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‘This intrusion had better be worth losing your head for!’ he hissed.
For a few awful seconds Leona thought the poor man was going to prostrate himself in an agony of anguish. He made do with a bow to beat all bows. ‘My sincerest apologies,’ he begged. ‘Your most honourable father, Sheikh Khalifa, desires immediate words with you, sir.’
Anyone else and Hassan would have carried out his threat, Leona was sure. Instead his mouth snapped shut, his hands took hold of her and dumped her rudely into a chair.
‘Faysal, my wife requires tea.’ He shot Leona’s own diversion at the other man. Glad of the excuse to go, Faysal almost ran. To Leona he said, ‘Eat,’ but he wasn’t making eye contact, and the two streaks of colour he was wearing on his cheekbones almost made her grin because it was so rare that anyone saw Sheikh Hassan Al-Qadim disconcerted.
‘You dare,’ he growled, swooping down and kissing her twitching mouth, then he left quickly with the promise to return in moments.
But moments stretched into minutes. She ate one of the freshly baked rolls a white liveried steward had brought with a pot of tea, then drank the tea—and still Hassan did not return.
Eventually Rafiq appeared with another formal bow and Hassan’s apologies. He was engaged in matters of state.
Matters of state she understood having lived before with Hassan disappearing for hours upon end to deal with them.
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ Rafiq then requested.
‘Orders of state?’ she quizzed him dryly.
His half-smile gave her an answer. Her half-smile accompanied her indication to an empty chair. She watched him sit, watched him hunt around for something neutral to say that was not likely to cause another argument. There was no such thing, Leona knew that, so she decided to help him out.
‘Tell me about your Spanish mistress,’ she invited.
It was the perfect strike back for sins committed against her. Rafiq released a sigh and dragged the gutrah from his head, then tossed it aside. This was a familiar gesture for a man of the Al-Qadim household to use. It could convey many things: weariness, anger, contempt or, as in this case, a relayed throwing in of the towel. ‘He lacks conscience,’ he complained.
‘Yet you continue to love him unreservedly, Rafiq, son of Khalifa Al-Qadim,’ she quietly replied.
An eyebrow arched. Sometimes, in a certain light, he looked so like Hassan that they could have been twins. But they were not. ‘Bastard son,’ Rafiq corrected in that proud way of his. ‘And you continue to love him yourself, so we had best not throw those particular stones,’ he advised.
Rafiq had been born out of wedlock to Sheikh Khalifa’s beautiful French mistress, who’d died giving birth to him. The fact that Hassan had only been six months old himself at the time of Rafiq’s birth should have made the two half-brothers bitter enemies as they grew up together, one certain of his high place in life, the other just as certain of what would never be his. Yet in truth the two men could not have been closer if they’d shared the same mother. As grown men they had formed a united force behind which their ailing father rested secure in the knowledge that no one would challenge his power while his sons were there to stop them. When Leona came along, she too had been placed within this ring of protection.
Strange, she mused, how she had always been surrounded by strong men for most of her life: her father, Ethan, Rafiq and Hassan; even Sheikh Khalifa, ill though he now was, had always been one of her faithful champions.
‘Convince him to let me go,’ she requested quietly.
Ebony eyes darkened. ‘He had missed you.’
So did green. ‘Convince him,’ she persisted.
‘He was lonely without you.’
This time she had to swallow across the lump those words helped to form in her throat before she could say, ‘Please.’
Rafiq leaned across the table, picked up one of her hands and gave it a squeeze. ‘Subject over,’ he announced very gently.
And it was. Leona could see that. It didn’t so much hurt to be stonewalled like this but rather brought it more firmly home to her just how serious Hassan was.
Coming to his feet, Rafiq pulled her up with him. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘For a tour of the boat in the hopes that the diversion will restrain your desire to weaken my defences.’
‘Huh,’ she said, for the day had not arrived when anyone could weaken Rafiq in any way involving his beloved brother. But she did not argue the point about needing a diversion.
He turned to collect his gutrah. The moment it went back on his head, the other Rafiq reappeared, the proud and remote man. ‘If you would be so good as to precede me, my lady. We will collect a hat from your stateroom before we begin…’
Several hours later she was lying on one of the sun loungers on the shade deck, having given in to the heat and changed into a black and white patterned bikini teamed with a cool white muslin shirt. She had been shown almost every room the beautiful yacht possessed, and been formally introduced to Captain Tariq Al-Bahir, the only other Arab as far as she could tell in a twenty-strong crew of Spaniards. This had puzzled her enough to question it. But ‘Expediency,’ had been the only answer Rafiq would offer before it became another closed subject.
Since then she had eaten lunch with Rafiq and Faysal, and had been forced, because of Faysal’s presence, to keep a lid on any other searching questions that might be burning in her head, which had been Rafiq’s reason for including the other man, she was sure. And not once since he’d left her at the breakfast table had she laid eyes on Hassan—though she knew exactly where he was. Left alone to lie in the softer heat of the late afternoon, she was free to imagine him in what would be a custom built office, dealing with matters of state.
By phone, by fax, by internet—her mouth moved on a small smile. Hyped up, pumped up and doing what he loved to do most and in the interim forgetting the time and forgetting her! At other times she would have already been in there reminding him that there was a life other than matters of state. Closing her eyes, she could see his expression: the impatient glance at her interruption; the blank look that followed when she informed him of the time; the complaining sigh when she would insist on him stopping to share a cup of coffee or tea with her; and the way he would eventually surrender by reaching for her hand, then relaxing with a contented sigh…
In two stuffed chairs facing the window in his palace office—just like the two stuffed chairs strategically placed in the yacht’s stateroom. Her heart gave a pinch; she tried to ignore what it was begging her to do.
Hassan was thinking along similar lines as he lay on the lounger next to hers. She was asleep. She didn’t even know he was here. And not once in all the hours he had been locked away in his office had she come to interrupt.
Had he really expected her to? he asked himself. The answer that came back forced him to smother a hovering sigh because he didn’t want to make a noise and waken her. They still had things to discuss, and the longer he put off the evil moment the better, as far as he was concerned, because he was going to get tough and she was not going to like it.
Another smothered sigh had him closing his eyes as he reflected back over the last few hours in which he had come as close as he had ever done to causing a split between the heads of the different families which together formed the Arabian state of Rahman.
Dynastic politics, he named it grimly. Al-Qadim and Al-Mukhtar against Al-Mahmud and Al-Yasin, with his right to decide for himself becoming lost in the tug of war. In the end he had been forced into a compromise that was no compromise at all—though he had since tried to turn it into one with the help of an old friend.
Leona released the sigh he had been struggling to suppress, and Hassan opened his eyes in time to see her yawn and stretch sinuously. Long and slender, sensationally curved yet exquisitely sleek. The colour of her hair, the smoothness of her lovely skin, the perfectly proportioned contours of her beautiful face. The eyes he could not see, the small straight nose that he could, the mouth he could feel against his mouth merely by looking at it. And—
Be done with it, he thought suddenly, and was on his feet and bending to scoop her into his arms.
She awoke with a start, saw it was him and sent him a sleepy frown. ‘What are you doing?’ she protested. ‘I was comfortable there—’
‘I know,’ he replied. ‘But I wish to be comfortable too, and I was not.’
He was already striding through the boat with a frown that was far darker than hers. Across the foyer, up the three shallow steps. ‘Open the door,’ he commanded and was surprised when she reached down and did so without argument. He closed it with the help of a foot, saw her glance warily towards the bed. But it was to the two chairs that he took her, set her down in one of them, then lowered himself into the other with that sigh he had been holding back for so long.
‘I suppose you have a good reason for moving me here,’ she prompted after a moment.
‘Yes,’ he confirmed, and turned to look into those slumber darkened green eyes that tried so hard to hide her feelings from him but never ever quite managed to succeed. The wall of his chest contracted as he prepared himself for what he was about to say. ‘You have been right all along.’ He began with a confession. ‘I am being pressured to take another wife…’
She should have expected it, Leona told herself as all hint of sleepy softness left her and her insides began to shake. She had always known it, so why was she feeling as if he had just reached out with a hand and strangled her heart? It was difficult to speak—almost impossible to speak—but she managed the burning question. ‘Have you agreed?’
‘No,’ he firmly denied. ‘Which is why you are here with me now—and more to the point, why you have to stay.’
Looking into his eyes, Leona could see that he was not looking forward to what he was going to say. She was right.
‘A plot was conceived to have you abducted,’ he told her huskily, ‘the intention being to use your capture as a weapon with which to force my hand. When I discovered this I decided to foil their intentions by abducting you for myself.’
‘Who?’ she whispered, but had a horrible feeling she already knew the answer.
‘Did the plotting? We are still trying to get that confirmed,’ he said. ‘But whoever it was they had their people watching your villa last night, waiting for Ethan and your father to leave for the party on the Petronades yacht. Once they had assured themselves that you were alone they meant to come in and take you.’
‘Just like that,’ she said shakily, and looked away from him as so many things began to fall into place. ‘I felt their eyes on me,’ she murmured. ‘I knew they were there.’
‘I suspected that you would do,’ Hassan quietly commended. ‘It is the kind of training we instilled into you that you never forget.’
‘But this was different.’ She got up, wrapped her arms around her body. ‘I knew it felt different. I should have heeded that!’
‘No—don’t get upset.’ Following suit, Hassan stood up and reached for her. She was as pale as a ghost and shaking like a leaf. ‘My people were also there watching over you,’ he assured. ‘The car driver was my man, as was the man at the gate. I had people watching their people. There was not a single moment when you were not perfectly safe.’
‘But to dislike me so much that they should want to take me!’ Hurt beyond belief by that knowledge, Leona pushed him away, unwilling to accept his comfort. It had been hard enough to come to terms with it, when she’d believed he had snatched her back for his own purposes. But to discover now that he had done it because there was a plot against her was just too much to take. ‘What is it with you people that you can’t behave in a normal, rational manner?’ she threw at him, eyes bright, hurt and accusing. ‘You should have phoned me not my father!’ she cried. ‘You should have agreed to a divorce in the first place, then none of this would have happened at all!’
The you people sent Hassan’s spine erect; the mention of divorce hardened his face. ‘You are one of my people,’ he reminded her curtly.
‘No, I am not!’ she denied with an angry shake of her head. ‘I am just an ordinary person who had the misfortune to fall in love with the extraordinary!’
‘At least you are not going back to denying you love this extraordinary person,’ he noted arrogantly. ‘And stop glaring at me like that!’ he snapped. ‘I am not your enemy!’
‘Yes, you are!’ Oh, why had she ever set eyes on this man? It would have been so much easier to have lived her life without ever having known him! ‘So what happens now?’ she demanded. ‘Where do we go from here? Do I spend the rest of my days hiding from dark strangers just because you are too stubborn to let me go?’
‘Of course not.’ He was standing there frowning impatiently. ‘Stop trying to build this into more than it actually is—’
More? ‘Don’t you think it is enough to know that I wasn’t safe to be walking the streets in San Estéban? That my life and my basic human rights can be reduced to being worth nothing more than a mere pawn in some wretched person’s power game?’
‘I am sorry it has to come to this—’
Well, that just wasn’t good enough! ‘But you are no better yourself!’ she threw at him angrily. ‘Up to now you’ve used abduction, seduction and now you’ve moved onto intimidation to bring the wayward wife into line.’ She listed. ‘Should I be looking for the hidden cameras you are using so that you can show all of Rahman what a strong man you can be? Do I need to smile now?’ she asked, watching his face grow darker with the sarcasm she tossed at him—and she just didn’t care! ‘Which way?’ she goaded. ‘Do I need to let Rafiq shroud me in an abaya again and even go as far as to abase myself at your exalted feet just to save your wretched face?’
‘Say any more and you are likely to regret it,’ he warned very grimly.
‘I regret knowing you already!’ Her eyes flashed, her body shook and her anger sparkled in the very air surrounding her. ‘Next I suppose you will have me thrown into prison until I learn to behave myself!’
‘This is it—’ he responded, spreading his arms out wide in what was an outright provocation. ‘Your prison. Now stop shouting at me like some undignified fishwife,’ he snapped. ‘We need to—’
‘I want my life back without you in it!’ Leona cut loudly across him.
What she got was the prince. The face, the eyes, his mood and his manner changed with the single blink of his long dark eyelashes. When his shoulders flexed it was like a dangerous animal slowly raising its hackles, and the fine hairs on her body suddenly became magnetised as she watched the metamorphosis take place. Her breathing snagged; her throat grew tight. He was standing perhaps three yards away from her but she could suddenly feel his presence as deeply as if he was a disturbing inch away.
‘You want to live your life without me, then you may do so,’ he announced. ‘I will let you go, give you your divorce. There, it is done. Inshallah.’ With a flick of the hand he strode across the room and calmly ordered tea!
It was retaliation at its most ruthless and it left her standing there utterly frozen with dismay. Inshallah. She couldn’t even wince at what that single word represented. The will of Allah. Acceptance. A decision. The end. Hassan was agreeing to let her go and she could neither move nor breathe as the full power of that decree made its stunning impact.
She had not deserved that, Hassan was thinking impatiently as he stood glaring down at the telephone. She had been shocked, angry, hurt. Who would not be when they discovered that people they cared about, people they had tried to put before themselves, had been plotting to use them ruthlessly in a nasty game called politics? She had every right to vent her feelings—he had expected it! It was the reason why he had found them privacy before telling her the truth!
Or part of the truth, he then amended, all too grimly aware that there was yet more to come. But the rest was going to have to wait for a calmer time, for this moment might be silent but it certainly was not calm, because—
Damn it, despite the sensible lecture he was angry! There was not another person on this planet who dared to speak to him as she had just done, and the hell if he was going to apologise for responding to that!
He flicked a glance at her. She hadn’t moved. If she was even breathing he could see no evidence of it. Her hair was untidy. Long silken tendrils had escaped from the band she’d had it tied up in all day and were now caressing her nape, framing her stark white profile to add a vulnerability to her beauty that wrenched hard on his heart-strings. Her feet were bare, as were her slender arms and long slender legs. And she was emulating a statue again, only this time instead of art-deco she portrayed the discarded waif.
He liked the waif. His body quickened; another prohibited sigh tightened his chest. Curiosity replaced anger, though pride held his arrogant refusal to be the first one to retract his words firmly in place. She moved him like no other woman. She always had done. Angry or sad, hot with searing passion or frozen like ice as she was now.
Inshallah. It was Allah’s will that he loved this woman above all others. Let her go? Not while he had enough breath in his body to fight to hold onto what was his! Though he wished he could see evidence that there was breath inside hers.
He picked up an ornament, measured the weight of the beautifully sculpted smooth sandstone camel then put it back down again to pick up another one of a falcon preparing to take off on the wing. And all the time the silence throbbed like a living pulse in the air all around them.
Say something—talk to me, he willed silently. Show me that my woman is still alive in there, he wanted to say. But that pride again was insisting he would not be the one to break the stunning deadlock they were now gripped in.
The light tap at the door meant the ordered tea he didn’t even want had arrived. It was a relief to have something to do. She didn’t move as he went to open the door, still hadn’t moved when he closed it again on the steward he’d left firmly outside. Carrying the tray to the low table, he put it down, then turned to look at her. She still hadn’t moved.
Inshallah, he thought again, and gave up the battle. Walking over to her, he placed a hand against her pale cheek, stroked his thumb along the length of her smooth throat then settled it beneath her chin so he could lift her face up that small inch it required to make her look at him.
Eyes of a lush dark vulnerable green gazed into sombre night-dark brown. Her soft mouth parted; at last she took a breath he could hear and see. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she whispered helplessly.
His legs went hollow. He understood. It was the way it had always been with them. ‘If true love could be made to order, we would still be standing here,’ he told her gravely.
At which point the ice melted, the gates opened and in a single painfully hopeless move she coiled her arms around his neck, buried her face into his chest and began to weep.
So what do you do with a woman who breaks her heart for you? You take her to bed. You wrap her in yourself. You make love to her until it is the only thing that matters any more. Afterwards, you face reality again. Afterwards you pick up from where you should never have let things go astray.
The tea stewed in the pot. Evening settled slowly over the room with a display of sunset colours that changed with each deepening stage of their sensual journey. Afterwards, he carried her into the shower and kept reality at bay by loving her there. Then they washed each other, dried each other, touched and kissed and spoke no words that could risk intrusion for as long as they possibly could.
It was Leona who eventually approached reality. ‘What now?’ she asked him.
‘We sail the ocean on our self-made island, and keep the rest of the world out,’ he answered huskily.
‘For how long?’
‘As long as we possibly can.’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her he knew exactly how long. The rest would wait, he told himself.
It was a huge tactical error, though he did not know that yet. For he had not retracted what he had decreed in a moment of anger. And, although Leona might appear to have set the words aside, she had not forgotten them. Nor had she forgotten the reason she was here at all: there were people out there who wanted to harm her.
But for now they pretended that everything was wonderful. Like a second honeymoon in fact—if an unusual one with Rafiq and Faysal along for company. They laughed a lot and played like any other set of holidaymakers would. Matters of state took a back seat to other more pleasurable pursuits. They windsurfed off the Greek islands, snorkelled over shipwrecks, jet-skied in parts of the Mediterranean that were so empty of other human life that they could have had the sea to themselves.
One week slid stealthily into a second week Leona regained the weight she had lost during the empty months without Hassan, and her skin took on a healthy golden hue. When matters of state refused to be completely ignored, Rafiq was always on hand to help keep up the pretence that everything was suddenly and miraculously okay.
Then it came. One heat-misted afternoon when Hassan was locked away in his office, and Faysal, Leona and Rafiq were lazing on the shade deck sipping tall cool drinks and reading a book each. She happened to glance up and received the shock of her life when she saw that they were sailing so close to land it felt as if she could almost reach out and touch it.
‘Oh, good grief,’ Getting up she went to stand by the rail. ‘Where are we, Rafiq?’
‘At the end of our time here alone together,’ a very different voice replied.
CHAPTER SIX
LEONA turned to find Hassan was standing not far away and Rafiq was in the process of rising to his feet. One man was looking at her; the other one was making sure that he didn’t. Hassan’s words shimmered in the air separating them and Rafiq’s murmured, ‘Excuse me, I will leave you to it,’ was as revealing as the speed with which he left.
The silence that followed his departure pulsed with the flurried pace of her heartbeat while Leona waited for Hassan to clarify what he had just said.
He was still in the same casual shorts and shirt he had been wearing when she had last seen him, she noticed. But there, the similarity between this man and the man who had kissed the top of her head and strolled away to answer Faysal’s call to work a short hour ago ended. For there was a tension about him that was almost palpable, and in his hand he held a gold fountain pen which offered up an image of him getting up from his desk to come back here at such speed that he hadn’t even had time to drop the pen.
‘We arrived here sooner than I had anticipated,’ he said, confirming her last thought.
‘It would be helpful for me to know where here is,’ she replied in a voice laden with the weight of whatever it was that was about to come at her.
And come it did. ‘Port Said,’ he provided, saw her startled response of recognition and lowered his eyes on an acknowledging grimace that more or less said the rest.
Port Said lay at the mouth of the Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. If they were coming into the port, then there could only be one reason for it: Hassan was ready to go home and their self-made, sea-borne paradise was about to disintegrate.
He had noticed the pen in his hand and went to drop it on the lounger next to the book she had left there. Then he walked over to the long white table at which they had eaten most of their evening meals over the last two weeks. Pulling out a chair, he sat down, released a sigh, then put up a hand to rub the back of his neck as if he was trying to iron out a crick.