The Arabian Love-Child

No, stop it, she told herself fiercely as things began to stir inside that she just did not want to feel. She lifted her eyes, made contact with the dark, dark disturbing density of his still shocked eyes that seemed to want to pull her like a magnet into taking another step closer.

She resisted the urge, held it back with a fist-grabbing catch of control. Then, with every bit of sophistication she had acquired over the past eight years, she murmured, ‘Hello, Rafiq,’ and even managed to hold out a surprisingly steady hand. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

CHAPTER TWO

IT CAME as a punch to his stomach. The truth—reality. Melanie was standing here in front of him. No ghost, no spectre dragged up from the depths of his own bitter memory. The same spun-golden hair, darker gold eyes, creamy smooth skin covering perfect features; the same small, soft kiss-needy mouth and that soft-toned sensually pitched voice which brushed across his senses like a long-remembered lover’s caress.

Yet in other ways it was not the same Melanie. The clothes didn’t match, nor the way she styled her hair. The old Melanie had worn jeans and battered old trainers, not handmade leather shoes with spindles for heels and a slender black suit that shrieked the name of its designer label. Her hair used to stream around her face and shoulders, freely and simply like a child’s, though then she had been a twenty-year-old woman.

‘What are you doing here?’ he rasped out without any attempt to hide his contempt.

‘You’re surprised.’ She offered a wry smile. ‘Maybe I should have prewarned you.’

The smile hit his system like burning poison, seared through his bloodstream on a path that had no right to gather in his loins. He shifted, ignored the hand. ‘You would not have got beyond the ground-floor foyer,’ he responded with a gritty truth that sent her hand sinking to her side.

It also wiped the smile from her face, and with it Rafiq felt the heat in his body begin to dissipate. She shifted uncomfortably—so did someone else. Dragging his eyes across his office, he saw his secretary standing by the door. Fresh anger surged, a burning sense of bloody frustration, because this was the second time today that Nadia had witnessed him behaving like an ill-mannered boor.

‘Thank you, Nadia.’ He dismissed her with icy precision.

His secretary left in a hurry. Melanie turned to watch her go. Give it an hour and the whole building was going to know that Mr Rafiq was undergoing a drastic change in personality, he was thinking grimly as Melanie turned back to face him.

‘She’s afraid of you,’ she dared to remark.

‘The word you mean to use is respect,’ he corrected. ‘But, in truth, your opinion of my staff does not interest me. I prefer to know how you dare to think you can safely walk in here masquerading as someone you most definitely are not.’

Eyes that reflected the winter pale sunlight streaming in through the window, widened. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Rafiq. I thought you knew who I was. Didn’t you receive the papers from my lawyer’s office?’

Since those very papers were lying on his desk in front of both of them, it was sarcasm at its infuriating best. But it also made its point. Rafiq’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean you actually are the Melanie Portreath who inherited the Portreath fortune?’ he demanded in disbelief.

‘Don’t sound so shocked,’ Melanie responded dryly. ‘Even poor little country girls can have a lucky change in fortune occasionally.’

‘Marry it, you mean.’

The moment he’d said it Rafiq could have bitten his tongue off. It was hard and it was bitter and gave the impression that he might actually still care that she’d been seduced by his wealth.

‘If you say so,’ she murmured, and turned away to take an interest in her surroundings. As she did so he caught the delicate shape of her profile and felt something painful tug at his chest. Damn it, he thought. Don’t do that to me.

‘This place is as cold as a mausoleum,’ she told him.

She was right, and it was. Leona was always telling him the same thing. His half-brother Hassan’s office, which was next door to this one, had received a full makeover by Leona’s gifted hand to make it more hospitable. But Rafiq refused to let her anywhere near his office because—because he liked mausoleums, having placed his life in one, he accepted with an inner sigh.

Maybe Melanie knew what he was thinking, because she turned suddenly and their eyes clashed again, golden light touching bleak darkness, and the years were falling away. She had once told him that he was incapable of feeling anything deeply, that his big test in life was to learn to trust his own feelings instead of deferring those judgements to others. ‘You’ll end up a cold and lonely cynic, Rafiq,’ she’d predicted. ‘Living on the fringes of real life.’

‘What do you want, Melanie?’ he demanded grimly.

‘To sit down would be nice.’

‘You will not be stopping long enough to warrant it.’

‘It would be to your loss.’

‘The door is over there,’ he drawled coldly. ‘My secretary will see you out.’

‘Oh, don’t be so arrogant.’ She frowned at him. ‘You could at least have the decency to hear what I have to say.’

‘You can have nothing to say that I wish to listen to.’ With that he turned and walked around his desk.

‘Now you sound pompous.’

He swung on her so angrily that she took a shaky step back from the desk in alarm. ‘I sound like a cheated man!’

The words rang in the space between them. Melanie looked into his face and felt her knees start to fail. Bold slashing features cast in bronze seemed to loom ever closer. Eyes spiked with bitterness threatened to shrivel her where she stood. His mouth was no longer a mouth, but a pair of parted lines between which a set of white teeth glinted with danger. And the cold slab of marble lying between them seemed to be the only thing holding him back from stretching out a large hand and taking hold of her by the scruff of her neck.

She was shocked. Oh, not because of the pulsing threat itself, but because she would never have believed that he could reveal so much of what was raging inside him. The man she’d used to know had been so fiercely controlled that it had taken him weeks to get around to admitting he was attracted to her. He’d used to haunt her family’s farm on the pretext that he was considering investing money into it. He’d used to turn up in strange places like the tack room at the stables, or the hay barn, and would stand watching as she heaved bales of hay onto a low-loader ready for transport to the animals scattered about the outlying fields.

‘You should not be doing this,’ he’d said in husky disapproval.

‘Why?’ She remembered laughing at him. ‘Because I’m a woman?’

‘No.’ He hadn’t smiled back. ‘Because you hate it.’

It had been a truth that had confounded her, because she hadn’t realised her dislike had showed. She’d been living on the farm since she was ten year’s old, had been expected to do her share of the many daily chores. But as for enjoying the life? No. She would have given anything to go back to how things used to be, when she’d lived in London with two loving parents instead of one bad-tempered uncle and his weak stepson.

‘You cheated yourself,’ she now returned unsteadily. ‘And you have no idea how badly you—’

‘Quit,’ he warned thinly, ‘while you still can.’

It was an outright threat. Instinct was telling her to heed it, but anger was already welling up from the dark pit where she’d stored it for the past eight long years.

‘As you did when you preferred to believe lies about me, rather than give me a single minute to explain what you saw?’ she flashed back at him. ‘Is this my cue to come over all tomb-like and walk out of here, Rafiq? Will it make you feel better if I leave you alone with your righteous belief that you were the only one injured eight years ago?’

‘Get out,’ he incised.

And there they were. Those magic words, delivered with the same black-toned lack of emotion as before, that literally froze her blood. Melanie looked into the cold dark cast of his face and thought, Ten minutes. It had taken just ten short minutes for them to reach the same point where they had finished things eight years ago.

She laughed, though it was a shaky sound, and swung away, aware that she might have mocked herself about those two small words earlier, but they were still having that same crippling effect on her now as they’d had then.

Only there was a difference. The younger Melanie had run; this older version was made of stronger stuff. She swung back, faced him squarely. ‘I have something important to tell you first,’ she announced.

‘I have no wish to hear it.’

‘You might regret saying that.’

‘Leave, Melanie,’ he reiterated.

‘Not until you hear me out.’

Where had that damn stubbornness come from? Rafiq glared at her with a mix of frustration and fascination. It had been a hard push to get the old Melanie to argue about anything. Now he could not shut her up!