can’t do this!’
The words burst from her before she had time to consider them or even try to decide if she would be wiser to hold them back. And she didn’t know whether to feel a sense of near panic or intense satisfaction as she saw the way that his head went even further back, forceful jaw tightening, gleaming jet-black eyes narrowing sharply as he looked up into her face.
‘I beg your pardon?’
It was a shock to realise that these were the first words she had ever heard him speak clearly. She had been intensely aware of him, of his presence in the house, ever since that moment that he had stepped out of his car and into the sunlit courtyard. It was as if he had always been in her life, not just newly arrived in her experience.
‘What did you say?’
The rich, dark, lyrically accented voice had sharpened, developing a razor’s edge that made her wince inside to hear it. And there was a new tension in the long muscular body that no longer lounged easily in the chair but had developed the tightness of a coiled spring, like that hunting cat she had imagined earlier waiting and watching for just the right moment to pounce.
He hadn’t actually moved but still there was enough of a threat of danger in him, in the tautly drawn jaw, the sharply narrowed eyes, that made her insides quail at the thought of that coldly reined-in anger turned on her. And yet somehow the new sense of risk added a sharper edge to the harsh male beauty of his face, the brilliance of those glittering jet eyes.
But not enough to curb her tongue.
‘You can’t do this! You can’t treat people this way!’
‘And what way would that be?’
‘You know only too well!’
‘I think not.’
To her nervous horror, he was leaning forward to replace the cup and its saucer on the table, uncoiling his long body with a slow and indolent grace as he got to his feet. Standing at his full height, he towered over her, big and overpowering, sending her throat into a spasm of shock and freezing her runaway tongue into silence. She swallowed hard and fought for the control not to turn and run straight for the door—fast!
‘I don’t believe I know what you’re accusing me of—or why,’ he went on, the beautiful voice shockingly soft and warm. Deceptively so because there was no way that the tone of his words matched the fierce, cold assessment to which those black, black eyes were subjecting her. ‘So perhaps you’d like to explain.’
He’d wanted to meet the sexy blonde from the moment he’d seen her watching him from the window, Malik reminded himself. In fact, he’d agreed to James Cavanaugh’s suggestion of tea largely in the hope that the maid would be the one who would bring it. He’d been disappointed when James himself was the one to go and fetch the tray. But then his host had been called away to an important phone call and now here was the blonde, appearing unexpectedly in the library without warning.
He would have sworn that, in the moment their eyes had met earlier, he had seen the same sudden flare of interest, of attraction, that he had felt for her. In fact, he had been so sure of it that he had been content to wait, believing it was only a matter of time before they came together. And her sudden appearance seemed to have proved him right.
She was even more stunning close up than he had imagined from the quick glimpse he had had of her through the window. She was tall, with rich, full breasts, a neat waist and curving hips. That ridiculous apron with its multicoloured flower print should have made her look anything but glamorous but the way it fastened around the slenderness of her waist emphasised the swell of her breasts, the flare of her hips. A real woman, unlike the almost boyish figures of so many of the females he had seen around London.
The sudden clutch of sexual hunger he experienced, just looking at her, was so primitive it was shocking. It was a long time since his rather jaded appetite had been stirred so strongly.
But her mood was not at all as he had anticipated. This hissing, spitting cat had little in common with the image of a warm, willing temptress he had built in his mind, letting himself consider that perhaps this trip to England might not be the boring diplomatic duty and family responsibility it had promised to be.
Instead he was faced with an aggressive, fiery creature who had marched up to him in a way that no woman in Barakhara would ever dare to do, confronting him with her hands on her hips and a blaze in her cool grey eyes.
‘I don’t need to explain! You know why you’re here!’
‘My business here is with Sir James—’
The attempt to squash her, silence her, failed as she drew in a sharp breath, then launched into a further attack, dismissing his intervention with an audacious wave of her hand.
‘Your business here is to decide Andy’s—Andrew’s—fate!’ she flung at him. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, dicing with people’s lives like that! Just what gives you the right…’
‘The law gives me the right,’ Malik broke in on her with a snap. ‘The law of—Barakhara. The same law that young Andrew chose to flout when he decided to pocket some of the items he found at that archaeological dig he was working on.’
Andy, his mind had noted, grabbing at the single word and working on the meaning behind it. She’d changed it pretty hastily to Andrew, but Andy was what she’d said at first, before she’d corrected herself.
And Andy meant a familiarity, a closeness that was more than servant to a member of the family she worked for.
‘A few paltry items!’ she scorned. ‘What? A coin or two? A fossil? And for that you’d lock him up for life!’
‘A few paltry religious items,’ Malik corrected coldly. ‘Items of deep significance to the history of Barakhara and its rulers. Items that in just the last century would have meant death for any non-Barakharanian to touch…’
He watched the colour ebb from her face with grim satisfaction. The ashen shade of her cheeks told him all he needed to know.
‘You didn’t know that?’
She could only shake her head, sending the pale gold of her hair flying as she did so.
Andy. Malik’s mind went back to the word in the way that he might worry at a sore tooth with his tongue. Andy…So what was the relationship between these two? Did they have something going between them? Was Andy perhaps her lover? The sting of jealousy that thought brought was as jagged as it was unexpected, making him move sharply, uncomfortably.
‘So he omitted to tell you the full facts about why he was arrested?’
Or was it the father who had done that? Was it the truth of the matter that James Cavanaugh—Sir James Cavanaugh— didn’t want the world to know just what his stupid elder son had been up to?
Malik’s mouth curled in distaste. The Honourable Andrew Cavanaugh was what the son called himself—what he had insisted on being called, Jalil had said. And the Honourable Andrew Cavanaugh lived in a house like this, with maids to clean and fetch and carry for him, and still he stole to line his own pockets. There was little that was honourable about that.
‘So now perhaps you’ll admit that I have a reason for what I’m doing.
