he thought again, and gave up the battle. Walking over to her, he placed a hand against her pale cheek, stroked his thumb along the length of her smooth throat then settled it beneath her chin so he could lift her face up that small inch it required to make her look at him.
Eyes of a lush dark vulnerable green gazed into sombre night-dark brown. Her soft mouth parted; at last she took a breath he could hear and see. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she whispered helplessly.
His legs went hollow. He understood. It was the way it had always been with them. ‘If true love could be made to order, we would still be standing here,’ he told her gravely.
At which point the ice melted, the gates opened and in a single painfully hopeless move she coiled her arms around his neck, buried her face into his chest and began to weep.
So what do you do with a woman who breaks her heart for you? You take her to bed. You wrap her in yourself. You make love to her until it is the only thing that matters any more. Afterwards, you face reality again. Afterwards you pick up from where you should never have let things go astray.
The tea stewed in the pot. Evening settled slowly over the room with a display of sunset colours that changed with each deepening stage of their sensual journey. Afterwards, he carried her into the shower and kept reality at bay by loving her there. Then they washed each other, dried each other, touched and kissed and spoke no words that could risk intrusion for as long as they possibly could.
It was Leona who eventually approached reality. ‘What now?’ she asked him.
‘We sail the ocean on our self-made island, and keep the rest of the world out,’ he answered huskily.
‘For how long?’
‘As long as we possibly can.’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her he knew exactly how long. The rest would wait, he told himself.
It was a huge tactical error, though he did not know that yet. For he had not retracted what he had decreed in a moment of anger. And, although Leona might appear to have set the words aside, she had not forgotten them. Nor had she forgotten the reason she was here at all: there were people out there who wanted to harm her.
But for now they pretended that everything was wonderful. Like a second honeymoon in fact—if an unusual one with Rafiq and Faysal along for company. They laughed a lot and played like any other set of holidaymakers would. Matters of state took a back seat to other more pleasurable pursuits. They windsurfed off the Greek islands, snorkelled over shipwrecks, jet-skied in parts of the Mediterranean that were so empty of other human life that they could have had the sea to themselves.
One week slid stealthily into a second week Leona regained the weight she had lost during the empty months without Hassan, and her skin took on a healthy golden hue. When matters of state refused to be completely ignored, Rafiq was always on hand to help keep up the pretence that everything was suddenly and miraculously okay.
Then it came. One heat-misted afternoon when Hassan was locked away in his office, and Faysal, Leona and Rafiq were lazing on the shade deck sipping tall cool drinks and reading a book each. She happened to glance up and received the shock of her life when she saw that they were sailing so close to land it felt as if she could almost reach out and touch it.
‘Oh, good grief,’ Getting up she went to stand by the rail. ‘Where are we, Rafiq?’
‘At the end of our time here alone together,’ a very different voice replied.
CHAPTER SIX
LEONA turned to find Hassan was standing not far away and Rafiq was in the process of rising to his feet. One man was looking at her; the other one was making sure that he didn’t. Hassan’s words shimmered in the air separating them and Rafiq’s murmured, ‘Excuse me, I will leave you to it,’ was as revealing as the speed with which he left.
The silence that followed his departure pulsed with the flurried pace of her heartbeat while Leona waited for Hassan to clarify what he had just said.
He was still in the same casual shorts and shirt he had been wearing when she had last seen him, she noticed. But there, the similarity between this man and the man who had kissed the top of her head and strolled away to answer Faysal’s call to work a short hour ago ended. For there was a tension about him that was almost palpable, and in his hand he held a gold fountain pen which offered up an image of him getting up from his desk to come back here at such speed that he hadn’t even had time to drop the pen.
‘We arrived here sooner than I had anticipated,’ he said, confirming her last thought.
‘It would be helpful for me to know where here is,’ she replied in a voice laden with the weight of whatever it was that was about to come at her.
And come it did. ‘Port Said,’ he provided, saw her startled response of recognition and lowered his eyes on an acknowledging grimace that more or less said the rest.
Port Said lay at the mouth of the Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. If they were coming into the port, then there could only be one reason for it: Hassan was ready to go home and their self-made, sea-borne paradise was about to disintegrate.
He had noticed the pen in his hand and went to drop it on the lounger next to the book she had left there. Then he walked over to the long white table at which they had eaten most of their evening meals over the last two weeks. Pulling out a chair, he sat down, released a sigh, then put up a hand to rub the back of his neck as if he was trying to iron out a crick.
When he removed it again he stretched the hand out towards her. ‘Join me,’ he invited.
Leona shook her head and instead found her arms crossing tightly beneath the thrust of her breasts. ‘Tell me first,’ she insisted.
‘Don’t be difficult,’ he censured. ‘I want you here, within touching distance when I explain.’
But she didn’t want to be within touching distance when he said what she knew he had to say. ‘You are about to go home, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed.
It was all right challenging someone to tell you the truth when you did not mind the answer, but when you did mind it—‘So this is it,’ she stated, finding a short laugh from somewhere that was not really a laugh at all. ‘Holiday over…’
Out there the sun glistened on the blue water, casting a shimmering haze over the nearing land. It was hot but she was cold. It was bright but she was standing in darkness. The end, she thought. The finish.
‘So, how are you going to play it?’ she asked him. ‘Do you drop me off on the quay in the clothes I arrived in and wave a poignant farewell as you sail away. Or have I earned my passage back to San Estéban?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Hassan frowned. ‘You are my wife, yet you speak about yourself as a mistress.’
Which was basically how she had been behaving over the last two weeks, Leona admitted to herself. ‘Inshallah,’ she murmured.
The small sarcasm brought him back to his feet. As he strode towards her she felt her body quicken, felt her breasts grow tight and despised herself for being so weak of the flesh that she could be aroused by a man who was about to carry out his promise to free her.
