by Lynne Graham
THE older man introduced himself as Talip Hajjar and greeted Rauf with a polite apology for his intrusion.
Talip was the superior officer of the gendarme, who had prepared the file on Brett Gilman’s dealings with the builders contracted to work on his villa project. From him, Rauf learned that the builders involved, having received what was owing to them from Rauf’s representative, now wished to drop the charges they had laid.
‘Although I understand that you have only just learned of this unpleasant business, you came forward immediately to compensate those defrauded by the Englishman. In doing so and in acknowledging your own interest in the firm who employed him, you have behaved with honour in every way. I doubt that we would ever have discovered that connection without your frank admission of it,’ Talip Hajjar admitted with wry honesty. ‘However, I also believe that it would be wrong to allow this dishonest foreigner to benefit from your acceptance of responsibility and escape the prosecution he deserves.’
‘It is not and never was my wish that that should be the result either,’ Rauf agreed with considerable gravity.
The older man regarded him with approval. ‘Then I must ask you to persuade the victims of his crime to let those charges stand. They only wish to drop them out of respect for the Kasabian name. But in such circumstances, a businessman of your standing and reputation can have nothing to hide or fear.’
Unhappily, Rauf could not feel that, while he had Lily lying in his bed, an as yet unacknowledged director of Harris Travel, that was quite true and, in instant defiance of a disturbing urge to keep quiet about her presence as a guest in his home, he offered the older man çay.
Over the tea that was brought, Rauf sat down to tell the gendarme officer the rest of the story. Having explained Lily’s presence in Turkey, he went on to vouch for her complete ignorance of her former brother-in-law’s unscrupulous activities as well as describing what her relatives had already endured at Gilman’s hands.
‘Her own family will face bankruptcy through this,’ Rauf concluded ruefully. ‘It was a sorry day indeed for the Harris family when Lily’s sister married her toy-boy charmer.’
‘Even their home taken from them! In placing so much trust in a son-in-law the father was sadly at fault,’ Talip Hajjar contended with a grimacing shake of his head. ‘And yet, which of us do not wish to place total faith in a family member?’
‘If you wish to interview Lily, I would ask you to wait until tomorrow. She has already retired for the night.’
‘The young woman must be very distressed at what she has discovered since her arrival. At present, I see no reason to trouble her with an official interview. However, should that situation change, I will know where to find her.’
When the officer had departed, Rauf strode back to his bedroom where he found Lily fast asleep, one hand tucked beneath the pillow, her lovely face serene above the lace neckline of the nightdress she wore. Had he not been so conscious of the faint purple shadows that lay beneath her eyes, however, he might have been tempted to waken her again. He had put his own honour on the line in standing as her character witness in an effort to shield her from being associated in any way with her corrupt former brother-in-law. He had done so gladly. But enough was enough, he told himself with decision. In turn, it was only right that Lily should explain what she had been doing at that hotel with Gilman three years earlier and, most of all, why she should’ve chosen to lie about it. He needed to have that last tiny shadow of doubt in her cleared away.
Around dawn after a long and restful sleep, Lily opened her eyes and focused on the light filtering in. One of the bay-window shutters had been drawn back. Rauf was sprawled along the window-seat, one powerful jean-clad thigh lifted, his attention on her as she sat up with a start.
‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered, instantly aware of his brooding tension.
‘I couldn’t sleep. There’s something on my mind, something I’ve always wanted to ask you about…’
As Rauf sprang off the seat and strolled across to the foot of the bed like a prowling lion ready to spring on the unwary, intent golden eyes zeroing in on her, Lily snatched in an anxious breath. ‘I haven’t quite woken up yet…but go ahead.’
‘On the last occasion that I stayed at your home in England…I saw you leaving a hotel with your sister’s husband.’
In stark disconcertion at that announcement, Lily lost colour and stiffened, her memory throwing her back in time to a very unpleasant experience. ‘But how could you have seen me?’
‘My accountant was staying at the same hotel that weekend and I had just dropped him off. I was in the car park. I watched you go in and I waited for you to come out again—’
‘But if you saw me why didn’t you mention it?’ Lily studied him in growing bewilderment and annoyance. ‘Why didn’t you just approach me?’
‘Yet you later claimed that you hadn’t left the travel agency at all that morning,’ Rauf completed, ignoring her interruption.
The awful silence that fell sawed at Lily’s ragged nerves like a knife. But as she understood how Rauf had set her up, pure unvarnished anger lit her eyes with sapphire fire. ‘So, you sat and watched me and you deliberately didn’t let me know you were there. Then you encouraged me to believe that it was safe to tell a harmless fib…and all the time,’ she condemned with rising volume, ‘all the time, it was a trap!’
‘You lied to me…if you’d told the truth, the trap couldn’t have touched you,’ Rauf countered, outraged that she should dare to question his behaviour when she was the one who had been in the wrong.
Lily thrust back the sheet and threw herself out of the bed. ‘Are you telling me that in your whole life you have never once told a lie to avoid embarrassment?’
His riveting golden eyes hardened. ‘You’re evading the issue—’
‘As far as I’m concerned the real issue here is your downright devious lack of decency in setting me up to fall like that!’ Lily flung. ‘What about trust? What about honesty?’
‘You proved yourself unworthy of my trust,’ Rauf spelt out with a contempt that stung her sensitive skin like a whiplash.
As Lily snatched in a deep, quivering breath, his brilliant gaze lodged to the natural prominence and movement of her breasts as she filled her lungs with air. Her face flamed at that male sexual appraisal and, even as he looked, her weak flesh tingled and swelled and the tender peaks pinched shamefully tight. In a defensive movement, Lily folded her arms over her chest. ‘Did I really?’
‘Entertain me…’ Rauf traded with derision. ‘Give me an innocent reason for telling me that harmless little fib!’
Lily compressed her lips so hard on that invitation that pallor spread round her mouth. That day three years back she had mounted a cover-up for the sake of appearances. She had lied sooner than admit that her supposedly happy family had been, from her point of view at least, very far from being what it had seemed.
‘Brett was having an affair,’ Lily admitted with a bone-deep bitterness that made Rauf’s gaze lock to her angry, defiant face with even keener attention. ‘Not for the first time either. Unfortunately that day Hilary was desperate to get hold of him because Gemma had been rushed into hospital and he wasn’t answering his mobile phone. But I had a fair idea where he would be. Local gossip suggested he always took his little tramps to the same hotel!’
‘You’re saying that, while you and others knew that he was a womaniser, your sister didn’t and you chose to protect her from that knowledge?’
‘Why not?’ Lily tilted her chin, knowing that Rauf, whose principles had about as much bend as ice, would concede no excuse for her concealment of the truth. But she had been much too scared of what the consequences of betraying Brett might have been and of how Rauf might have reacted to the reality that Brett’s threats had trapped her into keeping that silence.
‘And protect him too?’
Lily sent him a furious look for daring to attack her from that angle. Her father’s unswerving belief t
hat what went on in Hilary’s marriage was none of their business had been the first chain that had bound her to secrecy. ‘Of course not…Brett didn’t come into it…Gemma was crying for her daddy. That’s all I cared about that day!’
‘It was a hell of a long time before you came out of that hotel with Gilman,’ Rauf reminded her with sardonic bite.
‘Because I had Reception ring his room and nobody answered,’ Lily explained with angry embarrassment. ‘I checked the bar and the restaurant but he wasn’t there. I didn’t want to go up to the room myself and I hung about for ages, but in the end, I had to sneak past the receptionist into the lift and knock on the door of that room to get hold of him!’
Rauf found that account extraordinary, yet she told her story as though what she had done had been her only obvious choice. He could have believed that she might have chosen to stay silent the first time that she’d been confronted with her brother-in-law’s infidelity. But to ask him to accept that she would turn a blind eye to more than one affair and indeed lower herself to the level of tracking Gilman down to the place where he’d been staging his adulterous tryst stretched his credulity too far. Yet he registered that Lily saw nothing strange in what she had just confessed, saw nothing questionable in her own behaviour. Yet in forewarning Gilman, she had engaged in a complicit act of protecting his position in her family circle and shielding him from the consequences that he had so richly deserved.
‘Why don’t you just tell me the whole truth? You were infatuated with Brett Gilman!’ Rauf condemned with icy, derisive force.
At that shattering allegation, Lily stared back at Rauf in horror and it was a second or two before she could even get her vocal cords to work for her again. ‘How can you accuse me of something that sick?’
‘In what you’ve just told me that’s the only explanation that makes sense!’ Rauf shot back at her with chilling conviction, his eyes cold and dark as a winter pool. ‘I’m going to the hamam before I lose my head with you!’
The hamam? The bath house, she recalled abstractedly, that big domed building that she had noticed in the old courtyard and assumed to be no longer in use. There he was, the ultimate contemporary sophisticated male, about to go and immerse himself in the kind of ancient cultural experience that Hilary had urged her to try out as a tourist. As the door thudded shut in Rauf’s imperious wake, Lily lifted a trembling hand to her pounding brow and sucked in a jagged breath.
You were infatuated with Brett! She shuddered in angry recoil. How very wise she had been not to tell Rauf about the distasteful treatment she had had to withstand from Brett until she had left home to attend college! No doubt, Rauf would be all too happy to construe those facts as proof of an inappropriate sexual attraction and credit his own outrageous accusation as being founded in fact.
But even aside of that concern, Lily was still in considerable shock at what Rauf had revealed about his side of events three years ago. Rauf had seen her at that hotel, had known that she had lied to him and, after she had seen him off at the airport on his flight home that same day, she had never heard from Rauf again. Was it possible that Rauf had dumped her because of that lie? At that idea, a storm of powerful emotion seized hold of Lily: anger, fierce regret, incredulous frustration. Could Rauf not understand that she had not had a choice?
No way was he taking refuge in the hamam where he no doubt believed that she would leave him in peace! Snatching up her light robe and pulling it on, Lily left the bedroom. Sonngul was silent and dim behind the closed shutters. Entering the old whitewashed passage that appeared to lead out to the bath house, she opened the door at the foot of it and found herself in an opulent changing room with a line of shower and changing cubicles, luxurious built-in cupboards and shelves of fleecy towels waiting in readiness. It was obvious that the facilities were still very much in current use. Shedding her nightwear, Lily yanked a bath towel from the nearest shelf, wrapped it round herself and, having opened one door to discover that it led into a massage room complete with couch, stepped through the other into the bath house itself. There she fell still in astonishment at the magnificence of her surroundings.
The giant domed roof, supported on a circle of superb marble pillars, was studded with little star-shaped glass inserts that filtered the dimness with shards of golden dawn light. The walls were a glorious rich expanse of antique tiles beneath which sat marble washing wells into which water flowed in constant refreshment. Round the perimeter of the central raised and stepped platform ran a walkway and in a further expanse a flight of steps ran down into a sizeable pool.
A towel lay abandoned there and even as she watched, Rauf’s dark head broke the surface of the pool and he swam over to the steps to mount them. Nude and magnificent, water streaming from his big, powerful bronzed length and quite unaware of her presence, Rauf swept up the towel.
Her mouth running dry, Lily stared at him, watched his sleek muscles flex taut as he towelled his hair, burning colour warming her cheeks. ‘Rauf…?’ she breathed, disconcerted embarrassment engulfing the angry sense of frustration that had made her follow him.
In all his life, Rauf had never heard a female voice in the hamam and he could only be shocked. Some tourists might be willing to bathe in mixed-sex groups, but his own people were a great deal more inhibited and would not have dreamt of using even a private bath house at the same time as a member of the opposite sex. ‘What are you doing in here?’ he demanded, shaking out the towel and securing it round his lean hips in angry, instinctive circumspection.
Her legs uncertain supports, Lily sank down on the side of the warm central platform. ‘I needed to talk to you about what you said…and explain—’
‘And that could not have waited?’ Rauf fired back at her.
‘OK…once I lied to you but I want you to understand the situation as it was back then,’ Lily persisted, her hands closing together in a taut movement. ‘The first time I saw Brett with another woman, I was only fifteen. I told Dad about it but Dad made it quite clear that he didn’t want to know and he was very angry with me—’
Taken aback by that statement, Rauf strode forward and came down by her side. ‘With you? Your father was angry with you? But how could he be angry with you?’
‘Think of how things were in our family by then,’ Lily urged him heavily. ‘Dad liked and trusted Brett. He’d already signed over our home to Brett and Hilary. He had allowed Brett to take on more and more responsibility at Harris Travel—’
‘Your father was afraid to rock the boat,’ Rauf slotted in with instant grasp of why the older man had embraced such an attitude.
‘Dad believed that their marriage was their private business,’ Lily confided with a helpless sob catching at her throat as her overwrought emotions threatened to get the better of her. ‘Maybe to some degree he was right about that because Hilary was happy with Brett. She just worshipped him…she thought he was perfect but he was never faithful to her!’
Angry that he had not appreciated the complexity of the situation and that Lily should have been exposed to Gilman’s sleazy habits when she was still so young and vulnerable, Rauf closed a supportive arm round her slight frame. Lily had been caught up in a sordid family secret and taught that she had to keep it quiet. That her father could have laid such a burden on her outraged Rauf, but that she should have continued to blindly respect that embargo even at the age of twenty-one and lie even to him in her efforts to cover up for Brett continued to trouble him.
‘With us all still living in the same house and me feeling guilty at what I knew and what Hilary didn’t know, it was horrible… I hated Brett and once I got away to college I hardly ever went home because I couldn’t bear to be anywhere near him!’ Suddenly, Lily was sobbing incoherently against Rauf, her slim figure shaking with the force of her disturbed emotions.
On the brink of asking why, if that was true, he had, prior to ever meeting her family and without even realising who the man was at the time, himself once seen Brett Gilman leaving h
er London apartment building, Rauf almost groaned out loud at the analytical precision of his own keen brain. So there were a few minor inconsistencies still to be cleared up, but he could not doubt the genuine pain that his angry accusation had caused and it would be cruel to probe deeper.
‘I’m sorry,’ Lily exclaimed raggedly. ‘I’m sorry I lied to you—’
Rauf framed her distraught face with firm but gentle hands. ‘It doesn’t matter now…it’s not worth your tears. Nothing that bastard Gilman did is worth a single tear!’ Keen to distract her from the unhappy memories he had roused, Rauf lowered her down full length onto the heated navel stone and a slow smile curved his wide, sensual mouth as she looked up at him in surprise. ‘Now since you are here and the rest of the household is still asleep, you might as well stay and enjoy the hamam.’
Lily pressed her palms down onto the surface of the marble platform beneath her and finally realised why she had been getting so warm. ‘It’s like a sauna…’ she remarked with a soft laugh of appreciation. ‘In fact this entire place is just amazing!’
Rauf lay down several feet away.
‘Do the whole family bathe here together?’ Lily asked.
At the ignorance inherent in that question, Rauf drew in a startled breath. ‘Men and women don’t usually share the facilities. But this once, we’ll break with the rules and relax together.’
Good, clean, wholesome relaxation, Rauf told himself at the exact same time as he recalled how he and his friends as young boys had once fantasised about what might happen if a sexually adventurous woman were ever to enter the hamam when one of them was there alone. A ridiculous fantasy, for as a rule attendants were present and no such event could ever have taken place. But even so, at that point, his golden eyes flared and zeroed in on Lily’s prone length of their own seeming volition. Tiny beads of perspiration already mantled the satin stretch of delicate skin below her throat. Where his libido was concerned, even looking at Lily was a mistake and all the effects of the cold dip he had enjoyed minutes earlier evaporated fast.
