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.
In the end he chose a third option and took a rare sip at the white wine spritzer he had just prepared for her. The forbidden alcohol content in the drink might be diluted but he felt it hit his stomach and almost instantly enter his bloodstream with an injection of much appreciated fire.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ he announced, and watched her chin come up, watched her wonderful hair slide down her slender back and her hand drop slowly to her side while she took a steadying breath before she could bring herself to turn and face him.
‘I’ve been ill—with the flu,’ she answered flatly.
‘That was weeks ago,’ he dismissed, uncaring that he was revealing to her just how close an eye he had been keeping on her from a distance. The fact that she showed no surprise told him that she had guessed as much anyway. ‘After a virus such as influenza the weight recovery is usually swift.’
‘And you would know, of course,’ she drawled, mocking the fact that he had not suffered a day’s illness in his entire life.
‘I know you,’ he countered, ‘and your propensity for slipping into a decline when you are unhappy…’
‘I was ill, not unhappy.’
‘You missed me. I missed you. Why try to deny it?’
‘May I have one of those?’ Indicating towards the drink he held in his hand was her way of telling him she was going to ignore those kind of comments.
‘It is yours,’ he explained, and offered the glass out to her.
She looked at the glass, long dusky lashes flickering over her beautiful green eyes when she realised he was going to make her come and get the drink. Would she do it? he wondered curiously. Would she allow herself to come this close, when they both knew she would much rather turn and run?
But his beautiful wife had never been a coward. No matter how she might be feeling inside, he had never known her to run from a challenge. Even when she had left him last year she had done so with courage, not cowardice. And she did not let him down now as her silk stockinged feet began to tread the cream carpet until she was in reach of the glass.
‘Thank you.’ The wine spritzer was taken from him and lifted to her mouth. She sipped without knowing she had been offered the glass so she would place her lips where his lips had been.
Her pale throat moved as she swallowed; her lips came away from the glass wearing a seductively alluring wine glossed bloom. He watched her smother a sigh, watched her look anywhere but directly at him, was aware that she had not looked him in the face since removing the abaya, just as she had stopped looking at him weeks before she left Rahman. And he had to suppress his own sigh as he felt muscles tighten all over his body in his desire to reach out, draw her close and make her look at him!
But this was not the time to play the demanding husband. She would reject him as she had rejected him many times a year ago. What hurt him the most about remembering those bleak interludes was not his own angry frustration but the grim knowledge that it had been herself she had been denying.
‘Was the Petronades yacht party an elaborate set-up?’ she asked suddenly.
A brief smile stretched his mouth, and it was a very selfmocking smile because he had truly believed she was as concentrated on his close physical presence as he was on hers. But, no. As always, Leona’s mind worked in ways that continually managed to surprise him.
‘The party was genuine.’ He answered the question. ‘Your father’s sudden inability to get here in time to attend it was not.’
At least his honesty almost earned him a direct glance of frowning puzzlement before she managed to divert it to his right ear. ‘But you’ve just finished telling me that I was snatched because my father was—’
‘I know,’ he cut in, not needing to hear her explain what he already knew—which was that this whole thing had been very carefully set up and co-ordinated