Passion

She went home in tears that night only to find her stepfather, Scott, drunkenly upbraiding her mother with the club manager, Pete’s, complaint that Tilda had an unfriendly attitude towards the customers. The next weekend Pete told her that she had to stand in for one of the cage dancers who had called in sick. She refused. Threatened with the sack and worn down by what felt like everybody’s criticisms, she gave way, reasoning that the bikini-style outfit exposed no more than she would have revealed at the swimming pool. She persuaded herself that nobody really looked at the dancers except as gyrating bodies that added to the club atmosphere.

When Rashad arrived, a birthday cake was brought in for his benefit. Tilda still recalled the instant when he had registered who was dancing in the cage: the shock and consternation, the distaste he had been unable to hide. In the same moment cage dancing had gone from being what Tilda had told herself was essentially harmless to the equivalent of dancing naked and shameless in the street. When Rashad studiously averted his attention from her as though she were putting on an indecent display, she fled from the cage and refused to get back into it again. Chantal later revealed that Tilda had been set up.

‘It’s the prince’s twenty-fifth birthday. Sergio and Leonidas thought it would be a laugh to get you into the cage. They paid Pete to fix it for them.’

Tilda never did tell Rashad that truth. Telling tales about his best friends wouldn’t have got her very far. Instead, she blamed herself for not having had the guts to tell Pete where to get off. Eyes red from tears, she put on her uniform and got on with her usual waitressing. Already promised a full-time summer job at the firm owned by Evan Jerrold, she consoled herself with the prayerful hope that she would not be serving drinks for much longer. Unhappily, however, new employment would mean that she was unlikely to ever see Rashad again.

When she finished her shift, she emerged from the club to find the weather was wet and unseasonably cold, and that the girl who usually gave her a lift had gone off to a party without telling her. Shivering while she was trying to call a cab on her mobile, she tensed when a silver Aston Martin Vanquish pulled up in front of her with a throaty growl. Rashad sprang out and studied her in silence across the bonnet and she knew he wouldn’t ask anything of her because he had asked before and she had said no. He was too proud to ask again. Tears made her eyes smart; she still felt so utterly humiliated that she had let herself be pressed into dancing in the cage.

As Rashad walked round the bonnet and reached out to open the passenger door one of his bodyguards skidded up at speed to do it for him and prevent him from lowering himself to such a mundane task.

‘Thanks,’ she said gruffly and got in. At that moment she was not aware of having made a decision. She just couldn’t muster the mental resistance to walk away from him again. She told herself that if she kept things as light as though it were a holiday romance she wouldn’t get hurt.

‘You’ll have to tell me where you live,’ Rashad murmured as calmly as if she had been getting into his car every night for months.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said in a wobbly voice, as the excessively emotional surge of tears was still threatening her composure.

At the traffic lights he reached for her hand and almost crushed it within the fierce hold of his. ‘In my country we stopped putting people in cages when slavery was outlawed a hundred years ago.’

‘I shouldn’t have agreed to do it.’

‘You did not wish to?’

‘Of course not—apart from anything else, I’m not a dancer.’

‘Don’t do it again,’ Rashad told her with innate authority and instantly she wanted to do it again just to demonstrate her independence. She had to bite her lip not to respond with the defiance that she had acquired to hold her own with her stepfather.

And so it began: a relationship that attracted a great deal of unwelcome comment from others. Leonidas Pallis made it clear that he regarded her in much the same light as a call-girl. Sergio Torrente, the sleek, sophisticated Italian who completed the trio of friends, seemed equally disdainful of Tilda’s right to be treated with respect, but was not quite so obvious about revealing the fact. Had she been less green about the strength of male bonding, she might have realised then that with such powerful enemies her relationship with Rashad was utterly doomed to end in tears.

As the hateful Leonidas Pallis put it, ‘Why can’t you keep it simple?’ Tilda heard him ask Rashad this during a night out. ‘Boy meets girl, boy shags girl, boy dumps girl. You don’t romance waitresses!’

As her revolting stepfather put it: ‘Well, you can thank me for getting you the job that’s about to make your fortune. Tell him you like cash better than diamonds.’

Offered the chance to rent a room in a student house for the summer, she grabbed it to escape Scott and quit working at the club. At the same time she started her temporary job in the accounts department at Jerrold Plastics. The weeks that followed were the happiest but also the stormiest of her life, because Rashad laid down the law as if he were her commanding officer and did not adapt well to disagreement. She was challenged to keep his hands off her, but whenever passion threatened to overcome prudence she backed off fast. She was a virgin, well aware that she came from a very fertile line of women, and she was totally terrified of getting pregnant. She honestly believed, too, that keeping serious sex out of the equation would lessen the pain when Rashad returned to Bakhar.

Tilda was yanked out of those unsettling recollections only when the train pulled into the station. While she queued for the bus, she began putting the recent knowledge she had gained into those memories and she winced at the picture that began to emerge. Although she had had no idea of it, there had been a whole hidden dimension to her relationship with Rashad. That financial aspect encompassed, not only the embarrassing level of her family’s indebtedness, but also a seemingly brazen reluctance on her family’s part to pay rent or pay off the loan. Was it any wonder that over time Rashad had become suspicious of her motives and decided that all along she must have been a gold-digger out for all she could get?

Sex … It’s the only thing you have to give that I want. Still outraged by that declaration, Tilda could find no excuse for him on that score. Obviously that was all he had ever wanted from her and the brutal way he had ditched her had spelt out the same message. She was proud of the fact that she had not slept with Rashad five years earlier. But just as swiftly the false courage of offended pride and anger started to wane in the face of reality. When she began walking down the road where she lived her steps got slower and slower as she neared her home. After all, what had she achieved? She had got nowhere with Rashad. He was tough, resolute and ruthless. Emotion never got in the way of his selfdiscipline.

Sadly, the strength, intellect and tenacity that she had once admired also made Rashad a lethally effective opponent.

Tilda was wrenched from her reflections by the startling sight of her former stepfather climbing into his beat-up car outside her home. As the older man had never demonstrated the smallest interest in maintaining contact with Katie, James and Megan, his three children by her mother, Tilda was taken aback. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in dismay.

‘Mind your own bloody business!’ Scott Morrison told her, his heavy face flushed with aggression below his thinning blond hair.

Seriously concerned, Tilda watched him shoot his vehicle back out onto the road. Why had he been visiting the house? He had come at a time when her mother would be alone. She went straight into Beth’s workroom. Her mother was sobbing and the room was in turmoil. Curtains were heaped on the floor in a tangle and a chair had been turned over. Perhaps most telling of all, the older woman’s purse lay open on the ironing board with only a few coins spilling out of it.

‘I bumped into Scott outside. Has he been taking money off you again?’ Tilda asked baldly.

Beth broke down and, piece by horrible piece, the whole story came tumbling out. When Scott had found out several years earlier that Rashad was the current owner of the house, he had accused Beth of defrauding him of his share of the property. Ever since then Beth had been living in fear of Scott’s visits and giving way to his threats and demands for money. While she soothed the distraught older woman, Tilda’s anger grew for she finally understood why Beth had found it impossible even to pay rent. From behind the scenes, Scott Morrison had still been bleeding Tilda’s family dry.

‘Scott got what he was entitled to when the divorce settlement went through the court. He has no right to anything more. He’s been telling you lies. I’m going to get the police, Mum—’

‘No, you can’t do that.’ Beth gave her a look of horror. ‘Katie and James would die of shame if their father was arrested—’

‘No, they’d die of shame at what’s been going on here, what you’ve been putting up with on their behalf! Silence protects bullies like Scott. Don’t you worry … I’ll sort him out,’ Tilda swore, furious with herself for not even suspecting what had been going on behind all their backs. The divorce had not gotten rid of Scott after all and working for a living had never been his way.

She was hanging her coat below the stairs when she noticed that the post had arrived. She tensed at the sight of the familiar brown envelope and scooped it up. Yes, just as she had feared it was yet another missive from Rashad’s solicitors. Taking a deep breath, she tore it open. Nervous perspiration broke out on her brow as she realised what the letter was. It was a written notice asking her mother to leave the house within fourteen days. As the rent was in arrears the landlord, it stated, would go to court seeking possession at the end of the month.

Tilda took the letter upstairs. She just could not face giving it to her mother at that moment. From the window she watched her sisters, seventeen-year-old Katie and nine-year-old Megan, walking up the drive in their school uniforms. James was shambling along in their wake, a tall gangling boy of fourteen, who had still to grow into his very large feet and deep bass voice. Her brother, Aubrey, currently in his fourth year of studying medicine, would be home later. Tilda was deeply attached to all of her siblings. They had gone through so much unhappiness when Scott had been making their lives hell but they had stayed close. They were good kids, hard-working and sensible. What would losing their home mean to them? Everything. It would shatter her family, because Beth’s agoraphobia would ensure that the older woman could not cope. When Beth fell apart at the seams, what then? Aubrey would probably drop out of med school and Katie would find it impossible to study for her A-levels.

There was only one way out, only one way of protecting her family from the horror of being put out on the street: Rashad.

Rashad … and sex. It would most probably be a major disappointment to Rashad, whose womanising exploits filled endless pages in the tabloid newspapers, to discover that Tilda did not possess a single special sexy talent to offer in the bedroom. Nothing but ignorance. It would serve him right, Tilda reflected, tight-mouthed. Even so, common sense urged that she would have to ensure that he wrote off all the debts and the house as well before it dawned on him that she really wasn’t worth the sacrifice of that much money. She shuddered, shame enveloping her from head to toe. She would be selling herself like a product in return for cash.

She reminded herself that if she hadn’t been so fearful of heartache and pregnancy, she would have ended up in bed with Rashad while she had been dating him. But it would have been different back then, because she had truly loved him and had certainly believed that he had more feelings for her than he had finally demonstrated. Would she be able to have sex just for the sake of it? Presumably other women did. There was no point being over-sensitive to the reality that she really had no choice if she wanted to protect the people she loved from having their lives devastated.

Standing by the window, she called Metropolis Enterprises on her mobile and asked to speak to Rashad. Various very well-trained personnel tried to head her off and make her settle for much smaller fry. She persisted with the reminder that she’d had an appointment with the prince earlier that day and added that he would be very annoyed if he did not receive her personal call.

Rashad was in a meeting when the message flashed up on his BlackBerry. Tilda. A slow, chilling smile curved his wide, handsome mouth as he took the call in his office. So, the fish was biting. He felt like a shark about to attend a banquet. She was his. Finally his to enjoy. At his leisure in a place of his choosing and for as long as he wanted her. He would make all the rules and she would really, really hate that. His brilliant dark golden eyes gleamed with anticipation. He pictured her greeting him when he returned from a long trip abroad and knew instantly where he would accommodate her. Somewhere where her talent for infidelity could not possibly be exercised. A discreet location where she had nothing to do but devote herself to being his sexual entertainment. He could think of no place more suitable than his late grandfather’s desert palace.

‘How may I be of assistance?’ Rashad drawled smoother than the most expensive silk in tone.

Instantly Tilda wanted to reach down the phone and slap him, for she knew that he knew exactly why she was ringing. She swallowed her pride with difficulty. ‘I’m willing to accept your offer.’

‘What offer?’

Her short upper lip dampened with perspiration. ‘You said it was the only thing I had to offer that you wanted.’

‘Your body,’ Rashad filled in gently, savouring every syllable. ‘You. We’ll have to meet to discuss the rules.’

‘What rules?’ she protested. ‘I just want to know that that eviction order won’t proceed.’

‘Meet me tomorrow afternoon at my town house.’ He quoted the address and a time. ‘We’ll sort out the details of our future association. You’ll be living abroad. I can tell you that now.’

As Tilda parted her lips to argue with that alarmingly unexpected assurance, Rashad concluded drily, ‘It will be as I say.’

At that juncture he terminated the call. He would not compromise on any point. The rules would not be negotiable. Everything would be as he wanted it to be. The sooner she learned that and accepted it, the better.

CHAPTER FOUR

EVAN JERROLD brought his elegant Jaguar car to a halt in the exclusive London residential square. ‘Good luck,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Thank you.’ Tilda opened the passenger door of the luxury vehicle with a sense of relief, since telling lies made her uncomfortable. Evan had offered her a lift when her mother had mentioned that Tilda was heading to London that afternoon. Asked why she was taking time out of work, Tilda had told the first fib that had occurred to her—that she was attending a job interview. It had then occurred to her that the excuse of a new job could well be the perfect cover, if Rashad stuck to his insistence that she travel abroad.

‘Now remember I’ll give you an excellent reference. I’ll call back in an hour because you may be finished by then,’ Evan told her.

Tilda was embarrassed. ‘There’s no need.’