The sheikh's chosen wife (4 page)

'Do you?'

The question was like a
slap to the face. 'No we do not!'

'Prove it,' he
challenged.

Surprise had her falling
back another step. 'But you know Ethan and I don't have that kind of
relationship,' she insisted.

'And, I repeat,' he said,
'prove it.'

Nerve-ends began to fray
when she realised he was being serious, ‘I can't,' she admitted, then went
quite pale when she felt forced to add, 'But you know I wouldn't sleep with
him, Hassan. You know it,' she emphasised with a painfully thickening tone
which placed a different kind of darkness in his eyes.

It came from
understanding and pity. And she hated him for that also! Hated and loved and
hurt with a power that was worse than any other torture he could inflict.

'Then explain to me,
please,' he persisted nonetheless, 'when you openly live beneath the same roof
as he does, how I convince my people of this certainty you believe I have in
your fidelity?'

"But Ethan and I
haven't spent one night alone together in the villa,' she protested. 'My father
has always been there with us until he was delayed in London today!'

'Quite.' Hassan nodded.
'Now you understand why you have been snatched from the brink of committing the
ultimate sin in the eyes of our people. There,' he said with a dismissive
flick of the hand. 'I am your saviour, as is my prerogative.'

With that, and having
neatly tied the whole thing off to his own satisfaction, he turned and walked
away— Leaving Leona to flounder in his smooth, slick logic and with no ready
argument to offer.

'I don't believe you are
real sometimes,' she sent shakily after him. 'Did it never occur to you that I
didn't want snatching from the brink’

Sarcasm abounding, Hassan
merely pulled the gutrah from his head and tossed it aside, then returned to
the bottle of water. 'It was time,' he said, swinging the fridge door open
again. 'You have had long enough to sulk.'

‘I wasn't sulking!'

'Whatever,' he dismissed
with a shrug, then chose a bottle of white wine and closed the door. 'It was
time to bring the impasse to an end.'

Impasse, Leona repeated.
He believed their failed marriage was merely stuck in an impasse. 'I'm not
coming back to you,' she declared, then turned away to pretend to take an
interest in her surroundings, knowing that his grim silence was denying her the
right to choose.

They were enclosed in
what she could only presume was a private stateroom furnished in subtle shades
of cream faced with richly polished rosewood. It was all so beautifully designed
that it was almost impossible to see the many doors built into the walls except
for the wood-framed doors they had entered through. And it was the huge
deep-sprung divan taking pride of place against a silk-lined wall, that told
her exactly what the room's function was.

Although the bed was not
what truly captured her attention, but the pair of big easy chairs standing in
front of a low table by a set of closed cream velvet curtains. As her heart
gave a painful twist in recognition, she sent a hand drifting up to her eyes.
Oh, Hassan, she thought despairingly, don't do this to me...

She had seen the chairs,
Hassan noted, studying the way she was standing there looking like an
exquisitely fragile, perfectly tooled art-deco sculpture in her slender gown of
gold. And he didn't know whether to tell her so or simply weep at how utterly
bereft she looked.

In the end he chose a
third option and took a rare sip at the white wine spritzer he had just prepared
for her. The forbidden alcohol content in the drink might be diluted but he
felt it hit his stomach and almost instantly enter his bloodstream with an
injection of much appreciated fire.

'You've lost weight,' he
announced, and watched her chin come up, watched her wonderful hair slide down
her slender back and her hand drop slowly to her side while she took a
steadying breath before she could bring herself to turn and

'I've been ill—with the
flu,' she answered flatly.

'That was weeks ago,' he
dismissed, uncaring that he was revealing to her just how close an eye he had
been keeping on her from a distance. The fact that she showed no surprise told
him that she had guessed as much anyway. 'After a virus such as influenza the
weight recovery is usually swift.'

'And you would know, of
course.' she drawled, mocking the fact that he had not suffered a day's illness
in his entire life.

'I know you,'' he
countered, 'and your propensity for slipping into a decline when you are
unhappy...'

'I was ill, not unhappy."

'You missed me. I missed
you. Why try to deny it?'

'May I have one of
those?' Indicating towards the drink he held in his hand was her way of telling
him she was going to ignore those kind of comments.

'It is yours,' he
explained, and offered the glass out to her.

She looked at the glass,
long dusky lashes flickering over her beautiful green eyes when she realised he
was going to make her come and get the drink. Would she do it? he wondered
curiously. Would she allow herself to come this close, when they both knew she
would much rather turn and run?

But his beautiful wife
had never been a coward. No matter how she might be feeling inside, he had
never known her to run from a challenge. Even when she had left him last year
she had done so with courage, not cowardice. And she did not let him down now
as her silk stockinged feet began to tread the cream carpet until she was in
reach of the glass.

'Thank you.' The wine
spritzer was taken from him and lifted to her mouth. She sipped without knowing
she had been offered the glass so she would place her lips where his lips had
been.

Her pale throat moved as
she swallowed; her lips came away from the glass wearing a seductively alluring
wine glossed bloom. He watched her smother a sigh, watched her look anywhere
but directly at him, was aware that she had not looked him in the face since
removing the abaya, just as she had stopped looking at him weeks before she
left Rahman. And he had to suppress his own sigh as he felt muscles tighten all
over his body in his desire to reach out, draw her close and make her look at
him!

But this was not the time
to play the demanding husband. She would reject him as she had rejected him
many times a year ago. What hurt him the most about remembering those bleak
interludes was not his own angry frustration but the grim knowledge that it had
been herself she had been denying.

'Was the Petronades yacht
party an elaborate set-up?' she asked suddenly.

A brief smile stretched
his mouth, and it was a very self-mocking smile because he had truly believed
she was as concentrated on his close physical presence as he was on hers. But,
no. As always, Leona's mind worked in ways that continually managed to surprise
him.

'The party was genuine.'
He answered the question. 'Your father's sudden inability to get here in time
to attend it was not.'

At least his honesty
almost earned him a direct glance of frowning puzzlement before she managed to
divert it to his right ear. 'But you've just finished telling me that I was
snatched because my father was—'

'I know,' he cut in, not
needing to hear her explain what he already knew—which was that this whole
thing had been very carefuDy set up and co-ordinated with her father's assistance.
'There are many reasons why you are standing here with me right now, my
darling,' he murmured gently. 'Most of which can wait for another time to go
into.'

The my darling sent her
back a defensive step. The realisation that her own father had plotted against
her darkened her lovely eyes. 'Tell me now,' she insisted.

But Hassan just shook his
head. 'Now is for me,' he informed her softly. 'Now is my moment to bask in
the fact that you are back where you belong.'

It was really a bit of
bad timing that her feet should use that particular moment to tread on the
discarded abaya, he supposed, watching as she looked down, saw, then grew angry
all over again.

'By abduction?' Her chin
came up, contempt shimmering along her finely shaped bones. 'By plots and
counter-plots and by removing a woman's right to decide for herself?'

He grimaced at her very
accurate description. 'We are by nature a romantic people,' he defended. 'We
love drama and poetry and tragic tales of star-crossed lovers who lose each
other and travel the caverns of hell in their quest to find their way back together
again.'

He saw the tears. He had
said too much. Reaching out, he caught the glass just before it slipped from
her nerveless fingers. 'Our marriage is a tragedy,' she told him thickly.

'No,' he denied, putting
the hapless glass aside. 'You merely insist on turning it into one.'

'Because I hate
everything you stand for!'

'But you cannot make
yourself hate the man,' he added, undisturbed by her denunciation.

Leona began to back away
because there was something seriously threatening about the sudden glow she
caught in his eyes. 'I left you, remember?'

'Then sent me letters at
regular intervals to make sure I remembered you,' he drawled.

'Letters to tell you I
want a divorce!' she cried.

'The content of the
letters came second to their true purpose.' He smiled. 'One every two weeks
over the last two months. I found them most comforting.'

'Gosh, you are so
conceited it's a wonder you didn't marry yourself!'

'Such insults' He sighed.

'Will you stop stalking
me as if I am a hunted animal?' she cried.

'Stop backing away like
one.'

'I do not want to stay
married to you.' She stated it bluntly.

'And I am not prepared to
let you go. There,' he said. 'We have reached another impasse. Which one of us
is going to win the higher ground this time, do you think?'

Looking at him standing
there, arrogant and proud yet so much her kind of man that he made her legs go
weak. Leona knew exactly which one of them possessed the higher ground. Which
was also why she had to keep him at arm's length at all costs. He could fell
her in seconds, because he was right; she didn't hate him, she adored him. And
that scared her so much that when his hand came up, long fingertips brushing
gently across her trembling mouth, she almost fainted on the sensation that
shot from her lips to toe tips.

She pulled right away.
His eyebrow arched. It mocked and challenged as he responded by curling the
hand around her nape.

'Stop it,' she said, and
lifted up her hand to use it as a brace against his chest.

Beneath dark blue cotton
she discovered a silk-smooth, hard-packed body pulsing with heat and an
all-too-familiar masculine potency. Her mouth went dry; she tried to breathe
and found that she couldn't. Helplessly she lifted her eyes up to meet with
his.

'Seeing me now, hmm?' he
softly taunted. 'Seeing this man with these eyes you like to drown in, and this
nose you like to call dreadful but usually have trouble from stopping your
fingers from stroking? And let us not forget this mouth you so like to feel
crushed hotly against your own delightful mouth.'

'Don't you dare!' she
protested, seeing what was coming and already beginning to shake all over at
the terrifying prospect of him finding out what a weak-willed coward she was.

'Why not?' he countered,
offering her one of his lazily sensual, knowing smiles that said he knew better
than she did what she really wanted—and he began to lower his dark head.

'Tell me first.' Sheer
desperation made her fly into impulsive speech. 'If I am here on this
beautiful yacht that belongs to you—is there another yacht just like it out
there somewhere where your second wife awaits her turn?"

In the sudden suffocating
silence that fell between them Leona found herself holding her breath as she
watched his face pale to a frightening stillness. For this was provocation of
the worst kind to an Arab and her heart began pounding madly because she just
didn't know how he was going to respond. Hassan possessed a shocking temper,
though he had never unleashed it on her. But now, as she stood here with her
fingers still pressed against his breastbone, she could feel the danger in
him—could almost taste her own fear as she waited to see how he was going to
respond.

What he did was to take a
step back from her. Cold, aloof, he changed into the untouchable prince in the
single blink of an ebony eyelash. 'Are you daring to imply that I could be
guilty of treating my wives unequally?' he responded.

In the interim wave of
silence that followed, Leona stared at him through eyes that had stopped seeing
anything as his reply rocked the very axis she stood upon. She knew she had
prompted it but she still had not expected it, and now she found she couldn't
breathe, couldn't even move as fine cracks began to appear in her defences.

'You actually went and
did it, and married again,' she whispered, then completely shattered.
Emotionally, physically, she felt herself fragment into a thousand broken
pieces beneath his stone-cold, cruel gaze.