Zafir...
Thankfully she checked the impulse just in time. His haunting black eyes were staring at her hard, she saw, piercing her like the glowing points of a dagger. Although she shuddered, she still drank him in, realising that although he looked a little older he was still as handsome as sin and must still set women’s hearts fluttering from here to Kathmandu.
He had also grown his hair.
It fell way past his magnificent shoulders in glossy black waves. The disturbing recollection that the dark strands were like the finest silk to touch made her guiltily yearn to experience running her fingers through the new length...
‘The young lady fell off the wall, Your Highness,’ the guard interjected, sounding inexplicably protective, ‘and she is hurt.’
‘Hurting is what she is good at.’
Stung by the bitterly voiced statement, Darcy opened her mouth to protest. He was the one who was good at hurting...not her. Or had he so quickly erased that little fact from his memory?
‘What are you doing here, and why are you trespassing on my property?’
‘I’ll tell you why—because you wouldn’t take my calls or return my messages. You wouldn’t even let me make an appointment to see you. God knows how many times I’ve tried. This was a last resort. In all honesty I would have preferred to have left you alone...but I had to see you.’
His glance suspicious, the autocratic man in front of her responded grimly, ‘I have never, to my knowledge, received any such messages.’
Darcy’s mouth turned sickeningly dry. ‘You’re joking? Why wouldn’t you have received them? I always told your secretary that it was urgent and confidential. Why didn’t she believe me?’
‘Never mind that right now... If what you say is true then I will be making my investigations. More to the point, what is the reason you want to see me, Darcy? Did you not believe me when I said I never wanted to set eyes on you again? You could hardly have expected any good to come out of our meeting.’
He leaned down to her, and even as she breathed in the exotic scent of agar that highlighted his cologne she saw the expression on his carved face was disturbingly accusing.
‘How long have you known that I was here?’
Her eyes widened nervously. ‘I only recently found out. There was an article in the newspaper.’
‘And you saw the opportunity to get back at me for what happened in the past?’
Her blood ran cold for a moment. ‘No! That wasn’t the reason I wanted to find you, Zafir. Did you imagine my aim was to try and blackmail you in some way? If you think that then you couldn’t be more wrong.’ Tears stung the backs of her eyelids like hot springs. Swallowing hard, she continued, ‘The article said that you are engaged to be married.’
‘And no doubt you want to congratulate me?’
‘Don’t make light of my pain like that.’
As was her habit, when she was fuming at some injustice or another, she indignantly folded her arms. The movement was a little sharp, and it somehow ricocheted down to her injured ankle. She wasn’t able to suppress the groan of pain that rose up inside her.
His ebony eyes darkening in concern, Zafir turned to his immaculately suited companion. ‘Dr Eden. Please give the young lady some water and take a look at her ankle...now. It might be broken.’
Appalled that that might be the case, with a tremulous sweep of her hand Darcy pushed back her hair and stared. ‘I’m sure you’d relish that, wouldn’t you?’ She all but grabbed at the silver flask that was proffered and imbibed a deep gulp of icy liquid before she said anything else.
As he rose to his full height, the Sheikh’s expression was clearly perturbed. ‘While you deserve to be punished for what you did to me, I do not take any pleasure in the fact that you have been injured. And just one more thing’
As the slim, middle-aged doctor lithely dropped down to his haunches to examine her foot, the Arabian’s black eyes glinted a warning.
‘Do not call me Zafir. The use of that name is permitted only to a select circle of family and friends and clearly, Miss Carrick, you should speak in deference to the hierarchy of my position...you are my subordinate.’
It jolted her that he’d used her surname, and it gave her little satisfaction that he’d so strongly emphasised the ‘subordinate’ part. The suggestion of fury in his voice made her heart contract even more. She hadn’t immediately succumbed to tears at this latest encounter with him but Darcy felt like crying now.
Once upon a time she’d loved this man more than life itself. Now he sounded as though he hated her. And all because he’d believed his brother’s vindictive lies...
‘Although I can’t say for certain until it’s X-rayed, I think what we have here is a severe sprain, Miss Carrick.’
The doctor’s slim, cool fingers were gently checking her bones for breakage and prodding the puffy skin around her ankle to inspect it. Straight away his calm assertion along with his professional expertise reinstated her hope that things weren’t as disastrous as she’d feared.
A relieved sigh escaped her but then she quickly frowned. Just who did she think she was kidding? Things were about as disastrous as they could get. And, having intuited the mood he was in, she suspected that Zafir didn’t intend to let her get off lightly for shinning up his garden wall in order to force a meeting. He was the eldest son of the ruling family in the kingdom of Zachariah, and consequently not just important but powerful too, and she knew that if her motivation hadn’t been solely to tell him that he had a son and heir she would never have attempted to see him at all.
How many times did a person’s self-esteem have to be stamped into the ground before they were forced to admit defeat and walk away?
‘We should take you into the house so that we can make some arrangements for your care,’ Dr Eden added, his grey eyes flicking towards his impressive employer for confirmation.
The first man to help her reacted first, quickly assuming what must be his esteemed position as the Sheikh’s chief security guard. ‘I will go and get a stretcher, Your Highness.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Rashid,’ Zafir flashed, his icy gaze irritably scanning Darcy as she sat hunched on the new-mown lawn, massaging her ankle. ‘I will carry Miss Carrick over to the house myself.’
Her immediate declaration of indignation at being treated like some extraneous piece of baggage died on her lips. In her more forgiving moments, when she’d flirted with the unlikely idea of somehow meeting up with Zafir again and having a frank conversation with him about what had really happened back then, it hadn’t been like this. No, never like this... The warm, funny, erudite man she’d once worked for and fallen in love with was a very different person from the cold, embittered stranger she was faced with now.
Biting her lip, she murmured, ‘I think I’d rather crawl.’
She didn’t know if he’d heard her, but to add insult to injury he easily dropped down to lift her into his arms.
‘I hope you don’t have an accomplice in this little escapade of yours? If you do, no doubt he is long gone. Perhaps he found out that you were not so bewitching after all, and sensibly took the opportunity to flee when he had the chance?’
Swallowing down her hurt that he so naturally assumed she’d been with another man and up to no good, Darcy schooled herself to stay silent instead of reacting. But her senses were awash with pain, and a regret that thundered like a raging river in her blood.
Could he not see beyond his own prejudiced beliefs and realise the truth? Clearly not...
Without further preamble, he swept her up and marched towards the house, with the effete doctor in front and Rashid following