Rose slipped silently from the room, her heart clenching as she read the pain in Khalim’s face. Did every departure seem like the last time he would ever see his father? she wondered as she sat on a low couch outside the bedchamber.
It seemed a long time before Khalim came out again, and when he did his face was grave and Rose sprang to her feet.
‘Is everything…okay?’ she asked. It seemed a stupid question under the circumstances, but Khalim did not seem to notice.
‘His physician is with him now,’ he said slowly. ‘Come, Rose—we must go to the airport, where the plane awaits us.’
They walked back along the corridor and he glanced down at her. ‘The way you looked at me back there,’ he mused.
Rose’s eyes opened very wide. Had he seen the tell-tale signs of love? she worried. And wouldn’t that be enough to send him fleeing in the opposite direction?
‘When?’
‘When my father told you that we had agreed to bring in an outsider to arbitrate, you looked surprised. What was the matter, Rose—did you imagine that I had invented the job as a ploy to get you out to Maraban?’
‘It would sound insufferably arrogant of me to say yes,’ she answered slowly. ‘But maybe just a little, then, yes—yes, perhaps I did.’
He admired her honesty—it would have been easy for her to have been evasive, and to lie. And, in truth, had not such a vacancy existed—then might he not have manufactured an excuse to bring her on such a trip? He smiled. ‘You have fulfilled all my expectations, Rose. In every way and more.’
The limousine whisked them to the airport at Dar-gar and they were immediately escorted onto the plane, where Philip Caprice and the two glamorous air stewardesses were waiting for them.
And it wasn’t until the plane had taken off into a cloudless blue sky and Khalim found his eyes wandering irresistibly to her pure, beautiful profile that he began to experience some of the misgivings which his father had already expressed so eloquently.
He had not wanted to leave her this morning, and now he felt like dismissing Philip and making love to her again. Rose Thomas was getting under his skin, he acknowledged—and he seemed to be hell-bent on breaking every single rule which mattered.
His mouth hardening, he deliberately picked up his briefcase and pulled a sheaf of papers out.
Rose interpreted the body language. The almost imperceptible way he turned away from her. Oh, yes! He’d been virtually silent in the car on the way to the airport, and now she was getting the cold freeze. Was he having second thoughts? Had he thought more about the heinous crime of her being on the pill and decided that she was the worst kind of woman?
Was this the reality of being Khalim’s temporary woman?
She got to her feet and met the hard, dark question in his eyes. ‘I’m going to freshen up,’ she said, and picked up the smaller of her two bags.
When she emerged a whole half an hour later, Khalim froze.
While in Maraban she had dressed most appropriately, in trousers or long skirts—clothes which modestly concealed her delectable shape. But now she had changed into a strappy little sundress in a golden colour which matched her hair, and which showed off far more brown and shapely leg than he was comfortable with.
He shifted in his seat. Not at all comfortable with. He waited until she had decorously taken her place beside him before challenging her.
‘What is the meaning of this?’
She turned her head and raised her eyebrows. Now he was talking to her as though she were his concubine! ‘The meaning of what?’
‘This…this…vulgar display of your body,’ he grated, realising that he did not want her body on show for anyone. Anyone but him!
‘But this is exactly the kind of dress I was wearing when we first met,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘You liked it well enough then, as I remember.’
‘But now,’ he said coolly, ‘I do not.’
‘Oh?’
He lowered his voice to a sultry whisper. ‘I do not want other men looking at you in that way!’
‘You mean the way you’re looking at me?’ she enquired innocently.
‘That is different!”
‘I fail to see how!’ she answered wilfully.