A Mediterranean Marriage

‘Sorry?’ Lily whipped round to throw him a startled glance. Brett’s instigation? How had he known that Brett had played a part in her decision to finally take Rauf home to meet her family? But what Rauf said next soon wiped that seeming irrelevancy back out of her mind again.

‘Do you think I didn’t eventually work out that that was a set-up?’ Rauf dealt her contemptuous appraisal from shimmering golden eyes. ‘Harris Travel needed an investor and I was rich. Are you trying to say that it was pure coincidence that you decided to introduce me to your family at that particular time? I don’t think so!’

‘Is that what you believed?’ Lily was appalled at that accusation coming out of nowhere at her. How could he have thought that she could be that mercenary and calculating?

‘Despite what you seem to think, I didn’t come down in the last shower of rain,’ Rauf derided, utilising the colloquial speech he had acquired attending an English public school.

‘Back then I had no idea how wealthy you were!’ Lily slung at him in angry reproach. ‘Nor did I find out about the expansion plans for the business until after we arrived that weekend and we both heard Brett and Dad talking. The only reason I took you home was because my sister was dying to meet you!’

‘I wish I could believe you,’ Rauf breathed in a fierce undertone.

‘So you decided that I had been after your money all along…’ Lily framed shakily, stinging tears burning in her darkened eyes. ‘And how do you justify believing that when that same weekend I took you aside and suggested you think very carefully before you invested in Harris Travel? And what did you tell me? “This is business, Lily, not something you know much about”!’

Thrown by that unsettling reminder, Rauf opened his mouth to point out that her apparent lack of self-interest might also have been a very effective means of spurring him on to demonstrate his generosity towards her family. But in the end, he said nothing. After all, he was seeing a side of Lily that she had never allowed him to see before and he had no desire to silence her. There she was, practically jumping up and down with rage in front of him, the ultra-feminine, vulnerable front nowhere to be seen, and he was fascinated by that sight.

‘You knew it all, didn’t you?’ Lily accused in her furious turmoil, little pearly teeth visibly gritted. ‘But now it’s all gone wrong, you’re blaming me! Well, I’m sorry, but the only mistake I ever made with you, the only thing I have to regret, is that I was ever stupid enough to fall in love with you!’

Brushing past him on that final ringing assurance, Lily sped back across the dust road and fairly leapt into the helicopter, no assistance required. She turned her head away when Rauf boarded. She was convinced that she would never look him in the face again after losing control to the extent of admitting that she had been in love with him that summer. How could she have lowered herself to that level? He hadn’t been entitled to that ego-boosting confession.

The helicopter lifted into the air. Rauf snatched in a slow, steadying breath. No way could he have got everything so wrong. He was too clever to have misread the evidence. But maybe Lily’s tacky affair with Gilman had been on the wane by the time he himself had entered her life, maybe it had even been over…yeah, sure, she had been slinking shiftily out of that hotel with Gilman that afternoon for entirely innocent reasons and had lied about where she had been for entirely innocent reasons too? That was about as likely a possibility as her being the virgin she had sworn she was at the time!

His lean, devastating features set into aggressive lines. He was furious with himself. He was letting her get to him and work her wiles on him again. All she had had to do was tell him she had been in love with him and he had started doubting his own intelligence! But not for nothing had Rauf’s own mother deemed her son to be as stubborn in his convictions as a steel-wrapped rock set in concrete. Rauf knew exactly why Lily was tempting him again. His hormones had no discrimination and her draw was pure sex. Even in that prim cardigan, she sent his temperature rocketing!

But then Lily still had that pulling power only because she was incredibly beautiful and he had never been her lover. While she had been screaming at him through gritted teeth, he had been watching the sun gild her glorious hair, noting the delectable prominence of her breasts when she threw her slim shoulders back and wondering if she would unleash that same passion in his bed. Shifting in an effort to ease the tormenting ache of his lingering arousal, Rauf veiled reflective dark golden eyes. Why shouldn’t he find out?

After all, it was pretty obvious that if she was innocent of all blame when it came to the villas that never were, she was hardly likely to be involved in the accounts scam either. Gilman had moved on and doubtless taken his ill-gotten gains with him and Rauf would track him down and hang him high with pleasure for his sins…

CHAPTER FOUR

WITH pointed deliberation, Lily ignored Rauf’s proffered hand when the helicopter landed for the second time and stepped out alone.

Lily wouldn’t look at Rauf either, felt she couldn’t trust herself that far. That unfamiliar rage had emptied her, shaking her to her very depths with its ferocity. Yet after the revelations that Rauf had dropped on her without warning, she was only reeling into a state of deeper shock.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, focusing on his blue silk tie, and her mind in such conflict that she was thinking half a dozen other thoughts all at once. That he had decided she was a gold-digger without any justification. That, with even less reason, he had been prepared to believe she and presumably her entire family had conspired to defraud him along with Brett. That he had with a cool deliberation that chilled her to the marrow flown her out to that abandoned building site to confront her with Brett’s crooked dealings. That he also seemed to believe not a single word that she said.

Therefore she didn’t need to ask, indeed s

he already knew without being told that Rauf Kasabian had not the tiniest shred of sympathy for her or her sister or her sister’s children or her father.

‘Sonngul, my country estate…and I don’t know about you,’ Rauf imparted, ‘but I could do with a drink.’

A slight tremor ran through Lily’s whip-taut frame. She was terrified of breaking down in tears. She knew that that was the natural outcome of shock but she didn’t want to let herself down in front of him. In every way that mattered, Rauf seemed to be the enemy and a very ruthless one too. He would set the police on Brett and, although Lily would have loved to see Brett banged up in a prison cell, she could only shudder at the prospect of what that same reality would mean to Hilary and her daughters.

Her family lived in a small town and people were never kind when it came to fraud or bankruptcy. Hilary might be divorced from Brett but Harris Travel was still their father’s business and that was what people would remember longest. Having been betrayed by her husband and lost her former home into the bargain, Hilary would now have to face not only the scandal and shame of Brett’s prosecution, but also the loss of her family’s only means of support. It would break Lily’s father too, for the sole source of pride the older man still possessed was his good name. They would all be lambs to the slaughter.

As Lily accompanied Rauf down a path screened in and shaded by a wealth of lush overhanging foliage she broke the silence. ‘I must phone Hilary. She needs to be told about the villas.’

‘I can’t agree to you informing your sister at this point. In fact I don’t want you communicating with anyone back in England.’

Glancing up in astonishment at that forbidding assurance, Lily met the unashamed challenge in Rauf’s steady gaze.

‘Your sister may be divorced from Gilman but I doubt that she could be trusted to keep so much bad news to herself. She’s much more likely to demand an explanation from Gilman and I don’t want him to realise that he’s been found out until all the facts have been established,’ Rauf explained.

Lily snatched in a sustaining breath. ‘What you want may not be what I think best for my family!’

‘But if you want me to ease your family’s passage through this, you’ll do as I ask. If you choose to go up against me, remember that you were warned.’ Golden eyes hard as a polished wall rested on her shaken face.

‘You’re threatening me,’ Lily whispered sickly.