was a sadistic master, lashing open festering wounds with images and sensations, of those shoulders dominating her, those hips thrusting her to a frenzy, those thighs and legs encompassing her in the aftermath of madness.
She tore her gaze and memories away, choking on longing. Then he turned, and everything in her piled up with the brunt of his beauty, the rawness of her still-burning love.
His heavy-lidded gaze documented her reaction before he raised both eyebrows, a movement rich in nonchalance and imperiousness. “Finished with your latest act, or shall I wait until you’ve delivered the full performance?”
It wasn’t only his voice that was different. This wasn’t the Farooq she remembered. This wasn’t even the hostile stranger she’d walked out on. That man had been seething with harshness, with emotion. This man was even more forbidding, as he eyed her with the clinical coldness of a scientist dealing with inanimate matter.
His lips pursed as if he were assessing a defective product. He finally gave a slight shake of his awesome head, lips twisting on his unfavorable verdict. “As an unbiased viewer, I must tell you, your acting abilities are slipping. Exaggeration is not your friend.”
Before she could even process his dispassionate comment, let alone find words to answer it, he relieved her of his focus, cast his gaze around her space.
She could see his connoisseur’s mind adding up the worth of every square foot, every piece of furniture, brush stroke and decorative article and felt defensive. Though she’d made this place chic and cheery, it could well be derelict compared to the opulence he was used to. Which was a stupid thing to feel and think.
She had to make him leave. Now. Before Mennah woke up. Before he saw the childproofing she’d begun installing.
He finally returned those empty eyes to hers as he walked back toward her. She watched him cross the distance between them with the fatalism of someone about to be hit by a train.
“It cost a bundle, this place,” he murmured. “I would have wondered how you afforded it. If I didn’t already know.”
She almost blurted out “What do you mean by that?”
She didn’t. She couldn’t locate her voice. Her heart had long invaded her throat. She could barely breathe enough to keep from passing out. And his indifference and disparagement were encasing her in frost, hurrying her descent. Everything was taking on a surreal tinge. She began to hope this was a scenario out of her Farooq-starved imagination.
Then he was within touching distance. And she had to prove to herself he was—or wasn’t—really here.
She reached out a trembling hand, half expecting her fingertips to encounter a mirage. Instead they feathered over black-silk-covered flesh, the layered sensations of softness and steel, heat and hardness. Her fingers pressed into him, shudders engulfing her, like an electrocution victim unable to break the deadly circuit.
And she saw it, in his eyes. A response, blasting away the ice, mushrooming like a nuclear cloud before the wave of annihilation followed. Before he clamped onto her intruding hand.
A moan punched out of her as he squeezed awareness from her flesh and bones. Then, with scary precision, he removed her hand from his chest, let it drop like a soiled tissue.
With his eyes empty again, he half turned, raising his head as if sniffing for an oncoming storm.
“Hmm … filet mignon with mushroom sauce?” He turned his eyes to her. They weren’t back to impassivity at all, the harshness she’d seen in them that night in his penthouse polluting the amber. “Expecting a guest? Or is it a sponsor?” She gaped at him. His voice dipped into an abrasive bass. “I hope you’ve had enough of the shocked routine and will contribute to what started as a monologue and is now bordering on a soliloquy.”
Contribute. He wanted her to contribute. She had exactly four words to contribute. The sum total of what was left of her mind.
“Why are you here?”
Something feral flashed in the depths of his wolflike eyes. “So, you deem to end the mute show. If only to put on the dumb one.”
Each word was a lash on her rawness. “Please … stop.”
He inclined his head, a predator at leisure, his prey cornered, with all the time in the world to torment it. “Stop what? Critiquing your below par performance? You have only yourself to blame for that. It seems you haven’t been honing your craft of late.”
“Please … I don’t understand.”
“More acts, Carmen? Don’t you know the key to a successful acting career, especially an offstage one, is sticking with your strengths? My advice: never try the particular roles you just churned up for my benefit again. They neither suit nor work.”
“For God’s sake, stop talking in riddles. Why are you here?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Intent on dramatizing to the end, aren’t you? Or are you just intent on testing the limits of my patience? The reason I’m here is self-evident.”
She shook her head. “Not to me. So please, drop your act and just say what you came here to say, and then—please—leave me alone.”
He seemed to expand like a thundercloud about to hurtle down destruction, a beam of the day’s dying sun striking a solar flare of rage in the gold of his eyes.
“I once told you that I have my fill of games. I thought you had enough intelligence not to join the would-be manipulators who swarm around me. At least not to try the same trick twice. Evidently I’ve overestimated your IQ. This will be the last time I take part in one of your games, so savor it while you can. Try another at your peril.” He inclined his head at her, sent her heart slamming in her chest. “You want me to pretend I don’t know that you know why I’m here? Zain. Fine.” He gave a pause laden with the irony of someone about to deliver something redundant, the disgust of being forced to play an offensive game of make-believe.
Then he drawled, smooth and sharp as a razor, “I am here for my daughter.”
Two
Farooq’s words shot through Carmen, pulverizing the framework holding her heart in place. Yet something kept her on her feet and conscious. Probably hope that she was hallucinating. “W-what did you say?”
He exhaled, the icy armor not back in place, the underlying volcano seething through the cracks. “Spare me further theatrics. You had my daughter. You have my daughter. I am here for her.”
He knows about Mennah.
How could he know about her?
He somehow did, had said … said …
I am here for my daughter.
What did that mean? Here for her … how? It couldn’t mean what it sounded like. It couldn’t mean he … he …
He wanted to take Mennah away from her.
The ground softened. An abyss yawned beneath, pulled at her …
But
