by Lynne Graham
He invited Rio to dine with him at the palace and without hesitation chose the same evening that Polly invariably spent with her grandparents, Hakim and his wife. The less Polly was exposed to Rio, the better, he decided with pious resolve.
*
‘You did incredibly well tonight,’ Rashad told Polly on the drive back to the palace. ‘You didn’t once look to me for backup either.’
A sensation of unease niggled at the base of Polly’s skull. Why did he make that sound more like a negative than a plus? Why had he kept his distance throughout the evening? Was she ever going to understand the man she had married? The minute she believed she had solved the mystery of Rashad he would do something she wasn’t expecting and confuse her again.
‘I thought you wanted me to be independent—’
‘I do,’ Rashad confirmed. ‘I can’t always be by your side and sometimes you will have to attend such events alone.’
‘So why am I still getting a mixed message here?’ Polly queried a shade tartly.
Rashad shrugged a broad shoulder as he sprang out of the limo, relieved to be back on palace ground. He knew he was being difficult, he knew he was being too emotional but he was a seething tangle of conflicting feelings inside himself and struggling to hide the fact. In truth, Polly had shone like the brightest of stars at the dinner and without the smallest help from him. He had been very impressed by the natural warmth she exuded. Yet she had still somehow managed to maintain a certain amount of royal distance and formality, a formality which in no way came naturally to her for she was one of the most unstudied personalities he had ever met. In short she had contrived to be the public success that Ferah had always longed to be but had never managed to be. That cruel comparison stopped Rashad in his tracks and yet another surge of guilt and regret bit into him.
Polly sped after Rashad into the palace, wondering what the heck was wrong with him. By the time she actually caught up with him he was poised by the window in their bedroom. He flashed night-dark brooding eyes over her lovely face as she entered. Brilliant dark golden eyes screened by ridiculously long black lashes. Her heart skipped a sudden beat, her breath catching in her throat. Her hand flew up to her constricted throat and rested on the weight of the amber necklace. With a sigh she stretched her fingers round to the clasp at her nape to undo it.
‘Let me,’ Rashad urged, taking her by surprise as he strode forward.
The ornate collaret lifted and he settled it down in a careless heap on a tall dresser. ‘Don’t wear it again,’ he urged her in a roughened voice.
‘Wear what?’ Polly queried as she reached up and unhooked each earring in swift succession before looking at him in the mirror for further clarification.
‘The ambers. I’ll buy you another set,’ he promised curtly, his lean dark face shuttered.
Her violet eyes kindled with curiosity. ‘What’s wrong with this set?’ she asked bluntly.
Rashad tensed, dark lashes sweeping down to screen his expression. ‘It was Ferah’s favourite.’
‘Oh…’ Polly gasped as if he had punched her and deprived her lungs of breath, and in a way that was exactly what he had done. He didn’t like seeing her wearing his first wife’s much-loved jewellery? What was she supposed to take from that admission?
‘It awakens unfortunate memories,’ Rashad declared abruptly.
He had loved his first wife and clearly he couldn’t bear any reminder of her, Polly assumed, thoroughly discomfited by that awareness. ‘I’m your wife now,’ she reminded him flatly, wishing that that timely reminder didn’t sound quite so childish.
‘I’m well aware of that,’ Rashad said drily.
‘And maybe I don’t brush up as nicely as Ferah did in the ambers but you’ve just made me want to wear them every darned day!’ Polly admitted in a helplessly aggressive tone. ‘After all, she is gone and I’m here and I have feelings too!’
‘This is a crazy conversation.’ A questioning black brow elevated, doubtless urging her to think more carefully about what she was saying.
But Polly had had enough and she didn’t feel like pretending or indeed lying to save face. ‘No, I’m a possessive woman. Either you’re mine or you’re still hers!’ Polly fired at him in angry challenge.
‘Ferah is my past as you are my present and my future,’ Rashad countered in exasperation.
Polly’s violet eyes widened and glittered and she planted her hand truculently on one slender jutting hip. ‘But your past is raining on my present so I’m not getting a fair deal,’ she told him accusingly.
Rashad groaned out loud, frustration gripping him. ‘What am I supposed to do about that? I cannot help my past. I cannot forget my memories—’
‘No…’ Polly conceded. ‘But you could share them.’
‘Share them?’ Rashad exclaimed, an expression of appalled fascination stamping his lean, darkly handsome face. ‘What man would do that?’
‘A man who wants a normal relationship with his wife. If your memories are coming between us, you need to share them,’ Polly told him abruptly, for in actuality she was none too sure of the worth of what she was proposing. After all, she didn’t really want to think about Ferah. She preferred to forget that his first wife had ever existed, which was probably distinctly mean and ungenerous of her. Would it be worse for her to have Ferah fleshed out as a person? Ferah, the woman he had loved who must have loved him too?
‘My memories are not coming between us,’ Rashad assured her with brooding ferocity. ‘And I prefer to keep my memories to myself—’
‘Oh, tell me something I don’t already know,’ Polly scoffed in a helpless rush of bitterness. ‘It’s like when you were made someone locked you up internally and threw away the key!’
‘I am what I am—’
‘Too set in your ways to change?’ Polly skimmed back thinly.
‘We have only been married for a couple of months. What sort of miraculous transformation were you expecting this soon?’ Rashad derided.
Polly paled at that sardonic recap and intonation and turned away. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘I’m going for a ride,’ Rashad told her between gritted teeth.
‘No, you’re walking out on me again because I’ve said things you don’t want to deal with!’ Polly condemned angrily.
Rashad settled stormy dark golden eyes on her and froze. ‘Very well. I will stay.’
To talk? To share? Or to prove her wrong in her contention that he’d walk away sooner than deal with difficult issues? With a determined little wriggle, Polly unzipped her dress while watching Rashad shed his clothing. Watching him made her mouth run dry, all that sleek bronzed flesh overlying lean, hard muscle being exposed. Flushing at her thoughts, she pulled on a robe and went into the bathroom to remove her makeup.
Now he was furious with her, she ruminated wryly. Golden fury had blazed like the heat of the sun in his beautiful eyes. But he wouldn’t admit that he was angry. Nor would he raise his voice or lose his temper. His absolute control of his emotions mocked her trembling hands because she was so wound up she felt as though she might explode with the powerful anxious feelings racing round inside her.
Seeing her in his first wife’s jewellery roused ‘unfortunate memories’. It made him angry too. Had he watched her tonight in that wretched amber necklace and wished she were Ferah? What else was she supposed to think?
Rashad studied Polly’s slender figure. The silk of the robe outlined the rounded curve of her derriere and delicately shaped her pouting breasts, hinting at her prominent nipples. His reaction was instantaneous and it infuriated him but there it was: the lust to take, the lust to possess gripped him almost every time he looked at his wife. The strength of that craving disturbed him as much as his loss of self-discipline. Hard as a rock, he stepped into the shower and put the jets on cold but it didn’t help because all that out-of-control emotion washing about inside him like a dangerous rip tide threatening to drag him down only heightened his arousal, exacerbating h
is need to be close to Polly in the only way he knew.
Share his memories? Was Polly crazy to suggest such a thing? He did not want to relive his unhappy marriage to Ferah. The two women could not have been more different, he conceded heavily. Polly wanted to talk about sensitive issues but Ferah had refused to talk and had brooded on her disappointments until she was overflowing with the bitterness and self-pity that had eventually plunged her into long depressive episodes. How could he even consider sharing that unlovely truth with Polly?
Polly undid the robe and wondered if it would be a little ridiculous for her to put on a nightdress because they had had a disagreement. When she normally wore nothing to bed but her own skin a nightdress would be like making a statement, wouldn’t it be? Ultra-sensitive and on edge, she glanced uncertainly at Rashad as he strode out of the bathroom. The air positively crackled when she collided with burning dark golden eyes and she noticed, really couldn’t help noticing, his condition.
‘Yes, I want you,’ Rashad intoned thickly. ‘But then… I always want you.’
‘Don’t say it like you wish you didn’t!’ Polly exclaimed, her mouth running dry, her heartbeat speeding up.
‘It can be inconvenient—’
‘What’s a little inconvenience?’ she whispered, achingly aware of him, struggling to remind herself that he hadn’t dealt with her demand for more information and that she should be light on understanding while playing it cool and offended.
‘I couldn’t be gentle in the mood I’m in—’
Polly tried and failed to swallow. There was a wildness in his eyes, a gritty roughened edge to his dark deep drawl and, in the strangest way imaginable, she welcomed that hint that he was not as much in control as he usually was. It was almost as though a barrier had come down inside him, one of several barriers that kept her at a determined distance. ‘I might not necessarily need gentle right now…’
Without the smallest hesitation, Rashad crossed the space between them in one stride, both arms snaking round her to bring her crashing up against his hot, muscular body. His sensual mouth feasted on hers with a ferocity that suggested she could be the only thing standing between him and insanity and she gloried in a fervour that empowered her at a moment when her self-esteem had taken a battering. After all, it was hard to be proud of being Rashad’s consolation prize in the bride stakes, the replacement wife virtually forced on him by the Dharian people.
‘I burn to be with you,’ Rashad growled, erotic energy radiating from him as he brought her down on the bed, his hunger unleashed and sizzling with unashamed intensity. ‘Every minute of the day. My appetite for you consumes me.’
She would have told him that that cut both ways but his mouth crushed hers again and the taste of him was like an aphrodisiac, the plunge of his tongue making her body arch up in a wave of shivering delight that shot a fire storm of response through her veins. There was a ripping sound as he extracted her impatiently from the entangling folds of the silk robe. Long, knowing fingers zeroed straight in on the slick pink flesh at the heart of her and she jerked and moaned out loud, on the edge of spontaneously combusting with excitement.
Rashad flipped her over and drew her up on her knees. With a heartfelt growl of satisfaction he sank into her in a single compelling thrust. She was stretched almost to the point of pain but simultaneously the raw pleasure stormed through her nerve endings like a healing drug. He took her hard and fast and that sense of being on an edge flung her up onto an endless high of breathless excitement. Carnal pleasure gripped her bone and sinew. His lack of control thrilled her because she knew that she wasn’t in control either. In any case, this was Rashad and she loved him, trusted him, needed him, and that his savage hunger for her should be even stronger when he was angry and troubled comforted her. After all that same primal need to connect with him at such times was just as powerful and driving for her.
She was riding a ravishing surge of excitement when a skilled hand rubbed against her throbbing bud of pleasure and the world burst into Technicolor fireworks behind her eyelids. She jerked and cried out, caught up in a rolling climax that detonated deep in her pelvis and totally wiped her out. When she collapsed back down on the bed, Rashad rolled her into his arms and lay there with her, struggling for breath, his heart still thundering against her.
‘I’m sorry,’ Rashad gritted unevenly. ‘I was rough, selfish. I am truly sorry—’
‘No… I liked it…’
Long fingers pushed up her chin to force her eyes to meet his, his concern evaporating to be replaced by the beginnings of sheer masculine awe. ‘You liked it?’ he whispered wonderingly.
‘Uh-huh,’ Polly confirmed, her colour rising inexorably beneath that stunned appraisal.
‘Sometimes I feel as though there’s a crazy storm rising inside me—’
‘Tension, emotion…’
‘That I’ve failed to get under control,’ Rashad pronounced, his beautiful mouth tightening with dissatisfaction.
‘But you don’t need to control it, not with me. With me, you don’t have to put up a front, you don’t have to impress.’ Polly wrapped a possessive arm round his lean, damp body, small fingers smoothing down soothingly over his ribcage. ‘I want you to be yourself.’
‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Rashad turned his tousled dark head away from her. ‘Ferah chose to die sooner than remain with me,’ he said flatly, no emotion whatsoever in the statement.
Completely taken aback by that shockingly sudden change of topic, Polly tensed. ‘Chose?’ she queried with a frown.
‘A few weeks before she was bitten by the snake she took an overdose. Fortunately she was found in time and I arranged for her to have treatment and therapy but sadly it wasn’t enough. When she was bitten she concealed the bite until it was too late for the antidote to work,’ Rashad revealed. ‘She died in my arms. She told me that she was setting me free…’
Polly was appalled, belatedly grasping why any memory of Ferah was liable to upset him. She almost spoke her mind to say that she thought that that was a dreadfully cruel and martyred thing to have said to him in such circumstances but common sense made her bite her lip rather than speak in insensitive haste. ‘Setting you free?’ she whispered instead.
‘Free to marry another woman, one who could give me a child as she could not,’ Rashad extended curtly. ‘She knew her father had been trying to persuade me to divorce her and take another wife and that I had refused—’
‘Her own father was willing to do that to her?’ Polly pressed in disgust.
‘All my uncle saw was the end game and that was the restoration of the monarchy. He saw a king with an heir in tow as a safer bet than one with a barren wife,’ Rashad advanced bitterly. ‘Ferah knew how he felt because he told her that it was her duty to let me go. She was already depressed. All she ever wanted was to be a mother and when that was denied her she felt worthless. Being made to feel like a burden as well was too much for her. She wasn’t a strong person.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Polly muttered, feeling inadequate because he had told her a much more unhappy story than she had expected and for the first time she understood that Rashad had been as much wounded by his first marriage as he had been by the traumatic changes and injuries inflicted on him by his dysfunctional childhood. The sheer extent of the losses he had endured turned her stomach over sickly, making her feel outrageously naïve.
‘I should’ve given her more support. It’s my fault that she died,’ Rashad murmured with grave simplicity.
‘It wasn’t your fault!’ Polly argued vehemently. ‘She was depressed. You got her professional help. What more could you have done? By the sound of it, her own family did nothing to help her recover!’
Rashad stretched out with a heavy sigh. ‘It’s in the past and can’t be changed, aziz. Let us leave it there.’
But although Polly sealed her lips on further comment she couldn’t leave it there because she felt ashamed that she had come over all jealous and possessive
about his attachment to Ferah and his memories of his first marriage. Her sister had tried to warn her that Rashad had been through the emotional grinder in the past and she hadn’t really listened. He had also trained himself to control his emotions and keep his secrets and in his position that was hardly surprising. That he had let the barriers down just for a few minutes with her was a promising sign, she told herself with determined positivity.
CHAPTER NINE
POLLY SHIFTED IN the early hours, partially wakening to the sound of Rashad having a terse conversation with someone on the phone. Blinking, she turned over, eyes drowsy in the half-light before dawn as he put the phone down again and sat up.
‘There was an incident on the border during the night.’ He sighed, raking long brown fingers through his sleep-tousled jet-black hair. ‘A man was shot but mercifully not killed. I’ll be in meetings all day trying to calm this down, but first I have to fly out there and get the facts.’
He dropped a kiss on her brow and urged her to go back to sleep. A few hours later, Polly rolled out of bed with her usual energy and then stopped dead as a roiling wave of sick dizziness assailed her. There was nothing she could do but rush for the bathroom where she knelt on the cold tiled floor to be ignominiously sick. In the aftermath, she felt weak and shaky and it was a few minutes before she took the risk of standing up again.
She couldn’t have fallen pregnant so quickly, she reasoned with herself as she stepped into the shower, needing to feel clean from head to toe. Ellie had said the average conception took around six months but that it could just as easily take longer. No, it was much more likely that she had caught some bug or eaten something at dinner that had disagreed with her digestion. Even so, she thought that it would be sensible to consult the palace doctor.