Did she really want to subject herself to that kind of humiliation again? she asked herself. Was she crazy to risk exposing Robbie to the same?
The urge to change her mind and just walk away while she still had the chance rose up to grab at her again; panic of the sort she hadn’t experienced in a long time actually set her feet swivelling towards escape.
The door behind her opened. ‘Mrs Portreath?’ his secretary’s smooth voice prompted.
Melanie froze—utterly. She couldn’t move, not a muscle; she couldn’t even bring herself to draw in breath. It was awful. For a horrible moment she wondered if she was going to faint.
‘Mrs Portreath…?’
Remember why you are doing this, she tried telling herself. Think of Robbie. He loves you and he’s suffering right now, feeling the vulnerability of his own mortality and, more significantly, yours. Rafiq does not know what he turned his back on eight years ago. He deserves this chance to know about Robbie, just as Robbie deserves this chance to know him.
But she was scared of what it was going to mean to all of them. Rafiq was from a different race and culture. He viewed things through different eyes than she did. He might not want to know about Robbie. He might fling this chance right back at her and…
‘Mrs Portreath? Mr Al-Qadim will see you now.’
Mr Al-Qadim will see you, she repeated anxiously. Did it matter if he did toss Robbie aside? It would be his loss if he did. Robbie never needed to know about this visit, but if you’d asked him outright, he would say it was worth any risk. So do this one small thing for him and you might start to sleep nights.
Small. She almost laughed, because this was no small thing. It was huge, colossal, as big and unpredictable as the big man himself.
‘Get out’ her head echoed. What did those two cold words do but expose a man who was unwilling to face up to his responsibilities? Let him use them again, she decided as her chin lifted. She could take the rejection for Robbie. She had done it before, after all. Her conscience could be cleared and she could then walk away to get on with the rest of her life, and more importantly Robbie’s life, knowing she had at least tried.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she heard herself murmur, and by the time she turned to face Rafiq’s secretary she was back in control again, with her eyes clear and her slender shoulders set into a determined line. One of the doors to the office stood open. Nadia stood to one side of it, waiting for Melanie to step by. With only the smallest increase in her pulse-rate she walked towards that open doorway and through it, with her smile fixed and ready to meet fate full-on.
The room was just another play on steel and marble. It was huge, with high ceilings and wall-to-wall glass that framed a desk built of marble and steel. In front of the desk and standing slightly side-on stood Rafiq Al-Qadim. He was wearing a dark grey suit and was leaning over slightly with one big hand braced on the desk while he read the set of papers in front of him.
Her papers, Melanie recognised. Her requirements. Her nerves began to flutter. Had he seen? Did he know yet? A clammy sweat broke out on her skin as she stood just inside the door and waited for him to lift and turn his dark head so she could make that first stunning impact on eyes that, even after eight long years, still visited her in her dreams.
Rafiq was being deliberately slow in straightening to acknowledge Mrs Portreath. He was wishing he ha
dn’t agreed to this meeting. The woman might have inherited the Portreath fortune, but even her healthy millions were small fry to an investment bank like this. Randal Soames, the executor of the Portreath estate, had talked him into this interview. He was doing it as a favour to Randal because the woman herself was being so stubborn about wanting to use the services of the bank and, more significantly, she had insisted on seeing Rafiq. In his mind, if she’d managed to get the hard-edged Randal Soames to go against his own better judgement it made her one very manipulative woman.
He despised that kind of woman. Was learning to despise the whole female sex with each betrayal they hung upon him. If he had a choice he would have them all locked up in harems to use only when necessary. They called them the weaker sex, the vulnerable sex, when really they were stronger and more dangerous than a whole army of men.
‘Mrs Portreath to see you, sir,’ Nadia prompted. It was a brave thing to do when his secretary was already aware that his mood was about as volatile as an active volcano.
But it also meant that he had taken too long to lift up his head. So, gritting his teeth together behind the flat-lined set of his lips, he attempted to put some semblance of a smile on them as he straightened up and made himself turn to face the woman he was already predisposed to dislike.
What he found himself looking at shut his heart down. What he saw standing not fifteen feet away made him have to wonder if he was actually losing his mind. He could not believe it. He had conjured her up. Any second now two more women were going to walk through the door and stand right beside her: Serena and his mother. The three witches.
As that dark head lifted Melanie felt her breath begin to feather, felt her pulse begin to accelerate. He hadn’t changed, was her first breathtaking observation. He still had the build of a Roman gladiator and a proud cut to his jaw line that warned of no weakness anywhere. His hair was still as black as midnight, his hands as big and strong as she remembered them to be. He could fill a room like this with his size and the sheer electrifying force of his presence.
Yet his height and his size and his deep inner reserve had somehow always made her be very gentle with him. Why was that? Melanie asked herself now as she stood facing her past with the puzzled mind of maturity. It wasn’t as if he was a vulnerable giant. If anything, he had been cruel and heartless, utterly ruthless in his method of discarding her.
Her eyes took their time lifting to clash with his eyes. She was expecting to be frozen by cold disdain but what she found herself dealing with shook her to the core. For she was looking at Robbie’s eyes, Robbie’s beautiful, almost black eyes that were looking back at her with the same sensational long eyelashes that could turn her insides to soft, loving butter. And Robbie’s wonderful high slashing cheekbones, Robbie’s perfectly, perfectly moulded mouth.
And the beauty, dear God, she’d forgotten the masculine beauty in those lean dark high-born features that could flip her heart over and set her senses singing to the kind of tune she’d experienced with no other man. It hurt, oh, it hurt, because she was standing here staring love in the face again.
How could she not love, when she was seeing the man who had shaped her son’s image? she thought despairingly. It was like looking into the future and seeing her beloved Robbie as he would be thirty years on: the height, the riveting dark features destined to breaks hearts just as his father’s had done. Did that forecast worry her, or did it touch to life maternal pride, knowing she was in the process of rearing a heartbreaker for a son? She didn’t know, couldn’t think, didn’t even know why she was rambling over such ridiculous things when there were far more important issues to consider.
But her insides were a mass of shakes and tremors, her eyes stinging with the onset of tears. Tears for a lost love, a broken and irreparable love. She didn’t want to feel like this; she hurt as badly as if it was only yesterday that he’d thrown her out of his life.
A movement behind her caught her attention. Rafiq’s secretary was hovering, probably wondering what was going on. Neither she nor Rafiq had moved or even spoken. Rafiq was frozen, his face held by a shock so profound it was clear that he was in no fit state to say a word.
Which left that mammoth task to her, Melanie realised. She’d planned this moment, spent hours rehearsing it in her head. All she had to do was find the strength and the will to put her plan into action. But it wasn’t easy. She had come here believing that Rafiq had killed everything she used to feel for him. Now she knew that wasn’t the case, she accepted, as she set her feet moving across a vast space of marble until she came to a stop just an arm’s reach away from him.
She looked up—had to—he was six feet four inches, a towering figure in comparison to her five feet eight. It wasn’t a bad height for a woman, but compared to Rafiq she felt like a pocket miniature. He had shoulders that were three times the size of her slender ones, hands that could easily span her waist. His torso was lean and cased in hard muscle, and his legs—
No, stop it, she told herself fiercely as things began to stir inside that she just did not want to feel. She lifted her eyes, made contact with the dark, dark disturbing density of his still shocked eyes that seemed to want to pull her like a magnet into taking another step closer.