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On the low slung table between them were trays of food, both sweet and savoury from what she could tell. Steam streamed from the spout of a large silver teapot and she told herselfthatwas the cause of her mouth watering, not the power of the man in front of her. Her stomach was hungry, not clenched with desire and need. Her pulse was racing because she was unfit, not hoping for more of the man who had taken her innocence and left in its place a wanton woman whose sole focus was pleasure.
She took a step to close the distance between them and just over his shoulder was able to see what he was looking at that had him so absorbed.
It was a black and white picture of a family of four. Even if she hadn’t seen pictures of him in the exhibition, Star would have recognised the good-looking man with the same jaw and nose as Khalif. Faizan had his arm around his two young daughters and was leaning into his wife, Samira, who was smiling at the camera as if there was nowhere else in the entire world she’d ever want to be.
Star’s eyes were drawn to the gold necklace hanging just below the neckline of her silk top, almost exactly the same as the one Star had removed the moment she had returned to her suite.
He didn’t flinch, noticing her presence, she felt it as if it were more of a tightening within him.
‘She was very beautiful,’ Star said, shocked by the sudden drop in temperature that followed her declaration.
‘Tea?’
His question was such purposeful distraction, it was almost as if it were a challenge, or a warning. She nodded, but walked past him towards the view of the desert. Sand swirled in the distance, like her thoughts, shifting, scattering, only to be swept up by the air and thrown down elsewhere. Khalif, Samira, Faizan. Despite what her sisters might think, she wasn’t so clueless as to go blundering into a clearly painful area for Khalif. But there was definitely something there.
She could see it as surely as she could see the sky begin to turn to that purple pre-dusk hue that always reminded her of lavender and salt. And home. She felt a sudden pang of homesickness she’d not yet experienced since arriving in Duratra. Suddenly she didn’t want to know how Khalif’s family had cared for the necklace, why Samira had worn it and how Star might be able to get it for herself.
She wished she’d never heard of the Soames diamonds, of the estate in Norfolk.
And then a swooping wave of guilt and horror overwhelmed her, knowing that without it her mother would have no hope for recovery. For her mother, for her sisters, she would face Khalif, explain it all and do whatever she had to in order to return to the UK with the key to the missing jewels, whether she was pregnant or not.
She went to sit on the long sofa opposite the chair Khalif had occupied. She took a deep breath and began. ‘My grandfather died nearly a month ago.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, his formality clearly echoing the lack of emotion in her tone.
‘We’d never met him. Mum had never spoken about him and I guess we just didn’t ask.’ There was so much she hadn’t asked her mum, so much more she wanted to know. ‘We were notified only because he had named us as...sort of beneficiaries of his will.’
‘Sort of?’
Star shook her head from side to side. ‘His will held a complicated stipulation. If we meet that stipulation, we will inherit his country estate in Norfolk. Which we could then sell.’
Realisation dawned in his tawny eyes. ‘And pay for private treatment for your mother?’
Star nodded, breathing a sigh of relief that he understood. That he hadn’t immediately assumed she and her sisters were simply out for money. ‘It doesn’t have to sell for the biggest value—we have no idea what that would even be. It just has to be enough.’
‘Star, if you need—’
‘We don’t,’ she said, cutting him off before he could offer her anything. ‘Because we’re going to meet the stipulation and sell the estate.’
And Mum would get her treatment and be fine.
They had a plan, they would stick to it and everything would be okay, she assured herself. It had become a mantra in the last few weeks. A rhythm in her mind and her heart like a prayer.
‘So the stipulation...it has something to do with the necklace?’ he asked.
‘What do you know of it?’ she asked, hoping that might give her some indication of where to start.
‘It’s been in my family for over five generations and has been worn by the wife of every Sheikh during that time.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, why?’
It made her feel strange that Catherine’s necklace had been worn by the woman who’d married Hatem. And by the wives that had followed. Perhaps that was why she had not found a trace of it. She had been looking for it with the male heirs. And she suddenly felt a little foolish, remembering the words from the first part of the coded message her sister Summer had translated.
If you have discovered my message then I can assume two things: that you are female, because no man would wade through the private fripperies of my youth, and that you are clever, to have found the journals.
The pieces of Catherine’s mystery had remained secret because they had been protected by women. As, even, had this piece.
