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Sienna flinched. ‘Go on,’ she said, in a pinched kind of voice.
‘You realised that you had an extraordinary gift which few are given. The gift of beauty.’ His voice became cold as he recalled how he had fallen for the oldest trick in the book. ‘Sirens had it, and lured sailors to their death. Men are driven mad by beauty. And you decided to use it as women have used their youth and their looks since the beginning of time. As a bargaining tool.’
Sienna swallowed, willing herself to float out from her body—to hover suspended in the air above them, looking down at this horrible little scene to hear the words of vitriol which were spitting from his lips.
‘With you, presumably?’
He shrugged. ‘With me, yes—or with anyone else who happened to fit the bill at the time. I do not flatter myself that I would not have been moved aside if somebody even richer than I had stepped into the frame. You wanted a wealthy benefactor and for that you decided to play the Cinderella role. You chose a humble job as a receptionist, where your beauty stood out like…’ He frowned, as if he was trying to remember something, the ebony brows knitting together, and then his face cleared. ‘Ah, yes! Like a diamond in the rough,’ he said softly. ‘Hoping and praying and plotting that someone would sweep in and take you away from all that.
‘And I must say that you were very good,’ he continued, eyeing her thoughtfully. ‘Even I was taken in by your deceit. You really did come over as an innocent and unspoilt girl. In a way, I suppose I should commend you for your acting ability!’
‘Your English is quite perfect, Hashim,’ she said unsteadily.
‘I know it is,’ he agreed arrogantly. ‘I had an English tutor as a young child, and I am as fluent in your language as I am in my own. But why do you change the subject, Sienna?’
‘Why do you think?’ She felt as she imagined battered wives might feel. That after a while the punches no longer seemed to hurt. Insult someone enough and eventually the slurs would simply run off their skin like water. Let him rant and have his poisonous say, and then it would be over.
He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘And still you do not contradict me?’
‘What’s the point? You are the worst kind of bigot—for you do not open your mind to the possibility that you might be wrong. You have made your mind up that something is so—and therefore it must be. I’m a topless model without any morals, and now it seems I’m an old-fashioned gold-digger to boot! Nothing will change the way you view me—so why should I even bother trying?’
‘Because you have no defence against what I say!’ he accused.
‘We aren’t in a court of law!’
‘No, but that is where you might have ended up!’ he declared hotly. ‘In the end you did make the right choice—even though you have had to work hard for a living. But the women who continue along that path so often end up compromised. Next time—or the time after that—the photos that you agreed to do would not have been so tasteful. You would have got older, and as your youth faded you would have become more desperate. Soon you would have accepted less and less for more and more. And one day you might have ended up fully naked on some garage mechanic’s wall in one of those explicit shots—’
‘You bastard!’ she hissed.
‘But that is where you are wrong, Sienna. Your barb does not offend me because it is untrue—my birth was completely legitimate. Whereas what I say to you is true. The facts are indisputable.’
Sienna lifted a hand to the waiter who had begun to hover anxiously on the periphery of her vision. ‘A glass of red wine, please.’
‘Yes, madam.’
‘You did not storm off,’ he observed. ‘As I suspected you might.’
Sienna shook her head. Her legs would not have carried her anywhere. She took the wine from the waiter and drank a large mouthful. Gradually its warmth and vitality began to seep through veins which felt as though they had been injected with ice.
‘Why does it bother you so?’ she questioned. ‘Haven’t you had girlfriends with questionable pasts before?’
‘Of course I have. But they did not pretend to be something they weren’t.’
There had been women who had made no secret of their hunger for his body and his money. And there had been actresses, too—of course there had—including one who had starred in a film which had broken the mould at the time. Some of the critics had called it soft porn. But none of that had mattered—they had just been cheap flings. What he’d seen had been what he’d got, and he had accepted that.
