her mouth. ‘We had a fight—’
‘About what?’
‘William had known since the time when my parents died that I would inherit from him. He also knew that I had been sent off to live with another obscure uncle but, because he didn’t want the responsibility of a child cluttering up his reclusive life, he chose to ignore my existence until I was—old enough to be sensible, as he put it.’ Her mouth took on a bitter twist now. ‘But he didn’t get a sensible person. He got an angry one who was heavily pregnant and with no sign of a man to make her respectable.’
Rafiq flinched. ‘I can do simple arithmetic.’
‘William called me a few unpleasant names that you would recognise,’ she said, retaliating to his bite. ‘And I called him a few names in return. I went to leave. He stood up to stop me, tripped over his walking stick and would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed him. It—it was like holding frail skin and bone in my arms,’ she recalled, not seeing the way Rafiq stiffened in recognition of that sentiment. ‘H-he asked me to stay,’ she went on. ‘He was lonely. I was—in need of a roof over my head, so I stayed.’
Her accompanying shrug said, End of story. But as far as Rafiq was concerned it was only the beginning of it. ‘So you allowed William Portreath to become both father to my son and a grandfather in place of my own father!’
‘Am I supposed to feel guilty for allowing William to give Robbie something no one else would?’
‘Yes…’ He moved restlessly. ‘You should be feeling as guilty as hell.’
Melanie was not impressed. ‘You can say that now,’ she mocked. ‘But we both know you didn’t feel like that eight years ago. You just walked away.’
‘I did not know I was leaving a son behind.’
‘You didn’t want to know.’