NATASHA OAKLEY – Cinderella and the Sheikh (страница 3)

‘I know.’ Polly spontaneously bent down and placed a kiss on her mother’s cheek. ‘Have you got everything you need? Can I get you a drink?’

The dowager duchess laughed. ‘I’m fine. Any more champagne and I’ll be arrested for being drunk in charge of a wheelchair. You do what you need to do, darling.’

‘Get someone to come and find me if you want to go to bed,’ she said, taking in her mother’s tired face. ‘There’s no need for you—’

‘Stop fussing. I’ll be fine.’ Then, her attention snagged, ‘Who’s that man? I don’t recognise him.’

Polly followed the direction of her mother’s eyes.

‘With the Duke of Aylesbury? Front table, beneath the Mad Duchess oil painting?’

‘That’s—’ She stopped as Rashid’s eyes met hers. The sensation was akin to how she imagined it would feel if you stuck a wet finger into an electrical socket. He was quite, quite still…and, heaven help her, he was definitely watching her.

What was more he’d probably seen her watching him. Polly straightened her spine and summoned up her ‘perfect hostess’ smile, resisting the temptation to check that her hair was still firmly pinned in its chignon. Then, abruptly, he leant forward and spoke to the Duke of Aylesbury sitting immediately to his left.

She forced her chin that little bit higher as Sheikh Rashid’s blue eyes locked with hers once more. It had to be pure imagination that made her stomach clench in…

God only knew what. The word that had sprung into her mind had been fear. Except that didn’t make any sense.

‘He looks so angry.’

‘That’s His Highness Prince Rashid bin Khalid bin Abdullah Al Baha.’ His formal title came easily from her lips, absolutely no trace of the uneasiness she felt appearing in her voice. She dragged her eyes away. ‘Why do you think he’s angry?’

‘I just did,’ her mother said slowly, and then smiled. ‘For a moment. He has a very uncompromising face.’

That was one way of putting it. It seemed to Polly he had an uncompromising everything.

Her mother released the brake on her wheelchair, apparently having lost interest. ‘I hope Anthony isn’t intending to do business with him. I don’t think that would be a good idea at all.’

On that slightly obscure observation the dowager duchess moved away, her gloved hands moving lightly on the wheels of her chair. Polly watched her for the shortest of moments and then, deliberately not looking back at the Amrahi prince, walked towards the Long Gallery.

Or tried to. Every step she felt as though his eyes were boring into her back. All of a sudden it became difficult to walk in a straight line. She felt conscious of how her arms swung in relation to her legs. Wondered what would be the best thing to do with her hands. She hadn’t felt so self-conscious since she’d left puberty.

Polly slipped out into the Long Gallery and pulled the door shut behind her with a satisfying click. She rubbed a hand over the goose bumps on her forearm. What was the matter with her? Surely if she’d learnt one thing in the last six years it was not to let these people get to her. They could look down their long patrician noses any which way they wanted. It didn’t touch her. Couldn’t, if she didn’t let it.

But…

Still the words she needed to put a frame around what she was feeling eluded her. There was something. Something she couldn’t quite catch at.

Call it feminine intuition, but she was certain the mind behind those blue eyes wasn’t thinking about anything as pleasant as her state-school education and her mother’s temerity to marry ‘out of her class’.

Polly frowned. The way he’d looked at her had felt personal. He’d looked at her as though she were…

Damn it! What was the word?

He’d looked at her as if she were the…enemy. That was it. As though it were only the finest of veneers layered over his anger.

Polly shook her head. She was being ridiculous. The dark hair, olive skin, blue-eyed combination had really done something peculiar to her common sense. She didn’t know him. Didn’t even know very much about him and he’d have to know even less about her.

At best she’d be a name on their application for permission to film in Amrah. Maybe he just wasn’t keen on a film crew coming to his country? But that hardly made sense because he could say ‘no’ and Minty would have to move on to another project. It was hardly something he needed to lose any sleep over.

But she might. Polly walked the length of the Long Gallery and through into the library with the wonderful smell of leather, polish and really old books. If Sheikh Rashid did veto the project, what would she do then? It was past time she left this place and it wasn’t as though she had alternatives leaping out at her.

‘Everything all right, Miss Polly?’

Polly spun round and smiled up at her stepbrother’s elderly butler who’d come through the Summer Sitting Room. ‘Fine. I’m just on my way to check everything’s ready for the fireworks.’

‘You’ll find the two gentlemen from “Creative Show” in the staff room,’ the butler said, the merest flicker in his eyes communicating how annoying he’d found them.

Polly smiled and gathered up the folds of her peacock-blue dress. ‘We’re nearly done. And the rain seems to be holding off all right so I think we’ll revert to midnight. Let’s get this over as soon as possible and send these people home.’

‘Very good, Miss Polly.’

Miss Polly. She liked that. Henry Phillips had managed to find the perfect solution as to what to call someone who was almost one of the family but not quite.

No, not quite. She would always be the housekeeper’s daughter even if her mother had married the fourteenth duke. And Henry Phillips would always remember he’d taken her into the kitchens and made her hot milk and sugar during her father’s wake. It was a bond between them that would never be broken even if she was almost ‘a member of the family’.

‘Henry…?’ She stopped him as a new thought occurred to her. ‘What do you know about Sheikh Rashid Al Baha? He’s not been to Shelton before tonight, has he?’

‘No,’ the butler answered with one of his rare smiles, ‘but I fancy he’s the money who bought Golden Mile all the same.’

‘By himself?’

‘Indeed.’

‘He must be worth billions!’

‘A little more than that,’ the butler said with another thin smile. ‘I doubt it was pocket change, but nothing that need worry him, I gather.’

‘So why didn’t he come here?’ she asked with a frown.

‘I imagine all the negotiations were carried out through his agent. His Grace and the anonymous buyer of Golden Mile both wished the transaction to be private.’

‘Oh.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason.’ Almost no reason. It had suddenly occurred to her that the look in Rashid Al Baha’s cold blue eyes might have had something to do with Anthony after all. Her stepbrother made enemies easier than anyone she knew.

‘And they met tonight?’

Henry nodded.

‘What happened? Did they argue?’

‘That would be very unusual for someone from his culture, I believe. They spoke and it was extremely cordial. But—’ the elderly man searched for the correct word ‘—it was…shall we say, cold.’

Why? An Amrahi prince with the reputation and disposable income of this one would normally have Anthony exerting himself to charm. And even she had to own he was good at that when he saw a reason to be.

But ‘cold’was exactly the word to describe the way Rashid Al Baha had looked at her earlier. Cold, angry and speculative.

CHAPTER TWO

RASHID watched the Hon Emily Coolidge finger the large diamond nestled against her rather bony chest and felt a familiar wave of boredom wash over him. This was his mother’s country, the country in which he’d received much of his education, but he felt very little affinity with it. Or with the people who lived in it.

It felt empty. Soulless. Emily had to know he’d never choose her, or anyone like her, as the mother of his children. It made her behaviour inexplicable.

The brunette’s finger moved again across the cool plains of the diamond droplet. There’d been a time, not so long ago, when that unspoken offer would have been appealing. In fact, he wouldn’t have stopped to think about it. He’d merely have lost himself in mindless pleasure, content that Western women seemed to view these things differently.

‘Will you be in London next week?’

Rashid twisted the champagne glass between thumb and forefinger, concentrating on the play of light on the liquid in his glass. He really hadn’t thought much about who the mother of his children would be. It was always something for the future. Something far distant.

But now things were changing. He felt a mortality that had never touched him before. There had to be something inbuilt that made a man long to pass on his genes. To feel that he would go on…

Was that it? Was that what this gnawing dissatisfaction with his life was about? A wanting to set his place in history? To find meaning?