‘You want to live your life without me, then you may do so,’ he announced. ‘I will let you go, give you your divorce. There, it is done. Inshallah.’ With a flick of the hand he strode across the room and calmly ordered tea!
It was retaliation at its most ruthless and it left her standing there utterly frozen with dismay. Inshallah. She couldn’t even wince at what that single word represented. The will of Allah. Acceptance. A decision. The end. Hassan was agreeing to let her go and she could neither move nor breathe as the full power of that decree made its stunning impact.
She had not deserved that, Hassan was thinking impatiently as he stood glaring down at the telephone. She had been shocked, angry, hurt. Who would not be when they discovered that people they cared about, people they had tried to put before themselves, had been plotting to use them ruthlessly in a nasty game called politics? She had every right to vent her feelings—he had expected it! It was the reason why he had found them privacy before telling her the truth!
Or part of the truth, he then amended, all too grimly aware that there was yet more to come. But the rest was going to have to wait for a calmer time, for this moment might be silent but it certainly was not calm, because—
Damn it, despite the sensible lecture he was angry! There was not another person on this planet who dared to speak to him as she had just done, and the hell if he was going to apologise for responding to that!
He flicked a glance at her. She hadn’t moved. If she was even breathing he could see no evidence of it. Her hair was untidy. Long silken tendrils had escaped from the band she’d had it tied up in all day and were now caressing her nape, framing her stark white profile to add a vulnerability to her beauty that wrenched hard on his heart-strings. Her feet were bare, as were her slender arms and long slender legs. And she was emulating a statue again, only this time instead of art-deco she portrayed the discarded waif.
He liked the waif. His body quickened; another prohibited sigh tightened his chest. Curiosity replaced anger, though pride held his arrogant refusal to be the first one to retract his words firmly in place. She moved him like no other woman. She always had done. Angry or sad, hot with searing passion or frozen like ice as she was now.
Inshallah. It was Allah’s will that he loved this woman above all others. Let her go? Not while he had enough breath in his body to fight to hold onto what was his! Though he wished he could see evidence that there was breath inside hers.
He picked up an ornament, measured the weight of the beautifully sculpted smooth sandstone camel then put it back down again to pick up another one of a falcon preparing to take off on the wing. And all the time the silence throbbed like a living pulse in the air all around them.
Say something—talk to me, he willed silently. Show me that my woman is still alive in there, he wanted to say. But that pride again was insisting he would not be the one to break the stunning deadlock they were now gripped in.
The light tap at the door meant the ordered tea he didn’t even want had arrived. It was a relief to have something to do. She didn’t move as he went to open the door, still hadn’t moved when he closed it again on the steward he’d left firmly outside. Carrying the tray to the low table, he put it down, then turned to look at her. She still hadn’t moved.
Inshallah, he thought again, and gave up the battle. Walking over to her, he placed a hand against her pale cheek, stroked his thumb along the length of her smooth throat then settled it beneath her chin so he could lift her face up that small inch it required to make her look at him.
Eyes of a lush dark vulnerable green gazed into sombre night-dark brown. Her soft mouth parted; at last she took a breath he could hear and see. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ she whispered helplessly.
His legs went hollow. He understood. It was the way it had always been with them. ‘If true love could be made to order, we would still be standing here,’ he told her gravely.
At which point the ice melted, the gates opened and in a single painfully hopeless move she coiled her arms around his neck, buried her face into his chest and began to weep.
So what do you do with a woman who breaks her heart for you? You take her to bed. You wrap her in yourself. You make love to her until it is the only thing that matters any more. Afterwards, you face reality again. Afterwards you pick up from where you should never have let things go astray.
The tea stewed in the pot. Evening settled slowly over the room with a display of sunset colours that changed with each deepening stage of their sensual journey. Afterwards, he carried her into the shower and kept reality at bay by loving her there. Then they washed each other, dried each other, touched and kissed and spoke no words that could risk intrusion for as long as they possibly could.
It was Leona who eventually approached reality. ‘What now?’ she asked him.
‘We sail the ocean on our self-made island, and keep the rest of the world out,’ he answered huskily.
‘For how long?’
‘As long as we possibly can.’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her he knew exactly how long. The rest would wait, he told himself.
It was a huge tactical error, though he did not know that yet. For he had not retracted what he had decreed in a moment of anger. And, although Leona might appear to have set the words aside, she had not forgotten them. Nor had she forgotten the reason she was here at all: there were people out there who wanted to harm her.
But for now they pretended that everything was wonderful. Like a second honeymoon in fact—if an unusual one with Rafiq and Faysal along for company. They laughed a lot and played like any other set of holidaymakers would. Matters of state took a back seat to other more pleasurable pursuits. They windsurfed off the Greek islands, snorkelled over shipwrecks, jet-skied in parts of the Mediterranean that were so empty of other human life that they could have had the sea to themselves.
One week slid stealthily into a second week Leona regained the weight she had lost during the empty months without Hassan, and her skin took on a healthy golden hue. When matters of state refused to be completely ignored, Rafiq was always on hand to help keep up the pretence that everything was suddenly and miraculously okay.
Then it came. One heat-misted afternoon when Hassan was locked away in his office, and Faysal, Leona and Rafiq were lazing on the shade deck sipping tall cool drinks and reading a book each. She happened to glance up and received the shock of her life when she saw that they were sailing so close to land it felt as if she could almost reach out and touch it.
‘Oh, good grief,’ Getting up she went to stand by the rail. ‘Where are we, Rafiq?’
‘At the end of our time here alone together,’ a very different voice replied.
CHAPTER SIX
LEONA turned to find Hassan was standing not far away and Rafiq was in the process of rising to his feet. One man was looking at her; the other one was making sure that he didn’t. Hassan’s words shimmered in the air separating them and Rafiq’s murmured, ‘Excuse me, I will leave you to it,’ was as revealing as the speed with which he left.
The silence that followed his departure pulsed with the flurried pace of her heartbeat while Leona waited for Hassan to clarify what he had just said.
He was still in the same casual shorts and shirt he had been wearing when she had last seen him, she noticed. But there, the similarity between this man and the man who had kissed the top of her head and strolled away to answer Faysal’s call to work a short hour ago ended. For there was a tension about him that was almost palpable, and in his hand he held a gold fountain pen which offered up an image of him getting up from his desk to come back here at such speed that he hadn’t even had time to drop the pen.
‘We arrived here sooner than I had anticipated,’ he said, confirming her last thought.
‘It would be helpful for me to know where here is,’ she replied in a voice