The sudden clutch of sexual hunger he experienced, just looking at her, was so primitive it was shocking. It was a long time since his rather jaded appetite had been stirred so strongly.
But her mood was not at all as he had anticipated. This hissing, spitting cat had little in common with the image of a warm, willing temptress he had built in his mind, letting himself consider that perhaps this trip to England might not be the boring diplomatic duty and family responsibility it had promised to be.
Instead he was faced with an aggressive, fiery creature who had marched up to him in a way that no woman in Barakhara would ever dare to do, confronting him with her hands on her hips and a blaze in her cool grey eyes.
‘I don’t need to explain! You know why you’re here!’
‘My business here is with Sir James—’
The attempt to squash her, silence her, failed as she drew in a sharp breath, then launched into a further attack, dismissing his intervention with an audacious wave of her hand.
‘Your business here is to decide Andy’s—Andrew’s—fate!’ she flung at him. ‘I don’t know who you think you are, dicing with people’s lives like that! Just what gives you the right…’
‘The law gives me the right,’ Malik broke in on her with a snap. ‘The law of—Barakhara. The same law that young Andrew chose to flout when he decided to pocket some of the items he found at that archaeological dig he was working on.’
Andy, his mind had noted, grabbing at the single word and working on the meaning behind it. She’d changed it pretty hastily to Andrew, but Andy was what she’d said at first, before she’d corrected herself.
And Andy meant a familiarity, a closeness that was more than servant to a member of the family she worked for.
‘A few paltry items!’ she scorned. ‘What? A coin or two? A fossil? And for that you’d lock him up for life!’
‘A few paltry religious items,’ Malik corrected coldly. ‘Items of deep significance to the history of Barakhara and its rulers. Items that in just the last century would have meant death for any non-Barakharanian to touch…’
He watched the colour ebb from her face with grim satisfaction. The ashen shade of her cheeks told him all he needed to know.
‘You didn’t know that?’
She could only shake her head, sending the pale gold of her hair flying as she did so.
Andy. Malik’s mind went back to the word in the way that he might worry at a sore tooth with his tongue. Andy…So what was the relationship between these two? Did they have something going between them? Was Andy perhaps her lover? The sting of jealousy that thought brought was as jagged as it was unexpected, making him move sharply, uncomfortably.
‘So he omitted to tell you the full facts about why he was arrested?’
Or was it the father who had done that? Was it the truth of the matter that James Cavanaugh—Sir James Cavanaugh— didn’t want the world to know just what his stupid elder son had been up to?
Malik’s mouth curled in distaste. The Honourable Andrew Cavanaugh was what the son called himself—what he had insisted on being called, Jalil had said. And the Honourable Andrew Cavanaugh lived in a house like this, with maids to clean and fetch and carry for him, and still he stole to line his own pockets. There was little that was honourable about that.
‘So now perhaps you’ll admit that I have a reason for what I’m doing. That I am not quite the spawn of the devil you think me?’
‘I…’
She didn’t seem able to find an answer for him. Her soft pink lips opened, but no words would come out. And clouds of confusion dulled the silvery grey of her eyes.
Suddenly Malik felt a sense of rage at the fate that had brought him here, the job he had to do. Why couldn’t Jalil do his own dirty work?
There were times when he wished he could just let his young fool of a half-brother go to damnation in his own way. But if Jalil fell, then the whole of his country would go to rack and ruin too, and he had sworn an oath to his mother—Jalil’s mother too—that he would never let that happen. A vow made within the family was sacrosanct, and he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t keep it—no matter what it took.
He had hoped that a little dalliance with the blonde maid would at least provide some entertainment, some relaxation after the delicate negotiations he was going to have to handle. But from the stubborn, mulish expression on her face, he was going to have to work harder at winning her over than he had ever thought.
The unwanted and uncomfortable thought suddenly hit him that if she knew the son—this Andy—so well, then maybe she was close to the daughter as well.
That was a complication he could do without. He had seen no sign yet of the Gail that Jalil had talked about, but if she and this girl were friends…
‘No—he didn’t tell me,’ she managed now, stumbling over the words faintly and a raw colour washed those pale cheeks, betraying her embarrassment…
And making her look damnably sexy. It might be mortification that had put the blush on her skin but it made her look as if she had just got out of bed after a long, passionate session of sexual indulgence. It might have been the way that she had bitten down hard on her lower lip that had made it so pink, with all the blood rushing to the surface, but in his mind he knew that her mouth would look like that when she had been kissed senseless, taken to ecstasy and beyond.
‘What’s your name?’ he demanded suddenly, his voice rough with the effort of trying to distract himself from the heated blood that seemed to be pooling low in his body, hardening and tightening so that it was a struggle to think straight—to think at all.
‘I’m Abbie,’ she told him, looking a little startled that he should ask.
Not Gail, Malik thought on a rush of relief. Just for one uncomfortable moment he had wondered…
‘And what should I call you?’
She’d pulled back some of her confidence now, some of the strength there had been in her in the moment of her arrival in the room. There was a definite edge of sarcasm to her tone on the question. One that tugged a smile at the corner of his mouth, one that was impossible to hold back.
‘You can call me Malik.’
‘Malik…’ Abbie’s tongue curled around the exotic sound of the word as if she were tasting it.
It sounded rich and exotic, strong and firm—just right. Just like him.
‘Is that all?’
Her voice was softly husky, dragged from a throat that was too dry, too tight, to speak naturally. She swallowed hard and slicked a moist pink tongue over suddenly parched lips, watching his black gaze drop just for a moment to follow the tiny revealing gesture. And when his eyes lifted again, burning straight into hers, she knew that she was lost. She had fallen into sensual slavery without knowing why or how it had happened. But she was in and tumbling head over heels into an endless chasm of awareness, one from which she already knew she had no hope of escape.
Not that she wanted to. That smile had rocked her world. It had only been a small curl at the corners of his sexy mouth but it had made her shiver in instant reaction, heated pinpricks of awareness tormenting her sensitised skin.
‘Shouldn’t I add something else?’
Her question brought those brilliant eyes swiftly back up to her face, locking with her own bemused gaze, holding it fixed.
‘Add