by Lynne Graham
She had wanted more—all along she had wanted more, even when she’d been fighting with him and telling him that she didn’t believe in marriage. She had had her dreams too, even if she hadn’t acknowledged them. She had wanted him for ever, she had wanted him to love her, she had wanted him to prove to her that marriage could work between them against all the odds...and that was immeasurably more naive than anything he had expected, she conceded painfully. Cinderella gets her prince, the ultimate fairy tale...who would ever have believed that prosaic Bethany Morgan could harbour such a dream?
‘What is your decision? I must know,’ Razul prompted very quietly.
Thank heaven for his fear of embarrassing his family, she thought. ‘I’ll stay,’ she said unevenly, and fished around for a reasonable excuse. ‘I can do my research.’
‘Of course...your research,’ Razul said flatly.
But that wasn’t all she planned to be doing, Bethany decided with an abrupt flash of decisiveness which startled her. Right now Razul had the impression that the end of the summer couldn’t come quickly enough for him. He had had enough. He had been disappointed.
He felt that he had made a fool of himself. He had given up on his dream. Well, she wasn’t planning to give up on him that easily. If she was about to spend the rest of her life hopelessly in love with another woman’s husband, she was going to have some worthwhile memories to take home with her! Right now he was her husband and the way Bethany felt—and she felt incredibly vindictive—Fatima was always going to feel second-best, and Razul was going to be languishing after his first wife for the rest of his days!
‘I’ve been thinking a lot since I’ve been lying in this bed,’ Bethany informed him in an impulsive rush, and there was considerable truth in the admission. Deprived of Razul for twenty-four hours, she had had time to come to terms with her feelings.
‘You never stop thinking,’ Razul said grimly, as if it were the worst possible offence that a woman could commit.
‘My research means so much to me but it’s terribly inconvenient that I don’t speak Arabic,’ Bethany sighed. ‘You see, my research assistant did. That was why I picked him, and I realise that you’re probably very busy but I was wondering if we could make a trip together—’
‘A trip?’ The apparently compulsive view beyond the window which he had been glued to suddenly lost his concentration. He swung back to her.
‘Into the desert. So that I could get a real feel for the nomadic way of life. Of course, I would want the experience to be authentic—’
‘Authentic?’ he questioned, studying her with an obvious effort to conceal how stunned he was by the suggestion that she had just made.
‘Basic and back to nature...just you and me against the elements without a cohort of guards and servants. They would rather get in the way of authenticity, don’t you think?’ she queried less confidently.
‘But you would be alone with me,’ Razul pointed out very drily, his black lashes very nearly hitting his cheek-bones as he surveyed her with compelling intensity. ‘I had not thought you would wish to be subjected to such unwelcome intimacy.’
Bethany took a deep breath, her cheeks hotting up to scarlet as she studied his feet. ‘When did I say it would be unwelcome? It’s not as though I hate you or anything like that.’
A silence had never been so thunderously loud in her ears.
‘You would trust me not to touch you? I am not sure I could withstand the temptation of being alone with you.’ It sounded as if admitting that physically hurt him.
‘I was hoping not...’ Bethany licked her dry lips as the silence got even noisier and her face got even hotter. She was beginning to wonder if she was quite sane. She had the feeling that he was wondering too. Green light...then red stop-light, she recalled, writhing with mortification.
‘You were hoping I would not withstand temptation?’ he framed raggedly.
Dumbly she nodded, silenced by shock at what she had just told him.
Razul gave her the fright of her life. He groaned something volatile in Arabic and grabbed her out of the bed, drip and all, just as the door opened.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Laila enquired in disbelief.
‘I am taking my wife home,’ Razul announced aggressively, as if he was expecting a fight. ‘I will take a nurse too.’
Laila was struggling to keep her face straight. ‘Honeymooriers. You make me feel every year of my age’
As his sister left to make the arrangements Razul enveloped Bethany in a smouldering golden scrutiny that entrapped her. ‘I will make this the happiest summer of your life,’ he swore passionately.
And a shard of pain as sharp as a sliver of glass tore at her. The end of the summer loomed like a fate worse than death. Why did Razul have to keep on mentioning it? It was like pouring salt on an open wound, but then there was no point in avoiding reality, she reminded herself painfully.
CHAPTER NINE
LATE afternoon, Razul strolled across the grass towards her, fluidly graceful in his desert robes but wearing that slight frown-line between his aristocratic brows which told her that he was about to be difficult.
‘You are usually taking a nap at this hour,’ he reminded her, tawny eyes sweeping over her where she reclined in the shade of the trees with a book.
‘I’m feeling as fit as a fiddle.’
‘You still look pale...and strained.’
Bethany bowed her head. Only a week ago she had dropped her defences, burnt her bridges and thrown herself at Razul’s head. Never in her worst nightmares had she imagined sacrificing her pride to such an extent. And with what result? she asked herself, with the furious and bewildered resentment which had begun to rise in her over the past week.
For some reason, Razul had gone from that brief instant of seeming jubilance at the hospital into a cool, distant mood. He was extremely polite and remarkably attentive. He brought her flowers and books and visited her several times a day, but he might just as well have been a gracious host calling in on an ailing house guest for there was nothing more intimate in his attitude towards her.
‘When are we going into the desert?’ she murmured bluntly.
‘Perhaps next month when the temperatures begin to fall. You could not tolerate the current levels of heat—’
‘I am quite sure I could—’
‘But then you do not know what you are talking about,’ Razul incised with steely cool. ‘And you will surely allow that I do? At this time of the year the desert is a furnace, and to undertake such a trip would be utter madness.’
Bethany set her teeth. ‘You can have your own tent...if that’s what’s worrying you!’ And then the minute she’d said that she wanted to crawl under the recliner and cringe. But the most deeply humiliating suspicion had begun to torment her. After she had transformed herself from an exciting challenge into a positive pushover at the hospital, had it then dawned on Razul that he no longer found her madly desirable? Was he now cursing the situation in which he found himself, longingly wishing that he could get rid of her and fervently embrace Fatima without delay?
Involuntarily she glanced up, and caught the feral gleam in his golden eyes and the grimly amused twist of his sensual mouth. ‘Does your bed become lonely?’ Razul drawled slumbrously.
She flushed to the roots of her hair.
‘I am become a sex object. I do not find this role entirely unfamiliar. Other members of your sex have viewed me in this light. But you are my wife—’
‘Temporarily!’ Bethany lashed back, awash with furious embarrassment at the fact that he could read her so easily.
‘And though I have no desire to be offensive—’
‘But you do it so well, don’t you?’ she spat, fit to be tied.
‘I am not your stud.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Bethany was so outraged that she could hardly get the words out.
‘You would like it very well if I came to your bed every night in silence and departed equally silently b
y dawn. You could have the physical pleasure without yielding me a single glimpse of your inner self. I will not be used in such a fashion. When you learn to talk to me, I will share your bed—’
‘I don’t want to talk to you...I don’t want you in my bed...in fact I wish you’d take a running jump off the nearest cliff!’ she launched at him, quivering all over with raw mortification.
‘But I know that none of this is true,’ Razul delivered with gentle emphasis. ‘You simply cannot bear to be thwarted. Were you never disciplined as a child?’
Bethany’s mouth fell open.
‘I ask,’ Razul murmured smoothly, ‘because I threw such tantrums once...but I was disciplined. It did me a great deal of good.’
Bethany clasped her hands together tightly and slowly counted to ten.
Razul sank down fluidly into a chair opposite her. ‘I would like a cool drink.’
Bethany lifted the iced jug beside her and proceeded to pour.
‘And I do not wish to have it thrown at me.’
‘Really?’ Bethany breathed dangerously.
‘I would hate to subject you to the indignity of being dumped in the nearest pool. Rumour of your paddling experience in the fountain on our wedding day has already spread beyond these walls.’
She went scarlet and counted from twenty to fifty in the simmering silence.
‘That your temper matches the fire of your hair is no longer any secret.’
The count made it to a hundred at supersonic speed.
‘Now what would you like to talk about?’ Razul drawled with outstanding cool and a gently encouraging smile.
‘Methods of torture and death,’ she bit out shakily before she drew in a deep, sustaining breath and could bring herself to look at him again. ‘You make me so mad sometimes,’ she conceded, with a rueful groan.
‘At least I do not bore you as my father bored my mother.’
‘You said she left him before she died,’ Bethany recalled abruptly.
His expressive mouth twisted. ‘She is not dead.’
She frowned in astonishment. ‘But Zulema told me—’
‘I assure you that she is very much alive—the socialite wife of a prominent French politician and the mother of two other adult children.’
‘Did your father divorce her?’
‘She divorced him on her return to her family. My father was too proud to admit that he was a holiday romance which soured...thus the false report of her death.’
Bethany was fascinated. ‘A holiday romance?’
‘Laila’s mother had died, leaving my father a widower with four daughters. He met my mother in Paris,’ Razul explained calmly. ‘She was young and rich and spoilt and she thought it might be fun to marry an Arab prince. My grandfather was still on the throne then—’
‘Are you telling me that your mother was French?’ Bethany interrupted helplessly. ‘Christian?’
‘Yes. Scarcely a problem. Over a third of the population of Datar is Christian,’ Razul reminded her gently.
She had forgotten that fact. A century ago a large number of Christians of the Coptic faith had migrated from Egypt and begun settling in Datar. Their presence had led to a greater degree of religious tolerance and a smoother passage into a more secular society than was possible in many other Muslim countries. But she was stunned to learn that Razul was part French and, as if he understood her astonishment, he gave her a wry look.
‘I resemble my father, not my mother.’
‘How long were they married?’
‘Longer than she desired for she became pregnant the first month. She left Datar when I was two weeks old.’
‘Your father wouldn’t have allowed her to take you with her,’ Bethany assumed.
‘She had no wish to do so. A half-caste child would have been an embarrassment to her. It was much easier for her to remarry without me in the picture.’
Half-caste? Bethany felt quite sick at the expression. ‘Was that what your father told you?’
‘You are keen to put all blame upon my father’s shoulders,’ Razul sighed, his dark eyes revealing his exasperation. ‘He was deeply in love with her—an older man, perhaps not very wise to the ways of Western women but most vulnerable to so crushing a rejection, and that I, too, should be rejected inflicted the deepest wound of all.’
Bethany had flushed. But picturing that right old misery of a tyrant, as she had always imagined him, as a vulnerable, relatively unsophisticated older man, unceremoniously dumped by his bored young wife, took some doing. ‘Have you ever had any contact with your mother?’
‘Once. I went though my father warned me that it would be foolish.’ His lean fingers tautened round the glass he held and he gave a rueful laugh. ‘A skeleton rising from the grave could not have inspired more horror than I did. She does not like to remember that there was ever another marriage or another child because her husband does not love those of my race. In my presence she swore her servant to secrecy about my call.’
‘What a hateful thing to do to you!’ Bethany exclaimed hotly, appalled that any mother could have faced her son with such a repudiation, most particularly a son who, in spite of her desertion, had still retained sufficient generosity to seek her out.
‘You sound as though you actually care, aziz.’
Bethany froze; her gaze collided with compellingly intense dark eyes and she glanced away at speed, guarding her heart, guarding her tongue. ‘Of course I do. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through an experience like that!’
‘I did not suffer so much,’ Razul countered drily. ‘I had a father who loved me and, by the time I was three, a stepmother who raised me as though I were her own child. I also have two younger sisters whom you would have met had our marriage not been arranged at such speed. Both are married and living abroad.’
‘So you are the only son.’
‘Which may explain to you why my father is so embarrassingly protective of me. Laila did not joke. I sneeze in his presence and he turns pale,’ Razul revealed with wry exasperation. ‘I have often wished that Allah had blessed him with more sons.’
‘His beloved son,’ she recalled Laila saying. It had not occurred to her then that Razul was in fact the only son that King Azmir had. Six girls and one little boy, who must have been more precious then gold-dust from the hour of his birth, but equally that same circumstance must have placed an enormous weight of responsibility on Razul’s shoulders to be the perfect son and fulfil all expectations. Her hazy image of her father-in-law had taken quite a beating: not an old tyrant where his son was concerned, but, by all accounts, a loving, indeed over-protective father.
‘My father began developing his famous distrust of the Western world after his marriage failed. He was unreasonably embittered by the experience. For that same reason I was educated here in Datar...’
Bethany almost groaned out loud. ‘And then the one time he let you go to the West—’
‘I met you.’ Razul drained his glass and set it aside. A bitter curve twisted his firm mouth. ‘And when the rains come and you leave he will say... No, I will not think now of what he will say.’
No doubt there would be an entire week of joyous celebration at the old palace and convivial relations would be fully restored between father and son. ‘Of course...he didn’t want you to marry me.’ She had to force herself to say that out loud.
‘He did not.’ Razul made no attempt to duck the issue.
‘So why did you do it?’ she whispered helplessly, understanding better than most the incredible courage it must have taken for Razul to defy his elderly parent. Arab sons honoured their fathers. Arab sons were expected to regard paternal wishes as absolute rules to be obeyed without question.
‘I have already told you why.’ Perceptibly Razul had withdrawn from her again, his hard-boned features harshly set.
‘You wanted me that much?’ Bethany persisted unsteadily.
‘Do you think I make a habit of kidnapping women and springing sudden mar
riages upon them?’ A shadowy glimmer of his beautiful smile briefly crossed his mouth. ‘I hear you have already inspected the stables...can you ride?’
The change of subject was so swift as to leave her breathless. ‘Ride?’
‘I ride at dawn every day when it is cool. Tomorrow, were you willing, I would take you with me. The desert is a place of wondrous beauty at that hour...I would share it with you.’
‘Not much point in us sharing anything, is there?’ Bethany muttered tightly, suddenly attacked on all sides by a tidal wave of bitter pain.
‘Because you will leave?’ Razul rose to his feet. ‘Defeatist as always, aziz. If I can live with this knowledge, why cannot you? And why should I wish to settle for some empty charade of a relationship in the time that remains to us? I want the gold, not the gilt. I will not devalue what we might have together as you would devalue it. We will do more than share a bed before you return to your world.’
Bethany breathed in deeply and leant back fully to take in all six feet two inches of him as he stood with complete poise in the brilliant sunlight. ‘Ten days ago nothing I could say or do would persuade you to leave me alone,’ she reminded him fiercely.
‘Ten days ago, even one week ago, I was foolish enough to believe that your attitude to me was...shall we say...warming, softening, thawing?’ Razul queried with galling amusement. ‘But when I visited you here in your sickbed I learnt my mistake. We have discussed the weather although there is nothing to discuss. Does not a hot sun rise with every dawn? We have also discussed your reading matter, your research and world politics.’
‘Have I been boring you?’ Her face was as hot as hellfire at that crack about the weather.
‘You are far too intelligent to be a bore and your observations and opinions are always of interest to me,’ Razul retorted gently. ‘But, while you evade every personal subject and are scrupulously careful to show no more real interest in me than you might show in a stranger passing by you in the street, I feel we are still in a phase of courtship—’