It was dreadful. Say something, she wanted to beg him. Shout at me, if you like! But I need to know what you think of this beautiful child we made together. I need—
His hands came out and took back the brush and pan. As her breathy gasp filtered through the air she watched him lay them carefully aside. She didn’t know what was coming—was afraid of what was coming. Especially when long lean fingers curled around her upper arms and began drawing her to her feet. She felt small suddenly, overwhelmed by his superior height and size. He was standing too close, his touch achingly gentle yet frighteningly disturbing. The heat of his breath was on her face and his thighs were touching hers. Her arms felt soft and frail beneath the controlled power in his imprisoning fingers, and her breasts were tingling at the nearness of his chest.
Wary, she lifted her eyes to his, and the breath shivered from her lips at what she saw written in the dark glitter of his eyes.
No, she wanted to protest, but the denial just wouldn’t come, and it would have been too late anyway because his dark head lowered and he was kissing her, though not hard or hotly as he had this morning. Nor even because he felt driven by a simple need to make physical contact with another human being right now. He was kissing her with reverence, gently crushing her against him, gently crushing her mouth with his.
Then he released her and turned away, dark head slightly lowered, wide shoulders set. He picked up his jacket, then just walked out of the room and, seconds later, out of the house, leaving Melanie standing right where he had left her, with the warmth of his kiss still pulsing against her lips and what she’d seen in his eyes before he turned away, quietly tearing her apart.
Tears, she’d seen the hot black glint of tears in the eyes of a man who’d gone way beyond the point of being able to contain the power of what it was he had been forced to deal with today.
She had done that. With her little plots and shock strategies she had managed to reduce a proud man to tears in front of her. She had never felt so ashamed of herself.
Rafiq sat in his office staring down at the neatly processed, finely detailed document he had spent the whole night working on. He was good at this, he acknowledged with absolutely no sense of pleasure. Concentrating his talents on the detached and inanimate was most definitely his forte. Money instead of emotions. The planning and arranging of someone else’s finances instead of allowing himself to lie in his bed crucifying himself with his inadequacies as a fully paid up member of the human race.
The phone on his desk began to ring, halting the urge to put his head back and close his sleep-starved eyes. It was Randal Soames. ‘Are you sure you want this?’ the lawyer asked him.
‘Exactly as I have set it out,’ he confirmed.
He sounded dubious. ‘You might marry some day, have more children.’
Not this man, Rafiq thought bleakly. ‘Have you spoken to Melanie?’
Swift change of subject. He could almost hear Randal thinking it. ‘She isn’t there. There is some kind of function on at the boy’s school, I seem to recall. I’ll try again later.’
The boy’s school. Some kind of function. Just two more things about his son he had no knowledge of.
Oh, damn. He got up and swung away from his chair, shoved his hands into his trouser pockets, then stood staring out of the window at a cold grey day. It had now begun to pour with rain.
Safely slotted into his wallet rested a miniature image of himself at the age of seven. Similar hair, similar eyes, similar slightly rueful expression which hid the same vulnerability he had suffered at the same age. He felt as if he knew this child of his inside out, yet he could not say which school his dark red uniform represented, nor what the boy ate for breakfast each morning.
His son even had his skin shading. So where were Melanie’s genes? Where was his French blood? Where was there anything in the photograph to say that his son had not been cloned on a scientist’s bench instead of conceived during the act of love?
Love. He cursed the word, hated it—despised it—and felt it grinding against his every muscle like a physical torture set up to make him accept that love could beat the hell out of any man’s wish to feeling nothing.
He was in love with his son, but had made no attempt to go anywhere near him. He loved his father, his brother, and Hassan’s lovely wife, Leona—but differently. With them he felt safe to love; with the boy he did not. Which was why he was standing here preferring to stare at the rain than take the bull by the horns and face uncertainty.
As for Melanie…
A sigh shot from him at this other reason why he had spent the past two days simmering in his own confusion. He had loved Melanie when they had conceived their son, but he would prefer not to be reminded of it. Now, what came next? Where were they supposed to go? Into one of those awful situations he had witnessed amongst so many friends with broken relationships, where they shared the children by cool agreement—when there was nothing damn cool about a child’s feelings?
A knock sounded on his door; he swung round to watch Kadir walk in the room. As his aide offered a bow of apology for intruding Rafiq caught the sparkle of raindrops on the shoulders of his neat grey jacket. ‘Been out in this filthy weather, Kadir?’ he quizzed.
‘Yes, sir.’ Rafiq received another bow. ‘A note has just arrived for you,’ Kadir explained, and walked forward to hold it out to him.
Rafiq looked down at it without attempting to take it, wearily wondering, What now? Because this was no formal business note. The envelope was small and square, and its sender female, by the neatly scripted way his name had been written upon it. No address or postage stamp, which said it had been hand-delivered.
‘Who is it from?’
Kadir cleared his throat. ‘It arrived in another envelope addressed to me. This is all I know.’
All he knew. Frowning, Rafiq pulled his hands out of his pockets and accepted the letter, then he broke the glued seal. Still frowning, he took out the single sheet of paper and read the two short sentences written upon it. ‘Can I come up? I’m standing across the street.’
His heart hit against his ribcage. He swung back to the window to stare down through sheets of rain to the street. A solitary figure stood against the building opposite, sheltering from the rain beneath a big black umbrella.
Melanie. Something burst into life inside him. With a twist of his body he snatched his jacket off the back of his chair. ‘Have my car waiting,’ he instructed Kadir as he headed for the door—then paused as his mind made a connection. ‘Don’t make a habit of lying to me, Kadir,’ he advised.
Then he left, with Kadir’s rather heavy, ‘No, sir,’ hanging in the air.
The lift took him downwards; his feet took him outside. The sheeting rain drenched him in the few seconds it took him to cross the street.
Melanie only realised he was there when she saw his feet appear in front of her. The umbrella was wrenched from her fingers, and was held higher, so he could join her beneath it. She looked up and saw the strain in his face, the tiredness, the frown. ‘Are you mad?’ he demanded. ‘Why are you standing out here?’
‘I didn’t want your security people throwing me off the premises,’ she explained. ‘But I needed to talk to you.’
By the way he flattened his mouth she assumed he’d forgotten about his instructions regarding her and his bank. Then he noticed that she was shivering so much her teeth were chattering and, taking a grim hold on her arm, he hustled her into the nearest doorway, snapped the umbrella shut and laid it aside. Then he removed his jacket and swung it around her shoulders.
‘You’re freezing,’ he muttered. ‘I cannot believe you came here dressed like this.’
She was in her designer suit again. It had seemed appropriate when she’d made the decision to come. Now she was so grateful for the added warmth of his jacket that she huddled greedily into it. ‘It w-wasn’t raining this much when I left home and—and I’m not thinking very clearly right now…’
‘I understand the fe
eling,’ he murmured dryly.
‘Now y-you’re wet too,’ she continued in an agitated rush. ‘Y-you should have got Kadir to—’
‘Run a few more messages?’ he offered when she tried to swallow her runaway tongue.
She glanced up, met his eyes, saw the sardonic gleam in them and released a sigh. ‘He told you. He promised he wouldn’t. I didn’t want him to get into trouble for colluding with me.’
‘You believed I would be angry with him?’
‘It’s been two days…’ Two days of waiting and pacing and jumping out of her skin every time the doorbell or telephone rang. In the end she hadn’t been able to take the stress any longer and had come to find him. Now she wished that she hadn’t because she was feeling like a fool.
‘Kadir carried out your instructions to the letter,’ Rafiq inserted. ‘As for the rest…I guessed.’
He’d guessed. ‘Mr Omnipotent,’ she muttered.
To her surprise he laughed, it was a low deep sound that brought her eyes fluttering up to his again, which were warm and dark and concentrated on her. Things began to happen she just didn’t want, like a pooling of warmth deep down in her abdomen and a breathlessness that tightened her chest.
Don’t look at me like that, she wanted to protest, but too many things were leaping between them, such as the son they shared, not to mention shared kisses. Intimacy, in other words; too much of it that went back too many years yet could tug on her senses as if everything, including the events leading to Robbie’s conception, had happened only yesterday.
‘I needed time to think,’ he murmured huskily.
Husky suddenly made her clothes feel too tight. ‘I know you m-must be hurt, but I h-had to protect myself.’
‘From the omnipotent Arab with revenge on his mind?’ He smiled as he said it, but it was a grim smile.
‘I’m sorry, but, yes,’ she answered honestly. ‘You—’
His hand lifted up to push a stray coil of damp hair away from her temple and she responded with a tense little jerk. Beyond the shelter of the doorway, the rain pounded on the pavements. The coil of hair left a trailing raindrop behind it so his finger moved to scoop it from her cheek.
Someone dashed into the doorway, stopped to shake out their umbrella, then, with a curious glance at them both, walked into the building, leaving Melanie with the disturbing impression that she must look like a wicked woman snatching a secret assignation with her tall dark lover.
Lowering her eyes, she huddled further into his jacket. It was big on her—huge—the slippery silk lining whispering softly against the thin fabric of her suit. She was picking up the scent of his aftershave from it, subtle and spicy, tantalisingly familiar. He couldn’t stand much closer to her if he tried.
Maybe Rafiq was thinking along similar lines, because he released a short sigh. Her eyes became fascinated with his slender red tie and the way it lay down the length of his white shirt, covering muscular proportions that expanded and contracted with the sigh.
Her lips began to pulse, and it scared the life out of her. Things were happening here that really should not. ‘I don’t think this is an appropriate place,’ she said a little wildly.
‘No,’ he agreed, but made no move to do anything about it.
One of those silences fell; it pumped up her heartbeat and dried out her mouth. His hands began to move, sliding beneath the lapel of his navy blue jacket until the backs of his fingers came to rest against her breasts. She pulled in a sharp breath; for a fine tight nerve-singing moment she thought he was going to lower his head and kiss her.
Then she shivered as genuine cold made itself felt again, and he was setting her free to reach for the umbrella. Opening it up, he urged her beneath it, then out into the pouring rain. Her stiletto shoes danced puddles as he hurried her across the street. Expecting to be ushered into the bank, she was surprised to find herself being bundled into the back of a car. It was big and plush, with a glass partition between them and the driver, and seats made of soft black leather.
Through shivering chatters she watched Rafiq toss the umbrella onto the floor of the car, then climb in beside her. His shirt was wet, showing patches of dark skin beneath its white fabric and his black hair was soaked and slicked to his head. He leant forward to pick up a telephone, uttered some terse command in Arabic, then sat back with a sigh.
‘Where are we going?’ she questioned.
‘Somewhere we can talk.’
‘Oh.’ She took a pensive glance out of the window. ‘I thought the bank…’
‘No,’ he said, and that was all. Her top teeth pressed into her bottom lip because she wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that no.
‘Rafiq—’
‘Randal has been trying to contact you.’
A diversion. ‘Has he?’
‘He said you were out at some function or other.’
‘First thing this morning, yes.’ She nodded. ‘Robbie’s school is putting on a pantomime at Christmas. They’re doing Cinderella. There were rehearsals this morning. I—helped out.’
‘Which school?’
She told him. He pressed his lips together and nodded his dark head. Melanie shifted tensely, unsure of his mood now and even more uncertain that she wanted to be sitting here in such close confines with a man she couldn’t read from one second to the next.
For all she knew he could be sitting here plotting her downfall—or her seduction. Because something improper had been running through his mind back there in the doorway. It had been running through hers too, she was forced to admit. It just wasn’t fair. Only this man had ever been able to toss her into this hectic state of sexual awareness just by—being there.
She frowned at the rain-spattered window. That feeling had been there from the first time her arm had brushed against his shoulder when she’d been serving him at the Maitlands’ dinner table. Twenty years old, as naive as they came, she’d caught his scent, the sound of his low dark laughter and the deeply smooth voice tones as he’d spoken to the person sitting next to him, and her response had been so primitively sexual that she’d spilled the sauce onto the tablecloth.
After that had come the humiliating dressing down from Sally Maitland, then her first real contact with his hand, when Rafiq had cornered her later and tried to make light of the embarrassing incident. He’d been dressed in a dinner suit, big and dark, suave and sophisticated, with an easy grace that had belied his size and a lazily worn self-confidence that aimed to charm.
‘Watch him,’ Sally Maitland had warned later. ‘Arab men are notoriously attracted to slender young blondes. He’ll take what you are putting on offer, Melanie, then despise you for it later.’
She had been right, too. Rafiq had pursued her like a man besotted until he’d finally managed to break down her defences. He’d promised her everything: love, marriage, the whole wonderful package. But the moment he’d taken what he had really been after he’d despised her for giving it. He’d seen a tramp then, a woman willing to give it out to all and sundry once she’d acquired the taste.
He moved. She stiffened and swung her head round to send him a hard, accusing glance.
‘What?’ He looked shocked by it.
‘Nothing.’ She looked away again, hoping to goodness that eight years of abstinence had given her some defence against him, though why did she think she needed it?
Because Rafiq still desired her. It had been there when they’d met in his office two days ago, there when he’d come to her home. It had been there just now in the doorway when he’d almost given in to it and kissed her.
Three meetings, two kisses, and one still hovering on the sidelines with time on its side to give it a chance.
As for defences, they were not much use when she only had to look at him to feel that old breathless, sensual pull.
The car drew to a stop outside a block of select apartments. Life took another worrying twist when she realised where they had to be. Rafiq opened his door and braved the rain again to stride rou
nd to her side of the car and open her door.
‘I don’t think…’
His hand found her wrist and the jacket began to slip from her shoulders as he tugged her into the rain. As she grappled to save the jacket from falling onto the wet pavement he pulled her inside the building before she had a chance to voice a bigger protest.
A man dressed in a security uniform sat behind a desk. He stood up and smiled. ‘Good morning, sir…madam,’ he greeted politely. ‘Dreadful weather,’ he opined with a glance at their rain-soaked clothes.
Rafiq murmured a reply; Melanie offered a nervous little smile and wondered what the man must really be thinking as Rafiq pulled her into the lift.
‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ she protested a trifle breathlessly.
‘I do,’ he countered, and one glance at him told her why he did. He wasn’t even trying to hide it!
A wave of answering heat put her into a panic. ‘No,’ she said, and tried to twist her wrist free from his grasp so she could turn and make a diving exit before the lift doors closed. But Rafiq was one step ahead of her; with only the gentlest of tugs he brought her hard up against his body at the same time as his other hand snaked out to hit the lift button.
To the man on the desk they must have looked like two people so hungry for each other they couldn’t wait until they were alone. The lift doors closed while Melanie was still trying to recover from the shock contact with Rafiq’s body. Eyes like hot coals burned his intention; her blood began to race, charged by her hammering heartbeat.
‘How dare you?’ she choked in shrill protest. ‘This is supposed to be about Robbie!’
Rafiq laughed. Maybe she was right, but he didn’t think so. For two long days he had prowled through his life trying to understand what it was that was holding him back from going to meet his son. For two aching days and sleepless nights he’d swung from one reason to another without hitting upon the right one. But one look at Melanie standing in the rain and the answer had lit up in his head like a beacon. He could not deal with the problem of his son until he’d dealt with the problem of his son’s mother. He wanted her—all of her. He wanted every single thing he had walked away from eight years ago. He wanted her in his life, in his bed! And the best thing about it was that he meant to have it all, without the love thing cluttering up his reasoning.
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