by Tessa Radley
Anger splintered through her. “It might be a pittance to you but it’s my pittance. I worked for that money.”
“And for what do you so desperately need cash? An overloaded credit card after frequenting the boutique stores at Harbor City’s Ocean Terminal?”
His drawling cynicism made her want to smack him. Instead she tried to ignore him and huddled down into the corner as far away from him as she could get in the backseat. He was so overbearing. So certain that he was right about everything. Assuming she was a shopaholic airhead. Making decisions for her about where she should work, about when she should go home.
God help any woman silly enough to marry him—he’d be a dictator. Maybe he was already married. The thought caused a bolt of shock.
What did she care whether he was married?
That fierce, dark gaze clashed with hers. “I’m waiting.”
Trying frantically to regroup, she said, “For what?”
“For you to tell me why you’re so desperate for money.”
Tiffany cringed at the idea of telling him. “It makes me sound stupid.”
He arched an eyebrow. “More stupid than working at Le Club?”
She supposed he was right. So she hauled in a deep breath and said reluctantly, “I was mugged yesterday morning. My passport was stolen and my credit cards and my cash.”
It was mortifying. How many times had she been told to keep one card and a copy of her itinerary and travel insurance separate from the rest? How she wished she had. It would have saved a lot of grief. And a host of I-told-you-you-wouldn’t-survive-alones from her father, when she finally managed to locate him.
“All that I had left was twenty Hong Kong dollars that I had in my pocket and I used that for last night’s accommodation.”
“How convenient.”
The mocking note in his voice made it clear Mr. Arrogant Know-all thought she was lying.
“You don’t believe me.”
The seat gave as he shrugged. “It’s hardly an original story. Although I prefer it to a fabricated tale about an ailing grandfather or a brother with leukemia.”
He thought she was angling for sympathy. She stared across the backseat in disbelief. “Good grief, but you’re cynical. I hope I never become like you.”
In the flash of passing lights she glimpsed a flare of emotion in his eyes. Then it vanished as darkness closed around them again. “And I hope, for your sake, that you are not as naive as you pretend to be.”
“I’m not naive,” Tiffany said, annoyed by the nerve he’d unwittingly struck. He sounded exactly like her father.
“Then come up with a better story.”
“It’s true. Do you think I’d voluntarily make myself look like such an airhead?”
“The helpless, stranded tourist might work on some.”
She glared at him under the cover of night.
His voice dropped to a rasp. “Perhaps I’m the fool. I find myself actually considering this silly tale—against my better judgment.”
“Well, thanks.” Her tone dripped affront.
Unexpectedly he laughed aloud. “My pleasure.”
The sound was warm and full of joy. The cab pulled up at a well-lit intersection and the handsome features were flooded with light. Tiffany caught her breath at the sudden, startling charm that warmed his face, and somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach liquid heat melted. For a heady fragment of time she almost allowed herself smile, too, and laugh at the ridiculousness of her plight.
Then she came to her senses.
“It’s not funny,” she said with more than a hint of rebellion.
Rafiq moved his weight on the seat beside her. “No, I don’t suppose it would be—if your story were true.”
Rafiq’s brooding gaze settled on the woman bundled up against the door. If she moved any farther away from him, she’d be in serious danger of falling out. Was she telling the truth? Or was it all an elaborate charade?
The lights changed and the vehicle pulled away from the intersection. “Don’t you have anyone you can borrow money from?”
She turned her head and looked out into the night. “No.”
Frowning now, Rafiq stared at the dark shape of her head and pale curve of her cheek that was all he could see from this perspective, highlighted every few seconds by flashes from passing neon signs.
“What about your friend Renate? Can’t she help you out?”
She gave a strangled laugh. “Hardly a friend. I only met her today. She lodges at the hostel I’m staying at.”
Aah. He started to see the light. “There’s no one else?”
She shook her head. “Not someone I can ask for money.”
Rafiq waited for a heartbeat. For two. Then three. But the expected plea never came.
“You’re traveling by yourself.” It was a statement. And it explained so much, Rafiq decided, the reluctant urge to believe her growing stronger by the minute.
Tiffany shifted, and he sensed her uneasy glance before she turned back to the window.
She’d be a fool to tell him if she was. Or perhaps this was part of an act designed to make him feel more sympathy for a young woman all alone and out of her depth.
Had he been hustled by an expert? To Rafiq’s disquiet he wasn’t certain. And he was not accustomed to being rendered uncertain, off-balance. Particularly not by a woman. A young, attractive woman.
He was far from being an impressionable youth.
Three times he’d been in love. Three times he’d been on the brink of proposing marriage. And each time, much to his father’s fury, he’d pulled away. At the last moment Rafiq had discovered that the desire, the sparkle, had burnt out under the weight of family expectation.
Rafiq himself didn’t understand how something that started with so much hope and promise could fizzle out so disappointingly as soon as his father started to talk marriage settlements.
“So how much money do you need?” He directed the question to the sliver of sculpted cheek that was all he could see of her face.
This should establish whether he was being hustled.
A modest request for only a few dollars to cover necessities and shelter until she could arrange for her bank to put her back in funds would make it easier to swallow her tale.
“Enough to cover my bed and food until Monday.”
Rafiq released the breath that he hadn’t even been aware of holding.
As head of the Royal Bank of Dhahara he was familiar with all kinds of fraud, from the simplest ploys that emptied the pockets of soft-hearted elders to complex Internet frauds. Tiffany would not be seeing him again, so this was her only opportunity to try stripping him of a substantial amount of money and she had not taken it. She was in genuine need. All she wanted—and she hadn’t even directly asked him for it yet—was a small amount of cash to tide her over.
This was not a scam.
The first whisper of real concern for the situation in which she found herself sounded inside his head. He had a cousin who was as close to him as a sister. He’d hate for Zara to be in the position that Tiffany was in, with no one to turn to for help. Rafiq knew he would make sure Tiffany would be looked after. “Tell me more.”
“Except…” Her voice trailed away.
Every muscle in his body contracted as he tensed, praying that his instincts had not played him false. “Except…what?” he prompted.
She averted her face. Even in the dark, he caught the movement as her pale fingers fiddled with the hem of the short, flirty dress. “I’m not sure that I’m going to have enough available on my credit card to pay for the changes to my flight.”
“How much?”
Here it was. Rafiq forced his gaze up from the distraction of those fingers. She’d just hit him with the big sum—a drop in the ocean to him if she’d but known it—and he couldn’t even see her face to read her eyes as his hopes that she was the real deal faded into oblivion. The tidal wave of anger that shook him was unexpected.
It shouldn’t have mattered that she was a beautiful little schemer.
But it did.
Rafiq told himself it was because he wasn’t often wrong about people, that he’d considered himself too wily to be taken in by a pretty face. That was why he was angry….
Because of his own foolishness.
Not because he’d hoped against all odds—
She turned her head toward him, and her gaze connected with his in the murky darkness of the backseat. He almost convinced himself that he sensed real desperation in her glistening eyes.
Anger overpowered him. Damn her. She was good. So good, she belonged in Hollywood.
How nearly had she hooked him with her air of innocence and lonely despair?
And so much smarter than Renate. He would never have fallen for the platinum blonde’s sexual promise of a one-night stand…but this woman… By Allah, he’d nearly bought everything she’d sold him. With her wide waif’s eyes, her hesitant smile…she’d suckered him. Like Scheherazade, she was a consummate teller of tales.
Rage licked at his gut like hot flames. He was wise to her now.
He would not be deceived again.
No one made a fool of him. No one. And he hadn’t fallen into her trap—he’d been fortunate enough to realize the truth before it was too late. No, not fortunate, he admitted, shamed. He’d almost been duped. A slip of a female had drawn him so close to the claws of her honeyed trap, and proven that he was not as wise as he liked to believe. He could still be taken in by a pair of heavily lashed eyes.
Tiffany had been a little too confident. The mistake she’d made had lain in her eagerness to reel him in too quickly.
“Where are we?”
The cab had slowed. Rafiq glanced away from her profile to the imposing marble facade lit up by pale gold light. “At my hotel.”
“I never agreed to come here.” Her voice was breathy, suddenly hesitant. Earlier he might have considered it uncertainty—even apprehension; now he knew it was nothing more than pretence.
“You never gave me any address when I asked.” He opened his door and hid his anger behind a slow smile as he consciously summoned every reserve of charm he possessed. “Come, you will tell me your problems and I will buy you a drink, and perhaps I can find a way to help you.”
This was the final test.
If she’d been telling him the truth, she would refuse. But if she was only after the money, she would interpret that smile as weakness, and she would accept.
Rafiq couldn’t figure why it was so important to give her a last chance when she’d already revealed her true colors.
She hesitated for a fleeting moment and gave him a tremulous smile designed to melt the hardest heart. Just as he was about to surrender his cynicism, she followed him out of the cab.
The taste inside his mouth was decidedly bitter as she joined him on the sidewalk. Rafiq hadn’t realized that he'd still had any illusions left to lose.
Inside the hotel, he headed for the bank of elevators. “There’s an open pool deck upstairs that offers views over the city,” he said over his shoulder as she hesitated.
Once in the elevator, Rafiq activated it with the key card to his presidential suite.
He brooded while he watched the floors light up as the car shot upward. A sweetly seductive fragrance surrounded him—a mix of fresh green notes and heady gardenia—and to his disgust his body stirred.
Rafiq told himself he wasn’t going to take her up on what she was so clearly here for—he only wanted to see how far she was prepared to go.
Yet the urge to teach Tiffany a lesson she would never forget pressed down on him even as the sweet, intoxicating scent of her filled his nostrils. When the elevator finally came to rest, he placed his hand on the small of her back and gently ushered her out.
Balmy night air embraced Tiffany as she stepped through frosted-glass sliding doors into the intimate darkness of the hotel’s deserted pool deck.
Overhead the moon hung in the sky, a perfectly shaped crescent, while far below the harbor gleamed like black satin beyond lights that sparkled like sprinklings of fairy dust.
Tiffany made for a group of chairs beside a surprisingly small pool, a row of lamps reflecting off the smooth surface like half a dozen full moons. She sank into a luxuriously padded armchair, nerve-rackingly conscious of the man who stood with his back to her, hands on hips, staring over the city…thinking God knew what. Because he was back in that remote space that he allowed no one else to inhabit.
When he wheeled about and shrugged off his suit jacket, her pulse leaped uncontrollably. He dropped into the chair beside her, and suddenly the air became thick and cloying.
“What would you like to drink?” he asked as a waiter appeared, as if that slice of time when he’d become so inaccessible had never been.
Tiffany rather fancied she needed a clear head. But she also had no intention of showing him how much he intimidated her. Her chin inched higher. “Vodka with lots of ice and orange.” She’d sip it. Make it last.
Casting a somewhat mocking smile at her, Rafiq ordered Perrier for himself. And Tiffany wished she’d thought of that herself.
By some magic, the waiter was back in seconds with the drinks, and then Rafiq dismissed him.
She shivered as the sudden silence, the silken heat of the night and the sheer imposing presence of the man beside her all closed in on her senses. They were alone. How had this happened? He’d offered to buy her a drink…to lend a sympathetic ear. She’d imagined a busy bar and a little kindness.
Not this.
He turned his head. The trickle of awareness grew to a torrent as she fell into the enigmatic depths of his dark eyes.
Tiffany let out a deep breath that she’d been unaware of holding, and told herself that Rafiq was only a man. A man. Her father was a well-known film director. She’d met some of the most sought-after men in the world; men who graced covers of glitzy magazines and were featured on lists of women’s most secret fantasy lovers. So why on earth was this one intimidating her?
The only explanation that made any sense was that losing her passport, her money, had stripped away the comfort of her identity and put her at a disadvantage. No longer her parents’ pampered princess, she was struggling to survive…and the unexpected reversal had disoriented her.
Of course, it wasn’t him. It had nothing to do with him. Or with the tantalizing air of reserve that invited her to crash through it.
This was about her.
About her confusion. It was easy to see how he had become appealing, an unexpected pillar of strength in a world gone crazy.
The rationality of the conclusion comforted her and allowed her to smile up at him with hastily mustered composure, to say in a carefully modulated tone, “I’m sorry, I’ve been so tied up in talking about me. What brings you to Hong Kong?”
His reply was terse. “Business.”
“With Sir Julian?”
A slight nod was the only response she got. And a renewed blast of that do-not-intrude-any-further reserve that he was so good at displaying. He might as well have worn a great, big sign with ten-foot-high red letters that read Danger: Keep Out.
“Hotel business?”
“Why do you think that?”
Tiffany took a sip of her drink. It was deliciously sweet and cool. “Because he’s famous for his hotels—are you trying to develop a resort?”
“Do I look like a developer?”
She took in the angled cheekbones starkly highlighted by the lamplight; his white shirt with dark stripes that stood out in the darkness; his fingers clenching the glass that he held. Even though he should’ve appeared relaxed sitting there, he hummed with tension.
“I’m not sure what a developer is supposed to look like. People are individuals. Not one size fits all.”
He inspected her silently until she shifted. “What do you do, Tiffany? What are you doing in Hong Kong?”
“Uh…” She had no intention of confessing that she di
dn’t do very much at all. She’d completed a degree in English literature and French…and found she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. Nor did she have any intention of telling him about her abortive trip with her school friend, Sally. About how Sally had hooked up with a guy and how Tiffany had felt like a third wheel in their developing romance. She’d already revealed far too much; she certainly didn’t want Rafiq to know how naive she’d been. So she smiled brightly at him, took a sip of her drink and said casually, “Just traveling here and there.”
“Your family approve of this carefree existence?”
She prickled. “My family knows that I can look after myself.”
That was debatable. Tiffany doubted her father would ever believe she was capable of taking care of herself. Yet she also knew she had to tread carefully. She didn’t want Rafiq to know quite how isolated she was right now.
“I’ve been keeping in close touch with them.”
“By cell phone.”
It was a statement. She didn’t deny it, didn’t tell him that her cell phone had been in the stolen purse. Or that she didn’t even know where her father was right now. Or about her mother’s emotional devastation. Far safer to let him believe that she was only a text away from communicating with her family.
“Why don’t they send you money for the fare that you need?”
“They can’t afford to.”
It was true. Sort of. Tiffany thought about her mother’s tears when she’d called her yesterday to arrange exactly that. Linda Smith née Canning had been a B-grade actress before her marriage to Taylor Smith; she hadn’t worked for nearly two decades. The terms of her prenuptial agreement settled a house in Auckland on her, a far from liquid asset. It would take time to sell, and Mom needed her father’s consent to borrow against it. In the meantime there were groceries to buy, staff to pay, bills for the hired house in L.A.…and, according to her mother, not much money in the joint account. Add a husband who’d made sure he couldn’t be found, and Linda’s panic and distress had been palpable.
So, no, her mom was not in a position to help right now. She needed a lawyer—and Tiffany intended to arrange the best lawyer she could find as soon as she got back home. The more expensive, the better, she vowed darkly. Her father would pay those bills in due course.
