Читать книгу The Legacies of Powerful Men онлайн | страница 26

‘That’s immoral,’ she declared half under her breath, unable to resist making that accusation. ‘You’re inviting me to sell myself to you.’

‘I’m offering you the only rescue bid you’re likely to receive. It is for you to choose whether or not you will accept my proposition,’ Zarif contradicted, shutting out every protest emanating from his clean-living conservative soul and refusing to listen. One final act of rebellion, he reminded himself doggedly. And didn’t she deserve it for the games she had played three years back when she had lured him in with the promise of her passion and her beautiful body and falsely encouraged him to believe that she genuinely cared for him?

‘How long would you envisage this...arrangement lasting for?’ Ella prompted, her voice high and tight with strain for she could barely credit that after three years apart she could even be having such a conversation with him.

‘A year...’ Zarif murmured, disconcerted by the speed with which that time period had suggested itself to him and wondering where that idea had come from. After all, he had never kept a single mistress for as long as a year. His interest in a woman faded within the first few weeks of bedding her even though he saw comparatively little of his lovers. At the same time he tried and failed to picture Ella in the Dubai apartment while wondering if word of an Englishwoman’s presence there would be more likely to be leaked to the press. Just as quickly, he realised that the Dubai option would be a very bad idea. And that indeed he had a much better idea in the offing and one indeed that would make the punishment fit the crime.

‘For the sake of appearances, we will get married,’ Zarif decreed without hesitation.

‘Married?’ Ella exclaimed with stark incredulity.

‘I don’t want a scandal and if I marry you, even when it ends in divorce after a year, it will be a safer and more acceptable option to my people. Marriage would also have the advantage of allowing me to see as much of you as I want to,’ Zarif completed smoothly, his mind made up, the stirrings of his conscience magically washed away. If he married her, after all, he wouldn’t be breaking any rules or taking advantage of her. It was wonderful, he thought with a rare lightness of heart, what a little thinking outside the box could achieve.