‘I wish you would tell me where we are going,’ Evie complained. ‘I may have packed all the wrong things!’
He didn’t answer, his attention already diverting to Evie’s mother who was coming towards them and looking tearful.
She hugged Evie tightly. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said. It still amazed Evie how tactile her mother had become since she’d witnessed her daughter’s near-death experience. But a bit of the old Lucinda appeared when she turned towards Raschid. ‘I suppose you’re expecting a motherly hug too, now,’ she remarked coolly.
‘Not unless it is genuinely offered,’ he threw back.
Lucinda’s eyes flashed, with irritation or appreciation, Evie wasn’t entirely sure. But the curt, ‘Just you take precious care of her!’ was issued alongside a blow-softening kiss brushed against one of Raschid’s lean cheeks.
‘I think she is reluctantly beginning to like me,’ Raschid confided as they settled into the helicopter.
Shame the same could not be said of his own family’s feelings towards her, Evie thought—and just like that she felt her mood flip over from light to heavy.
He noticed, this sharp-eyed Arab of hers. ‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded. ‘What did I just say to cause you to look like that?’
‘Nothing.’ She found a smile from somewhere that only just made it. ‘I’m tired, that’s all—missing the nap Asim daily forces upon me.’
Asim was sitting up front with the pilot. Evie wasn’t surprised to find he was coming with them. Everywhere Evie went these days, Asim was right there with her. He hadn’t been bluffing when he’d told her that this child she was carrying was now his responsibility.
‘Then as soon as we board the plane that is exactly what you will do,’ Raschid ordained.
They transferred to one of the Al Kadah personal jets at a private airfield not many minutes away from Westhaven. The moment they were up in the air, Raschid released them both from their seat belts and pulled Evie to her feet.
‘Time for the lady’s rest,’ he explained, drawing her along the luxury main cabin and in through a door that turned out to be a fully equipped bedroom.
‘Oh, very decadent,’ Evie teased, looking curiously around her as Raschid moved over to the double bed that dominated the cabin, complete with passion-purple silk sheets and mounds of richly coloured silk pillows.
Picking something up from the bed, he tossed it negligently over his shoulder. It was a short silk nightdress in a very sensual dark red colour.
‘Turn around,’ he commanded, ignoring the taunt. ‘So I can release you from this exquisite creation.’
Evie did as he bade her. ‘I feel I must inform you that as a full-blooded Arab I am feeling very cheated at this precise moment,’ he said lightly as his deft fingers dealt with the long zip that ran down the length of her spine. ‘I was expecting those seed-pearls decorating your front to be my one hundred and one buttons—as is the traditional way Arab women drive their new husbands crazy while they are forced to unwrap their prize inch by painful inch.’
‘But you don’t want what’s beneath this gown,’ Evie pointed out. ‘So why bother to mention it?’
‘Is that what you really think?’
The dress was eased away from her shoulders, and allowed to slither to the floor. Evie reached up to pull off the skullcap while kicking off her white satin slip-ons at the same time. She felt Raschid’s fingers at the clasp of her smooth satin bra, and quivered slightly as his warm flesh touched her flesh.
‘Yes,’ she said.
She heard his soft laugh as he bent down to deal with the only piece of clothing she had left. Seconds later, she was naked, and his hands were gently clasping her slender hip bones. The brush of his mouth against the curving cheeks of her bottom made her spine arch in stinging response.
‘Liar,’ he drawled. ‘You know I adore every single inch of this delectable body.’
Then he was turning her to face him, his hands still holding her there in front of him while he continued to squat at her feet. In a slow, slow, agonisingly sensual drift of his heavy eyelids, he inspected her from bare toes upwards.
Her legs turned to liquid, her thighs began to burn, that hidden place between them pulsing out its needy message. He inspected the pale-skinned flatness of her stomach where their baby was not yet making its presence felt, drifted those hooded eyes up over her rib-cage to her breasts where a new firm fullness was most definitely evident.
‘Every inch,’ Raschid repeated huskily.
Evie dragged in a constricted breath of air, her hand snaking up to cup his lean cheek so that she could make him look at her. His eyes changed colour, darkening on a swirling tempest of craving. Her thumb moved, brushing across his lips to gently part them. The moist inner heat lining the recess of his mouth drew powerfully on some inner heat of her own that had her folding to her knees in front of him.
‘I don’t really need to rest, you know,’ she told him softly. ‘But I do need you.’
‘Ah…’ he sighed sorrowfully. ‘But—’
Evie smothered the ‘but’. She crushed it right back into his mouth with the hungry press of her own. What was absolutely glorifying was the fact that he didn’t attempt to fight her. He let her deepen that kiss to a bone-melting intimacy that made her feel alive and happy for the first time in weeks.
He still held her hips tightly between his two hands; Evie used her own hands to begin urgently dealing with his clothes. As far as she was concerned, he was wearing too many; impatient fingers tossed the nightdress to one side then began pushing his jacket from his shoulders before yanking at his tie.
In all their two years she had never longed for him as much as she was longing for him right now, and it showed in the small growl of triumph she made against his mouth as the tie came free.
Shirt buttons then began popping without a care to how they came free. He wasn’t helping her—which only incited her urgency. The shirt came to rest around his elbows with his jacket, trapped there by the hands he still had clamped to her hip bones.
Evie didn’t care; she had warm, tight skin to touch at last, and a wonderful hair-roughened breastplate to reacquaint herself with. Her mouth wrenched itself away from his so it could go and taste that newly exposed flesh.
On a tormented groan, Raschid suddenly burst into action. He freed his arms from his trailing clothes, reached for her, pulling her hard against him, his hot mouth homing in on tight, tingling nipples that set her whole body singing.
How long had it been since they’d been together like this? Five weeks?
It showed in the violence of their breathing, in the urgency with which they began to devour each other. He sucked so hard on one of her nipples that she actually whimpered—then laughed because she had missed his mouth on her like this so very badly.
Breathing gone haywire, bodies hot, emotions locked into a raging frenzy. When he dragged himself to his feet, Evie rose up with him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
His mouth found hers again; she clung to him, her breasts pressing against him in open provocation. But when she dropped her hands to the waistband of his trousers his reaction was so unexpected that it thoroughly stunned her. Picking her up in his arms, Raschid turned and dumped her on to the bed.
‘No!’ he ground out, jerked right away from her, then spun on his heel to bend and snatch up the discarded nightdress, which he tossed at her before bending to snatch up his shirt.
‘Wh-what do you mean—no?’ she gasped, barely able to believe he really meant what he was implying here!
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. ‘I didn’t mean to become so carried away. But we must not,’ he added tautly. ‘I made a vow…’
‘A vow?’ Evie repeated shrilly, beginning to shake all over in reaction. ‘What kind of vow?’
‘Cover yourself,’ he commanded roughly.
Having recently devoured her with his eyes, he was now looking anywhere but at her, his dark face a mask of bone-gripping ten
sion. Evie knew that look. He was hurting, and at this precise moment she was glad he was hurting!
‘What kind of vow?’ she angrily insisted.
‘A vow to Allah,’ he confessed. ‘That I would treat you with respect.’
‘I’ve got news for you, Raschid,’ Evie informed him, grimly dragging the nightdress over her trembling flesh. ‘This doesn’t feel like respect, it feels like rejection!’
He winced as if she’d hit him, but it didn’t stop that wonderful chest Evie had just eagerly exposed for herself from disappearing behind snowy white linen.
‘That is because you misunderstand my motive,’ he explained, bending to retrieve his jacket and his tie next. ‘For too long I have undervalued your importance to me. It is a sin I am determined to put right.’
‘What sin?’ she demanded bewilderedly. ‘The sin of wanting to make love to me?’ She sounded so damned offended that his mask of a face seemed to turn to iron.
Yet he nodded his dark head in sombre confirmation. ‘And the sinful lack of understanding as to what our relationship was doing to your pride, your self-esteem and your reputation.’
‘Is this explanation supposed to make me feel better?’
‘It will, when I’ve finished,’ he said, dragging his jacket back on.
He didn’t look so elegant now, Evie noted caustically, with half the buttons on his precious shirt missing! ‘Then by all means please go on!’ she invited. ‘For I find myself completely enthralled by all of this—humility!’
He muttered something she didn’t catch—an Arab curse aimed at sarcastic females, she suspected.
‘I exposed you to mockery, humiliation and danger,’ he nonetheless continued. ‘I stood by and watched your own family shun you at your brother’s wedding. I witnessed the whole party freeze in horror when you caught Christina’s bridal bouquet! I then watched you stand alone by a moonlit lake and toss those damn flowers into the water as if you were tossing away all hope for you and me!’ His chest heaved on an angry rasp of air.
‘Yet, seeing all of this,’ he grimly went on, ‘knowing exactly how wretched you must have been feeling, I still responded badly to your news about the baby! How you could bring yourself to speak to me after that performance,’ he concluded gruffly, ‘I will never comprehend!’
Evie said nothing—what could she say? He was only telling it as it was, after all. She had been tossing away hope with those flowers. He had reacted badly about the baby.
‘You didn’t even carry a bouquet to our wedding,’ he then inserted huskily. ‘Do you think I did not see the significance in that omission? I have this dreadful suspicion that if you ever hold another flower in your hand you are always going to see that cursedly doomed bouquet in its stead!’
He was probably right, so Evie didn’t argue the point with him. ‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with you and I making love now that we are married.’
‘I made a vow to Allah,’ he said, bringing the whole unbelievable conversation reeling back to where it had begun. ‘While I waited out my vigil in that hospital waiting room, I promised Him that if He gave me a final chance with you I would never, ever undervalue your worth to me again. And since sex is all I ever gave to you before,’ he finally concluded, ‘then sex will now await its pleasure, until I have proved to you that you mean more to me than just a source of physical gratification.’
And that was what this was really all about? He’d made some silly vow to Allah while sitting in a hospital waiting room turning himself inside out with guilt and worry?
‘In case it has escaped your notice,’ Evie dryly mocked, ‘I tended to use you in exactly the same way.’
To her surprise, he laughed one of those warm, husky, very male laughs that eased some of the tension out of him.
‘Then take pity on me,’ he pleaded, turning rueful eyes on her. ‘And make this penance I have set myself easier to bear by lusting after me when I cannot see you doing it.’
Evie relaxed back into the pillows, no longer angry, but studying him thoughtfully. ‘You won’t be placing the baby at risk by making love to me, you know,’ she said. ‘If that’s what this is really all about.’
‘It isn’t,’ he denied.
‘I asked the doctor last week when I went for my checkup,’ she persisted regardless. ‘And he assured me that physical intimacy would not be a problem.’
He wasn’t blind; he could see exactly what her lavender eyes were offering him. ‘The world is full of practised sirens,’ he remarked wearily. ‘But why did I have to marry myself to one?’
‘Kismet,’ Evie said, her eyes openly provoking him now.
‘Purdah is beginning to take on a whole new appeal where you are concerned,’ he warned. Then, on a sigh, he came to sit down beside her, and leant down to softly kiss her cheek. ‘Why don’t you put me out of my misery and go to sleep?’ he suggested.
‘I can’t convince you to change your mind and join me?’ A delicate finger came up to gently play with his mouth.
‘No.’
‘Even though this is my wedding day and I am feeling terribly neglected?’ The finger moved to his jawline, and began trailing downwards to where the whorls of crisp dark hair were showing above the gap in his open shirt. ‘I promise not to try to seduce you.’
‘You are seducing me already.’ He utterly derided that promise, pointedly removed the trailing finger, and got to his feet again.
‘How can you make a pact with Allah about something as important to us as sex?’ Evie cried, losing all patience.
‘Rest,’ he commanded, moving back to the door.
‘All right,’ she snapped, sitting up again. ‘I’ll rest when you tell me how long this penance of yours is to last.’
For some reason the question put tension back into his shoulders. Alarm shot through her, the horrible suspicion that he was hiding something from her chilling her blood.
‘Raschid…’ she murmured as a sudden frightening thought struck her. ‘There isn’t something wrong with me or the baby that people aren’t telling me, is there?’
‘Of course not!’ he snapped, spinning round to frown at her. ‘You and the baby are perfectly healthy!’ he stated tersely. ‘No one has lied to you about that!’
‘Then what are you hiding?’
The breath hissed from his lungs on a sigh of frustration, and for a moment, a very brief but telling moment, Evie saw indecision flash across his eyes before he turned his back on her.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
But it was already too late; Evie had seen that indecision, and panic was suddenly erupting inside her. Climbing off the bed, she walked towards him. Her hand was trembling as she gripped his arm. ‘Don’t lie to me,’ she thrust at him angrily. ‘Don’t ever lie to me! There is something going on here that you aren’t telling me, and I want to know just what it is!’
The muscles beneath her gripping fingers bunched, his lean dark profile clenching on the power of whatever it was he was trying hard to suppress here.
Evie watched and waited, his tension becoming her tension, the war he was having with himself becoming her war until the prolonged silence began to buzz like an alarm bell vibrating along tautly stretched nerve-ends.
Then he turned his head, saw her strained pallor, the anxiety that was darkening her eyes, and on a soft curse he surrendered.
‘Okay,’ he said, taking hold of her hand to grimly lead her back to the bed. Sitting her down there, he then looked around him for a chair and set it so that he could seat himself right in front of her. ‘I was going to leave this as long as I could before telling you,’ he admitted. ‘But I can see that what you’re thinking is possibly worse than reality. So…’
Leaning forward to take hold of her hands, he announced very gently, ‘I am taking you home, Evie. To Behran…’
Behran—Evie’s mind went up like a volcano, shock, horror, a bone-chilling sense of trepidation all straightening her spine on a constricted gasp of dismay.
No, she didn’t think that, but it didn’t alter the fact that the very idea of going to his homeland was filling her with horror.
Yet—she should have seen this coming! Why hadn’t she seen it coming? She had just married this man! She was now the wife of the future ruler of Behran! She carried his child inside her—maybe the next ruler of Behran after Raschid!
‘Why?’ she managed to breathe out frailly.
‘Because this visit is necessary,’ he replied. ‘To have avoided taking you home directly after our marriage would have given rise to the suggestion that I am ashamed of my western wife.’
He was talking pride here—defiance in the face of any dissension.
‘Wh-what is this going to mean?’ she asked, forcing the words past all the horrors that were trying to possess her. ‘Will I have to face them the moment we get off the plane?’
‘No.’ His fingers were squeezing hers tightly, urging her to trust what he was telling her. ‘We will transfer from the plane to a helicopter at the airport,’ he explained, ‘then fly directly to my private palace. The news will spread quickly enough that we are there together, and thereby lay to rest any suspicion that I am reluctant to bring you home. But you need see no one,’ he promised. ‘We will, in effect, be on our honeymoon, which will give you the chance to acquaint yourself with my way of life before we have to present ourselves officially as a couple.’
He meant to his father, though he was careful not to make the dreaded connection out loud.
Aware of his eyes still fixed intently on her, that he was tense, worried, and unsure as to how she was going to respond to this challenge he was setting before her, Evie lowered her eyes to their hands where they rested on her silk-covered lap, and tried desperately to pull her ragged senses together.
Raschid was a man of two cultures. He was used to slipping in and out of two different guises depending on which part of the world he was in. But she wasn’t. In all the time they had been together it had never once occurred to him to invite her to his homeland. She hadn’t even been invited to any of the functions Raschid had attended at his own embassy. For two long years she had not existed, as far as his people were concerned.
Exotic Affairs: The Mistress BrideThe Spanish HusbandThe Bellini Bride Page 15