The Arabian Love-Child

‘Lunch is out,’ she announced jerkily. ‘I have to be somewhere else at one.’

Rafiq said nothing. He just continued to sit there watching as her cheeks grew even paler and her tongue made a nervous pass across trembling lips. Lips that still pulsed from his kiss, he noticed. Lips that seemed to have forgotten how to speak. She was tense, she was edgy, she was so nervous he could see the fine tremors attacking her flesh.

A sudden thought made his eyes narrow. She was Melanie Portreath now, not the Melanie Leggett he’d used to know. William Portreath had been in his nineties when he’d died, making his widow very rich. Rafiq knew how these things usually worked: wise men tended to protect their money from the machinations of a trophy wife.

But protect it for whom? ‘Answer me, Melanie,’ he commanded grimly.

She shimmered a glance at him then dragged it away, swallowed, and murmured huskily, ‘M-my son. The trust is to be set up for my son.’

So, the old man had been capable of enjoying the charms of his lovely young bride! Rafiq’s skin began to prickle at the very idea of it. She was now so pale her eyes were bruising. Was it shame? Was she beginning to realise that it was not as easy as she had expected to come in here and admit that she had sold herself for a pot of gold to a man old enough to be her grandfather?

Sickness was suddenly clawing at his stomach, disgust climbing up the walls of his chest, as she stood there staring at him through eyes that seemed to beg him for some kind of understanding. But all he saw was her beautiful, smooth naked form lying beneath a withered old man.

Placing the papers on his desk, he stood up and was amazed at the smoothness of the movement, was impressed by the way his legs carried him around the desk. ‘Come with me,’ he said, and was further impressed by the steadiness of his voice as he gave the instruction.

Melanie was looking slightly bewildered. He had no wish to look into her face any longer so he turned and walked away. As he strode towards the door he could hear her following him. In the outer foyer Nadia was busy at her computer, and Kadir was leaning against her desk while talking on the telephone. He was speaking Arabic, but Rafiq had not a single clue what words were being spoken in his natural tongue.

‘Kadir!’ With a flick of a hand he brought his aide to attention and kept on walking towards the other side of the room, where the lift stood with its doors conveniently open and waiting for them.

Kadir arrived at Rafiq’s side as he was silently indicating to his aide Melanie should precede him. She was frowning as she did so, eyeing Rafiq warily as she passed him by. He ignored her to indicate to Kadir to follow suit. Kadir entered the lift. Rafiq stepped in after them, but only for as long as it took him to hit the ground-floor button. He was taking no chances here.

‘Escort Mrs Portreath off the premises,’ he instructed Kadir. ‘And ensure that she does not gain entrance to this building again.’

With that he walked away, hearing Melanie’s shocked gasp as the lift doors put solid steel between them. As he strode past Nadia’s workstation he ignored his secretary’s stunned expression. With the easy flow of a man completely in control of his own actions, he stepped back into his office and closed the door.

Melanie was staring at the walls of her steel prison. Shock was holding her silent and still. Beside her, the dark-haired young Arab called Kadir was almost as frozen.

She found her voice. ‘What happened?’ she whispered.

He offered her a very formal bow. ‘I’m afraid I do not know.’

Then, before either could say anything else, the doors were opening onto the ground-floor foyer and Kadir was politely carrying out his master’s wishes by escorting her all the way to the giant glass doors and even beyond. In a daze of bewilderment Melanie found herself being offered another polite bow before the young man turned and retreated through the doors again, leaving her standing there in a state of utter disabling shock at the slick smooth way Rafiq had just executed his revenge on her—if revenge was what it had all been about. She didn’t know, didn’t care. He had thrown her out—publicly. In all her life she’d never felt so humiliated.

Stunned beyond being able to function sensibly, she began moving and almost fell beneath the wheels of a passing car. The car horn sounded; she just stood watching as it brushed by within inches.

Up high, in his marble tower, Rafiq viewed her near-death experience through black eyes and with bone-crackingly clenched teeth. It was only as he stood there fighting a battle between fear for her life and a wish never to lay eyes on her again that he made the connection between Melanie and the golden-haired woman he had watched hovering in the street before.

If he had known then what he knew now she would not have got beyond the building’s entrance doors, saving them both a lot of trouble.

The liar, the cheat, the little slut, he seethed in ice-cold silence. And he’d had the pleasure of experiencing two of her kind in a single day! All he needed now was for his mother to rise up from the grave and tell him exactly how much money she had squeezed out of his father before she’d agreed to carry his child full term.

Money. It always came down to money with women, he concluded, as he turned away from the window after watching one of their number safely cross the road. His mobile phone began to ring. Striding over to his desk, he picked it up, opened the back, removed the SIM card, then discarded the lot into the waste-paper bin where today’s Spanish newspaper was already showing yesterday’s news.

By tomorrow he would have pulled the plug on Serena’s finances. And his mother had ceased to be an issue when she’d died on the day of his birth. Which left only Melanie—or Mrs Portreath, he amended bitterly as he picked up the stack of her papers with the intention of consigning those to the waste-paper bin along with everything else.

Only something caught his eye and he hesitated…

CHAPTER THREE

MELANIE had no idea how she managed to get home again. She had only a vague recollection of standing on an Underground train and being strangely comforted because she was just one more blank face amongst many. But now here she stood in her own warm kitchen, surrounded by everything that represented familiarity, comfort and security to her—and she felt like an alien.

An alien being in an alien place, present, yet not a part of. It was an odd sensation, because she recognised everything yet couldn’t seem to connect with any of it. The old Aga set into the chimney-breast, for instance, the scrubbed table that took up too much space but was as much a part of the family as Robbie’s pictures decorating the cork notice-board on the wall by the door. Assorted mugs hung from old-fashioned cup hooks suspended beneath one of the ancient wall cabinets, and at some point since coming home, she had set the old kettle to heat on the Aga, though she didn’t remember doing it. It was puffing out steam in a gentle flow now, telling her the water was hot but not yet boiling. She had lost her shoes somewhere and was standing on cold quarry tiling in silk stockings that had cost her the absolute earth, though it felt as if she was floating above the floor.

Shock. She was suffering from shock. She understood that even if she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Every time she tried to think what had thrust her into this foggy state she experienced that awful sinking sensation of a lift swooping downwards and the claustrophobic sensation of being encased in steel. But what had happened before the lift and what had come after it was refusing to show itself.

She looked at the wall clock, saw it wasn’t even one o’clock yet, and realised she’d done well to get back so quickly after…

That lift swooped her downwards again and she fumbled for a kitchen chair then sank onto it, put a cold hand up to cover her mouth and caught a brief flash of Rafiq’s stone-like face. She blinked slowly as the part of her brain that stored pictures refused to connect with the part that stored emotion.

He’d thrown her out.

She dropped the hand onto the table, fingertips hovering in the air as if they knew that making contact with anything solid would cause some kind of horrible calamity.

He’d played with her like a cat with a mouse. He’d insulted her, kissed her, had brought her right there to the very edge of panic by suddenly showing an interest in things she’d no longer wanted him to know about. Then, quite calmly and precisely, he had thrown her out.

Her fingers began to curl down towards the table, her stomach muscles coiled into a ball, and at last blood began to pump more oxygen to her brain. Across the kitchen the kettle began to make hissing noises; the clock on the wall chimed the hour. The fingers touched base and she stood up; it was quick and tense and impulsive.

How could she have got it so wrong? How could she have talked herself into believing that he possessed a heart worth pleading with? Where had she ever got the stupid idea that he was a worthy father for her very precious son?

The telephone mounted on the wall behind her began ringing. Forcing herself to go and answer it took most of her self-control.

‘I saw you come back,’ a female voice said. ‘How did it go?’

It was her neighbour, Sophia. ‘It didn’t go anywhere,’ Melanie replied, then burst into tears.

Sophia arrived within minutes, banging on the back door with a demand to be let in after having come through the hole in the hedge that separated their two gardens. She was a tall, dark-haired, sex-seething bombshell with lavender eyes and a lush mouth that could slay the world. But inside the stunning outer casing lurked a legal mind that was a sharp as a razor and as tough as the glass ceiling she was striving to break through.

‘Dry those tears,’ she instructed the moment Melanie opened the door to her. ‘He doesn’t deserve them, and you know he doesn’t.’

Half an hour later Melanie had poured the whole thing out to her over a cup of tea. By then Sophia’s amazing eyes had turned glassy. ‘It sounds to me as if you and Robbie have just had a very lucky escape. The man is a first-class bastard. I did tell you, you should have stuck with me, kid,’ she added sagely. ‘I’m a much better father-figure for any boy child.’

It was such a ludicrous thing to say that Melanie laughed for the first time. But in a lot of ways Sophia was speaking the truth, because her neighbour’s curt, no-nonsense approach to life had always appealed to Robbie. When he was in need of something other than his mother’s loving softness he would disappear through the hole in the hedge to search out Sophia. So did Melanie, come to that.

‘What did your lawyer have to say when you told him?’ Sophia asked curiously. ‘The same as me—I told you so?’

Randal. Melanie’s brain ground to a halt again; she went still, her eyes fixed and blank. Then—

‘Oh, dear God,’ Melanie breathed, then jumped up and made a dive for the telephone.

‘What?’ Sophia demanded anxiously. ‘What did I say?’

‘Oh—hello.’ Melanie cut across Sophia with the tense greeting. ‘I need to speak to Randal Soames, please. I’m M-Mrs Portreath…W-what do you mean he isn’t there? I was supposed to be meeting him there for lunch!’

‘Mr Soames was called out on urgent business, Mrs Portreath,’ his secretary told her. ‘I was expecting you to arrive at any minute so I could offer you his apologies.’

She didn’t want an apology. ‘I have to speak to Randal!’ She was becoming hysterical. ‘When will he be back?’

‘He didn’t say…’