father subsided a little. “That still doesn’t make it safe for you—”
“Look,” Julia interrupted. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But like it or not, Rashid Kamal is the father of my child. And at the moment, according to him, his father is contemplating naming my son as his heir. Whether that’s an empty threat or not, it just points up the fact that there are things we have to discuss. And since I don’t want those things leaked to the media, we are going somewhere alone, and I will not be taking a bodyguard.”
She won the argument. But by the end she was so worn out with pretending to trust Rashid Kamal that she was sweating with nerves.
The helicopter beat the air as it slowly settled onto the grass, whipping Julia’s long hair and the full skirt of her soft yellow dress. She put a hand up to hold her hat. Rashid watched the way her dress clung to her stomach, looking for the signs that a child was growing there.
When he cut the rotor, she came across the lawn towards him and leaned in the passenger door, peering towards the seats in the back of the helicopter. Rashid pulled his mouthpiece away from his chin so she could recognize him.
“Hello!” he cried over the engine noise.
Julia did a double take. She hadn’t been expecting him to be piloting the helicopter himself, and a fresh wave of nervous energy swept her.
“Hello!” Her voice held the sound of her determination to keep this pleasant. She had a deep, primitive urge to turn and flee.
“Can you climb in?” He spoke so matter-of-factly that her fears were momentarily calmed. He’s a Kamal, she told herself. That doesn’t mean he’s going to murder me in cold blood.
He leaned across to offer her a hand, but she clambered in without his help. He frowned to himself without knowing why. Something to do with wanting to be needed. Especially because she was pregnant.
With his son.
He helped her strap herself in, however, and gestured towards a headset in front of her. Julia took off her straw hat and slipped the headset over her ears. A moment later the chopper lifted smoothly off under his guidance, and they were airborne.
“Did you bring a bathing suit?” Rashid’s voice said in her headset.
It felt too intimate to have his voice inside her head like this. It reminded her of the last time she had heard him so close. Then he had not needed the assistance of a headset to give the impression of closeness; his voice had sounded close because his mouth was against her hair.
Beautiful, he had murmured. You are so beautiful….
Julia’s cheeks burned with the memory. “I did,” she said, hefting her drawstring bag as evidence without meeting his eyes. She dropped the bag between her feet and turned to look out. He had taken them out over the water and was heading north.
So the private place he had in mind was not on any of the Tamir Islands. She had wondered if he meant to take her to his horse farm on Siraj.
“Are we going to a yacht?” she wondered, half to herself, forgetting that her headset, too, had a microphone.
“No, an island.”
“An island? Rashid, I don’t have a passport with me!”
He laughed. “Stop worrying, Julia.” Again his voice was intimate and seductive in her ears. “Your seat reclines. Lie back and relax.”
In the cocoon of the helicopter with him, she felt strangely detached from the normal world. If she had not known Rashid was a Kamal, she would have felt an instinctive trust of him.
There was nothing she could do about this situation except start screaming to be taken home. Or go along with it.
She was tired after her sleepless night, and she would do better in the coming discussion if she caught some sleep now. With a resigned shrug, Julia found the mechanism, reclined her seat, and, with the sun bright above them, and sparkling almost painfully from the deep blue of the Mediterranean below, closed her eyes and let herself drowse. The memory was never far away….
Chapter 5
After her mother hung up, she had crouched on the floor, her head in her arms, alternately sobbing her brother’s name and begging God to let him live. “Lucas, oh, Lucas! Please, God, please, no!”
She’d thought she’d faced the possibility, been prepared for the worst ever since learning that Lucas’s plane had gone missing. She saw now what an illusion that was. Now, when all her hopes came crashing down around her, she could see how wildly she had been hoping, how she had staved off any real acceptance that the worst might happen.
She was crouched in the gloom, sobbing wildly, when a hand touched her shoulder.
“Please go away,” she hiccuped desperately, hiding her face in her hands. “Please.”
“I can’t do that,” said a voice. “I can’t leave you here like this. Come.” The voice was strong with masculine authority, and perhaps it was because she felt lost without Lucas in the world, felt as if her sheet anchor was gone, that she took comfort from his presence.
He drew her to her feet, and she allowed him to do it, then buried her face in a strong, comforting shoulder as he held her and gently stroked her hair. “My brother,” she sobbed. “My brother—”
She was swept by another bout of inconsolable weeping, and her knees collapsed. He caught her as she slumped, and without a word bent and swung her up in his arms.
His hold was strong and sure, like her father’s when she was a child. He strode down the corridor and stopped by a door, and she heard the sound of a key in the lock. In another moment she was inside in deep darkness. He bent and she felt something soft under her back. A bed. He tried to straighten, but she clung to him. “Hold me,” she begged. “Just hold me for a minute, please.”
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