Should she ignore it? Hope her silence might make him give up and go away? She sighed, knowing Zayed wasn’t the kind of man to give up and go away.
But if she answered it, she couldn’t afford to crumble. She needed to stay strong. To remember the way he’d read her emails and accused her of all those outrageous things. To calmly tell him that whatever he said would have no effect on her resolve to put as much distance between them as possible. What she mustn’t do was to give any hint of how much she’d been missing him. She was like someone who’d never tasted sugar and then suddenly become addicted to it. At first the sweetness was almost too good to be true...and then too late you discovered it made your teeth rot.
Undoing the chain on the door, she peered out. There were no moon or stars to lighten the night but there was no mistaking the formidable physique silhouetted there, a towering shadow of fathomless black against the darkness.
She kept her voice low. ‘What are you doing here?’
His voice was just as soft. ‘Maybe I need to know if you’re having my baby.’
‘Couldn’t you have just picked up the phone to ask me that?’
‘Are you?’
‘No.’ Somehow she managed to keep the pain from her voice. To hide the unexpectedness of yet another layer of hurt. ‘Whatever else it is you want to say, I don’t want to hear it. So why don’t you save us both some time and go back where you came from?’
His voice was quiet. ‘I’m not going anywhere unless you agree to see me. I’ll stand on the doorstep all night until you let me in, if necessary. Alternatively, I could go back to the car to fetch a toolbox and take the door off its hinges.’
‘You’ll wake the neighbours.’
In the darkness she could see him shrug. ‘Then don’t make me,’ he said.
She expelled an angry sigh. ‘You’d better come in.’
He had to dip his head to enter the low-ceilinged cottage and once inside he managed to make everything look as if it were made from cardboard. It was disconcerting to see him in jeans and a leather jacket instead of his usual flowing robes. Somehow it made him resemble some hunk from the poster of an action film and it made him look gloriously and dangerously accessible. She wondered what he thought of her get-up—the thick sweater she’d pulled on over her pyjamas and the woolly bed socks which were covering her feet.
But it didn’t matter what he thought of her appearance. She wasn’t trying to impress him, or seduce him. She wasn’t even going to ask him to sit down because she wasn’t planning on him staying that long.
‘So. Why don’t you say whatever it is you want to say and then go?’
Zayed nodded as he sucked in a deep breath. He could feel the blood pounding through his veins and the way his mouth had become as dry as desert dust as he stared into her face. Apology wasn’t something which came easily to him for he was a man who found it difficult to accept he’d been in the wrong, but he knew what he needed to say. ‘I’m sorry for the way I behaved in Qaiyama.’
She shrugged. ‘It was...regrettable—but there’s nothing we can do about it now. However, thank you for your apology and for the effort you made in coming to give it to me.’
It wasn’t what he was expecting but he accepted she was going to make him work a little harder than that. ‘But that isn’t the only reason I’m here, Jane.’
‘Let me guess.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘You want to resurrect your ego by demonstrating just how wonderful a lover you can be?’
‘While the thought of doing that makes my blood sing,’ he said softly, ‘what I really want is your forgiveness.’
She shook her head. ‘And I don’t feel inclined to give it to you,’ she said and suddenly she stopped caring about saving face. About pretending not to be hurt. She was hurt. That was a fact—and facts were what she dealt with. ‘At least, not now. Not yet. Give me a year. Maybe five. Come back when the pain isn’t quite so raw and we might even be able to laugh about it.’
‘Jane—’
‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘Whatever it is you want to say, I’m asking you to consider the effect it might have on me first. Please, Zayed. Don’t try to seduce me because you want to.’ Her voice broke a little. ‘Because you can.’
His jaw clenched as she spoke to him, his eyes closing briefly—as if it was rare for someone to heap such censure upon him, and of course it was. But she wasn’t here to protect Zayed’s feelings...she was too busy trying to safeguard her own.
‘I miss you—and that’s the truth,’ he said, looking straight into her eyes—his gaze direct and dark and unflinching. ‘I like having you around, Jane. Much more than I’d realised. I’d never really valued companionship before—I’d always thought it overrated and intrusive—but suddenly I do. I like the way you make me feel and I’m not just talking about sexually. You challenge me intellectually. I’ve never had that from a woman before. You make me smile and I’ve never had that before either. You infuriate me with your stubbornness, yet I admire the way you fight your corner. And my people adore you—that is in no doubt. You have the makings of a first-class desert queen, Jane, and I...’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, I would like to make the position permanent.’
‘You’d like to make the position permanent,’ she repeated in a low voice.
‘Why not?’ He smiled then. That roguish, sexy smile which told her he considered himself on firmer ground now—that he was heading towards the victory of the finishing line as he had done so many times before.
‘We have proved our compatibility in many ways,’ he continued. ‘And I think you’re honest enough to admit that you won’t ever find another man who compares to me.’
‘So you no longer think I was planning to hook up with David Travers as soon as the ink on our divorce papers was dry?’
He shrugged. ‘I may have been a little hasty in my judgment.’