Saved by the Sheikh! / Million-Dollar Marriage Merger: Saved by the Sheikh! / Million-Dollar Marriage Merger. Charlene Sands
Читать онлайн книгу.
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