The sheikh's chosen wife(2)

Below the white gutrah a pair of dark eyes glinted. 'Sheikh Abdul?' Rafiq questioned hopefully.

'Unfortunately, no.' Hassan gave a half smile, I was in fact referring to my lovely wife, Leona...'

Dressed for the evening in a beaded slip-dress made of gold silk  chiffon, Leona stepped into a pair of matching beaded mules then turned  to look at herself in the mirror.



Her smooth russet hair had been caught up in a twist, and diamonds  sparkled at her ears and throat. Overall, she supposed she looked okay,  she decided, giving the thin straps at her shoulders a gentle tug so the  dress settled comfortably over her slender frame. But the weight she  had lost during the last year was most definitely showing, and she could  have chosen a better colour to offset the unnatural paleness of her  skin.

Too late to change, though, she thought with a dismissive shrug as she  turned away from her reflection. Ethan was already waiting for her  outside on the terrace. And, anyway, she wasn't out to impress anyone.  She was merely playing stand-in for her father who had been delayed in  London due to some urgent business with the family lawyer, which had  left her and her father's business partner, Ethan, the only ones here to  represent Hayes-Frayne at tonight's promotional dinner.                       
       
           



       

She grimaced as she caught up a matching black silk shawl and made for  her bedroom door. In truth, she would rather not be going out at all  tonight having only arrived back from San Esteban an hour ago. It had  been a long day, and she had spent most of it melting in a Spanish heat  wave because the air-conditioning system had not been working in the  villa she had been attempting to make ready for viewing. So a long soak  in a warm bath and an early night would have been her idea of heaven  tonight, she thought wryly, as she went down the stairs to join Ethan.

He was half sitting on the terrace rail with a glass in his hand,  watching the sun go down, but his head turned at her first step, and his  mouth broke into an appreciative smile.

'Ravishing,' he murmured, sliding his lean frame upright.

'Thank you,' she replied. 'You don't look so bad yourself."

His wry nod accepted the compliment and his grey eyes sparkled with lazy  humour. Dressed in a black dinner suit and bow tie, he was a tall,  dark, very attractive man with an easy smile and a famous eye for the  ladies. Women adored him and he adored them but, thankfully, that mutual  adoration had never raised its ugly head between the two of them.

Leona liked Ethan. She felt comfortable being with him. He was the Hayes  in Hayes-Frayne, architects. Give Ethan a blank piece of paper and he  would create a fifty-storey skyscraper or a whole resort complete with  sports clubs, shopping malls and, of course, holiday villas to die for,  as with this new resort in San Estaban.

'Drink?' he suggested, already stepping towards the well stocked drinks trolley.

But Leona gave a shake of her head. 'Better not, if you want me to stay awake beyond ten o'clock,' she refused.

'That late? Next you'll be begging me to take you on to an all-night  disco after the party.' He was mocking the fact that she was usually  safely tucked up in bed by nine o'clock.

'Do you disco?' she asked him curiously.

'Not if I can help it,' he replied, discarding his own glass to come and  take the shawl from her hand so he could drape it across her shoulders.  'The best I can offer in the name of dance is a soft shoe shuffle to  something very slow, preferably in a darkened room, so that I don't  damage my ego by revealing just how bad a shuffler I am.'

'You're such a liar.' Leona smiled. 'I've seen you dance a mean jive, once or twice.'

Ethan pulled a face at the reminder. 'Now you've really made me feel my  age,' he complained. 'Next you'll be asking me what it was like to rock  in the sixties."

'You're not that old.' She was still smiling.

'Born in the mid-sixties,' he announced. 'To a free-loving mother who bopped with the best of them."

'That makes you about the same age as Hass..."

And that was the point where everything died: the light banter, the  laughter, the tail end of Hassan's name. Silence fell. Ethan's teasing  grey eyes turned very sombre. He knew, of course, how painful this last  year had been for her. No one mentioned Hassan's name in her presence,  so to hear herself almost say it out loud caused tension to erupt  between the both of them.

'It isn't too late to stop this craziness, you know," Ethan murmured gently.

Her response was to drag in a deep breath and step right away from him. 'I don't want to stop it,' she quietly replied.

'Your heart does."

'My heart is not making the decisions here.'

'Maybe you should let it."

'Maybe you should mind your own business!'

Spinning on her slender heels Leona walked away from him to go and stand  at the terrace rail, leaving Ethan behind wearing a rueful expression  at the severity with which she had just slapped him down.

Out there at sea, the dying sun was throwing up slender fingers of fire  into a spectacular vermilion sky. Down the hill below the villa, San  Esteban was beginning to twinkle as it came into its own at the exit of  the sun. And in between the town and the sun the ocean spread like satin  with its brand-new purpose-built harbour already packed with smart  sailing crafts of all shapes and sizes.

Up here on the hillside everything was so quiet and still even the  cicadas had stopped calling. Leona wished that she could have some of  that stillness, put her trembling emotions back where they belonged,  under wraps, out of reach from pain and heartache.

Would these vulnerable feelings ever be that far out of reach? she then  asked herself, and wasn't surprised to have a heavy sigh whisper from  her. The beaded chiffon shawl slipped from her shoulders, prompting  Ethan to come and gently lift it back in place again.

'Sorry,' he murmured. 'It wasn't my intention to upset you.'

I do it to myself, Leona thought bleakly. 'I just can't bear to talk  about it,' she replied in what was a very rare glimpse at how badly she  was hurting.

'Maybe you need to talk,' Ethan suggested.

But she just shook her head, as she consistently had done since she had  arrived at her father's London house a year ago, looking emotionally  shattered and announcing that her five-year marriage to Sheikh Hassan  ben Khalifa Al-Qadim was over. Victor Frayne had tried every which way  he could think of to find out what had happened. He'd even travelled out  to Rahman to demand answers from Hassan, only to meet the same solid  wall of silence he'd come up against with his daughter. The one thing  Victor could say with any certainty was that Hassan was faring no better  than Leona, though his dauntingly aloof son-in-law was more adept at  hiding his emotions than Leona was. 'She sits here in London, he sits in  Rahman. They don't talk to each other, never mind to anyone else! Yet  you can feel the vibrations bouncing from one to the other across the  thousands of miles separating them as if they are communicating by some  unique telepathy that runs on pure pain! It's dreadful,' Victor had  confided to Ethan. 'Something has to give some time.'                       
       
           



       

Eventually, it had done. Two months ago Leona had walked unannounced  into the office of her family lawyer and had instructed him to begin  divorce proceedings, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. What  had prompted her to pick that particular day in that particular month of  a very long year no one understood, and Leona herself wasn't prepared  to enlighten anyone. But there wasn't a person who knew her who didn't  believe it was an action that had caused a trigger reaction, when a week  later she had fallen foul of a virulent flu bug that had kept her  housebound and bedridden for weeks afterwards.

But when she had recovered, at least she'd come back ready to face the  world again. She had agreed to come here to San Estaban, for instance,  and utilise her design skills on the completed villas.

She looked better for it too. Still too pale, maybe, but overall she'd begun to live a more normal day to day existence.

Ethan had no wish to send her back into hiding now she had come out of  it, so he turned her to face him and pressed a light kiss to her brow.  'Come on,' he said briskly. 'Let's go and party!"

Finding her smile again, Leona nodded her agreement and tried to appear  as though she was looking forward to the evening. As they began to walk  back across the terrace she felt a fine tingling at the back of her neck  which instinctively warned her that someone was observing them.

The suspicion made her pause and turn to cast a frowning glance over  their surroundings. She could see nothing untoward, but wasn't surprised  by that. During the years she had lived in an Arab sheikhdom, married  to a powerful and very wealthy man, she had grown used to being kept  under constant, if very discreet, surveillance.