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For Raschid was in Abadilah, with Aisha. And Evie should not be standing here in his apartment.
From that very cold, distant place she seemed to have retreated into, she watched her other self open her fingers and let both the cheque and the card drop to the floor. Then that person simply turned and walked away—out into the hallway, out of the apartment and into the waiting lift. It took her downwards. She didn’t even stop when the concierge called out to her sharply.
Outside, the good weather was still holding. London was baking beneath a heatwave that had most people walking around in shirt-sleeves. So she didn’t look out of place in her pale blue knitted top and casual white cotton trousers as she joined the lunchtime rush taking place on the pavements.
A car followed her for a while, though she didn’t know that, its two occupants pacing her progress along the embankment until she turned onto a paved walkway where a car could not go.
An hour later—maybe two—and she was still walking. It must have been instinct that eventually made her aware of where she was, because she suddenly found herself standing outside her mother’s apartment.
She rang the bell, and her mother’s disembodied voice sounded in the communication box.
‘It’s Evie,’ she heard herself say. ‘Can I come in?’
There was a moment’s surprised silence, then the buzzer sounded to tell Evie she could open the front door now. Her mother’s apartment was on the first floor. She was already standing at the flat door when Evie got there. Lucinda took one look at her daughter and went as white as a sheet.
‘Oh, my God, Evie,’ she gasped in shaken dismay. ‘You’re bleeding!’
Evie barely heard her; she was too busy fainting at her mother’s feet.
* * *
It was very late that same evening and Lucinda was sitting beside her daughter’s hospital bed when the door suddenly swung open and Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah stepped into the room with his faithful servant crowding right behind him.
He took one look at Evie lying so still in the bed and strode urgently forward. Only to pull to a halt when Lucinda Delahaye jumped to her feet and placed herself firmly between him and her daughter.
For once, Lucinda looked less than her usual immaculate self. Her hair was untidy, silken threads of gold were tumbling around her face where they had escaped from the elegant chignon they were supposed to be contained in. She had aged decades, her usually alabaster-smooth skin scored by lines of strain.
She grimly ushered them out of the room, firmly closing the door behind her. ‘How dare you people show your faces here?’ she raked at them viciously.
Raschid didn’t seem to hear her. His bronzed skin looked grey, his golden eyes blackened by a terrible shock.
‘The baby…?’
‘Oh, I suppose it would solve all your problems to hear that she’s lost it!’ Lucinda lashed at him.
‘No!’ Raschid ground out, and swayed, his face going so white that it was only as Asim reached out to take hold of him that Lucinda realised how Raschid had misunderstood her meaning.
‘Well, she hasn’t lost it.’ She grudgingly rectified the error. ‘Though how she didn’t after what your henchmen did to her has to be a miracle.’
‘Is there somewhere we can discuss this in privacy?’ Asim quietly suggested.
The hospital corridor wasn’t busy, but some of the patients had the doors to their rooms standing open. They had to be able to hear every word that was being said.
Asim still had an arm around Raschid’s shoulders while Raschid himself seemed incapable of anything except just standing there looking devastated. And for some reason that devastation utterly incensed Evie’s mother.
‘You want privacy?’ Lucinda hissed. ‘I can give you privacy,’ she grimly decreed, and stalked off down the corridor with the two men following behind her.
And she was in no mood to be pleasant. Having just gone through the worst experience of her life, watching the very lifeblood seep out of her daughter, Lucinda wanted someone else’s blood as recompense.
Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah’s blood.
‘Do you know what those two men did to her?’ she demanded the moment they were shut away inside the waiting room. ‘If Evie ever forgives you in this lifetime, Sheikh, then I certainly will not!’
‘It was a mistake,’ he muttered, still so caught up in his first impression of what Lucinda had said to him that even with her swift correction of that misunderstanding he still hadn’t recovered.
‘Was it also a mistake when you didn’t bother to get in touch with her for two whole weeks?’ Evie’s mother challenged.
‘I had nothing good to say,’ Raschid thickly explained. ‘It seemed—kinder to wait until I could relay only good news.’
‘Kind?’ Lucinda scorned that excuse. ‘Where was the kindness in keeping her in suspense like you did? She bottles things up!’ she cried. ‘She always has done! I thought you knew that! You told me you loved her! You promised to take care of her!’ she went on remorselessly. ‘Instead she was treated like a whore by your people!’
Raschid flinched then suddenly folded into a nearby chair to bury his face in his hands.
‘Lady Delahaye…’ It was Asim who tried to calm the situation, his voice that soothingly diplomatic one Evie knew so well. ‘We understand and accept your right to be angry. But we would sincerely appreciate it if you could explain to us what happened after Miss Delahaye left the apartment.’
As he stood there, tall and proud beside his crumpled master, Lucinda felt a sudden urge to leap on both of them. Instead she turned her back, folded her arms across her trembling body and tried at last to get a hold on herself.
‘She walked out of there with nothing,’ she whispered starkly. ‘In shock. No money. No idea of what she was doing—’ There was a pause while she swallowed several times before she could continue. ‘I don’t know how long she walked for but she eventually found her way to my door—my door!’ she swung around to fling at Raschid. ‘Do you realise how far that is from your apartment? And she was bleeding!’ Lucinda choked out on a wretched sob. ‘Bleeding and she didn’t even know it!’
Lurching violently to his feet, Raschid took two tense strides towards the door then just stopped, his whole frame clenched by some powerful inner tension that held him locked right there to the spot. ‘Did they touch her?’ he rasped out tautly.
‘Who?’ Lucinda said bitterly. ‘Your men?’
‘They were not Sheikh Raschid’s men, Lady Delahaye,’ Asim denied.
‘His father’s men, then—what’s the difference?’ she flashed. ‘But in answer to your question Evie didn’t say they physically touched her, only that they made her see that if your father could hate her that much, then there really was no chance for the two of you.’
‘And her health?’ Asim enquired gently.
Tears washed across Lucinda’s eyes but she blinked them away again as determinedly as Evie herself would have done. ‘She lost a lot of blood,’ she replied. ‘But by some quirk of fate managed to hang on to her baby. Now they are prescribing bed-rest, no stress and no confrontations. So I would appreciate it, Sheikh Raschid, if you would respect those things.’
A warning. A threat. The English way of issuing both that was just as effective as the Arab way.
Raschid didn’t answer. But he did move at last, lifting a hand to rub wearily at his eyes before turning around to face Lucinda.
It was the first time Lucinda had actually allowed herself to look at him—and at last she saw the ravages that had taken place on his face. The