by Lynne Graham
‘C-courtship?’ Bethany slid upright, no longer able to bear the simple fact that he was looking down at her—both mentally and physically. He was driving her clean up the wall.
‘You treat me neither like a lover nor a husband. You deny me all intimacy...except when you look at me.’ His dark appraisal mocked her with an all-knowing sexual awareness that burned her right down to her toes. ‘But, if I had to learn English to communicate with you, you too must learn the language which I desire to hear.’
‘You want it all don’t you?’ Revenge, she thought bitterly. So much for the violins that he had played at the hospital when he had talked about her being his dream! He knew that if he touched her she was his...as much his as if he had a brand on her backside, she reflected furiously. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy him-oh, no, indeed, he wanted to sneak inside her head as well and prise out her every secret so that his control was absolute.
‘Have you ever doubted it?’
‘Well, what do you want to know?’ Bethany slung at him with a scornfully elevated brow. ‘I have nothing to hide,’ she declared.
‘Really, aziz.’ His tawny eyes danced with infuriating amusement. ‘Are you so desperate for me that you must stun me with so immediate an offer?’
Bethany spread her hands in an arc of screaming frustration and then she caught his irresistible smile and began to feel foolish. ‘You know how to send me up now, don’t you?’
‘I should have resisted the temptation...but then you take yourself so very seriously. You have accused me of so many ridiculous things. I look back in laughter now on my two hundred concubines, my other wife, your view of me as a potentially violent man...and more recently still the assumption that I am a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, who will turn into a monster within hours of wedding you,’ Razul enumerated, and his mouth twisted. ‘If I could not laugh I would be in deep trouble.’
Bethany swallowed convulsively. Now that he had reeled off all her accusations like that she was severely embarrassed by his tolerance. ‘I’m sorry but...well, there was some justification for my suspicions.’ She lifted her chin. ‘My aunt was married to an Arab and she had a pretty ghastly experience. But I’m quite sure you are aware of that, since you had me investigated.’
A frown-line had drawn his fine brows together. ‘I was not aware of it. The investigation only embraced your life over the past year, nothing more,’ Razul stated very quietly. ‘I too felt that I was intruding upon your privacy and sought only the information that you were free of any entanglement with another man.’
‘Oh.’ It was Bethany’s turn to be disconcerted.
‘Your aunt?’ he prompted as they began to walk along a stone terrace under the trees.
Bethany’s aunt was only seven years older than she was. She had been a frequent visitor in her older sister’s home throughout Bethany’s childhood. When she had been nineteen and studying for her degree, Susan had met an Iranian engineer at a party. Faisal had been utterly charming and seemingly as much in love with Susan as Susan had been in love with him. Their whirlwind romance had ended in marriage...ended in more ways than one.
‘It was a disaster right from the start,’ Bethany told Razul with stark emphasis. ‘From the moment they were married he changed. He treated her like a prisoner. He objected to her clothing, her make-up and her friends. He accused her of flirting with other men. He tried to stop her going to her classes. He didn’t even like her visiting her family. He turned against us too. In the end he was knocking her about and she was terrified of him... She had to go to the police.’
‘And you cite this to me as evidence of a cultural gulf?’
‘Wasn’t it?’ Bethany snapped.
‘Surely such men exist within every culture? They are emotionally inadequate, irrationally jealous and possessive and they invariably turn to violence, do they not?’ Razul drawled quietly.
Her tongue snaked out to moisten her dry lower lip. She was really quite devastated by a line of argument that she had never acknowledged before, because of course such men existed in every culture.
‘He was a sick man and a dangerous man. It is fortunate that your aunt escaped him before he did more serious damage. But what was your family about in allowing so young and inexperienced a girl to marry a foreigner about whom they knew nothing?’
‘He seemed so romantic,’ Bethany said gruffly, recalling how reluctantly impressed even she had been by Faisal. ‘He seemed absolutely devoted to her.’
‘It must have been most disturbing for you to witness the aftermath of such a marriage.’
‘Disturbing’ barely covered it. Susan on their doorstep night after night, her haunted eyes swollen, face drawn, weight falling off her, all her youthful energy drained away by stress and misery and growing fear of Faisal’s threats. It had been a nightmare period. But Razul was right, loath as she was to admit it. Susan could well have married one of her own countrymen and ended up in the same predicament.
‘It was,’ she agreed rather woodenly. ‘But Susan did go on to get her business degree and she emigrated to Canada soon afterwards. She’s actually a director in an international company now.’
‘Has she remarried?’
‘No.’ Bethany almost laughed at the idea. ‘She’s very ambitious.’
‘Your role model?’
Bethany flushed, thinking of the long talks she had had with Susan when she had fled to Canada two years earlier. Her aunt had hailed her as a virtual heroine for walking away from so dangerous and impossible an attraction. Susan had never regained her trust in the male sex. She was still very bitter about her two-year nightmare with Faisal, and for the first time Bethany fully acknowledged how deeply affected she herself had been by that same nightmare.
Faisal’s apparent adoration of Susan had impressed her so much. The young Arab had seemed strong and caring, his relationship with her aunt before their marriage—in Bethany’s adolescent eyes—seemingly the very essence of romance. Scarred as she was by growing up in the atmosphere of a bad marriage, Bethany had nonetheless been touched and delighted to see two people really loving each other. She had been absolutely shattered when that relationship had failed as well. It had seemed to her then that there was no such thing as a trustworthy or reliable man.
Bethany bent her head, admitting, ‘I do admire what Susan’s done with her life since that awful period.’ But she was no longer sure that she could admire her aunt for allowing that one, admittedly ghastly experience to turn her off all men.
‘Some women manage to combine both career and marriage,’ Razul murmured.
‘Superwomen, you mean...baby under one arm, vacuum cleaner under the other and a mound of work they bring home every night from the office!’
‘Servants do make a difference. My sister Laila has managed this combination most successfully,’ Razul pointed out. ‘As soon as their youngest child began school she embarked on her medical training.’
‘How on earth did she manage it?’
‘Strong will and Ahmed’s support.’
Involuntarily Bethany grinned. ‘I have this feeling that Ahmed jumps every time Laila snaps her fingers.’
‘This is true,’ Razul conceded with a pronounced air of reluctance. ‘But he is a skilled and most kindly man, somewhat in awe of my sister even after all these years. She has broken many taboos in our family and he is very proud of her achievements. They have a very happy marriage, a true partnership—’
‘I wasn’t criticising Ahmed,’ Bethany broke in uncomfortably, wondering why he was labouring the point of his sister’s blissfully happy marriage and successful career to such an extent. If anything it made her feel inexcusably and meanly envious.
‘There must be a certain amount of compromise in all relationships between men and women.’
‘And I know who usually does the compromising,’ Bethany muttered with the cynicism of habit. ‘The woman.’
‘You know that is not always true.’
‘Well, it’s true m
ore than it should be,’ she countered, thoroughly irritated by the persistent way Razul contrived to put her in the wrong and make her sound like some man-hating feminist...like Susan? she asked herself uncomfortably, seeing much that she had refused to see before. Perhaps her aunt had become her role model because she had not been able to respect her own mother for the treatment she withstood from her father.
‘Are you telling me that there are no women who take advantage of men?’
Her teeth gritted. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’
‘You need to be challenged, for you are very stubborn.’
Involuntarily her gaze connected with his brilliant dark eyes and her heart skipped an entire beat, her mouth going dry. ‘And you are not?’
‘This is not a competition to see who can be most inflexible.’
Still looking at him, Bethany felt a prickling of heat twist low in her stomach. She could feel her entire body tense with physical awareness. Her breathing fractured, a sudden stirring heaviness swelling her sensitive breasts beneath their fine covering, pinching her nipples into painfully tight little buds. She watched his stunning eyes shimmer gold and trembled, her heart pounding.
‘Do not look at me like that,’ he breathed raggedly.
Bethany smiled with a new, sensual consciousness of her female power and waited. She was not one whit discomfited by her own response when she saw it mirrored in him. On this level, she thought helplessly, they were equal ‘Why not?’
With a muffled groan he reached out and pulled her to him, sealing every inch of her to the hard, lean muscularity of his male heat and strength. Her senses swam. Instinct took over. As his mouth came down on her softly parted lips a long sigh of satisfaction escaped her and a wanton thrill of excitement jolted her from head to toe, leaving her dizzy and disorientated and clinging to his broad shoulders to stay upright.
When he set her back from him the shock of separation was sharp. She focused passion-glazed eyes on him in bewilderment. He steadied her against the wall behind her and withdrew a fluid step, studying her with grim intensity.
‘You learn quickly.’
‘You’re a good teacher.’ A hectic flush lit her fair complexion as she registered his withdrawal. Suddenly she felt unbearably humiliated.
‘But I was too impatient. I taught you the wrong things,’ Razul murmured very quietly, and reached for her clenched hand, smoothing out her taut fingers and cradling them in his.
Scorching tears had flooded her eyes. She bowed her head, immobilised by her devastating weakness. She wanted him so much. It was as if there were a clock ticking inside her where her heart should be. She couldn’t think, couldn’t be rational about the concept of losing Razul, but she could feel the time they had left sliding remorselessly through her fingers like silky grains of sand. The inner strength she depended on was fast buckling into a kind of fevered desperation in which she told herself that she knew what she was doing, when she really didn’t know at all.
‘I want to show you something.’ Retaining a purposeful grip on her hand, he trailed her back indoors with enthusiasm and drew her into one of the reception rooms. A basket sat on the priceless carpet. ‘It is for you’
She crouched down and lifted the lid, already knowing what she would find within—another kitten, a rolling ball of Persian fluff with bright eyes, the twin of the gift he had given her two years earlier.
‘You kept the female,’ he commented. ‘This one is male.’
‘Yes. Thank you. He’ll be great company for her...when they finally get around to meeting,’ she managed stiltedly.
The pedigree kitten danced across the rug, swung an ambitious paw at the strap dangling from the basket lid and fell over in comical confusion. Yet she didn’t laugh; in fact her throat closed over.
A matching pair, male and female. He probably thought-that she would let them breed. It would not occur to him that she might have had the female doctored and that this was one little male who would not become a father. Her cat was barren, just as her mistress would be, she reflected, gripped by a sudden stab of pain. No kittens, no children—and although it was a ridiculous comparison to make it brought home to Bethany as nothing else could have done that she would never, ever have a child of her own, because if she couldn’t have Razul she would have nobody.
‘You are thinking of the British quarantine rules,’ Razul registered harshly.
She heard that harshness but was too distressed by her own emotional turmoil to question it. ‘He’ll be quite grown-up by the time he emerges from six months of confinement and comes home to me,’ she mumbled tightly.
‘Please excuse me...I have some calls to make.’
His abruptness disconcerted her. She sprang upright, painfully reluctant to see him leave her. ‘Do you have to make them right this minute?’
‘For what would you ask me to remain?’ Razul angled a chillingly impassive glance over her. ‘No doubt it is your wish that I make arrangements for the cat to be put into quarantine now?’
‘No...yes...oh, I don’t know.’ Hurt by his visible reluctance to stay with her and wretchedly conscious of the ice in the air, she heard herself ask, ‘What have I done...what did I say?’
The merest sliver of gold showed beneath the lush screen of his lashes. ‘Nothing of import.’
Yet the silence stretched and buzzed like a razor-edge, honing her nerves to screaming point.
Awkwardly she cleared her throat. ‘Did your father live here with your mother?’
‘Is that not obvious?’
East on one side of the hall, West on the other. A his and hers set of rooms which were unmatched to a degree that might have been farcical had it not been the evidence of a bitterly divisive gulf which had never been bridged. ‘I gather nobody compromised in that relationship?’
‘My mother had no desire to go what she called “naive”
Bethany winced visibly.
‘You flinch, but were you any more generous on our wedding day?’ Razul condemned.
She paled and then swung her head up again with pride. ‘You didn’t give me enough time to adjust...you have to know that!’
His lion-gold gaze shimmered. ‘What I know is that that half-hour waiting in the desert was the longest thirty minutes of my life,’ he admitted in a growling undertone. ‘Having undergone that, I was determined that we would marry without further delay.’
‘Because I tried to run away...or because I seem to have this problem with you when it comes to making up my mind?’ She worried ruefully at her lower lip, her wide green eyes unguarded and vulnerable as she stared back at him. ‘The first four days I was here I lurched from one shock to the next, barely knowing what I was thinking or feeling. Everything happened so fast; I couldn’t control it and I’ve never been in a situation like that before. It was unbelievably unnerving...’
‘But not giving you time worked for me,’ Razul responded without apology.
Yes, with hindsight she could see that it had. He had kept her on the run, emotionally and physically. He had battered down her defences and allowed her no breathing space and that constant pressure had been more than she could withstand.
‘It would not have worked for me in England,’ he continued with cool emphasis. “There you would have closed doors in my face, taken the telephone off the hook, run away somewhere where I couldn’t find you. And even here, now as my wife, you place outrageous barriers between us—’
‘But I’m not your real wife, Razul!’ Bethany reminded him, stabbed by an inescapable surge of bitterness. ‘I’m only here on a temporary basis. You seem to forget that.’
‘How could I forget it when you hold that belief between us like a drawn sword?’ Razul demanded with a blinding flash of seething condemnation.
‘What did you expect?’ she retorted painfully. Golden eyes flared over her in a shockingly sudden storm of dark fury. ‘You play dangerous games in the name of pride,’ he condemned. ‘Allow me to make certain facts clear. We will not mee
t again after you leave. Our time will be over and there can be—indeed, there will be—no turning back for I will be married again within months. That was the promise I made to my father. I also gave my word that I would not contact you again, although I now see no room even for temptation on that count...your cold heart does not tempt, it repels!’
Caught unprepared, Bethany was stunned by the pain that his words inflicted on her. Every scrap of colour drained from her face. She swallowed convulsively, couldn’t even suck air into her lungs, she was so devastated by what he’d flung at her. Her cold heart...she would have given ten years of her life to possess such a gift at this moment, to have the enviable power to detach herself from her pain.
But anger came to her rescue as nothing else could have done. Bringing her to Datar had been an act of unsurpassed cruelty and she blamed Razul absolutely for the torment that she was suffering now. It would have been better by far had she never known what they could have together. No, she didn’t believe that old chestnut about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all!
She threw her fiery head back and fixed glittering green eyes on him, bitterness consuming her like a fire raging out of control. ‘Do tell me what sort of second wife you are looking forward to receiving...’ she invited with shrewish sweetness.
Razul froze in shock, his golden eyes veiling to darkness. ‘That I will not discuss with you—’
‘Why not? Heaven knows, you have been so disarmingly frank about everything else! So go on, tell me. I really would like to know!’
A silence of savage intensity now thundered between them, vibrating with her challenge and his wrathful incredulity.
‘She will be a very good wife by my father’s standards,’ Razul gritted rawly, breaking that terrible silence with a suddenness that shook her. ‘If I am ill-bred enough to raise my voice, she will beg to know how she has offended me. She will not answer me back. She will greet my every opinion with admiration and agreement. She will never come to my bed without invitation. She will spend her days dressing up in Western fashions, watching television, shopping and gossiping with her friends. I see her now,’ he breathed with merciless bite. ‘Beautiful, indolent by nature and not very well educated, but she will give me children.’ A slight tremor fractured that final phrase.