‘Well, thanks for being concerned about how I am feeling!’ she flashed back at him.
She was right. ‘You’ve just knocked me for six,’ he breathed unsteadily.
‘And I might be wrong, so don’t start going off the deep end about it!’ she snapped, and went to turn away.
Oh, Allah, help him, what was he doing here? With shaking hands he took hold of her by her silk-swathed shoulders and pulled her against him. She was trembling too. And she felt different, slender and frail and oh, so precious.
He kissed her—What else did a man do when he was so blown away by everything about her?
‘I should not have dropped it on you like this,’ she murmured repentantly a few seconds later.
‘Yes, you should,’ he argued. ‘How else?’
‘It might come to nothing.’ Anxiety was playing havoc with her beautiful eyes.
‘We will deal with the something or the nothing together.’
‘I am afraid of the nothing,’ she confessed to him. ‘I am afraid I might never get the chance to feel like this again.’
‘I love you,’ he said huskily. ‘Can that not be enough?’
‘For you?’ She threw the question back at him, clinging to his eyes like a vulnerable child.
‘We know how I feel, Leona,’ he said ruefully. ‘In fact, the whole of Rahman knows how I feel about you. But we hardly ever discuss how you feel about the situation I place you in here.’
‘I just don’t want you to have to keep defending my place in your life,’ she told him. ‘I hate it.’
Hassan thought about the damage-control exercise he had already set into motion, and wished he knew how to answer that. ‘I like defending you.’ His words seemed to say it all for him.
‘You won’t tell anyone tonight, will you?’ she flashed up at him suddenly. ‘You will keep this our secret until we know for sure.’
‘Do you really think I am that manipulative?’ He was shocked, then uncomfortable, because he realised that she knew him better than he knew himself. ‘Tomorrow we will bring in a doctor,’ he decided, looking for an escape from his own manipulative thoughts.
But Leona shook her head. ‘It would be all over Rahman in five minutes if we did that. Look what happened when I went to see him to find out why I couldn’t conceive?’
‘But we have to know—’
‘Evie is bringing me a pregnancy testing kit with her,’ she told him, too busy trying to smooth some semblance of calmness into herself to notice how still he had gone. ‘I rang her and explained. At least I can trust her not to say anything to anyone.’
‘What did she say?’ Hassan enquired carefully.
‘She said I should make sure I tell you. Which I’ve done.’ She turned a wry smile on him. ‘Now I wish that I hadn’t because, looking at you, I have a horrible feeling you are going to give the game away the moment anyone looks at you.’
Confess all, he told himself. Tell her before the Al-Kadahs tell her that you already suspected all of this, days ago. A knock at the door was a thankful diversion. Going to
open it, he found Rafiq standing there dressed very much like himself—only he was wearing his gutrah.
‘Our guests are arriving,’ he informed him. ‘You and Leona should be downstairs.’
Guests. Dear heaven. His life was in crisis and he must go downstairs and be polite to people. ‘We will be five minutes only.’
‘You are all right?’ Rafiq frowned at him.
No, I am slowly sinking beneath my own plots and counter-plots. ‘Five minutes,’ he repeated, and closed the door again.
Leona was standing by a mirror, about to fix her lipstick with a set of very unsteady fingers. The urge to go over there and stop her so that he could kiss her almost got the better of him. But one kiss would most definitely lead to another and another. In fact he wanted to be very primitive and drag her off by her beautiful hair to his lair and smother her in kisses. So instead he stepped back into the other room and came back a moment later wearing white silk on his head, held by triple gold thongs, to find that Leona had also covered her hair with a gold-spangled scarf of red silk.
The red should have clashed with her hair but it didn’t. It merely toned with the sensual colour on her lips. She lifted her eyes to look at him. He looked back at her. A different man, a different woman. It was amazing what a piece of silk laid to the head could do for both of them, because neither was now showing signs of what was really going on inside them.