A Mediterranean Marriage

by Lynne Graham

  Lily was shaking from the terrifying and frustrating awareness that she seemed to have been tried, judged and found guilty on the spot. Nor did Rauf appear to have the slightest intention of hearing a word she said in her own defence.

  ‘That’s not true. How can you even think that I could do such a thing?’ she asked with shocked distaste. ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m your wife!’

  Dark colour accentuated the taut angularity of Rauf’s superb cheekbones and he spread both hands into a violent arc. ‘Yes, you’re my bride. That’s quite a coup I gave you, isn’t it? You must’ve been laughing all the way down the line at me—’

  ‘I’ve had enough. I am not even going to try to talk to you in the mood you’re in—’

  ‘Oh, yes, you are,’ Rauf bit out, closing strong hands to her wrists before she could complete her intent and drop back into her seat again. ‘And I warn you…your usual, very effective ploy of turning on the waterworks won’t silence me this time around!’

  ‘At this moment, Rauf Kasabian…’ as Lily wrenched her wrists free of his hold her blue eyes burned like the sapphire centre of a flame over his lean, darkly attractive features ‘…I wouldn’t cry if you tied me to a stake and stood over me with a match!’

  ‘At last a piece of good news. I also think you need to know when and where my suspicions about you and Brett began—’

  ‘Inside your own very colourful imagination?’ Lily sliced in.

  Incensed by that scornful suggestion, Rauf flashed her a scorching look of pure intimidation. ‘Tecer Godian…do you remember him?’

  Disconcerted, Lily muttered, ‘Mr Godian, your last accountant…the one who came over to England to check out Harris Travel three years ago?’

  ‘Tecer was an astute man. That last day that I stayed at your home, you said you had to go into the travel agency to help out because an employee was ill. Tecer was there checking the accounts and so were you and Brett. Even though Tecer saw nothing that he could quite put his finger on, he saw enough to rouse his concern—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Tecer had no idea that I was personally involved with you. Later that same morning, he said to me, “The son-in-law, Brett…and Lily, the wife’s little sister, there’s something wrong and disturbing about that relationship. They don’t behave like normal family members do with each other.”’

  At that revelation, Lily tensed with surprise. Had Tecer Godian noted her fear and nervous tension at being alone, as she had initially believed, with her brother-in-law in the front office? Her considerable relief when she had first registered that the older man was in the back room going over the accounts and her chattiness once Brett had mercifully gone out? Yes, as Rauf so rightly said, Tecer had been a shrewd man, as an outsider seeing what those more closely involved did not see. But Rauf had taken those astute warning words and put them into a very different context.

  ‘I paid no heed, asked no questions, but I understood what Tecer meant all right after I had waited in that car park until you finally emerged from that hotel with Gilman!’ Rauf grated in contemptuous condemnation. ‘Even though you refuse to admit it, all along you were in love with your sister’s husband—’

  ‘That’s not what the man saw between Brett and I,’ Lily argued with furious emphasis. ‘It’s a pity that you never asked Tecer to explain what he meant—’

  ‘Do you think that I would’ve lowered myself to the level of discussing you with a man who was not only my employee, but also a family friend?’ Rauf scorned.

  ‘You might have saved us both a lot of unhappiness if you had,’ Lily condemned with angry reproach, finally understanding what had first made Rauf suspect the nature of her relationship with her sister’s ex-husband. ‘But perhaps you took out of his words what you wanted to believe—’

  ‘And what the hell is that supposed to mean? We’re straying too far from the main issue here,’ Rauf condemned with brooding force, shimmering golden eyes pinned to the flushed, taut oval of her face. ‘My every worst suspicion about your integrity has been proved correct.’

  ‘And that’s a relief for you, isn’t it?’ Lily studied him with wondering eyes, bitter anger of a strength she had never before experienced building even higher inside her. ‘To believe that I loved Brett, that I only took you home so that you could invest in Harris Travel and that all the time my sole motivation was to enrich Brett and get my own greedy hands on your wretched money?’

  His aggressive jawline clenched, for it infuriated him that, even when he set the evidence before her, she was still striving to portray herself as a poor little victim. ‘Yes…that is what I must believe.’

  Lily loosed a jagged little laugh. ‘Then I’m sure this can’t come as a surprise to you either…I very much regret getting married to you yesterday!’

  ‘Like hell you do!’ Rauf countered in a lion’s roar of rebuttal that shook her where she stood. ‘If you weren’t my wife, I’d be handing you straight over to the police!’

  ‘Hopefully they would be a little better at investigating crime than you are…then that’s their job,’ Lily traded with dulcet sweetness of tone, her powerful sense of injustice mounting as she had considered all the sins that he seemed to believe her capable of committing. ‘So go ahead and hand me over because I don’t ever want to have anything more to do with you!’

  ‘Let me tell you, after a few nights in a prison cell you wouldn’t be half so bloody impertinent!’ Rauf launched back at her, incensed by what he interpreted as a ridiculous declaration. ‘And what’s more, you married me knowing that you were protecting yourself from any threat of imprisonment—’

  ‘My goodness…’ Lily trilled, burning spots of furious colour now highlighting her cheekbones. ‘I ought to write a book about my life as a wicked, unscrupulous adventuress…only I don’t seem to have been a very successful one, do I?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Rauf demanded.

  ‘Well, according to you, I loved Brett and cheated, lied and stole for him, but somehow never had the guts to be wicked enough to sleep with him,’ Lily recounted with wide, questioning eyes. ‘Then there’s also the small fact that I’m virtually broke until my next month’s salary arrives, so I appear to have been a total loser as an embezzler as well. And, lastly, my crowning error seems to have been to marry the guy I robbed…which hardly promises me the happiest of secure futures…does it?’

  His devastatingly handsome features clenched hard. ‘If I receive one more facetious response from you—’

  ‘You’ll what…divorce me?’ Lily slung at him bitterly. ‘Well, I’m ahead of you there…I want a divorce!’

  Rauf went rigid at that threat and instantly asserted, ‘You can forget that as an option—’

  ‘And you can keep your lousy money too. I’ll think myself lucky just to be free from the nightmare of being tied to a guy who has no faith in me at all!’

  ‘You’re married to me and, I’m afraid, there’s no escape clause in this lifetime,’ Rauf heard himself launch back at her in an even blacker rage.

  ‘I’d rather take my chances with the police…I’ll hand myself over, get this sorted out,’ Lily declared again, her chin taking on a defiant tilt.

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Rauf seethed, out of all patience with her.

  ‘I did not put my name on that bank account—’

  ‘Stop lying to me! Gilman needed your name on the account because you’re a director in Harris Travel, which means that he can lie and say he opened up that account as an employee at your request! As a director, you can be held liable for the disappearance of the funds I invested in the firm!’

  Without warning, Lily’s knees betrayed a lowering need to knock together in fright and she sank down into a seat on the other side of the cabin. She had not realised that the awarding of that directorship by her father from which she had yet to earn a single penny meant that she could be put in such a position. Now at last she understood why Brett had smugly informed her that she
would have to protect him. Very probably, Brett had put her name on the account with his own for the reasons that Rauf had just defined, and no wonder her sister’s ex-husband had crowed when she had announced that she and Rauf had just got married! Brett would also have foreseen the unlikelihood of Rauf choosing to press charges over the stolen cash when to do so would cast doubt on his own wife’s honesty. But Lily could not abide even the idea of Brett Gilman escaping his just deserts!

  Having thought that through, having cast her mind back over the misery Brett had sentenced her to suffer when she’d been too young and naive to know how to fight back, Lily breathed in slow and deep to strengthen herself. She was very pale but she folded her trembling hands together on her lap and finally lifted her head high. ‘Well, it’s better that I should be held liable than either my sister, who has children, or my father, who has a string of health problems,’ she pointed out with quiet determination.

  ‘When are you going to stop talking nonsense?’ Rauf demanded, throwing his arms wide in incredulous roaring frustration, for the dialogue was travelling into fanciful realms that made no sense at all to him. ‘There will be no prosecution about the missing money for the very obvious reason that I am not prepared to label my wife a thief!’

  ‘But that would mean that Brett got off scot-free…and I couldn’t stand that,’ Lily stated. ‘He has caused my family and me so much unhappiness that I want him to pay for it even if it means that I have to tolerate suspicion being cast on me for a while. But I firmly believe that the truth will come out…and that in a law court his guilt would be proved.’

  Rage beginning to dwindle in the face of such agonisingly naive statements, Rauf studied Lily with the inescapable conviction that once again, against all belief and the apparent facts, he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. From where he stood, he could practically feel the flames of idealistic, self-sacrificing fervour Lily exuded and he snatched up that fax from the Turkish bank’s head office with a hand that was far from steady.

  Her name was on the account but that was not actual evidence that she herself had put it there. After all, what was to have prevented Gilman from taking another blonde woman into the bank to open that account and supplying a piece of identification purloined from Lily without her knowledge? Nor had she been a co-signatory on the account, which meant that the withdrawals had been made solely by Gilman. In fact, Rauf registered at that second, calmer reappraisal, Lily’s name being on that account bore all the hallmarks of a clumsy attempt by Gilman to cover his own tracks and spread the blame. Suddenly, he was certain that he would discover on further investigation that Lily’s signature on opening the account had been forged. Lily had reacted with honest anger and she had no fear of talking to the police. Furthermore, no sane guilty woman would seek to defend herself and engage his support by angrily abusing him and threatening to divorce him!

  ‘We’re going to be meeting my family in little more than an hour,’ Rauf drawled not quite levelly because, so shattered was he by the belief that he had again misjudged her, clinging to what he saw as a safe certainty felt comforting. He had fallen once more into the same chasm of doubting her and he cursed the jealousy that had clouded his judgement. He knew he had to redress the damage he had done and grovel…only grovelling was not a talent that had ever come to Rauf in any shape or form.

  Lily gaped at him. ‘I’m hardly going to go ahead with that now—’

  ‘But you have convinced me that you are innocent of any blame. I wasn’t prepared for that fax and I overreacted to it and I must apologise to you. A more level-headed examination of the facts does indeed suggest that Gilman has tried to frame you,’ Rauf asserted levelly.

  ‘But it’s obvious that you’ve never been able to trust me,’ Lily said tightly. ‘Your suspicions about Brett and I have always been there and have never gone away—’

  ‘But it’s all out in the open now and I’m finally convinced that there was never anything inappropriate in your dealings with Gilman!’ Rauf swore with fierce intensity, dark-as-midnight eyes glittering, revealing his steadily rising stress level, for he was not accustomed to Lily not listening to what he said or rejecting his pleas in his own defence. ‘Right now, I don’t give a damn about him…I’m much more concerned about us—’

  ‘Why would that be? Even though you couldn’t trust me, you still married me. I find that very strange and extremely hurtful,’ Lily confessed a little unsteadily, for tears were prickling at the back of her aching eyes. ‘But that’s the way it is and what it means is that you have never cared for me as you ought to care for me—’

  ‘You are totally wrong about that.’ Getting tenser by the second, for Lily was in a frame of mind he had never before had to deal with, Rauf strode forward and attempted to reach for her hands. However, Lily only shrank back and coiled her fingers even tighter together, resisting even his touch.

  ‘No, I’m not…from start to finish, all you can ever have wanted from me was sex and all you still want from me is sex…and you’re so obsessed with the sex that you were even willing to stay married to a woman whom you once believed not only carried on with her own sister’s husband, but also stole from you!’ Lily condemned in tight, jerky spurts of words. ‘I don’t think that’s healthy. I don’t think anyone would think that was healthy—’

  ‘And put like that it doesn’t sound healthy either.’ Rauf groaned with a feeling grimace, dropping down into an athletic crouch beside her seat and striving to gain eye contact because he knew that always got results. ‘But to write off everything that is between us as just sex is outrageous—’

  ‘I think so too, but then I also think you’re just orientated that way,’ Lily muttered ruefully, finally looking up to connect with his beautiful dark golden eyes and the rather stunned light that was starting to take root there. ‘You’re also the most dreadfully suspicious guy I have ever met—’

  ‘But only over this one single issue,’ Rauf interrupted at speed, desperate for her to make that distinction. ‘And that issue is that bastard, Gilman, and every single misunderstanding that has occurred between us has related to him in some way—’

  ‘I really don’t think you can call accusing your own wife of being a thief…a misunderstanding,’ Lily interrupted heavily.

  ‘I have a very quick temper and an obvious and very regrettable propensity for leaping to the wrong conclusion when it comes to you.’ Pouncing on her hands the instant her slender fingers loosened their grip on each other, Rauf tugged her upright out of her seat. ‘But that is only because I care so much about you. I’m sorry, güzelim.’

  But just then even the rare sight of Rauf looking drawn and taut with strain could not make Lily swerve in her convictions. She had always loved him and as a result felt she had been much too willing to overlook the flaws in their relationship. But now harsh reality had punctured her happiness and she believed all that she had said to him. She also reckoned that he was hopeless at working out what went on inside his own complex head. After all, he had looked very shocked when she had said that his sole interest in her was sex, but when had he ever mentioned anything else?

  ‘I’m sure you can explain to your family that you made a mistake getting married to me in such haste—’

  ‘They’d still expect me to bring the mistake home,’ Rauf cut in with helpless irony as he settled her back in her seat and did up her belt because the jet was soon to land. ‘In the Kasabian family, when you get married, you stay married—’

  ‘Maybe the Harris women have a fatal habit of marrying the wrong men—’

  ‘Putting me on a level with Gilman is hitting way below the belt—’

  ‘If we’ve already split up, it would be less embarrassing for you when I’m helping the police with their enquiries,’ Lily told him flatly.

  ‘You won’t be helping the police with any enquiries!’ Rauf countered with savage determination, his adrenalin racing at the mere mention of such a development, and at the same time as he spoke he saw his
entire system of values take a metaphorical lurch into new and dangerously disturbing territory. For hadn’t he too once believed that it was always right to speak the truth? Only now intelligence was suggesting the direct opposite. That fax made Lily look like an embezzler and Gilman’s co-conspirator.

  Just then, Rauf registered that there was nothing that he would not do to protect Lily from potential harm. And if protecting Lily meant lying and burying the evidence to ensure that she could in no way be tainted or threatened by Gilman’s crimes, he would do it without hesitation. He was shocked by that awareness but he only had to look at Lily and think of her in a prison cell and every one of his ethics and every one of his principles went into hiding and what was left immediately assured him that the ends justified the means.

  As the jet landed Lily was in a complete daze at the far-reaching decisions she had made. Yet, Brett had to be stopped. Enough was enough. What other awful things might Brett do if he was left free? Was she to spend the rest of her days in secret fear of the man? And why should Rauf lose his money because he had married her? That would be wrong. It would be even more wrong if Rauf or his family were to suffer embarrassment through his having married a woman in danger of being arrested for fraud. After all, if she could be held liable as a director of Harris Travel for the disappearance of Rauf’s investment that also meant that she could be held liable for the villa fraud as well…didn’t he realise that she saw that now?

  She shivered, cold, quaking dismay springing her from her daze. How could she even blame Rauf for his distrust when that fax had thrown up such seemingly convincing proof of her involvement in the matter of those missing funds? How could she blame him when she had yet to tell him the real truth about her relationship with Brett? Possibly, Rauf had always sensed that he was not hearing the whole story and that was why he had stayed unconvinced. Yet what was the point of telling him now when they were parting? For of course they had to part; if Brett was to be prosecuted, if Rauf was to be protected from scandal, there was no option on that score.