‘I am glad you like it. Have you lived at Shelton Castle all your life?’
‘On and off,’ she said evasively. Rashid was being polite and she didn’t want that. She wished, for perhaps the millionth time in her adult life, she were more like Minty. It would have been nice to have felt confidently sexy and flirted a little bit with a man who most certainly knew how the game was played.
But she was seriously out of practice. Like the clothes, the easiest way to maintain the peace at Shelton was to keep a low profile. Her life would have been immeasurably worse if Anthony had thought she intended to snare a society husband for herself. Far better to blend into the background.
‘Go on,’ Rashid prompted, his entire attention focused on her.
‘Initially we had a house on the estate. Then he died and we moved out into the village. For a while.’
‘But not for long?’
‘No.’ Polly made a great show of sipping her fruit juice as the silence stretched out between them.
‘Please. If it is not intrusive I would like to know about your life.’
He really did sound as if he meant it. Goodness, but he was good. How incredibly easy it would be to allow herself to believe he really wanted to know all about her. And how foolish. She ought to have slipped some of those glossy articles in her handbag so she could remind herself how Rashid had become quite so adept at making a woman feel special.
Only she hadn’t thought she’d meet him again. Certainly hadn’t thought she’d be staying in his home. And couldn’t have imagined he would turn any part of his attention on her.
‘My mum continued to work at the castle and eventually she became the housekeeper. So we moved back. We had a suite of rooms in the staff quarters…until Mum married Richard,’ she said, truncating years into the fewest number of sentences possible.
‘Were you pleased?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She took another sip of her drink, adding when he said nothing, ‘I suppose I was shocked, but they were very happy together.’
‘And was that why you decided to come back to Shelton Castle after you finished university?’
How the heck did he know that? Surely Minty hadn’t thought it necessary to provide him with a full CV…
He must have seen something of her surprise in her face because he smiled. A slight deepening of the tiny lines fanning out from his sexy eyes, which had her stomach perform a complete somersault. ‘You have a first from Warwick University in English and Political Science.’ Rashid adjusted his powerful body against the cushions, but only so he could see her face more clearly. ‘That information was in the paperwork sent to me.’
Ah. If he knew about her interest in politics, maybe that went some way to explaining his concern at her involvement. He needn’t have worried. Since leaving university the only politics she’d had time for were the internal ones going on at Shelton.
‘My mother found it…difficult to adjust to being the Duchess of Missenden.’
‘Difficult?’
‘Difficult is probably not the right word,’ she concurred. The truth was her mother had found it completely impossible. Anthony had been incandescently angry. Benedict and Simon very little better. ‘Dukes don’t generally marry their housekeepers. Not in England, anyway. So I came for moral support with Richard’s blessing. I meant to spend just a year there but…’ Polly shrugged ‘…time passed and I stayed. And then there was the accident and I…stayed again.’
Nothing like the art of British understatement. Six years of emotional turmoil neatly contained in a handful of sentences.
‘Until now.’
‘Until now,’ she echoed with a smile. ‘I think this is the first thing I’ve ever done entirely for myself. I hope I don’t make a mess of it.’
‘Why should you?’
‘Well…’ Polly pretended to hesitate ‘…there’s having to speak directly at a camera as though it were a friend, coping with the heat…’
Rashid laughed and her chest grew tight, as though she’d swallowed too much air. ‘How about you? I—I seem to have given you my life story from four years onwards.’
‘I was under the impression you had researched me fairly thoroughly,’ he said lazily, his voice little more than a rumble.
Her eyes flew up to meet his teasing ones and she felt as pinned as a butterfly in a collector’s box. There was no getting away from sexy blue eyes that ripped through every preconception she’d ever had about herself.
‘What do you wish to know about me?’
Where to start? It was difficult not to be fascinated by a man who was so completely different from anyone she’d ever met before. He was simply more. More arrogant. More sexy. More inscrutable. More charismatic. More.
And yet he had roots in her own country. Those compelling blue eyes reminded her of it. ‘Do you really not feel remotely English? Not on any level?’
Rashid leant forward and tore off a piece of rukhal bread and offered it to her. Polly took it and he tore off a second piece for himself. ‘I think I made a choice.’
‘Between being Arab and English?’ She broke off the tiniest piece of her bread and put it in her mouth, watching the frown that formed on his forehead.
‘You will have read something of my parents’ divorce?’
It was scarcely a question but Polly nodded. She’d certainly done that. It was practically the first thing anyone wrote about him.
‘I was eight at the time and very angry when my mother left. I wanted nothing to do with her. I identified completely with my father. My one aim and purpose was to be like him. And that meant embracing everything that was important to him. I wanted to expunge everything English from my life because he hated it.’
‘So how did being given an English education fit into that?’ she couldn’t resist asking.
Rashid smiled. ‘I went to the same boarding school and university as my father. Followed that up with a Sandhurst military training, as had my brother Hanif before me. And during the holidays I absorbed every thing Amrahi. Poetry. Art. Music.’
‘To please your father?’
‘Initially. Even horse racing was his passion before it was mine. My father,’ Rashid said, reaching for the water jug and refilling Polly’s glass, ‘insisted we were connected with our Bedouin heritage and the Bedouin have a long tradition as master horsemen.’
So, naturally, Rashid had wanted to excel. Polly accepted her glass back. ‘I’ve only been to the races once in my life. The summer after Mum married Richard. To be honest it seemed more about gambling than sport. I suppose you could argue gambling is a sport.’
‘Not in Amrah.’
No, not in Amrah. Polly took another piece of rukhal bread. ‘So, if there’s no revenue from gambling, how is the Samaah Golden Cup funded?’
‘Private investment.’
‘Yours?’
His dark eyebrows rose, the blue eyes beneath them glinting in amusement.
Polly bit her lip and shook her head slightly. ‘That must be millions of dollars of “private investment”.’
‘Twenty-eight million.’
‘That’s crazy!’
‘We have to look to the future. Tourism and international finance is vital to our economy.’
‘And do you get a good return on twenty-eight million dollars?’ she asked politely.
‘I think so. I make sure that I do.’
Six words, but they sent a shiver down her spine. It reminded her of how he’d been at Shelton. That feeling that he would break whatever needed to be broken.
Rashid leant forward and tilted her chin up so he could look directly into her eyes. ‘I have a habit of winning.’
‘So I’ve read.’
Then his hand lightly stroked the side of her cheek, burning a trail across her skin. His eyes lingered on her lips. If he kissed her now she wouldn’t be able to stop him—even though she knew this was all a game to him.
Humiliatingly, he must know she’d fall into his bed like a ripe greengage from a tree. Almost. There was still the finest steel of self-preservation holding her back.
Rashid’s blue eyes glittered down at her, his thumb moving to stroke across her sensitive lips. Slowly. Very slowly, he moved to kiss her.
Her hands came up to hold him off, but one touch of his lips had them snaking round his neck, pulling him closer. Beneath her fingers she felt the soft curling hair that touched the nape of his neck. Her mouth softened and she heard the guttural sound of satisfaction deep in his throat.
Winning. This was all about winning.
‘No.’ She pulled back, her breath coming in short sharp bursts.
Rashid’s hands still cradled her face, his eyes locked with hers. ‘Polly.’ His deep voice breathed her name, sending renewed shivers coursing through her body.
‘This isn’t right. Please.’
His smiled twisted. Then he sat back, watching her face. ‘I will escort you back to your room.’
‘Th-thank you.’ Polly felt by her side for her lihaf, which had fallen off unheeded. She balled it up in her hand as sudden cold whipped through her. He must think she was a complete idiot. Any other woman would have just closed their eyes and thanked their lucky stars.
Other women did.
‘Come.’