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No, stop it, she told herself fiercely as things began to stir inside that she just did not want to feel. She lifted her eyes, made contact with the dark, dark disturbing density of his still shocked eyes that seemed to want to pull her like a magnet into taking another step closer.
She resisted the urge, held it back with a fist-grabbing catch of control. Then, with every bit of sophistication she had acquired over the past eight years, she murmured, ‘Hello, Rafiq,’ and even managed to hold out a surprisingly steady hand. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
CHAPTER TWO
IT CAME as a punch to his stomach. The truth—reality. Melanie was standing here in front of him. No ghost, no spectre dragged up from the depths of his own bitter memory. The same spun-golden hair, darker gold eyes, creamy smooth skin covering perfect features; the same small, soft kiss-needy mouth and that soft-toned sensually pitched voice which brushed across his senses like a long-remembered lover’s caress.
Yet in other ways it was not the same Melanie. The clothes didn’t match, nor the way she styled her hair. The old Melanie had worn jeans and battered old trainers, not handmade leather shoes with spindles for heels and a slender black suit that shrieked the name of its designer label. Her hair used to stream around her face and shoulders, freely and simply like a child’s, though then she had been a twenty-year-old woman.
‘What are you doing here?’ he rasped out without any attempt to hide his contempt.
‘You’re surprised.’ She offered a wry smile. ‘Maybe I should have prewarned you.’
The smile hit his system like burning poison, seared through his bloodstream on a path that had no right to gather in his loins. He shifted, ignored the hand. ‘You would not have got beyond the ground-floor foyer,’ he responded with a gritty truth that sent her hand sinking to her side.
It also wiped the smile from her face, and with it Rafiq felt the heat in his body begin to dissipate. She shifted uncomfortably—so did someone else. Dragging his eyes across his office, he saw his secretary standing by the door. Fresh anger surged, a burning sense of bloody frustration, because this was the second time today that Nadia had witnessed him behaving like an ill-mannered boor.
‘Thank you, Nadia.’ He dismissed her with icy precision.
His secretary left in a hurry. Melanie turned to watch her go. Give it an hour and the whole building was going to know that Mr Rafiq was undergoing a drastic change in personality, he was thinking grimly as Melanie turned back to face him.
‘She’s afraid of you,’ she dared to remark.
‘The word you mean to use is respect,’ he corrected. ‘But, in truth, your opinion of my staff does not interest me. I prefer to know how you dare to think you can safely walk in here masquerading as someone you most definitely are not.’
Eyes that reflected the winter pale sunlight streaming in through the window, widened. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Rafiq. I thought you knew who I was. Didn’t you receive the papers from my lawyer’s office?’
Since those very papers were lying on his desk in front of both of them, it was sarcasm at its infuriating best. But it also made its point. Rafiq’s eyes narrowed. ‘You mean you actually are the Melanie Portreath who inherited the Portreath fortune?’ he demanded in disbelief.
‘Don’t sound so shocked,’ Melanie responded dryly. ‘Even poor little country girls can have a lucky change in fortune occasionally.’
‘Marry it, you mean.’
The moment he’d said it Rafiq could have bitten his tongue off. It was hard and it was bitter and gave the impression that he might actually still care that she’d been seduced by his wealth.
‘If you say so,’ she murmured, and turned away to take an interest in her surroundings. As she did so he caught the delicate shape of her profile and felt something painful tug at his chest. Damn it, he thought. Don’t do that to me.
‘This place is as cold as a mausoleum,’ she told him.
She was right, and it was. Leona was always telling him the same thing. His half-brother Hassan’s office, which was next door to this one, had received a full makeover by Leona’s gifted hand to make it more hospitable. But Rafiq refused to let her anywhere near his office because—because he liked mausoleums, having placed his life in one, he accepted with an inner sigh.
Maybe Melanie knew what he was thinking, because she turned suddenly and their eyes clashed again, golden light touching bleak darkness, and the years were falling away. She had once told him that he was incapable of feeling anything deeply, that his big test in life was to learn to trust his own feelings instead of deferring those judgements to others. ‘You’ll end up a cold and lonely cynic, Rafiq,’ she’d predicted. ‘Living on the fringes of real life.’
‘What do you want, Melanie?’ he demanded grimly.
‘To sit down would be nice.’
‘You will not be stopping long enough to warrant it.’
‘It would be to your loss.’
‘The door is over there,’ he drawled coldly. ‘My secretary will see you out.’
‘Oh, don’t be so arrogant.’ She frowned at him. ‘You could at least have the decency to hear what I have to say.’
‘You can have nothing to say that I wish to listen to.’ With that he turned and walked around his desk.
‘Now you sound pompous.’
He swung on her so angrily that she took a shaky step back from the desk in alarm. ‘I sound like a cheated man!’
The words rang in the space between them. Melanie looked into his face and felt her knees start to fail. Bold slashing features cast in bronze seemed to loom ever closer. Eyes spiked with bitterness threatened to shrivel her where she stood. His mouth was no longer a mouth, but a pair of parted lines between which a set of white teeth glinted with danger. And the cold slab of marble lying between them seemed to be the only thing holding him back from stretching out a large hand and taking hold of her by the scruff of her neck.
She was shocked. Oh, not because of the pulsing threat itself, but because she would never have believed that he could reveal so much of what was raging inside him. The man she’d used to know had been so fiercely controlled that it had taken him weeks to get around to admitting he was attracted to her. He’d used to haunt her family’s farm on the pretext that he was considering investing money into it. He’d used to turn up in strange places like the tack room at the stables, or the hay barn, and would stand watching as she heaved bales of hay onto a low-loader ready for transport to the animals scattered about the outlying fields.
‘You should not be doing this,’ he’d said in husky disapproval.
‘Why?’ She remembered laughing at him. ‘Because I’m a woman?’
‘No.’ He hadn’t smiled back. ‘Because you hate it.’
It had been a truth that had confounded her, because she hadn’t realised her dislike had showed. She’d been living on the farm since she was ten year’s old, had been expected to do her share of the many daily chores. But as for enjoying the life? No. She would have given anything to go back to how things used to be, when she’d lived in London with two loving parents instead of one bad-tempered uncle and his weak stepson.
‘You cheated yourself,’ she now returned unsteadily. ‘And you have no idea how badly you—’
‘Quit,’ he warned thinly, ‘while you still can.’
It was an outright threat. Instinct was telling her to heed it, but anger was already welling up from the dark pit where she’d stored it for the past eight long years.
‘As you did when you preferred to believe lies about me, rather than give me a single minute to explain what you saw?’ she flashed back at him. ‘Is this my cue to come over all tomb-like and walk out of here, Rafiq? Will it make you feel better if I leave you alone with your righteous belief that you were the only one injured eight years ago?’
‘Get out,’ he incised.
And there they were. Those magic words, delivered with the same black-toned lack of emotion as before, that literally froze her blood. Melanie looked into the cold dark cast of his face and thought, Ten minutes. It had taken just ten short minutes for them to reach the same point where they had finished things eight years ago.
She laughed, though it was a shaky sound, and swung away, aware that she might have mocked herself about those two small words earlier, but they were still having that same crippling effect on her now as they’d had then.
Only there was a difference. The younger Melanie had run; this older version was made of stronger stuff. She swung back, faced him squarely. ‘I have something important to tell you first,’ she announced.
‘I have no wish to hear it.’
‘You might regret saying that.’
‘Leave, Melanie,’ he reiterated.
‘Not until you hear me out.’
Where had that damn stubbornness come from? Rafiq glared at her with a mix of frustration and fascination. It had been a hard push to get the old Melanie to argue about anything. Now he could not shut her up!
The telephone on his desk began to ring, and glad of the diversion he picked it up. It was Nadia informing him that his next appointment had just cancelled. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, and returned the receiver to its rest, then glanced at Melanie. ‘I’m sorry but my next appointment has arrived,’ he lied. ‘Which means that your time is up.’
Melanie stared at him. He could have done without seeing the hurt glinting in her eyes. ‘You never intended to give me a chance, did you?’ she gasped.
‘Even as Mrs Portreath?’ He arched a cold black eyebrow. ‘No,’ he confessed. ‘I have a congenital dislike of machinating women, you see, so using Randal Soames to get you into this room earned you no more extra time than if you had managed to get in here as Melanie Leggett.’
And that, Melanie realised, more or less said it. She had failed in her mission even before she’d arrived here. What a joke, what a sad little joke. For a few moments longer she continued to stand there, looking at this tall dark beautiful man with the romantic face of Arabia and eyes fit to turn a desert to ice, and seeing no sign at all that there was anything worth appealing to beyond those eyes she knew she was going to give up the fight.
‘You know what I think, Rafiq?’ she said quietly. ‘I think you’ve just lost the only chance you will ever be given to turn yourself into a human being.’
And with that she turned to walk away. From his chance, from Robbie’s chance. The threat of tears suddenly overtook her, because she knew deep down inside she was walking away from her own last chance to make this man understand the truth about her.
I was a fool for thinking I could do it, she railed at herself. Rafiq needed a heart before he could care enough to want to listen. Robbie didn’t need a man without a heart cluttering up his life. He had already known the best. It would be an insult to William Portreath’s memory to now offer her son the worst.
‘Wait…’
Her hand had a grip on the door handle. Melanie froze like a statue with her eyes to the door. What next? What now? she wondered tensely. Did she even want to hear it?
Yet she didn’t move. Bigger fool that she was, she just stood there and waited, with her teeth clenched tightly and her heart pumping heavily, while behind her there was…nothing. He didn’t speak again, nor move, as far as she could tell. And where the silence before had held a smothering sense of failure, this silence screamed with hope. Weak and pathetic, pained and helpless—hope.
She was trembling; Rafiq could see it happening. So much so that the knot of silk hair was threatening to come loose. Was she close to tears also? He had a suspicion that she was—just as he had a suspicion that he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life by stopping her from leaving here.
But her last remark had got to him; it had touched a raw nerve inside that went back eight years to when he’d regretted not listening to what she’d had to say. The human being part had pricked him, because if anyone knew he was only half-human then it had to be himself. But here stood the woman he blamed for that.
So why had he stopped her when she could have been gone by now? Confusion at his own actions set him frowning as he threw himself down into his chair and tried to decide what do next. As he did so his eyes fell on the stack of papers he’d only had time to glance at before Melanie had walked into the room.
‘Tell me about William Portreath,’ he invited.
Her shoulders sagged a little, her chin dipping towards her chest to expose the long slender length of her nape. A nape he could almost feel against his fingers—fingers that actually stretched out on cold smooth marble in a feather-like caress. He drew them into a fist, sat outwardly relaxed in his chair while inside every muscle he owned had knotted in an effort to cast out what had been daring to take a grip. His gaze dropped to where her hand still grasped the door handle. Like him, she was dubious about continuing this.
The tension rose along with the silence, and his heart began to pump unevenly in his chest. When his mobile phone began to ring he was so glad of the diversion that he answered it without even thinking about it.
It was Serena again. Of course it was Serena. She had just remembered who was financing her tour, and was using her most seductive voice to try and make him see sense.
At last Melanie moved. He didn’t. In fact his eyes, ears, his capacity to breathe had all been lost in a stress-loaded moment as he watched her fingers slacken and finally drop away from the handle altogether. She began to turn. It was slow and uncertain. She began walking back across the room with her eyes carefully lowered so he could not see what was going on behind them.
Serena was turning on the heat now, the fact that he hadn’t cut the connection giving her encouragement. She wanted them to carry on as they had been. She wanted him to remember what it had been like for them.
But he was remembering what it had been like with Melanie. He watched her come towards him in her smart suit that skimmed her slender body like a smooth outer skin, but he saw tight faded jeans and a simple tee shirt, saw himself peeling both from her wonderful flesh with hands that worshipped what they found. He saw beautifully formed breasts with rose-tinted areolae and perfect nipples that tightened at the slightest caress. His eyelashes grew heavy as his gaze skimmed downwards to recall the flatness of her silk-smooth stomach with its perfect oval for a navel and gently rounded hips that loved to be cradled in his. Shy Melanie, virginal Melanie, with a soft mouth that had trembled because she had wanted him so badly, and eyes glowing like topaz, aroused and ready to offer him her one precious gift. If everything else she had ever offered him had been lies then he knew without question that wanting him so badly she had had to give him her virginity had been Melanie’s one truth.
Should that count for something now? he pondered grimly. In his own country it would count for everything. They would have been man and wife on the strength of that one night alone. Indeed, his sense of honour had already made that decision before he had claimed his exquisite prize. It was a prize that still held a power over him as he sat here in the present listening to one woman beg for his passion while the other aroused him without having to try. He recalled a single afternoon spent upon an old-fashioned feather mattress beneath an eiderdown when her arms had clung to him and her body had accepted him with small soft gasps that had rolled his heart around. He had felt the barrier, could still feel it tempting the proud crown of his sex. ‘Yes,’ she had said in that soft breathy whisper, and it had stirred him beyond anything he could ever remember.
He was in agony, he noted ruefully. But while he sat here struggling with his own discomfort, he also had the satisfaction of seeing Melanie’s cheeks grow warm and her eyelashes flicker in a way that placed a wry smile on his lips. She knew what he was thinking and was unable to look at him because she was feeling the effects of those memories just as strongly as he was.
It was sex, nothing more. He could deal with sex—as the beautiful Serena would agree.
If he didn’t stop undressing her with his eyes she would change her mind and leave, Melanie decided as she sank down into the chair by the desk. He was daring to sit there looking as laid back as a man could look while listening to a telephone conversation, but his hooded eyes were burning through her clothing. Did he think she was too dense to know what he was doing?
A wry smile twitched his mouth. It was a mouth that should have looked mean and cold, but by some quirk of fate looked anything but. She sighed, dropped her eyes away from him and wished his expression did not reminded her of sex. One man, one afternoon, only that one experience to call upon—and she was certainly able to call upon it, she noted helplessly. All it had taken was a knowing glint in those eyes and she could see the man in all his naked glory. The breadth of his wide bronzed shoulders and long muscular torso peppered with soft dark hair and—no, stop right there.
Who was on the other end of the phone that could hold him in silence for so long? she wondered as she shifted restlessly on the chair. She wished he would speak, if only to break this terrible tension that was eddying in the air.
Sexual tension. The man had always had the power to turn her inside out with that heavy-lashed, steady stare. Perhaps he knew it, perhaps the call had finished ages ago but he was stretching out the silence on purpose just to extend the agony. Could he be that calculating?
Yes, she decided, of course he could. He had made it very clear that he didn’t want her here, but then for some baffling reason had decided to give her a chance to say what she’d come to say. Perhaps she’d touched a nerve when she’d challenged his status as a human being, and this was his idea of payback. Rafiq had pride enough for ten men. He had an ego as big as…other parts.
Oh, stop it! she railed at herself as a second wave of heat crawled up her cheeks.
Rafiq saw the blush and was reminded of the first time he’d seen her, at a friend’s country estate. He had been there as a weekend guest and Melanie had been one of the paid staff. She’d served him throughout dinner, quiet, shy, and wearing a perpetual blush to her cheeks. Every time she’d leant over his shoulder to serve him he’d inhaled the scent of her delicate perfume, had felt the soft brush of her breath and her silk hair brushing his cheek. Electric, clinging…He stopped breathing for a moment in dark recollection. Twice she’d caught his shoulder with a serving dish and had almost died with embarrassment. Twice he’d found himself making a joke about his own size in an attempt to deflect the wrath of his hostess.
‘She’s new—temporary,’ Sally Maitland had explained with the condescending tone of someone who had lived her whole life being served only by the best. ‘Leave it, Melanie!’ she had snapped in annoyance while Melanie valiantly tried to remove spilled sauce from where it had landed on the tablecloth by Rafiq’s plate. Her hand had been trembling, the heat from her cheeks hot enough to heat his own cheek as she leant across him. ‘You just can’t get the staff these days. Melanie is more used to feeding chickens than people.’
He smiled at the memory, though it was more like a grimace. Melanie had fed him a lot that weekend. She’d fed his mind and his senses by being everywhere he’d happened to be. Her perfume had lingered in his bedroom whenever he’d walked back into it after she’d been there tidying the bed; her shyly lowered eyes had followed him whenever she’d had the misfortune to be serving food. If they’d met on the stairs she’d blush like mad and scurry hastily away from him; if they’d brushed arms or shoulders she’d jump like a startled kitten and refuse, though he’d tried, to utter a single word to him. Nods and shakes had been all he’d got for his trouble.
Nods and shakes that had almost driven him out of his mind.
‘Come on, querida. Forgive me and let us put this behind us. Carlos is not expecting fidelity from me and I—’
With a flick of the hand he cut the connection. Melanie lifted her face. ‘You didn’t speak a single word,’ she said, almost accusingly.
‘No words were required,’ he drawled lazily, and smiled the kind of smile that made her feel threatened and edgy and eager to get out of here.
‘About William,’ she said firmly, ‘I think I should start by—’
‘Lunch,’ he inserted.
‘Lunch?’ Melanie offered him a perfectly blank stare.
He offered a smile to her. ‘I think we will take this conversation away from the business environment and place it in a more…congenial setting.’
‘But you have another appointment waiting outside!’
His answer to that was to reach out and pick up the other phone. Several smooth words spoken in Arabic and as far as Melanie was concerned the problem of his next appointment had been consigned to the archives. The phone went back on its rest.
‘Problem solved,’ he murmured with lying smoothness.
‘I really do prefer to deal with this right here.’ It was almost a desperate little plea.
‘Oh, come.’ He stood up. ‘Here I am attempting to show you my human side by offering to listen to you, and you throw this gesture back in my face?’
If he thought listening to her talk over lunch was going to be pleasant then he was in for a surprise, Melanie thought ruefully. And why did she feel as if she’d just come face to face with a slippery snake?
She watched him warily as he walked around the marble slab. The dig about his human side hadn’t passed her by either, nor the fact that in the space of a one-way conversation with his mobile phone his whole manner towards her had taken a complete reversal. He arrived at the side of her chair. The hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end. He was waiting for her to give in and stand up, but her eyes were level with a certain part of his anatomy and what she could see happening there sent a wave of shocked heat sweeping down her front.
This had nothing to do with lunch, or talking, or even him showing his human side! It was to do with sex. Let-me-rumble-you-on-the-nearest-bed kind of sex—for old times’ sake.
‘Stop this, Rafiq,’ she uttered tensely.
‘Stop what?’
