Rashad acknowledged abstractedly, doubting that she would reach any higher than his chest, but the ripe curves of her figure at breast and hip were defiantly female and mature.
Polly gazed back at him, dry-mouthed with nervous tension. He had amazing cheekbones, a perfect narrow-bridged nose and a full wide sensual mouth enhanced by the dark shadow of stubble already visible on his bronzed skin. With difficulty she recollected her thoughts and spoke up. ‘I gather all this fuss is about the ring that I had in my bag,’ she assumed. ‘I’m afraid I know very little about it. It only recently came into my possession after my mother died and I think that she had had it for a long time—’
Rashad’s sister-in-law, Hayat, brought tea to the table, acting as a discreet chaperone and stepping back out of view.
‘What was your mother’s name?’ Rashad enquired, watching Polly lick a drop of mint tea off her lower lip and imagining that tiny pink tongue flicking against his own flesh with such driving and colourful immediacy that he was glad of the table that concealed the all too masculine swelling at his groin.
Polly was starting to feel incredibly tired as well as desperately thirsty and she sipped constantly at the tea, wishing that it were cold enough to gulp down. ‘Annabel Dixon,’ she admitted heavily. ‘But I don’t see what that—’
Rashad had frozen into position. Lush black lashes swooped down to hide his eyes and then skimmed upward again to frame startled gold chips of enquiry, his surprise unconcealed. ‘When I was a child I had a nanny called Annabel Dixon,’ he revealed flatly. ‘Are you saying that that woman was your mother?’
‘Yes...but I know very little about her and nothing at all about her time here in Dharia because I was brought up by my grandmother, not by my mother,’ Polly told him grudgingly while marvelling at the idea that her mother had looked after Rashad as a little boy. ‘Why is the ring so important?’
‘It is the ceremonial ring of the Kings of Dharia, a symbol of their right to rule,’ Rashad explained. ‘It has great emotional significance for my people. The ring went missing over twenty-five years ago when my family died and the dictator Arak staged a coup to take power here. Who is your father?’
Polly stiffened at his question. A headache was forming behind her brow and she was wishing she had access to the medication in her case while also dimly wondering when she could hope to be reunited with her luggage. ‘I don’t know but if all this happened twenty-five years ago it must’ve happened around the time I was conceived, so you see I have no further information to offer. I had no idea the ring was a lost treasure, nor do I know how my mother got hold of it or why she kept it. Surely she would’ve known how important it was?’
‘I would’ve assumed so,’ Rashad conceded. ‘I was in her care with my brothers from birth to the age of six and during that period your mother must have learned a great deal about my family.’
‘What was she like?’ Polly was betrayed into asking.
He looked at her in surprise.
‘I don’t really remember her...at least I have only the vaguest of recollections. Perhaps you don’t remember anything about her,’ Polly added hastily, her very pale face flushing as she gave him that escape clause.
‘She was always smiling, laughing,’ Rashad recounted quietly. ‘I was fond of her...as were my brothers. She was not blonde, like you...she had red hair—’
Polly nodded stiffly, thinking about her sister’s red hair, which Ellie hated. ‘Is there anyone else here who would still remember her?’ she asked daringly. ‘Naturally I’m very curious about her.’
‘Few of the staff from that era remain in the household,’ Rashad responded with regret, his lean dark face shadowing because so many of the palace staff had died in the coup.
‘So what happens to the ring now?’ Polly pressed tautly.
‘It must remain here in Dharia,’ Rashad pointed out in some surprise, as if she should have grasped that reality immediately. ‘This is where it belongs.’
Polly lifted her chin, her blue eyes darkening with annoyance even as a mortifying trickle of sweat ran down between her breasts below her loose tee shirt. She might be feeling hot and bothered and impossibly tired but there was nothing wrong with her wits. ‘But it is my ring and it’s the only token I will ever have from my mother.’
Rashad was taken aback by her statement. ‘That is most unfortunate but—’
‘For me, not for you!’ Polly interrupted fierily, her anger sparking at his immense assurance and his assumption that she would simply accept the situation.
Rashad was unaccustomed to being interrupted and even less familiar with the challenge of dealing with an angry woman. An ebony brow lifted at a derisive slant. ‘You are more fortunate than you appreciate,’ he told her levelly. ‘You could have been accused of theft simply for having the ring in your possession—’
Polly rammed back her chair and stood up, bracing her hands down on the table to steady herself because that quick impulsive movement had left her a little dizzy. ‘Well, go ahead and have me charged with theft!’ she urged furiously. ‘How dare you treat me like a criminal? My journey has been interrupted. I was marched off by security staff in front of an audience at the airport, held against my will in a nasty little room for hours and had the life threatened out of me when a crowd mobbed the car on the way here—’
‘You were selected at random at the airport to be searched in a drug-screening scheme we have recently established,’ Rashad interposed smooth as glass. ‘I regret that you have been inconvenienced and embarrassed and will ensure that what remains of your holiday compensates you for the experience.’
Backing further away from the table and its support, Polly valiantly straightened her back and squared her shoulders to lift her head high. ‘I want my mother’s ring back!’ she declared stridently.
Rashad rose fluidly upright, shamefully entertained by the sheer fury that had erupted in her face, flushing the skin to a delicious shade of pink, darkening her bright blue eyes to violet and compressing her lips into a surprisingly tough line. ‘You must know that that is not true. The ring did not belong either to your mother or your family—’
‘It was left to me. Therefore it belongs to me.’
Rashad raised a black brow as he strode towards her and she warily backed away, her legs feeling oddly weak and unusually clumsy.
‘The most basic law is that a stolen item may not be considered the legal possession of the person it is given or sold to because the individual who gave or sold it did not have the right of ownership to do so.’
Polly wasn’t listening to him. After all, now he was talking like a lawyer and, even in his light grey designer suit, he looked like a fantasy against the colourful backdrop of the courtyard. He didn’t look real, indeed none of what had happened to her since she first set foot on the soil of Dharia felt remotely real, so far did those events lie outside her experience. And all of it, him, her surroundings and the whole complex problem of the wretched ring, not to mention the heat, which she was finding unbearable, was becoming too much for her.
‘I’m not going to discuss it with you because it’s my ring, not yours!’ Polly flung back at him dizzily while she wondered why her fantasy image of him was turning a little fuzzy round the edges and putting him into a soft focus that did very little to blur the hard
