Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (154 page)

For a long moment he could not trust himself to speak.

All he could do was stare.

Chapter 12

Daliah's eyes. One look into them and he felt himself reeling.

There have been faces that launched a thousand ships, lips
that caused the fall of empires, but for him, all it took was a
pair of eyes. The moment he looked into their depths, he knew he'd tasted of forbidden fruit and that nothing else would ever
taste quite the same again.

They were arresting eyes, the kind of twin jewels maharajas
and kings throughout the centuries had killed to possess, and
were all the more beguiling since they were all of her that he
could see.

For the first time in his life he was utterly mesmerized, as
though an enchanted spell had been woven around him. Wispy
trills of gooseflesh rippled up and down his body.

Those eyes.

They were the eyes of the purest emerald green flecked with
darker slivers of rich Siberian malachite and highlights of paler
jade, two luminescent matched cabochons. Their shape was
slightly almond, rounded near the nose and tilted upwards at
the outside ends at an exotic, almost feline slant, and the lashes
were black and long, of perfect sable softness, made of black
velvet, of spun-sugar dreams.

He nearly groaned aloud.

He'd been dealt the queen of hearts. The ace of spades. A
royal flush.

Like two duelling titans they stood squaring off in that cool
octagonal foyer, he in whitest white and she in blackest black.
Beneath her veil he was positive her chin was jutting with the same indignation he saw in the light-fractured flashes of her
eyes.

An eternity seemed to pass. Then he caught the sudden
movement of her
abbeya
as she drew a deep, startled breath. Her eyelashes fluttered rapidly in a blink of recognition and,
unexpectedly, he heard a ripple of taunting laughter rising
from beneath the veil.

It was like a physical assault. He took an anguished step backward; the laughter had reduced his self-possession to
nothing, had hurt as intensely as a knife stab straight through
the heart. Then the cynical amusement reached her eyes as
well and glowed there like yet another harsh slap: potent,
painful, utterly humiliating.

He stared confusedly at her.

It was then that she spoke.

'Well, well,
well!'
Her voice, as taunting as her laugh, was
throaty and mature, almost smoky in its alluring richness. 'Who would have thought that the famous Najib al-Ameer
had to resort to white slavery to get women!'

'You recognize me.' He looked slightly startled, and then
cursed himself for showing it. Of course she would recognize
him! It was a fool thing not to have thought of it before.
His face had appeared with more regularity than he liked in
newspapers and magazines and on television on five conti
nents.

'Even in that silly Rudolf Valentino get-up,' she said astrin
gently.

'You are surprised.'

'Why shouldn't I be? I didn't expect it to be you I would
find at the end of the line.' Her voice took on the ugliness of
mimicry. 'Not Najib al-Ameer, the richest man in the world!'
She laughed tauntingly again.

His cheeks trembled from the effort of trying to keep him
self under control, but his voice remained steady. 'I am not
the richest man in the world,' he said stiffly. 'Nor have I ever
claimed to be.'

She gestured with her arm. 'The richest. The second-richest.
The tenth-richest. What does it matter?'

He did not speak.

The laughter drained out of her eyes and they narrowed
to lynx slits. 'What do you want of me?' The words hissed
venomously forth.

He did not reply.

'Why have you brought me here?' she demanded again,
more sharply this time. 'Answer me, dammit! Are you playing
some sort of perverse sexual game?'

He flinched at the angry words. 'I would watch my tongue
if I were you,' he advised with more calm than he felt.

It was then that he noticed her hands. She was holding them
up in front of her, as though unaware that she was gently
massaging her wrists. He stifled a wince when he caught sight
of the ugly chafed skin and the deeply embedded pattern left
from too-tight ropes. Quickly he averted his eyes.

Nothing was working out right. Nothing. Never in his wild
est dreams had he imagined he would feel such pangs of guilt
and responsibility, such immediate remorse. Whenever he'd
imagined this moment, it had seemed so clear-cut, so well-
defined and simple. Nothing at all like this, so complicated and confusing, so rife with boiling emotional turmoil.

It was all turning out wrong.

Curse the veil and the
abbeya!
Instead of rendering her
sexless, they lent her an exquisite, painful aura of timeless
mystery which reached down into his loins, and deeper still,
into his very being.

He was seized with the mad impulse to rip the offending
veil away and reduce her to something human that he could
hate and lash out at.

'I am sorry that we are forced to meet under these regret
table circumstances,' he finally said for lack of anything better.
'If there is anything I can do to make this stay—'

'You bet your sweet ass you can do something!' she snarled with shrewish magnificence. She waved her arms and flapped
her robes in righteous anger. 'You can release me at once
and arrange for my transportation out of this godforsaken
hellhole, that's what you can do!'

He shut his eyes and tried to cast her from his mind, his memory. He had made a terrible mistake. He should never
have come down here to see her. She was supposed to be
everything that he had taught himself to hate, everything he
had dedicated his lifetime to destroying. So why shouldn't he
have wanted to see her, just once?

But he hadn't counted on drowning in the spell of her eyes
and his own torment. He was not surprised by her anger and
her spirit, but he found himself totally thrown by them.

What a fool he was making of himself!

He opened his eyes and managed to find his voice. 'I will
take you to your room.' He reached out to take her by the
arm.

'Don't touch me!' Angrily she shook him off.

'Very well. If you prefer the German girl to me . . .'

If looks could have murdered, he would have been dead. 'I
prefer anyone to you, Arab pig!'

Faster than the speed of light, his hand shot toward her,
grabbed hold of the veil, and yanked it savagely from her face.
The wild light blazed wilder in her eyes.

He pulled his lips back across his teeth. 'Jew bitch!'

She drew up her head, hawked deeply, and spat a globule
of saliva into his face.

He did not bother to wipe the dripping spittle away. For
long moments he could only stare.

An unholy look changed his face completely, turning his black eyes to mercury, so silvery that she could see herself
reflected in them. Without warning, one of his hands clamped
around the back of her head and thrust it forward to meet his,
and the other unerringly found a breast through the thick
cloth. He squeezed it cruelly.

The pain tore through her and tears formed in the corners of her eyes, but she refused him the satisfaction of crying out.
Then his savage lips forced themselves hungrily upon hers.

It was as if someone had thrown a switch. She went stiff as
a marble statue; even her lips seemed to have turned suddenly
to stone. But her eyes were alight. They seemed to burn with
hell's own fury.

He squeezed her even more cruelly, still staring into her
face. She had gone pale, and moisture beads stood out on her
forehead, but the taunting expression in her eyes refused to
die.

Savagely he shoved her away. His voice was ugly but
touched with a grudging respect. 'You make a lousy whore,'
he said.

Her taunting expression changed to one of wild triumph.

Hamid and Monika escorted Daliah upstairs, still in a daze of
confusion; if she hadn't known it to be impossible, she would
have said that Najib al-Ameer had been attracted to her. Why
else would he have stared at her so intensely, and then forced
himself on her the way he had? But she decided that that had
not been desire, but hate—undiluted hate. That was why he
had tried to hurt her.

Vaguely she was aware of endless enormous halls and giant
pieces of modern sculpture. Finally Hamid opened a massive
door.

'You can thank that Arab capitalist for this,' Monika
growled. 'I don't know why he should have a soft spot for you.
If it were up to me, I would lock you in a dark cellar.'

Daliah didn't know what she meant by that until she'd been shoved inside a room and the door slammed and locked from
the outside. She stared around her in disbelief at the palatial
pink suite.

Why not a dark cellar?

Why this gilded prison?

Chapter 13

Every city in Europe has its one world-famous café where
local inhabitants and tourists alike are drawn, and the tables
and chairs spill out onto the pavements, where one can sit and
watch the world parading by. They are places where one goes
both to see and to be seen, where life is unhurried and news
papers can be read over leisurely cups of coffee or cool drinks
nursed, where the intellectuals gather and spend hours arguing
the important topics of the day. In Tel Aviv, such is the Kassit
Café on Dizengoff Street.