He swung on her so angrily that she took a shaky step back from the desk in alarm. ‘I sound like a cheated man!’
The words rang in the space between them. Melanie looked into his face and felt her knees start to fail. Bold slashing features cast in bronze seemed to loom ever closer. Eyes spiked with bitterness threatened to shrivel her where she stood. His mouth was no longer a mouth, but a pair of parted lines between which a set of white teeth glinted with danger. And the cold slab of marble lying between them seemed to be the only thing holding him back from stretching out a large hand and taking hold of her by the scruff of her neck.
She was shocked. Oh, not because of the pulsing threat itself, but because she would never have believed that he could reveal so much of what was raging inside him. The man she’d used to know had been so fiercely controlled that it had taken him weeks to get around to admitting he was attracted to her. He’d used to haunt her family’s farm on the pretext that he was considering investing money into it. He’d used to turn up in strange places like the tack room at the stables, or the hay barn, and would stand watching as she heaved bales of hay onto a low-loader ready for transport to the animals scattered about the outlying fields.
‘You should not be doing this,’ he’d said in husky disapproval.
‘Why?’ She remembered laughing at him. ‘Because I’m a woman?’
‘No.’ He hadn’t smiled back. ‘Because you hate it.’
It had been a truth that had confounded her, because she hadn’t realised her dislike had showed. She’d been living on the farm since she was ten year’s old, had been expected to do her share of the many daily chores. But as for enjoying the life? No. She would have given anything to go back to how things used to be, when she’d lived in London with two loving parents instead of one bad-tempered uncle and his weak stepson.
‘You cheated yourself,’ she now returned unsteadily. ‘And you have no idea how badly you—’
‘Quit,’ he warned thinly, ‘while you still can.’
It was an outright threat. Instinct was telling her to heed it, but anger was already welling up from the dark pit where she’d stored it for the past eight long years.
‘As you did when you preferred to believe lies about me, rather than give me a single minute to explain what you saw?’ she flashed back at him. ‘Is this my cue to come over all tomb-like and walk out of here, Rafiq? Will it make you feel better if I leave you alone with your righteous belief that you were the only one injured eight years ago?’
‘Get out,’ he incised.
And there they were. Those magic words, delivered with the same black-toned lack of emotion as before, that literally froze her blood. Melanie looked into the cold dark cast of his face and thought, Ten minutes. It had taken just ten short minutes for them to reach the same point where they had finished things eight years ago.
She laughed, though it was a shaky sound, and swung away, aware that she might have mocked herself about those two small words earlier, but they were still having that same crippling effect on her now as they’d had then.
Only there was a difference. The younger Melanie had run; this older version was made of stronger stuff. She swung back, faced him squarely. ‘I have something important to tell you first,’ she announced.
‘I have no wish to hear it.’
‘You might regret saying that.’
‘Leave, Melanie,’ he reiterated.
‘Not until you hear me out.’
Where had that damn stubbornness come from? Rafiq glared at her with a mix of frustration and fascination. It had been a hard push to get the old Melanie to argue about anything. Now he could not shut her up!
The telephone on his desk began to ring, and glad of the diversion he picked it up. It was Nadia informing him that his next appointment had just cancelled. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, and returned the receiver to its rest, then glanced at Melanie. ‘I’m sorry but my next appointment has arrived,’ he lied. ‘Which means that your time is up.’
Melanie stared at him. He could have done without seeing the hurt glinting in her eyes. ‘You never intended to give me a chance, did you?’ she gasped.
‘Even as Mrs Portreath?’ He arched a cold black eyebrow. ‘No,’ he confessed. ‘I have a congenital dislike of machinating women, you see, so using Randal Soames to get you into this room earned you no more extra time than if you had managed to get in here as Melanie Leggett.’
And that, Melanie realised, more or less said it. She had failed in her mission even before she’d arrived here. What a joke, what a sad little joke. For a few moments longer she continued to stand there, looking at this tall dark beautiful man with the romantic face of Arabia and eyes fit to turn a desert to ice, and seeing no sign at all that there was anything worth appealing to beyond those eyes she knew she was going to give up the fight.
‘You know what I think, Rafiq?’ she said quietly. ‘I think you’ve just lost the only chance you will ever be given to turn yourself into a human being.’
And with that she turned to walk away. From his chance, from Robbie’s chance. The threat of tears suddenly overtook her, because she knew deep down inside she was walking away from her own last chance to make this man understand the truth about her.
I was a fool for thinking I could do it, she railed at herself. Rafiq needed a heart before he could care enough to want to listen. Robbie didn’t need a man without a heart cluttering up his life. He had already known the best. It would be an insult to William Portreath’s memory to now offer her son the worst.
‘Wait…’
Her hand had a grip on the door handle. Melanie froze like a statue with her eyes to the door. What next? What now? she wondered tensely. Did she even want to hear it?
Yet she didn’t move. Bigger fool that she was, she just stood there and waited, with her teeth clenched tightly and her heart pumping heavily, while behind her there was…nothing. He didn’t speak again, nor move, as far as she could tell. And where the silence before had held a smothering sense of failure, this silence screamed with hope. Weak and pathetic, pained and helpless—hope.