‘Khalil. My love! I was bargaining for your life! Surely you didn’t believe—’
‘And now you are bargaining for your own!’ He stepped forward, grasping her arms and yanking her close. ‘Be grateful I am not the savage you think I am,’ he growled. ‘If I were, I would gladly slit your throat and leave you here for the vultures.’ He flung her from him and strode to Najib, who stood waiting beside the white mare. ‘Take her to the airstrip,’ he snapped to one of his men, ‘and have her flown to Casablanca. We have Abu—Sam Bennett can have his daughter.’ He leaped on to Najib’s back, grasped the reins, and gave Joanna one last, terrible look. ‘They deserve each other.’
He dug his heels hard into Najib’s flanks. The horse rose on its hind legs, pawed the air, then spun away with its rider sitting proudly in the saddle.
It was the last Joanna saw of Khalil.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE doorman pushed open the door and smiled as Joanna stepped from her taxi and made her way towards him.
‘Evening, Miss Bennett,’ he said. ‘Hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement, isn’t it?’
Joanna smiled back at him. ‘Hello, Rogers. Yes, but New York in August is always pretty awful.’
The lift operator smiled, too, and offered a similar comment on the weather as the car rose to the twelfth floor, and Joanna said something clever in return, as she was expected to do.
It was a relief to stop all the smiling and stab her key into the lock of her apartment door. Smiling was the last thing she felt like doing lately. With a weary sigh, she stepped out of her high heels and dropped her handbag on a table in the foyer.
Sam kept saying she’d developed all the charm of a woman sucking on a lemon, and she supposed it was true—but in the three months she’d been back from Casablanca she hadn’t found all that much to smile about.
Joanna popped off her earrings as she made her way towards her bedroom. She was vice-president of Bennettco now, she had an office of her own, a staff, and even her father’s grudging respect.
So why wasn’t it enough? she thought as she peeled off her dress and underthings.
She stepped into the blue tiled bathroom and turned on the shower. The water felt delicious but she couldn’t luxuriate beneath it for long. In less than an hour, Sam was picking her up. They were going to another of the endless charity affairs he insisted they attend, this time at the Palace Hotel.
A mirthless smile angled across her lips as she stepped from the shower and towelled herself dry. The Palace. She had been to it before, knew that it dripped crystal chandeliers and carpeting deep enough to cushion the most delicate foot. But she remembered a real palace, one that boasted no such touches of elegance, yet had been more a palace than the hotel would ever be.
Damn, but she wished she hadn’t seen that little squib in the paper at breakfast! ‘Jandaran Prince Consolidates Hold on Kingdom, Seeks Financing for Mining Project’, it had said, and she’d shoved the paper away without reading further, but it had been enough. A rush of memories had spoiled the day, although she couldn’t imagine why. She didn’t care what happened to Khalil. She had never loved him. How could she have, when they came from such different worlds? It was just that she’d been frightened, and despairing, and there was no point pretending he wasn’t a handsome, virile male.
An image flashed into her mind as she reached for her mascara. She saw Khalil leaning over her, his eyes dark with desire. Joanna, he was whispering, Joanna, my beloved…
Her hand slipped and a dark smudge bloomed on her cheek. She wiped it off, then bent towards the mirror again and painted a smile on her lips. What had happened in Jandara was a closed chapter. No one even knew about her part in it, thanks to Sam.
‘I didn’t tell a soul,’ he’d said, after she’d finally reached Casablanca.
‘Not even the State Department?’ she’d asked, remembering shadowy fragments of something Khalil had said the night he’d abducted her.
‘Not even them. I was afraid I might compromise your safety. How could I know what an animal like Khalil might do if I called out the troops? That’s why I couldn’t give in to his demands. I figured once I did, the bastard might kill you. You understand, don’t you?’
Joanna had assured him that she did. Sam hadn’t been saying anything she hadn’t thought of herself. Sending Abu after her had been the only way he’d thought he could rescue her. As for Abu—Sam had been duped, he’d said with feeling.
‘The guy had me fooled. How could I have known what he really was like?’
Joanna slid open the wardrobe in her bedroom and took a sequinned blue gown from its hanger. The only fly in the ointment was that the proposed mining deal had gone down the tubes. Khalil had wasted no time making sure of that. Within twelve hours, Abu had been sentenced to life imprisonment, Khalil had been restored to the throne of Jandara, and the Bennett contract had been returned by messenger, accompanied by a terse note, signed by Khalil.
‘We will develop the property ourselves.’
Sam had turned red with anger and cursed and then said hell, win some, lose some, what did it matter? He had his Jo back. That was all that counted.
Joanna whisked a brush through her hair. He was right. That was what counted, that she was back, and if sometimes, at night, she awoke from dreams she could not remember with tears on her cheeks, so what? She was getting ahead rapidly at Bennettco and that was what she wanted. It was all she wanted.
She glanced at the clock. It was time. Quickly she stuffed a comb, tissues and her lipstick into an evening bag, slipped on a pair of glittery high-heeled sandals, and made her way out of the door.
Sam was waiting at the kerb in his chauffeured Lincoln. ‘Hello, babe,’ he said when she stepped inside. ‘Mmm, you look delicious.’
Joanna’s eyebrows rose. ‘What gives?’
He chuckled as the car eased into traffic. ‘What do you mean, what gives? Can’t I give my girl a compliment?’
‘You’re as transparent as glass, Father,’ she said with a wry smile. ‘Whenever you want something from me and you expect a refusal, you begin laying on compliments.’
He sat back and sighed. ‘I was just thinking, on the way over here, what a terrible time that bastard put us through.’
Joanna’s smile faded. ‘Khalil?’
He smiled coldly. ‘What other bastard do we know? To think he locked you up, treated you like dirt—’
‘I really don’t want to talk about him tonight, Father.’
‘Did you know he’s in town?’
She shrugged, trying for a casual tone. ‘Is he?’
Sam grunted. ‘Abu may have been a brute,’ he said, ‘but Khalil’s no
better.’
Joanna looked at him. ‘You know that’s not true!’
‘You’re not defending him, are you, Jo?’
Was she? Joanna shook her head. ‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘of course not.’
‘It burns my butt that the man treated you the way he did and gets rewarded for it,’ Sam said testily. ‘There he is, sitting in Abu’s palace, snug as a quail in tall grass, counting up the coins in the national treasury.’
Joanna closed her eyes wearily. ‘I doubt that.’
Sam chuckled. ‘But we’ll have the last laugh, kid. I’ve seen to that.’
Joanna turned towards her father. There was something in his tone that was unsettling.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We may have lost the mining deal—but so has Khalil!’
‘He’s not. He’s going to put together a consortium himself.’
‘He’s going to try and milk a fat profit straight into his own pockets, you mean.’
‘No,’ Joanna said quickly. ‘He’d never—’
‘How do you think he’ll like having the world hear he wanted the fortune tucked away in those mountains so badly he killed for it?’ Sam said, his eyes glittering.
Joanna stared at her father. ‘Killed who?’
‘Abu. Who else?’
‘But Khalil didn’t kill him. He’s in prison. And it isn’t because of the fortune in those mountains, it’s—’
‘For God’s sake, Jo!’ Sam’s voice lost its cheerful edge and took on a rapier sharpness. ‘Who cares what the facts are? I’m telling you I’ve come up with a way to put a knife in that s.o.b.’s back for what he did to us!’
‘Us? Us? He didn’t do anything to us. I was the one he took, the one whose—’