‘But not today,’ he said. ‘Not for at least twenty-four hours.’
‘I have to get away,’ she said, half-demanding, half-pleading.
‘You have no choice, as it turns out,’ he snapped, his voice cold and imperious again. ‘The airport is closed.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘YOU’RE lying.’ Her voice seemed surprisingly level under the circumstances. ‘This is just some pathetic attempt to keep me here. But it won’t work. I’m leaving.’
‘Unfortunately it’s true. Insurgents from neighbouring Jamalbad have been stirring up trouble along the border. This is the second such infraction in a few weeks—the first happened while we were en route from Milan. It seems someone thought that my absence then was an opportune time to stir up trouble.’
She thought back to the plane flight, his sudden disappearance, the urgent discussions going on around the communications equipment.
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘Yet in spite of that danger, you still brought me here.’
‘I would never have brought you here if I’d thought it was serious. My guards believed they’d dealt with the problem. It now appears they missed the ringleaders. They’ve still been out there, stirring up trouble. We’ve closed the airport as a precautionary measure.’
‘For an entire day?’
He shrugged. ‘It is best to be prudent—perhaps it will be closed for less.’
She looked ruefully down at the suitcase and let go of the handle. It was like letting go of a lifeline. He’d told her she would be safe here. Now she couldn’t get away even when she wanted to.
And how she wanted to.
She wanted to be as far away from this desert ruler as possible. Her previous life had never seemed calm—the fashion industry was madness as well as maddening, but compared to the way her feelings and emotions were being tossed about now it was a cakewalk.
She didn’t want to stay near Khaled. If his scheming methods to get her here weren’t frightening enough, his quiet declaration that he didn’t have to force her to marry him and that she would come to him of her own accord scared her even more.
He was kidding himself! Not that she wanted to hang around to prove his theory wrong. But neither did she want to stay and be subjected to the pull of his fiery magnetism.
She couldn’t trust herself to resist it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I promise you will be safe. That’s why I came to see you today. I wanted you to hear it from me, to assure you that we are dealing with the problem and that Jebbai will soon be returned to its former peaceful existence.’
‘And what of my former peaceful existence?’ she said. ‘When will I be returned to that?’
She looked so fragile right then, her blue eyes foggy with vulnerability and defeat, and he felt her anguish deep inside, in a place he’d long thought shrivelled and empty.
She did that to him. Touched him in ways no one ever had. Why else would he have risked his whole plan by revealing the truth so soon? Her constant goads, her insistent demands, they had been bad enough—nobody had ever defied him the way she did. But it was the way she seemed so desperate to return to her deceitful lover that had forced him over the edge of reason.
So he’d spilled his intention to take her as his bride much earlier than he’d planned and in doing so he’d threatened the entire scheme.
But maybe this way was better. Maybe now he would secure a far more effective payback.
Already he’d exacted a measure of revenge upon his former foe. He’d smelt the fear coming down the phone line as clearly as one felt the blast-furnace heat of a Jebbai midsummer day. Half a world away Paolo would know that this was his doing, he would know that he had brought this on with his own precipitous actions so long ago. He would wear the guilt like a heavy burden he could never shrug off. He would bear the pain forever.
As for Sapphire? Her anguish at her so-called fiancé’s betrayal was palpable. He’d felt her despair like a knife thrust under his ribs; it touched him deep inside and instinctively, bizarrely, he wanted to make it better.
He had thought it would be easy—to take the woman of the man he hated as easily as stealing one of his possessions. Yet this woman was no cold chattel, no in animate property. She was warm, and human and so responsive.
And he wanted her.
Oh, how he wanted her.
He wanted to feel more of her responsiveness, more of her body curling into his, more of her body melding with his until she was part of him, until they were part of each other.
And he wanted her now.