His gaze dropped to the floor by the bed, where their clothes still lay in an intimate huddle that was a lot more honest than the two of them were with each other.
‘Find out how Ethan is.’
The sound of her voice brought his attention back to her. She hadn’t moved, had not turned to look at him, and the demand spoke volumes as to what was really being said. Barter and exchange. She had given him more of herself than she had intended to do; now she wanted something back by return.
Without a word he crossed to the internal telephone and found out what she wanted to know, ordered some food to be sent in to them, then strode across the room to sit down in the chair next to hers. ‘He caught an accidental blow to the jaw which knocked him out for a minute or two, but he is fine now,’ he assured her. ‘And is dining with Rafiq as we speak.’
‘So he wasn’t part of this great plan of abduction you plotted with my father.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a sign of relief.
‘I am devious and underhand on occasion but not quite that devious and underhand,’ he countered dryly.
Her chin was resting on her bent knees, but she turned her head to look at him through dark, dark eyes. Her hair flowed across her white-swathed shoulders, and her soft mouth looked vulnerable enough to conquer in one smooth swoop. His body quickened, temptation clawing across flesh hidden beneath his short robe of sand-coloured silk.
‘Convincing my own father to plot against me wasn’t devious or underhand?’ she questioned.
‘He was relieved I was ready to break the deadlock,’ he informed her. ‘He wished me well, then offered me all the help he could give.’
Her lack of comment was one in itself. Her following sigh punctuated it. She was seeing betrayal from her own father, but it just was not true. ‘You knew he worried about you,’ he inserted huskily. ‘Yet you didn’t tell him why you left me, did you?’
The remark lost him contact with her eyes as she turned them frontward again, and the way she stared out into the inky blackness beyond the window closed up his throat, because he knew what she was really seeing as she looked out there.
‘Coming to terms with being a failure is not something I wanted to share with anyone,’ she murmured dully.
‘You are not a failure,’ he denied.
‘I am infertile!’ She flashed out the one word neither of them wanted to hear.
It launched Hassan to his feet on a surge of anger. ‘You are not infertile!’ he ground out harshly. ‘That is not what the doctors said, and you know it is not!’
‘Will you stop hiding from it?’ she cried, scrambling to her feet to stand facing him, with her face as white as the sheet she clutched around her and her eyes as black as the darkness outside. ‘I have one defunct ovary and the other one ovulates only when it feels like it!’ She spelt it out for him.
‘Which does not add up to infertility,’ he countered forcefully.
‘After all of these years of nothing, you can still bring yourself to say that?’
She was staring up at him as if he was deliberately trying to hurt her. And, because he had no answer to that final charge, he had to ask himself if that had been his subconscious intention. The last year had been hell to live through and the year preceding only marginally better. Married life had become a place in which they’d walked with the darkness of disappointment shadowing their past and future. In the end, Leona had not been able to take it any more so she’d left him. If she wanted to know what failure really felt like then she should have trodden in his shoes as he’d battled with his own failure to relieve this woman he loved of the heavy burden she was forced to carry.
‘We will try other methods of conception,’ he stated grimly.
If it was possible her face went even whiter. ‘My eggs harvested like grains of wheat and your son conceived in a test tube? Your people would never forgive me for putting you through such an indignity, and those who keep the Al-Qadim family in power will view the whole process with deep suspicion.’
Her voice had begun to wobble. His own throat closed on the need to swallow, because she was right, though he did not want her to be. For she was talking about the old ones, those tribal leaders of the desert who really maintained the balance of power in Rahman. They lived by the old ways and regarded anything remotely modern as necessary evil to be embraced only if all other sources had been exhausted. Hassan had taken a big risk when he’d married a western woman. The old ones had surprised him by deciding to see his decision to do so as a sign of strength. But that had been the only concession they had offered him with regard to his choice of wife. For why go to such extremes to father a son he could conceive as easily by taking a second wife?
Which was why this subject had always been so sensitive, and why Leona suddenly shook her head an
d said, ‘Oh, why did you have to bring me back here?’ Then she turned and walked quickly away from him, making unerringly for the bathroom he had so recently used for the same purpose—to be alone with her pain.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO hours, Leona noticed, as she removed her slender gold watch from her wrist with badly trembling fingers and laid it on the marble surface along with the diamonds from her ears and throat. Two hours together and already they were tearing each other to pieces.
On a sigh she swivelled round to sink down onto the toilet seat and stare dully at her surroundings. White. Everything was white. White-tiled walls and floor, white ceramics—even the sheet she had discarded lay in a soft white heap on the floor. The room needed a bit of colour to add some—
She stopped herself right there, closing her eyes on the knowledge that she had slipped into professional mode and knowing she had done it to escape from what she should really be thinking about.
This situation, this mad, foolish, heart-flaying situation, which was also so bitter-sweet and special. She didn’t know whether to laugh at Hassan’s outrageous method of bringing them together, or sob at the unnecessary agony he was causing the both of them.
In the end she did both, released a laugh that turned into a sob and buried the sound in her hands. Each look, each touch, was an act of love that bound them together. Each word, each thought, was an act of pain that tore them apart at the seams.