Jamilah had looked at him aghast. Abdul was the most mild-mannered man she’d ever known, and had worked at the stables for longer than anyone could remember. He rarely opened his mouth to anyone. The girls had scuttled off, and he’d immediately apologised to Jamilah red-faced, clearly mortified. She’d waved off his apology, not knowing where the sudden passion had blazed from, and with the curious feeling that he’d been defending Salman. But from what?
With a groan of frustration, mixed with anger at her obsessive thoughts about Salman, Jamilah threw back the covers and got out of bed. She stripped off and went straight to her shower, where she endured the icy spray until her teeth were chattering—as if she could numb all feeling.
‘You will have dinner with me tonight.’
Salman’s voice was an autocratic decree from the ruler of Merkazad. If it had been Nadim, Jamilah would have said yes immediately. But it was Salman, and as her suddenly sweaty hand gripped the handset of the phone in her office she said waspishly, ‘Why should I?’
Salman sighed, and her skin prickled.
‘Because we need to discuss some things …’
Her heart thumped. ‘I have nothing to discuss with you.’
Salman said, with an edge to his voice, ‘What you said to me the other day appears to be true. As much as I might be acting ruler, I’m being constantly diverted to you.’
Jamilah couldn’t even feel a bit smug for a second. She just said faintly, ‘I told you you’d need to earn their respect.’
‘And until that day dawns I’m afraid that I need you—’
Jamilah’s mind blanked when he said those words, and she had to concentrate just to keep up.
‘To have dinner with me and discuss official business. Or do you want me to bother Nadim and his pregnant wife while they are spending time with her family?’
Immediately Jamilah answered, because she knew Salman would have no compunction about disturbing them, ‘No. Of course not.’ She continued in a rush, before she could lose her nerve, ‘I’m finished at work by seven. I’ll see you at eight.’
Salman’s voice was husky. ‘Good. I’ll be looking forward to it, Jamilah.’
Jamilah let the phone drop with a clatter and put hands to hot cheeks. Suddenly breathless, she had to consciously block out evocative images and memories of those weeks in Paris and tell herself that never again would she be so foolish as to let Salman anywhere near the vulnerable heart of her.
A few hours later, though, seated in Nadim’s private formal suite, which Salman had moved into, at an intimate dining table, Jamilah was struggling hard to cling on to her sense of equilibrium. Salman sat opposite her in a black shirt. It made him look even darker, more dangerous. She took another sip of delicious red wine and cursed the impulse which had made her change into a black dress and high-heeled shoes. And leave her hair down. And put on the slightest touch of mascara. She told herself it was just armour. And she needed all the armour she could get.
Salman put down his knife and fork and sat back, wiping his mouth with a napkin. She’d once teased him about the single-minded way he ate. To block the insidious memory, she commented, ‘You’re not drinking …’ And then she smiled sweetly. ‘Still recovering from last week? They say it gets harder with age to cope with the after-effects.’
Almost curtly Salman said, ‘I don’t drink.’
Jamilah frowned, and Salman’s whole body tightened. If she had any idea how aroused and hot he was for her right now she’d run a mile. Since Hisham had shown her in earlier he’d been in a state of heat and lust. He’d expected her to be in jeans and a shirt, and wouldn’t have been surprised to see mucky riding boots.
But she was dressed in something floaty and black. And, while it revealed nothing overt, it clung to her soft bountiful curves with a loving touch. All he wanted to do was smash aside the table between them and rip it off her.
He forced an urbane smile and tried to clamp down on his recently dormant but now raging libido. ‘And I don’t do drugs, either.’
Jamilah was reminded of how he’d certainly appeared sober enough the morning she’d found him passed out. His admission made her feel funny … curious. She shook her head, not understanding. ‘How could you bear to be around those people, then? How could you invite them here and let them run amok like that?’
Salman smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘What can I say? I’m drawn to their instinctive hedonism. I find their lack of engagement with reality fascinating.’
Jamilah had the sudden inexplicable sense that he envied those people, and battled her growing curiosity. Her voice was scathing. ‘I find that hard to believe. It would be impossible to stay in any kind of proximity to that kind of world without being out of your head.’
His eyes darkened to unreadable black. ‘Believe it or not, I’ve been drunk once, and only once.’
At that admission, which Jamilah could see he didn’t welcome, his face shut down, became impassive. Jamilah remembered then that Salman had never drunk to excess during the time she’d been with him.
And then he said, ‘What about you, Jamilah? Are you such a paragon of virtue that you’ve never overindulged?’
Jamilah’s insides contracted. She could remember heady nights of wine and food when she’d been with Salman, the delicious tipsiness that had imbued her and Paris with a magical hue of romance. It certainly hadn’t done the same for Salman. Almost unconsciously she pushed away her half-full glass and answered, ‘I’m no paragon of virtue, Salman, but, no, I don’t feel that I need to see life through a veil of inebriation and crippling hangovers.’
He smiled mockingly, and she couldn’t fail to notice something unbearably bleak this time. ‘Because you wake up each morning with a sense of optimism about your life and the future?’
Jamilah went still inside. Once she’d been like that. So long ago that she almost couldn’t remember it. But she couldn’t deny that now every day when she woke up there was a dull sense of loss … of emptiness. He didn’t know that losing the baby had made her fearful that she might never get pregnant again. No one knew what she’d been through. And she wasn’t about to bare her soul to Salman now.
Much as she hated to admit it, her sense of isolation had been heightened recently by Nadim and Iseult’s unabashed joy in finding each other.
She wiped at her mouth perfunctorily with a napkin and sat up straight, looking pointedly at her watch even if she didn’t register the time. ‘What did you want to discuss, Salman? I’ve got an early start in the morning. We’ve got three new colts that need to be broken in.’
She looked at him then, and was taken aback at the sudden ashen tinge to his skin. Instinctively she leant forward and said, ‘Salman?’
But, as if she’d imagined it, he recovered. He stood up abruptly and walked over to a cabinet, where he took out some papers. Jamilah felt decidedly shaky, and tried not to let her eyes dwell on his tight buttocks encased in superbly cut black trousers. He turned and came back and her face flamed guiltily. She willed down the heat, hating feeling so out of control.
He put down the sheaf of documents and she picked up the top one, feeling at a serious disadvantage as he stood looming over her with hands in his pockets. She could see that it was a press communiqué about an important series of meetings of Middle Eastern heads of state to be held in Paris later that week, regarding the global financial crisis.
She looked up at him blankly. ‘So? What am I supposed to be seeing here?’
‘I have to go to Paris in Nadim’s place.’
Feeling threatened,