And he did have a point. She had come straight here after a long flight, directly into the heat of the Quador day. She was hot and she was sticky. Once she bathed and made herself respectable she could visit her father.
She shuddered. Would Rashid tell him? She met the coldness of his eyes and her tongue snaked out in a vain attempt to moisten her dry lips. She saw his eyes darken in angry response. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I would like to bathe and change, and then I will be gone from your life for ever.’
His smile was cruel. How naive she was if she thought that she could drop a bombshell like that and simply walk away from the devastation she had caused! But he merely nodded his head. ‘Very well, Jenna,’ he agreed equably. ‘Your chaperon will show you to a private set of apartments, and you will make use of them as you please.’
Swallowing nervously, she nodded. In truth, she had not expected his anger to subside so quickly. She had thought that his pride would be offended more than anything—and didn’t it almost hurt that he now seemed to be accepting the situation with apparent calm? Maybe Rashid was more modern and more tolerant than she had imagined him to be.
But one sneaking look at the unyielding face told her not to push her luck, and to get out of there before he changed his mind.
He barked out an instruction and the chaperon nodded, beckoning Jenna to follow her.
Unseeingly, she left the State Rooms and walked in the footsteps of the older woman through a maze of palace corridors, her heart pounding painfully with relief and an aching sense of regret for what could now never be. It wasn’t until she was safely inside a dim, cool bedchamber, where her one suitcase lay unopened on the bed, that her pulse began to die down to something approaching normality.
‘You wish that I should stay and assist you?’ asked the chaperon, but Jenna shook her head.
She needed solitude to get her jumbled thoughts and emotions in some kind of order. She needed to compose herself and present a calm façade to her father—and she certainly couldn’t begin to do that if she had an audience. Particularly an audience with such curious eyes. She shook her head. ‘Thank you, but, no. I am used to managing on my own.’
Once the woman had quietly closed the door behind her Jenna sank with trembling knees onto the low, wide divan on which most high-born Quadors slept, and buried her face in her hands.
If she lived to be a hundred she would never forget that look of haunted disillusion which had fired Rashid’s face, so that for a moment he had resembled the devil himself. And she found herself remembering with poignant longing the expression of indulgent tenderness with which he’d used to look at her, so very long ago.
But it was too late for that now. She had sealed her fate with her words, and Rashid would never forgive her. She must just pray that he would be reasonable enough never to repeat what she had told him to her dear father.
She forced herself into action. The sooner she acted, the sooner she could be out of here. She filled the deep circular bath with water and oils scented with jasmine, and stripped off her jeans and her silky top. She threw them on the bed, together with her underwear.
Then she opened the suitcase and pulled from it a traditional Quador outfit, her breath escaping in a shuddering sigh as she laid it carefully on the bed.
The soft, silken robes brought back memories of happier times. In a way she had missed their filmy respectability—the long flowing tunic and the wide trousers worn beneath. A woman could feel like a real woman when concealed in the soft, sensual caress of silk.
She bit her lip as she lowered her body into the bath and closed her eyes.
She lay there for long, timeless moments, until lethargy began to seep into her limbs, and then she washed herself with the delicious scented soap and wrapped herself in a towel. She walked back into the bedchamber to find the room filled with an unexpected presence.
A dark, powerful and brooding figure awaited her, and her heart very nearly stopped.
‘R-Rashid,’ she stumbled foolishly. ‘W-what on earth are you doing here?’ But the look in his eyes told its own story, and her heart picked up its beat again as she shrank from the ebony blaze of his eyes.
He had come here to gather facts, or at least that was what he had convinced himself during his furious march through the palace. He had intended to do nothing more than tell her that the thought of her with another man had tainted his view of her for ever. But one sight of her curved and slender body, even the boyish haircut, had driven away reason and left him with nothing but the insistent clamouring of his senses. He was on fire with a need that consumed him.
‘I’ll leave why I’m here to your own imagination, Jenna,’ he said, his voice menacingly soft.
To think that all the while he had been rejecting Chantal’s sensual invitation Jenna had been cavorting with some un
known man on the other side of the world! The rage burned so bright within him that he felt he might explode with it.
‘And I am sure it is a very vivid imagination these days, is it not? Has your American lover taught you much?’ Dark eyebrows were arched in arrogant and erotic query. ‘Perhaps your new-found knowledge is such that you would like to share it with me?’
She understood his meaning instantly. ‘S-stop it!’ she gasped, but she was speaking as much to her own body as to the sexual predator who stood so tense with expectation beside the divan.
What was happening to her?
Because, somehow, the way that he was looking at her with a mixture of desire and contempt was igniting forbidden dreams that she had thought long-vanished.
A cruel smile curved his delicious lips. ‘Stop what?’ he questioned, almost conversationally. ‘I’m merely elaborating on what you have just told me—giving you the opportunity to demonstrate your liberation!’ He spat the last word out as if it were poison.
‘I think you’d better go, Rashid,’ she said in a low voice. She dropped her gaze from his so that he wouldn’t see the hot, answering hunger in her eyes, which was making her breasts tingle so intensely that it was a sensation close to exquisite pain. ‘I’d like to get dressed now.’
The smile became even more cruel. ‘But that would oppose the wishes of your Ruler, Jenna.’