Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(125)

This was how it was supposed to be, she thought. A man touching a woman and the woman wanting, needing, melting—

“Please, Rache. You're the only one who c'n help me.”

But this was also the first and only time he'd touched her with tenderness and not as a hurried and impatient stimulation that would ultimately lead to his own pleasure.

That bird needs a bag on her head!

You look like a dog's arse, Rachel Winfield!

Blokes'll have to roger her wearing a blindfold.

She stiffened under his touch, remembering the voices and how she'd battled them throughout her childhood. She knocked Trevor Ruddock's hand away.

“Rache!” He even managed to look wounded.

Yes. Well. She knew how that felt.

“I got home round ten on Friday night,” she said. “And if the cops ask, that's what I mean to tell them.”



N HER BEDROOM CEILING, SAHLAH STUDIED THE silhouette of tree leaves illuminated by the moon. They didn't move. Despite the proximity of her family's house to the sea, there was no breeze. It would be another night of smothering heat when the thought of having bedclothes touch skin was akin to the idea of trying to sleep enshrouded in cling film.

Except that she knew she wouldn't sleep. She'd bade her family goodnight at half past ten, after suffering through an evening of tense conversation between her father and her brother. Akram had been first struck dumb by the news that Haytham's neck had been broken. Muhannad had seized what advantage their father's consternation gave him, announcing everything else that he'd learned in his meeting with the police—which was little enough, to Sahlah's ears—and outlining what he and Taymullah Azhar had planned as their next move. Akram had inserted, “This is not a game, Muhannad,” and the dispute between them had grown from there.

Their words, spoken tersely by Akram and hotly by Muhannad, not only pitted father and son against each other but also threatened the peace of their household and the fabric of their family. Yumn sided with Muhannad, of course. Wardah reverted to a lifetime of acquiescing to males and said nothing at all, with her eyes cast down upon her embroidery. Sahlah tried to find a means of rapprochement between the two men. In the end, all of them sat in a silence so electric that the air itself seemed filled with sparks. Never one to deal with quiet in any of its forms, Yumn had jumped to her feet and seized the moment to slide a video into the machine. When the grainy picture appeared on the screen—an Asian boy following along behind a herd of goats, stick in his hand, as a sitar played and the credits rolled in Urdu—Sahlah said her goodnights. Only her mother responded.

Now it was half past one. She'd been in bed since eleven. The house had been still since midnight, when she'd heard her brother moving round the bathroom, preparatory to finally retiring. The floors and walls had stopped their nighttime creaking. And she waited fruitlessly for sleep.

But in order to sleep, she knew she would have to wipe her mind of thoughts and concentrate on relaxing. While she might have managed the second activity, she knew she wouldn't be able to manage the first.

Rachel hadn't phoned, which meant that she hadn't gathered the necessary information for the abortion. Sahlah could only school herself to patience and hope that her friend would neither fail her nor betray her a second time.

Not for the first time since suspecting she was pregnant did Sahlah bitterly regret the lack of freedom imposed upon her by her parents. Not for the first time did she despise herself for having lived so docilely under the benign and loving but nonetheless implacable thumbs of her father and mother. She realised that the very womblike environment that had long kept her feeling so protected in an often unfriendly world was what stymied her now. The restrictions her parents had long placed upon her had sheltered her, indeed. But they'd also imprisoned her. And she'd never really known that till now, when more than anything she wished she had the coming-and-going lifestyle that English girls had, that carefree way of living in which parents seemed to be faraway planets orbiting only peripherally in the solar system of their daughters’ lives.

Had she been a tearaway, Sahlah realised, she'd know what to do. In fact, had she been a tearaway she'd probably announce what she intended to do. She'd tell her story without a single face-saving digression and without regard for anyone's feelings. Because her family wouldn't mean anything to her if she were a tearaway, her parents’ honour and pride—not to mention their natural, loving belief in their offspring—would be of no account.

But she'd never been a tearaway. Consequently, protecting the parents she loved was paramount to her, more important than her own personal happiness, dearer to her than life itself.

Dearer than this life certainly, she thought, automatically making a cradle of her hands to encircle her belly. But as quickly as she'd made the gesture, just as quickly did she force herself to reverse it. I can't give you life, she told the organism within her. I won't give life to something that would dishonour my parents and bring destruction upon my family.

And disgrace upon yourself, Sahlah dear? she heard the implacable voice of her conscience asking in that mocking tone she'd been listening to night after night and week after week. For who is to blame for the position in which you now find yourself if not yourself?

“Whore, slag,” her brother had cursed her in a whisper so violent that she shuddered from the simple memory of having heard it. “You'll pay for this, Sahlah, the way all whores pay.”