LITMIR.BIZ

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her, kissed her, had brought her right there to the very edge of panic by suddenly showing an interest in things she’d no longer wanted him to know about. Then, quite calmly and precisely, he had thrown her out.

      Her fingers began to curl down towards the table, her stomach muscles coiled into a ball, and at last blood began to pump more oxygen to her brain. Across the kitchen the kettle began to make hissing noises; the clock on the wall chimed the hour. The fingers touched base and she stood up; it was quick and tense and impulsive.

      How could she have got it so wrong? How could she have talked herself into believing that he possessed a heart worth pleading with? Where had she ever got the stupid idea that he was a worthy father for her very precious son?

      The telephone mounted on the wall behind her began ringing. Forcing herself to go and answer it took most of her self-control.

      ‘I saw you come back,’ a female voice said. ‘How did it go?’

      It was her neighbour, Sophia. ‘It didn’t go anywhere,’ Melanie replied, then burst into tears.

      Sophia arrived within minutes, banging on the back door with a demand to be let in after having come through the hole in the hedge that separated their two gardens. She was a tall, dark-haired, sex-seething bombshell with lavender eyes and a lush mouth that could slay the world. But inside the stunning outer casing lurked a legal mind that was a sharp as a razor and as tough as the glass ceiling she was striving to break through.

      ‘Dry those tears,’ she instructed the moment Melanie opened the door to her. ‘He doesn’t deserve them, and you know he doesn’t.’

      Half an hour later Melanie had poured the whole thing out to her over a cup of tea. By then Sophia’s amazing eyes had turned glassy. ‘It sounds to me as if you and Robbie have just had a very lucky escape. The man is a first-class bastard. I did tell you, you should have stuck with me, kid,’ she added sagely. ‘I’m a much better father-figure for any boy child.’

      It was such a ludicrous thing to say that Melanie laughed for the first time. But in a lot of ways Sophia was speaking the truth, because her neighbour’s curt, no-nonsense approach to life had always appealed to Robbie. When he was in need of something other than his mother’s loving softness he would disappear through the hole in the hedge to search out Sophia. So did Melanie, come to that.

      ‘What did your lawyer have to say when you told him?’ Sophia asked curiously. ‘The same as me—I told you so?’

      Randal. Melanie’s brain ground to a halt again; she went still, her eyes fixed and blank. Then—

      ‘Oh, dear God,’ Melanie breathed, then jumped up and made a dive for the telephone.

      ‘What?’ Sophia demanded anxiously. ‘What did I say?’

      ‘Oh—hello.’ Melanie cut across Sophia with the tense greeting. ‘I need to speak to Randal Soames, please. I’m M-Mrs Portreath…W-what do you mean he isn’t there? I was supposed to be meeting him there for lunch!’

      ‘Mr Soames was called out on urgent business, Mrs Portreath,’ his secretary told her. ‘I was expecting you to arrive at any minute so I could offer you his apologies.’

      She didn’t want an apology. ‘I have to speak to Randal!’ She was becoming hysterical. ‘When will he be back?’

      ‘He didn’t say…’

      ‘W-well…’ Melanie took in a breath and tried to calm herself ‘…I need you to get him on his mobile phone and tell him I have s-speak to him urgently.’

      ‘Yes, Mrs Portreath. I will try to contact him for you but I can’t promise. He tends to switch off his mobile when he’s in a meeting, you see.’

      Melanie placed the receiver back on its rest, then sank weakly against the wall and put a hand up to cover her aching eyes.

      ‘What was all that about?’ Sophia questioned.

      ‘I left my papers on Rafiq’s desk,’ she breathed. ‘How could I have been so stupid!’

      The covering hand began to tremble. On a sigh, Sophia came to place an arm across her shoulders. ‘Okay, calm down,’ she murmured soothingly. ‘I think you need to remember that he didn’t give you much chance to do otherwise,’ she pointed out.

      No, he hadn’t, Melanie agreed. He’d just got rid of her. He’d heard enough—had enough—and had just got up and marched her out! Sophia almost copied him by marching her back to the kitchen table and sitting her down again, only her friend used a guiding arm to do it whereas Rafiq hadn’t even spared her a glance, never mind touched her! As if she was unclean. As if he would have contaminated himself if he’d remained in her company too long.

      A shudder ripped through her. ‘Stop shaking,’ Sophia commanded. ‘The man isn’t worth the grief.’

      But Melanie didn’t want to stop shaking. She wanted to shiver and shake and remember another time when he’d done almost the same thing. She had followed him back to London, had almost had hysterics in her desire to get inside his embassy and plead with him. What she’d met with when she’d eventually been granted an audience had been Rafiq locked into his Arab persona, about to attend some formal function dressed in a dark red cloak, white tunic and wearing a white gut rah on his head. He’d looked taller and leaner, foreign and formidable. His face had taken on a whole new appearance: harder, savage, honed to emulate some cold-eyed, winged predator. ‘Get out.’ He’d said those two immortal words then turned his back on her to stride away.

      ‘Melanie, if he still despises you as much as you think he does, he will probably consign your papers to the bin without bothering to read them.’

      ‘Yes.’ She liked that scenario.

      ‘But would it be a very bad thing if he did read them?’ Sophia then dared to suggest. ‘At least he would know everything—which is what you wanted, remember? It was why you decided to go to see him in the first place.’

      Sophia was holding onto her hands while trying to talk some good sense into the situation. But she hadn’t been there this morning; she hadn’t seen the size of the mistake Melanie had made. It had been huge; she’d been damned by her own foolish optimism, letting the years soften Rafiq’s hard image until she’d actually begun to question whether she had been fair to him.

      William had helped by gently nudging her in this direction. Dear, sweet, gentle William who, like herself, hadn’t liked to see bad in anyone. But even William’s advice had only been wise with all the facts laid before him. If Rafiq did decide to read those papers they would only tell him half the story. As for the other half—

      Well, that half belonged to his eagerness to believe badly of her simply because people had told him to.

      But, no. She sighed. There had been so much more to it than words of poison spoken into his ear. He had seen her with Jamie. It had all been so desperately damning. And explainable, she reminded herself, if he had only given her the chance to explain. He hadn’t and still wouldn’t. That hadn’t changed. He still looked at her and saw her through the unforgiving eyes of a half-Arab man with his feet firmly entrenched in cultural principles and a deep-rooted belief that all women were natural sinners.

      And she no longer wanted a man like that to come anywhere near her son so he could contaminate him with his poisonous view of her.

      ‘Melanie—’

      No. She scrunched her hands free, then got to her feet. She didn’t want to talk about it any more. For what was the use in talking when it was basically too late? All she could hope for now was that Randal would come through for her and manage to retrieve her stuff before Rafiq decided to feed his hatred by reading things that he really did not want to know.

      ‘What are you doing at home at this time of the day, anyway?’ she asked Sophia as an abrupt change of subject. ‘I thought you were supposed to be wowing them all in some court or other.’

      ‘The case

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