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
