* * *
The bar was too noisy. Too dark.
Almost immediately Rashid regretted the impulse that had seen him climb down the stairs to the noisy bar in the basement of the building alongside his hotel.
Because the questions in his mind were still buzzing, and as his eyes skated over a dance floor filled with young women wearing more make-up than clothes he wasn’t convinced he was going to find the relief he needed here.
He ground his teeth together, the fingers that had been bound so tightly today already aching to curl once more into fists.
He was wasting his time here. He turned to leave, and that was when he saw the woman sitting by herself at the bar. His eyes narrowed. She was attractive, he guessed, under that bookish exterior, and she sure looked out of place here, standing out in her short-sleeved shirt in a sea of otherwise bare flesh. Too buttoned up with her brown hair pulled back into a tight bun. A glass of milk in a wine bar wouldn’t have looked more out of place.
But at least she looked as if she was past puberty. At least she looked like a woman.
He watched her down half her cocktail and scowl into the glass, but not as if she was morose, more as if she was angry. So she was as unimpressed with the world as he was? Perfect. The last thing he needed was someone with stars in their eyes. Maybe they could be angry at the world together.
He was already edging his way through the crowd when a man sidled up to her and slipped his arm around her back.
Rashid suppressed a growl and turned away. He might be angry, but he wasn’t about to fight over a woman.
* * *
‘I’m not actually looking for company,’ Tora said to her persistent would-be friend. Sure, someone sympathetic to get the whole sorry cheating-cousin saga off her chest might be therapeutic. Someone to lend her a shoulder and rub her back and say it would all be okay might be nice, but she hadn’t come here looking for that and she wasn’t about to consider any offers, not if the sympathetic shoulder came packaged like this one.
‘Just when we were getting on so well, too,’ he said, moving his bulk sideways when he saw her picking up her clutch to block her from getting up from her stool.
‘I hadn’t noticed,’ she said, mentally adding another hate to her growing list—leery men in bars who imagined they were God’s gift to women, although, to be honest, that one had always been right up there with seedy bars. ‘And now if you wouldn’t mind getting out of my way?’
‘Come on,’ he said, curling his arm closer around her back, and breathing beer fumes all over her. ‘What’s your rush?’
It was when she turned her head to escape the fumes that she saw him. He moved like a shadow in the dark basement, only the burst of coloured lights betraying his movements in the glint of blue-black hair and the whites of his eyes under the lights. He was tall and looked as if he was searching for someone or something, his eyes scanning the room, and, while heads turned in his wake, so far nobody seemed to be laying claim to him.
Surprising, given the way he couldn’t help but be noticed if someone was waiting for him.
Not to mention convenient.
‘How’s about I get you another drink?’ the man offered, slurring his words. ‘I’m real friendly.’
Yeah, she thought, if only he were sober and could speak clearly and looked a little more like the man who’d just walked in, she might even be interested.
‘I’m meeting someone,’ she lied, pushing off her stool but making sure it was her shoulder that brushed past his stomach and not her breasts. Her feet hit the ground and even on her sensible heels, she wobbled. Whoa! Maybe those cocktails weren’t such a total loss after all.
‘He stood you up, eh?’ said the man, still refusing to give up on his quarry. Still refusing to believe her. ‘Lucky I’m here to rescue you from sitting on the shelf all night.’
‘No,’ she said, in case Mr Beer Breath decided to argue the point, ‘he just walked in,’ and she squeezed her way past him determined to prove it.
* * *
Half-heartedly Rashid scanned the room one last time, already knowing that he was wasting his time in this place. He turned to leave—he would find no oblivion here—when someone grabbed his arm.
‘At last,’ he heard a woman say above the music. ‘You’re late.’
He was about to say she was mistaken and shrug her off, when her other arm encircled his neck and she drew herself closer. ‘Work with me on this,’ she said as she pulled his head down to hers.