‘So, he worries?’ Rafiq prompted.
She nodded. ‘He has nightmares about it,’ she confessed, and watched in thick-throated distress as he turned his head so she could see those dark knowing eyes. ‘He worries himself sick if I so much as sneeze. As I’ve been saying from the start, he—’
‘Needs me,’ Rafiq finished. ‘As back-up,’ he added.
It sounded so very cold put like that, but—‘Yes,’ she confirmed.
‘And if I had not come through with this back-up?’
She looked away and did not answer. But, being the man he was, he had already worked out what her alternatives were going to be. His hand snaked out to catch her chin, then he made her to look back at him. Hard eyes glinted into her eyes. ‘As far as my son and his mother are concerned I will not be walking away,’ he vowed very clearly. ‘So you may put away any other options, Melanie. For the ring on your finger will be joined by another, and you will not need to look elsewhere for anything—understand?’
Yes. She nodded and let her eyelashes flutter onto her cheeks so he couldn’t read her thoughts. Because she was beginning to understand an awful lot of things, and none of them helped her to feel less anxious about the situation. With every word he uttered, Rafiq was reveali
ng an affinity with his son that promised to grow into a bond like no other. Who would become the expendable link then? She would, and on realising it she began to appreciate what it meant to feel so frighteningly vulnerable.
The car pulled up outside her house. Melanie was never so relieved for an excuse to escape. She went to pull her chin free of his fingers, but he held on until she surrendered and looked back up at him. The glow in his eyes was skin-piercingly covetous. It pricked at just about every nerve-end she possessed. The sexual pull was stunning; the emotional one threatened to strip her bare. Sparks flew; her breathing snagged; for a few blind seconds she had to fight the urge to turn her mouth into those cool fingers and say something calamitous like, I still love you, Rafiq.
She wanted to run and Rafiq didn’t blame her. He could not look at her without the sexual fallout drenching the air. The cool tips of his fingers slid against skin like fine satin, the inner recesses of his mouth sprang into life with a need to taste what he could feel. A driving compulsion to lean down and take what was throbbing in the atmosphere held him motionless, because he dared not even breathe in case he gave in to its magnetic pull.
He had revealed the absolute worst of himself to her today, yet she was still sitting here looking at him through those hungry eyes. Why was that? he asked himself. She was wearing his ring and was prepared to marry him when she had to know his arguments for marriage were a bluff, and that she possessed the resources to turn her back on him if she so pleased.
Was she doing this for their son? A son who had not even looked upon his father’s face and who, when he did, might well decide he didn’t like what he saw! What then—what did Melanie do then?
He removed his fingers and looked away from her, and heard her feather out a shaky breath. His driver opened the door for her. She scrambled out of the car and hurried up the path to fumble the key into the lock of her front door. The black suit skimmed her slender figure; her pale hair swung around her slender nape. His heart gave a tug. It was fear. He grabbed it and crushed it down again.
It had stopped raining but the air was cold and damp. As he stepped out of the car he felt it seep into his bones and had a sudden wish to be at home, standing beneath the relentless heat of the desert sun.
But first he had a son to meet and a relationship to build. His heart gave a different kind of tug, and he grimaced as he turned to dismiss his driver. Then he swung back to look at the house into which Melanie had already disappeared. The car moved away as he walked up the path. As he walked inside the house seemed to stir, like a sleeping monster awakening from a long dark slumber as its senses picked up on the scent of threat.
Threat to whom? To Melanie or his son? Was it William Portreath’s ghost Rafiq could sense stirring in the shadows, watching Rafiq infiltrate his domain so he could see for himself if he was a worthy successor? He gave himself a mental shake. He wasn’t usually prone to such superstitious nonsense, he grimly mocked himself.
A sound came from the living room and he stepped into it to find Melanie on her knees in front of the fire, putting a light to the logs neatly aligned in the grate. Flames leaped to life and she was on her feet, moving round the room lighting faded old lamps, plumping faded old cushions. ‘Make yourself at home,’ she invited. ‘I need to go and change before—The fire should be okay, and I’ve switched on the central heating system so the house will heat up pretty quickly.’
For a man who had never walked into any of his many homes needing to think about what kept it heated—or cool, for that matter—Rafiq viewed all this brisk domesticity through vaguely shocked eyes. She disappeared into the hallway. He listened to her light footsteps as she ran up the stairs, and heard a door open and close. A few minutes later the clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half-hour. It was instinctive when he hitched back a snowy white shirt cuff to check the time on his state-of-the-art satellite-controlled wrist-watch and grimaced when he discovered that the old wooden-cased clock was accurate almost to the second.
Three-thirty, Melanie noted. That left them with ten short minutes before Robbie arrived back from school, and she tried not to predict what was going to happen as she scrambled out of her suit and into jeans and a pale blue sweater, then brushed her hair while avoiding any contact with a mirror because—
A ball of heat rolled in her stomach, then sank to the apex at her thighs. She caught her breath, then just stood there staring at the old-fashioned roses on the wallpaper while her head decided to play her some flashbacks from the last few hours just to make the feeling worse.
Oh, she’d behaved like an absolute wanton. What must he be thinking about her?
He—Rafiq ben Jusef Al Alain Al-Qadim. She gave him his name and was immediately hit with his naked image. Big, dark, muscular and sleek, with curling black hair following the contours of his long torso from his wide chest like an arrowhead pointing the way to the enthralling eminence of his, of his—
No. She blinked the image away, eyelashes fluttering with a terrible reluctance to let the image fade, which brought a flush to her cheeks as she slid her feet into a pair of lightweight flat shoes and tried very hard to concentrate her mind on what lay ahead of them instead of what lay behind.
She came down the stairs to the sound of a car engine idling outside the front gate. A door slammed; there was a child’s shout of ‘See you!’ and her whole body froze on a moment’s stark panic of what was about to happen.
The door was on the latch. She always made sure it was left on the latch so that Robbie could let himself in. His bag arrived first, swinging in through the door to land on the polished wood floor before he propelled himself inside. His tie was flying, as usual, his shirt collar curled up towards his chin.
‘Hi,’ he said, seeing her standing there as he closed the door behind him.
‘Hi, yourself.’ Her heart dipped and dived as she made herself walk forward on legs that felt hollow. ‘Have you had a nice day today?’
‘We’ve been making Christmas cards,’ he informed her as she went down on her haunches in front of him. ‘Mrs Dukes is going to print lots of copies so we can send them to our friends.’
‘Well, that sounds like a good idea.’ She smiled, or tried to, while anxiously straightening his shirt collar and running shaky fingers through his ruffled hair.
‘What are you doing that for?’ Robbie frowned at her. ‘I’m going to get changed in a minute.’