by Lynne Graham
His luxuriant black hair uncovered, Raschid now wore only a light cream robe. As he approached her, a faint smile softened his firm mouth. His eyes glittered over her. None of her fearful tension was mirrored in his relaxed bearing.
‘I am relieved that you didn’t undress completely and get into bed to await me,’ he mocked, cool palms resting on her shoulders as he studied her with contrasting sombreness. ‘You are my wife now.’
Polly’s brain was woolly, her head was starting to spin. Dimly she grasped that there was something more than nerves amiss with her. Only willpower enabled her to force the weakness back and stand straight. ‘I can’t get into that bed with you!’ she blurted out.
He dropped down fluidly on one knee and unclasped the girdle. ‘I will carry you there,’ he promised, snapping free the first of the countless silver buttons, beginning at the very hem of her kaftan.
‘I can manage those for myself,’ she muttered, stricken by his lack of reaction to her controversial announcement.
Unexpectedly throaty laughter shook him. A hand halted her retreat, tugging her firmly back within reach. ‘The hundred and one buttons are mine to undo. With each I glimpse another…’ He surveyed her in sudden reflective silence. ‘A most provocative custom,’ he completed gently.
‘For a man,’ she interposed tremulously. ‘If you think that I intend to stand here while you strip me…’
The lean brown fingers did not hesitate at their self-appointed task. ‘This I do not think—I know,’ he countered with perfect cool. ‘You are nervous, Polly, but you are my wife.’
The repetition of that brutal fact slid through her unnaturally taut figure. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, she reflected crazily. His wife. All individuality, all rights of self-determination wrested from her by a single ceremony. ‘This…this is barbaric!’ she whispered.
‘Think before you speak. I will not endure insults tonight.’ Hard warning chased the previous huskiness from his deep, dark drawl.
Shivering, Polly crossed her hands over her breasts. ‘You’re not being very…reasonable, Raschid.’ Her wide eyes implored his understanding. ‘We’re strangers! I can’t just…’
Rising soundlessly, he uncrossed her defensive hands, his gaze silvery and unyielding. ‘You entered this marriage of your own volition, aware that this moment would arrive.’
Oxygen locked in her aching throat. ‘I didn’t think about it…I couldn’t!’
‘You will not refuse me.’
‘I’m not refusing. I…I…’ She faltered to a halt, not really knowing what she was saying but overpoweringly aware of the charge of anger her objections were unleashing in him. He hadn’t raised his voice; he didn’t need to. The atmosphere was dry as tinder ready to burst into crackling flames.
‘I find this emotional display offensive.’
‘I expect you would,’ Polly muttered helplessly. ‘It’s not a problem you’re likely to suffer from, is it?’
Raschid’s hand closed over her wrist, yanking her back from the further retreat she had been unconsciously making. ‘You are my bride. What you seek to deny me is no longer yours to deny,’ he asserted icily.
She trembled. ‘That’s medieval!’
‘Be careful you do not discover just how medieval I can be.’ He sounded the threat with syllabic sibilance, his nostrils flared, his golden features ruthlessly cast. In his proud demeanour he was every inch a barbaric desert prince, the fierce and pagan image of a feudal culture in which it was unthinkable for a wife to disobey her husband. ‘You make an impressive start to our marriage, do you not? For what, after all, did you offer me on our first encounter but this?’
Her fingers pressed to the annoying pulse flickering wildly at the base of her throat. The aggression she had incited utterly intimidated her and she felt incredibly weak. ‘That isn’t the way it was.’
‘How was it?’ Derision brought violet brilliance to his challenging stare. ‘Did you offer me intelligent conversation? Did you try in any fashion to impress me except as a beautiful woman?’
Polly winced from the lash of his contempt. ‘I was nervous…embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say to you.’
‘Yet you cared not what awaited you. You cared only that I took you. You did not even ask me if you would be my only wife,’ he reminded her. ‘And I told you then that I would bed you.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’ She backed to the corner of the bed, her hand clutching at one of the posts for support. She was tempted to throw her knowledge of his mistress at him but too afraid of sending his temper right over the edge. ‘Don’t you realise how I feel? All you see is…’
‘My bride defying me, and I do not like it,’ he incised succinctly.
‘All you see is an object. Don’t you think I have feelings?’
An imperious brow lifted. ‘Do you consider mine?’
‘You have none.’ She leant back breathlessly while he calmly continued to flick loose the buttons. She did not even have the energy to put up a token fight. ‘A wedding ring,’ she whispered bitterly, ‘does not dignify lust.’
The metallic sheen of Raschid’s suddenly savage scrutiny made her quail. She loosed a gasp of fear as he moved and swept her up to tumble her down on the bed. ‘With that charge on our wedding night you insult me beyond belief. I have tolerated much from you since we left that church; I will tolerate no more.’ His intonation was raw. ‘I bought you. I own you. That is the pact which you made.’
Shattered, she stared up at him. He met her shocked eyes levelly. The declaration had not been made for effect. I own you. Her whole being recoiled from that primal affirmation of possession. As the canopy above her seemed to be revolving, she pushed her hands down on the mattress to lift herself up. The motion took enormous effort of will. She was so cold now that her teeth wanted to chatter. Her silence appeared to have defused his anger.
He came down beside her, reaching up to dim the wall lights before gathering her into his arms. ‘Polly, let us not begin in discord and bitterness. You should not fear what is natural between a man and a woman.’
A draining tide of dizziness tipped her head back, the argent fall of her hair tumbling over his arm. His voice was coming and going like a buzz-saw in her ears.
‘Raschid,’ she framed hoarsely.
‘Listen to me.’ His natural assurance emerged even in the low pitch of his roughened murmur. ‘It is desire which burns in me. That is not lust. There is no giving in lust—it takes and despoils. That is not how I would initiate my bride into the pleasures of lovemaking.’
Her eyes slid shut as his fingers rested against her cheek. He said something harsh in Arabic, his hand skimming up to her brow, but Polly was already becoming limp, slipping without argument down into the emptiness of oblivion.
* * *
‘Awake?’ A thermometer was thrust in her parched mouth. A strange and yet somehow familiar face, thin and topped by a frilly green hat which contrasted violently with the carrot-red hair, swam into clarity above her. ‘Do you know where you are today? Not to worry, you’re over the worst. It’s not often I’ve seen that high a fever with influenza.’ The stark Glaswegian accent increased Polly’s sense of unreality.
Out came the thermometer at last. Polly tried to move, and discovered her limbs were weighted. Her body was weak as a kitten’s. Lethargically she turned her muzzy head. Sunlight was casting lacy shadows through the frieze on to the Persian carpet on the floor. Everywhere she looked, flowers flourished in a riot of colour. Dust motes danced in the air. Her attention wandered back to the nurse. ‘How do you come to be here?’ She winced at the corncrake rasp of her voice.
‘Noticed I’m not a local, have you? Then you’re well on the mend. I’m Susan MacKenzie.’ An almost depressingly cheerful grin came her way. ‘I’m on contract with the Jumani City Hospital. I was brought to the palace on the first night, along with every consultant in the building.’ She laughed uproariously at the recollection. ‘Half the palace in
habitants were crammed outside that door. You didn’t half create a panic!’
Polly grew even paler. ‘What day is it?’
‘Saturday. You couldn’t possibly remember much. You’ve been out of your skull and wandering ever since you became ill. It’s a marvel that nobody realised that you weren’t well. Still, ’flu can take you very suddenly, and with all that make-up you had on, they couldn’t have told just by looking. Talk about the gilded lily!’
Polly’s sluggish brain edged back to the wedding and the wedding night. Embarrassment swallowed her alive. By the sound of it, she had given Raschid the kind of night he would never forget! A dramatic collapse on the marital bed seemed a fitting end to a disastrous wedding. Tears lashed her eyelids, but she was too weak to shed them.
‘You must be gasping to see your husband,’ Susan MacKenzie burbled. ‘It might be a while before he appears. Until your fever broke last night he hardly left this room. He’s probably sleeping now—he must be exhausted.’
Polly closed her aching eyes. She had made a thorough nuisance of herself. What choice had Raschid had but to play the devoted new husband? And if the tender trap of marriage had inspired him with aversion, the reality of it within days must have left him gnashing his teeth.
An hour later, washed, brushed and nearly deafened by Susan’s endless chatter, she was having chicken broth spooned into her. After a nap, she wakened to find Jezra seated by the bed. The teenager immediately grasped her hand fervently, her swollen eyes swimming with tears. ‘I am so glad that you are getting better, Polly. Even if Raschid never forgives me for the cruel words I spoke to you in anger, I am glad. Please believe me. I am so glad,’ she sobbed, emotion overcoming her.
Polly was soon patting her shoulder and doing her best to soothe the distressed girl. Her illness had infused Jezra with the guilty and superstitious conviction that her revelation had somehow taken its toll. Firmly telling her that that was nonsense, Polly prompted, ‘How did Raschid find out about it? Susan said I was rambling. I hope I didn’t…’
‘I told him. My conscience troubled me,’ Jezra whispered. ‘He was very angry, and who could blame him? What will I do if he tells our father?’
The unlikelihood of that event curled Polly’s mouth. ‘I shouldn’t worry about that.’
Jezra sighed unhappily and fiddled with her tissue. ‘I repeated a dreadful slander. I am ashamed to admit that I believed in it. Now I know how wrong I was to listen to gossip. Raschid is not like that.’
While remaining cynically unconvinced of Raschid’s sainthood, Polly smiled reassuringly in the hope that the mortifying topic might be killed between them for good. Perceptibly Jezra brightened. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t like you, I didn’t know you, but Raschid was so unhappy with Berah,’ she volunteered in a rush. ‘I was afraid that you would make him unhappy as well.’
Her lashes concealing her perplexity, Polly took a charged breath. Raschid’s sister was patently unaware that she might be telling her something which she didn’t already know.
‘All she could think about was babies. All she could do was cry and be depressed,’ Jezra muttered scornfully. ‘I am sure you are different. My brother is a very fine man.’
The facts had been staring her in the face. She had been too dumb to see the obvious. How could Raschid’s first marriage have been happy? A childless marriage in an Arab society where sons were so highly prized as proof of a man’s virility could not have been blissfully content. If Berah had not adapted to her infertility, the relationship must have been a severe strain on Raschid as well. But he must have loved her, he must have loved her deeply not to divorce her or take another wife. In his position there could be no other explanation.
When the door opened both their heads spun. Jezra took one look at the motionless figure on the threshold and got up, scuttling out past her elder brother with alacrity. Had Polly had the power of her legs and the innocence to believe she could manage a similar exit, she would have copied her.
Painful heat washed her cheeks. Raschid had never seemed less approachable; his bright eyes were guarded, his expression sombre. ‘I am relieved to see you so much improved. Your health has been a matter of grave concern to all of us.’
She bent her head, overtly conscious of the wan and thinned reflection Susan MacKenzie had shown her in her hand mirror. She looked ghastly. And if even she, who had never had much interest in her appearance, thought that, how much worse must she look to him? ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve caused a lot of trouble.’
He expelled his breath. ‘Is this how I appear to you—as a man who expects his sick wife to apologise for the impossible? I am not such a man. If I were to tax you with any failing—and this must be said in case you are equally foolish on some future occasion—why didn’t you tell me how you were feeling?’
With hindsight Polly realised that she had gone through the wedding in an increasingly feverish haze. Until the artificial stimulants of tension and self-discipline had come crashing down inevitably in this same room, she hadn’t realised how very ill she was feeling. Awkwardly she endeavoured to explain that to him, her fingers restlessly creasing at a corner of the white sheet.
‘You were burning up when I touched you. You must have known that you were ill.’ Raschid sighed heavily. ‘When you fainted I felt very little different from a man bent upon rape.’
At this startling admission her head flew up.
‘I am not so insensitive that I would make sexual demands of a sick woman, whatever you may believe me capable of,’ he stressed in a taut undertone.
She evaded his unusually expressive eyes. Reproach was unhidden there. ‘I didn’t believe that,’ she muttered. ‘I didn’t think…’
From somewhere surfaced the memory of those eyes above hers when she was ill. Beautiful, compelling eyes which had inspired her with oddly lyrical and sentimental comparisons. As it occurred to her that she might have spoken them out loud, she was ready to crawl beneath the sheet. Of course, she’d been delirious. Undoubtedly she had talked senseless gibberish.
Raschid took the seat his sister had vacated. He was very constrained, his smile remarkable only in its brevity. ‘I sometimes believe that you think very infrequently where I am concerned—but we need not talk of that night again,’ he declared. ‘You were clearly not in full possession of your senses. I do not hold you responsible for what you said then.’
A grin suddenly threatened the tight line of her mouth. Hurriedly she squashed it. He looked so deadly serious. He was proffering what she estimated to be on his terms a forgiveness of the utmost generosity. Lunacy must have been upon her—how otherwise would she have dared to fight with him? But perhaps only now did she comprehend how very deeply she had offended him that night.
‘We have a great deal to discuss.’
Polly tensed, recoiling from the threat of Raschid openly raising the subject of his mistress and telling her the same lies that he had evidently told his trusting sister.
‘However, some matters are better postponed until you are stronger,’ he decreed.
He was letting the dust settle on Jezra’s inopportune bombshell. A splendid move from a skilled diplomat, Polly realised with bitter resentment. By the time he did raise the subject, the immediacy of drama would be long gone, and in his mind, leaving himself currently undefended was probably as good as a declaration of innocence. It would take some early bird to catch him out!
A lean hand enclosed hers, spinning her out of her fierce introspection. ‘I always seem to be approaching you with criticism,’ he said.
‘I expect you believe that you’ve had cause.’ Polly was in no mood to think guiltily of their catastrophic wedding and its equally trying aftermath from his point of view. That short-lived generosity had steadily receded from her.
‘No. It is this failing I have of making assumptions, of jumping the…’ He hesitated.
‘Gun?’ she filled in shakily, outrageously conscious of the thumb absently caressing the tend
er skin of her inner wrist.
He frowned. ‘Why didn’t you explain to me that your father was in debt? I had no knowledge of the fact. Your family appeared to be living in comfort and prosperity.’
Polly blinked. ‘You didn’t know about Dad?’
‘When I visited your home I knew nothing about your family. Now I suspect that the bride price went to your father and not to you. Is this not true?’ he prompted. ‘You gave the money to him?’
Polly didn’t recall having anything to actually give. She had a vague memory of signing some papers at her father’s request. ‘I suppose so, but what…?’
‘I understood that the money went solely to you.’
‘Me?’ she echoed, finally picking up his drift. ‘Good lord, what would I have done with it?’
A less guarded smile curved his well-shaped mouth. ‘I believed that you became a woman of financial substance by our marriage. In short, I believed that you had married me for your own enrichment, encouraged to that move by your parents. Instead I now learn…’
‘How did you?’ she interrupted.
‘You were most talkative in your fever,’ he breathed, abruptly releasing her thin fingers.
She flushed at the confirmation. ‘It’s not really important now, is it?’
Rising from the chair with the natural grace that accompanied all his movements, Raschid had strolled over to the window. She was surprised that he should turn his back on her; it was a gesture considered very rude by his race. But as she spoke, he immediately turned, presenting his hard-edged profile to her. ‘On the contrary,’ he murmured quietly, ‘I now perceive you as you are. You didn’t marry me for personal gain, you obviously did so for your family’s benefit. Naturally this must alter my view of you, and you may not wish to hear me say it, but I think very ill of parents able to smile so happily while they barter their unwilling daughter into marriage with a stranger.’