Читать книгу The Legacies of Powerful Men онлайн | страница 21

‘That is not for me to answer,’ Zarif responded without expression. ‘They raised Jason, taught him their values. They must know their son best.’

‘No.’ Ella challenged that view with vehement force. ‘They only know the man they wanted him to be, not the man he actually is! At this moment, my mother and father are distraught at what Jason’s done.’

An untimely knock on the door at that instant of high tension heralded the appearance of a waiter with a tray. Ella closed her lips and breathed in deep to master her tumultuous emotions. Coffee was served in fine china cups, cakes proffered. Any appetite Ella might have had following her scratch meals in recent days had been killed stone dead by her ever-growing sense of dread of what the future might yet visit on her parents. In the lingering silence while the waiter walked to the door to leave, she searched Zarif’s extravagantly handsome features, cursing his inscrutability, desperate to see some sign of a softer response to her appeal on her parents’ behalf.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand what you want from me,’ Zarif murmured half under his breath, his temperature rising as she sat forward, inadvertently revealing the shadowy valley between her full rounded breasts. There was a bitter irony to his response for he knew in that moment of fierce driving desire that what he wanted from her was exactly what he was convinced he could have had for the asking three years earlier.

Back then he had been no sophisticate, having never slept with anyone other than the wife he had married at the age of eighteen. He had wanted Ella and she had wanted him but he had believed it would be dishonourable to become intimate with her before he married her. Thanks to Ella’s rejection, he was no longer that innocent, he reflected with a bitterness that was laced with regret for past mistakes. His wide sensual mouth narrowed and compressed while he wondered if she was deliberately playing the temptress as women so often did with him in an effort to divert and attract him.