to make one of his silent appearances. Leona was covered—just—but it did not take much imagination for her to know what Faysal must believe he was interrupting. The colour that flooded her cheeks must have aided that impression. Hassan went one further and rose up like a cobra.
‘This intrusion had better be worth losing your head for!’ he hissed.
For a few awful seconds Leona thought the poor man was going to prostrate himself in an agony of anguish. He made do with a bow to beat all bows. ‘My sincerest apologies,’ he begged. ‘Your most honourable father, Sheikh Khalifa, desires immediate words with you, sir.’
Anyone else and Hassan would have carried out his threat, Leona was sure. Instead his mouth snapped shut, his hands took hold of her and dumped her rudely into a chair.
‘Faysal, my wife requires tea.’ He shot Leona’s own diversion at the other man. Glad of the excuse to go, Faysal almost ran. To Leona he said, ‘Eat,’ but he wasn’t making eye contact, and the two streaks of colour he was wearing on his cheekbones almost made her grin because it was so rare that anyone saw Sheikh Hassan Al-Qadim disconcerted.
‘You dare,’ he growled, swooping down and kissing her twitching mouth, then he left quickly with the promise to return in moments.
But moments stretched into minutes. She ate one of the freshly baked rolls a white liveried steward had brought with a pot of tea, then drank the tea—and still Hassan did not return.
Eventually Rafiq appeared with another formal bow and Hassan’s apologies. He was engaged in matters of state.
Matters of state she understood having lived before with Hassan disappearing for hours upon end to deal with them.
‘Would you mind if I joined you?’ Rafiq then requested.
‘Orders of state?’ she quizzed him dryly.
His half-smile gave her an answer. Her half-smile accompanied her indication to an empty chair. She watched him sit, watched him hunt around for something neutral to say that was not likely to cause another argument. There was no such thing, Leona knew that, so she decided to help him out.
‘Tell me about your Spanish mistress,’ she invited.
It was the perfect strike back for sins committed against her. Rafiq released a sigh and dragged the gutrah from his head, then tossed it aside. This was a familiar gesture for a man of the Al-Qadim household to use. It could convey many things: weariness, anger, contempt or, as in this case, a relayed throwing in of the towel. ‘He lacks conscience,’ he complained.
‘Yet you continue to love him unreservedly, Rafiq, son of Khalifa Al-Qadim,’ she quietly replied.
An eyebrow arched. Sometimes, in a certain light, he looked so like Hassan that they could have been twins. But they were not. ‘Bastard son,’ Rafiq corrected in that proud way of his. ‘And you continue to love him yourself, so we had best not throw those particular stones,’ he advised.
Rafiq had been born out of wedlock to Sheikh Khalifa’s beautiful French mistress, who’d died giving birth to him. The fact that Hassan had only been six months old himself at the time of Rafiq’s birth should have made the two half-brothers bitter enemies as they grew up together, one certain of his high place in life, the other just as certain of what would never be his. Yet in truth the two men could not have been closer if they’d shared the same mother. As grown men they had formed a united force behind which their ailing father rested secure in the knowledge that no one would challenge his power while his sons were there to stop them. When Leona came along, she too had been placed within this ring of protection.
Strange, she mused, how she had always been surrounded by strong men for most of her life: her father, Ethan, Rafiq and Hassan; even Sheikh Khalifa, ill though he now was, had always been one of her faithful champions.
‘Convince him to let me go,’ she requested quietly.
Ebony eyes darkened. ‘He had missed you.’
So did green. ‘Convince him,’ she persisted.
‘He was lonely without you.’
This time she had to swallow across the lump those words helped to form in her throat before she could say, ‘Please.’
Rafiq leaned across the table, picked up one of her hands and gave it a squeeze. ‘Subject over,’ he announced very gently.
And it was. Leona could see that. It didn’t so much hurt to be stonewalled like this but rather brought it more firmly home to her just how serious Hassan was.
Coming to his feet, Rafiq pulled her up with him. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘For a tour of the boat in the hopes that the diversion will restrain your desire to weaken my defences.’
‘Huh,’ she said, for the day had not arrived when anyone could weaken Rafiq in any way involving his beloved brother. But she did not argue the point about needing a diversion.
He turned to collect his gutrah. The moment it went back on his head, the other Rafiq reappeared, the proud and remote man. ‘If you would be so good as to precede me, my lady. We will collect a hat from your stateroom before we begin…’
Several hours later she was lying on one of the sun loungers on the shade deck, having given in to the heat and changed into a black and white patterned bikini teamed with a cool white muslin shirt. She had been shown almost every room the beautiful yacht possessed, and been formally introduced to Captain Tariq Al-Bahir, the only other Arab as far as she could tell in a twenty-strong crew of Spaniards. This had puzzled her enough to question it. But ‘Expediency,’ had been the only answer Rafiq would offer before it became another closed subject.
Since then she had eaten lunch with Rafiq and Faysal, and had been forced, because of Faysal’s presence, to keep a lid on any other searching questions that might be burning in her head, which had been Rafiq’s reason for including the other man, she was sure. And not once since he’d left her at the breakfast table had she laid eyes on Hassan—though she knew exactly where he was. Left alone to lie in the softer heat of the late afternoon, she was free to imagine him in what would be a custom built office, dealing with matters of state.
By phone, by fax, by internet—her mouth moved on a small smile. Hyped up, pumped up and doing what he loved to do most and in the interim forgetting the time and forgetting her! At other times she would have already been in there reminding him that there was a life other than matters of state. Closing her eyes, she could see his expression: the impatient glance at her interruption; the blank look that followed when she informed him of the time; the complaining sigh when she would insist on him stopping to share a cup of coffee or tea with her; and the way he would eventually surrender by reaching for her hand, then relaxing with a contented sigh…
In two stuffed chairs facing the window in his palace office—just like the two stuffed chairs strategically placed in the yacht’s stateroom. Her heart gave a pinch; she tried to ignore what it was begging her to do.
Hassan was thinking along similar lines as he lay on the lounger next to hers. She was asleep. She didn’t even know he was here. And not once in all the hours he had been locked away in his office had she come to interrupt.
Had he really expected her to? he asked himself. The answer that came back forced him to smother a hovering sigh because he didn’t want to make a noise and waken her. They still had things to discuss, and the longer he put off the evil moment the better, as far as he was concerned, because he was going to get tough and she was not going to like it.
Another smothered sigh had him closing his eyes as he reflected back over the last few hours in which he had come as close as he had ever done to causing a split between the heads of the different families which together formed the Arabian state of Rahman.
Dynastic politics, he named it grimly. Al-Qadim and Al-Mukhtar against Al-Mahmud and Al-Yasin, with his right to decide for himself becoming lost in the tug of war. In the end he had been forced into a compromise