Rafiq stiffened infinitesimally, Hassan looked as if she could not have insulted him more if she’d tried.
His eyes narrowed, his mouth grew thin, his handsome sleek features hardened into polished rock. Beneath the dark robes, Leona saw his wide chest expand and remain that way as, with a sharp flick of a hand, he sent Rafiq sweeping out of the room.
As the door closed them in, the sudden silence stifled almost as much as the abaya had done. Neither moved, neither spoke for the space of thirty long heart-throbbing seconds, while Hassan stared coldly down at her and she stared at some obscure point near his right shoulder.
Years of loving this one man, she was thinking painfully. Five years of living the dream in a marriage she had believed was so solid that nothing could ever tear it apart. Now she couldn’t even bring herself to focus on his face properly in case the feelings she now kept deeply suppressed inside her came surging to the surface and spilled out on a wave of broken-hearted misery. For their marriage was over. They both knew it was over. He should not have done this to her. It hurt so badly that he could treat her this way that she didn’t think she was ever going to forgive him for it.
Hassan broke the silence by releasing the breath he had been holding onto. ‘In the interests of harmony, I suggest you restrain from mentioning Ethan Hayes in my presence,’ he advised, then simply stepped right past her to walk across the room to a polished wood counter which ran the full length of one wall.
As she followed the long, lean, subtle movement of his body through desperately loving eyes, fresh fury leapt up to save her again. ‘But who else would I ask about when I’ve just watched your men beat him up and drag him away?’ she threw after him.
‘They did not beat him up.’ Flicking open a cupboard door, he revealed a fridge stocked with every conceivable form of liquid refreshment.
‘They fell on him like a flock of hooligans!’
‘They subdued his enthusiasm for a fight.’
‘He was defending me!’
‘That is my prerogative.’
Her choked laugh at that announcement dropped scorn all over it. ‘Sometimes your arrogance stuns even me!’ she informed him scathingly.
The fridge door shut with a thud. ‘And your foolish refusal to accept wise advice when it is offered to you stuns me!’
Twisting round, Hassan was suddenly revealing an anger that easily matched her own. His eyes were black, his expression harsh, his mouth snapped into a grim line. In his hand he held a bottle of mineral water which he slammed down on the cabinet top, then he began striding towards her, big and hard and threatening.
‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ she burst out bewilderedly. ‘Why am I under attack when I haven’t done anything?’
‘You dare to ask that, when this is the first time we have looked upon each other in a year—yet all you can think about is Ethan Hayes?’
‘Ethan isn’t your enemy,’ she persisted stubbornly.
‘No.’ Thinly said. Then something happened within his eyes that set her heart shuddering. He came to a stop a bare foot away from her. ‘But he is most definitely yours,’ he said.
She didn’t want him this close and took a step back. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she denied.
He closed the gap again. ‘A married woman openly living with a man who is not her husband carries a heavy penalty in Rahman.’
‘Are you daring to suggest that Ethan and I sleep together?’ Her eyes went wide with utter affront.
‘Do you?’
The question was like a slap to the face. ‘No we do not!’
‘Prove it,’ he challenged.
Surprise had her falling back another step. ‘But you know Ethan and I don’t have that kind of relationship,’ she insisted.
‘And, I repeat,’ he said, ‘prove it.’
Nerve-ends began to fray when she realised he was being serious. ‘I can’t,’ she admitted, then went quite pale when she felt forced to add, ‘But you know I wouldn’t sleep with him, Hassan. You know it,’ she emphasised with a painfully thickening tone which placed a different kind of darkness in his eyes.
It came from understanding and pity. And she hated him for that also! Hated and loved and hurt with a power that was worse than any other torture he could inflict.
‘Then explain to me, please,’ he persisted nonetheless, ‘when you openly live beneath the same roof as he does, how I convince my people of this certainty you believe I have in your fidelity?’
‘But Ethan and I haven’t spent one night alone together in the villa,’ she protested. ‘My father has always been there with us until he was delayed in London today!’
‘Quite.’ Hassan nodded. ‘Now you understand why you have been snatched from the brink of committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of our people. There,’ he said with a dismissive flick of the hand. ‘I am your saviour, as is my prerogative.’
With that, and having neatly tied the whole thing off to his own satisfaction, he turned and walked away—Leaving Leona to flounder in his smooth, slick logic and with no ready argument to offer.
‘I don’t believe you are real sometimes,’ she sent shakily after him. ‘Did it never occur to you that I didn’t want snatching from the brink?’
Sarcasm abounding, Hassan merely pulled the gutrah from his head and tossed it aside, then returned to the bottle of water. ‘It was time,’ he said, swinging the fridge door open again. ‘You have had long enough to sulk.’
‘I wasn’t sulking!’
‘Whatever,’ he dismissed with a shrug, then chose a bottle of white wine and closed the door. ‘It was time to bring the impasse to an end.’
Impasse, Leona repeated. He believed their failed marriage was merely stuck in an impasse. ‘I’m not coming back to you,’ she declared, then turned away to pretend to take an interest in her surroundings, knowing that his grim silence was denying her the right to choose.
They were enclosed in what she could only presume was a private stateroom furnished in subtle shades of cream faced with richly polished rosewood. It was all so beautifully designed that it was almost impossible to see the many doors built into the walls except for the wood-framed doors they had entered through. And it was the huge deep-sprung divan taking pride of place against a silk-lined wall, that told her exactly what the room’s function was.
Although the bed was not what truly captured her attention, but the pair of big easy chairs standing in front of a low table by a set of closed cream velvet curtains. As her heart gave a painful twist in recognition, she sent a hand drifting up to her eyes. Oh, Hassan, she thought despairingly, don’t do this to me…
She had seen the chairs, Hassan noted, studying the way she was standing there looking like an exquisitely fragile, perfectly tooled art-deco sculpture in her slender gown of gold. And he didn’t know whether to tell her so or simply weep at how utterly bereft she looked.
