by Lynne Graham
Fresh from his successful manoeuvres in England, and having stopped off in Paris to do some necessary shopping on the way home, Rauf watched the staff struggling to cart the vast bulk of the carved düzen up the steps of his family home. Lily would be surprised and pleased that he was getting into the spirit of the occasion. In eight days, fourteen hours and thirty seven minutes, Lily would be back where she belonged by his side, in his home and in his bed. While he waited, he would use that time to demonstrate what a wonderful husband he could be: romantic, tender, caring, considerate, sensitive, generous, patient, magnanimous and tolerant. Having mentally scored a little tick beside each and every one of those desirable qualities in the performance of which he was certain he could excel, Rauf made his entrance and was relieved to find Lily alone.
‘Lily…’ he breathed with satisfaction.
‘Rauf…’ Lily feasted her shadowed blue eyes on him for one painful moment and managed a lacklustre smile. In a lightweight dove-grey suit cut to fit his lithe, wide-shouldered masculine physique by a master tailor with designer style, Rauf looked utterly breathtaking: sleek, sexy, gorgeous. There he lounged, the ultimate fantasy fix of masculinity, his face slashed by a vibrant smile that was capable of melting the skin off her bones…but Lily blocked him out in self-defence and wished her rapid heartbeat had as much pride.
‘Miss me?’ Rauf demanded.
‘We’ve been very busy here…’ Lily compressed her soft mouth. After all, it had taken Rauf two days to return to Turkey while his father had flown back after less than twenty-four hours away. But then, just as she should have known, she told herself wretchedly, if her body was out of bounds Rauf had been in no great hurry to get back to her and that had hurt. But was it fair for her to judge him on that? After all, who had tossed and turned every night just thinking about him? Thinking blush-making stuff too, Lily reminded herself guiltily, recalling the depth of her own longing for him and striving not to cringe where she sat.
At that point a welcome diversion was created by the entry of a staggeringly large wooden trunk adorned with ornate carving.
‘The düzen…my first gift to you.’ Resisting a dangerous urge to ask what was the matter with her, reminding himself that his former lack of faith in her had undoubtedly made her think less of him, Rauf opened the trunk and removed a large box from the interior.
‘What’s this?’ Lily asked weakly.
‘The fabric for your wedding dress…it’s an old custom for the bridegroom to provide it—’
‘I thought you weren’t into customs…’ Determined not to be impressed, Lily lifted the lid on the box. An exquisite expanse of fine gold hand-embroidered white silk was revealed. ‘Oh…it’s out of this world!’
‘Don’t let me see it—’ Rauf warned as she almost cast aside the lid in her excitement.
‘I thought you chose it—’
Rauf dealt her a discomfited look that tugged at her heart no matter how hard she tried to resist. ‘Don’t mention it to the diehard traditionalists in the household, but I want it to be a surprise when I see you in your wedding gown. I just listed what I thought you might dislike and left the choosing to the designer. She’s flying in this evening for a dress fitting.’
Lily replaced the lid on the box and studied him with dreamy eyes because she found that confession so sweet. It was no use. She couldn’t be cool with him when she just loved him to death. So maybe he did have a slight secret yen for the svelte, sophisticated Kasmet but she was not about to make the crucial error of questioning him on that score. Of course, Rauf had had at least one significant relationship and if she pried into his past he would resent it and what would she gain? Well, he would tell her the truth if she asked, only sometimes the truth could hurt, she acknowledged ruefully.
‘I picked everything else in the trunk,’ Rauf assured her.
‘Everything else…?’ Lily got up to look down into the trunk in amazement. It was packed full of clothes.
‘Your trousseau…’ Rauf regarded her with vibrant amusement. ‘But I had the lingerie conveyed up to your room in a separate delivery. I didn’t want to embarrass you—’
‘You bought me lingerie…?’
‘And what a very erotic experience that was, güzelim.’ The smouldering undertone Rauf utilised made her mouth run dry and her face burn.
The tap-tap of his great-grandmother’s stick warned that they were about to have company. Nelispah Kasabian’s delight at the sight of that giant trunk was touching to behold.
‘Of course, I’m being shortchanged here,’ Rauf murmured silkily to Lily under cover of the chatter that erupted between their companions.
‘How?’
‘You’re supposed to respond with the equivalent of a bottom drawer you’ve been industriously sewing and collecting up since childhood,’ Rauf shared mockingly. ‘Full of useful items like saddlebags and saucepans and hand-stitched sheets.’
‘I’m afraid you’re getting the equivalent of the barefoot bride,’ Lily confided, dying to ask him how he had got on with Hilary but reluctant to do so with an audience around.
Half an hour later, Rauf took Lily in his car to see the sumptuous Topkapi Palace, the former residence of the Ottoman sultans for over four hundred years, out at Seraglio Point.
‘So what happened with my sister and why hasn’t she phoned me?’
‘She said that she would prefer to talk to you when she comes over for the wedding—’
‘Stop holding out on me…was she horribly upset about the villas?’
‘Shocked and extremely angry. However, your father has agreed that I can buy into Harris Travel in the guise of an equal partner,’ Rauf divulged. ‘Hilary said no initially but I can be very persuasive.’
‘Yes, I know…’ Studying his bold bronzed profile, picking up on the quiet note of satisfaction in his dark, deep drawl, she smiled. ‘You’ve been incredibly kind—’
‘Your family has had a rough ride and I wanted to help—’
‘Do you always get what you want?’
‘You were one of my very few failures.’
‘And Kasmet?’ The other woman’s name just leapt off Lily’s tongue before she could prevent it.
At the traffic lights, Rauf turned with a frown to shoot her a piercing dark glance of enquiry. ‘Where did you meet her?’
Lily coloured. ‘She was at the tea party your mother held—’
Rauf grimaced. ‘My father still does business with her father but I’m surprised she had the nerve to attend. None of us like her—’
‘According to her, you’re still madly in love with her.’
Rauf dealt her a thunderstruck appraisal. ‘Eleven years after I caught her in bed with someone else?’ he demanded in disbelief.
‘Then I gather you didn’t have a recent affair with her.’ Lily was amused.
Car horns shrilled behind them as Rauf’s stunned scrutiny flared into outrage. ‘Are you out of your mind? She told you that? Right,’ he ground out, nosing the sleek sports car with aggressive intent into another lane. ‘I’m going over to her home to settle this now—’
‘No…no, please, let’s not do that!’ Lily exclaimed in lively dismay.
‘If she wants to tell lies, she can pay the price of being called on them!’
‘I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction—’
‘Of knowing that you believed every word?’ Rauf slotted in. ‘You’re my wife and I won’t be slandered, nor will I allow anyone to upset you—’
‘I’ll be much more upset if you make a big thing of this!’ Lily warned. ‘I just wondered…that’s all, but now I can accept that Kasmet was simply being spiteful—’
‘After I’ve spoken to her, she won’t indulge that spite around you again,’ Rauf swore, untouched by her efforts to cool him down.
Never had Lily been so relieved as when Rauf hit the bell on a smart townhouse some minutes later and nobody answered the door. Extravagantly handsome features still set with fierce determination, he
swung back into the car.
‘I can’t wait to see the Topkapi Palace…’ Lily murmured placatingly.
Rauf looked at her, beautiful eyes molten gold, and then he leant over her, closed one hand into the silky fall of her pale hair and kissed her with a drugging, possessive fervour that electrified her sensation-starved body. She tipped her head back, heart hammering, heat burning between her slender thighs, opening her mouth to his, trembling at the hungry thrust of his tongue into the tender interior.
With a driven groan, Rauf jerked back from her, dragged in a shuddering breath. ‘You see…I lose it with you. I can’t even keep my hands off you in public places!’
‘So let’s go somewhere private,’ Lily heard herself whisper without even thinking about it.
‘No…no sneaking around,’ Rauf spelt out, shooting the powerful car into reverse without looking back at her.
Lily had flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘We’re married!’
‘We’ve got a lifetime ahead,’ Rauf asserted grittily, resisting temptation with all his might.
An hour later, in the shade of the garden pavilion in the fourth courtyard of the palace, Lily gazed at the spectacular view of the sea but her thoughts were far away. She was thinking of the immediacy with which Rauf had responded to her questions about Kasmet and comparing his blunt honesty with her own secrecy about Brett. Time and time again, she had utilised weak excuses to persuade herself that she need not tell Rauf the unpleasant truth about Brett’s behaviour towards her, but in only telling half of the story she had not been fair to either herself or Rauf.
Drawing in a slow, strengthening breath of the hot, still air, Lily said in sudden decision. ‘I have something I want to tell you…I want you to understand why I’ve always been scared of Brett…. No, please don’t interrupt me!’
In open disconcertion, Rauf made a sudden movement towards her, his frowning dark golden gaze probing her pale, taut face.
In the uneasy silence, Lily jerked a slim shoulder. ‘I suppose it’s an irrational fear but, the trouble is, he got to me when I was too young to know how to handle a bully like him,’ she confided heavily. ‘That first time I saw Brett with another woman and told Dad, Brett realised that it was me who had seen him. He picked me up at school and acted like a madman because he wanted to frighten me. He shouted at me and threatened me and he said if I ever talked about him again, he would tell Hilary that I’d been…you know…er…trying to come on to him…’
As a revealing look of revulsion entered her stricken gaze in remembrance Rauf bit out something savage in his own language and reached for her knotted hands to take them in his. His big, powerful frame was rigid and the pallor of deep shock and anger was visible round the harsh set of his firm mouth.
‘Even now, I don’t know whether or not Hilary would ever have accepted my word against Brett’s. She was crazy about him and she thought he was very handsome and was always saying how other women flirted with him. So I kept quiet but that wasn’t enough for Brett. He hated me and he liked to make me squirm,’ Lily muttered through compressed lips. ‘For three years until I was able to leave home to go to college, Brett tormented me.’
‘How?’ The demand left Rauf like a bullet and his hands closed taut over hers.
‘When there was nobody else within hearing, he’d make sick comments and stuff…’ Lily grimaced and had to steel herself to continue. ‘About how my body was shaping up…and crack dirty jokes…he never laid a hand on me but I was very scared that, some day, he would.’
Rauf closed supportive arms round her slight, shivering figure and eased her close. He himself was literally shaking with rage. He knew that if he ever got within twenty feet of Gilman, he would want to kill him. He snatched in a great, shuddering lungful of fresh air in an effort to get a grip on himself. What a blind fool he had been not to put what he already knew together and come up with a more likely scenario than Lily having been in love with her sister’s husband! Now he knew what his former accountant, Tecer Godian, had been warning him about: the older man had seen Lily’s fear of her brother-in-law.
‘I didn’t tell Dad because I was afraid that Brett might carry out that threat he’d made and say that I had been trying to tempt him. How could I prove that he was lying when the truth would have wrecked Hilary’s marriage? Who was going to even want to believe me? I couldn’t cope with the situation—’
‘Of course you couldn’t…’ Rauf breathed in a fierce undertone. ‘You should have told me about all this three years ago.’
‘I was afraid you might think that I’d encouraged him and, anyway, keeping it all a secret was too much of a habit by then,’ Lily confessed jaggedly. ‘It was because of Brett that I started to dress the way I do—I was trying not to attract his attention. It was only when I went to college that I realised how different I was from other girls. I was so nervous around the boys…I didn’t even like being looked at because that reminded me of Brett and it made me feel unclean.’
‘It’s all right…all right,’ Rauf muttered thickly, attacked by a raw mixture of guilt and even fiercer regret for his own lack of understanding.
‘But I fell in love with you, so I tried harder with you,’ Lily admitted painfully. ‘After you…well, a good while after you, I went for counselling because I knew it wasn’t normal to feel the way I did.’
For a long time, Rauf just held her close. When the sound of voices warned that they were about to be disturbed, Rauf took her to the restaurant. At a quiet table on the garden terrace, he asked her about the counselling sessions she had attended.
‘Realising that I was letting Brett ruin my life was the start of my recovery,’ Lily said with a wry grimace. ‘All that awful secrecy in my family, the trapped feeling I used to have in our home when he was around, the feeling of helplessness…that was what made me the way I was. I let Brett turn me into a victim—’
‘I didn’t help…’ Rauf closed a hand over hers, his dark-as-midnight eyes overbright with unashamed pain at what she had endured. ‘All along I sensed your reserve with me and it made me uneasy and too quick to ascribe other motives to your behaviour. But I did nothing to encourage your trust, güzelim.’
Her throat thickened and she swallowed hard. It felt good that there were no more secrets between them. He had not doubted her either; no, he had not doubted her for even a moment. A winging sense of joyous relief filled her, natural colour warming her cheeks again, any lingering tension banished.
The days that followed in the run-up to their wedding were a hive of constant activity. Having given her a whistle-stop tour of the main sights of Istanbul, Rauf whisked Lily off to the sites that lay further afield. She made initially nervous inroads into her new wardrobe and discovered that, although the clothes Rauf had chosen for her were a feast of designer style, none could be deemed either revealing or daring, and she teased him about the reality that his great-grandmother admired most of the outfits too.
Midweek, Rauf brought her the evidence of Brett’s attempt to involve her in the fake bank account he had set up at that Turkish bank in London. Rauf had obtained a copy of the signature purporting to have been hers and the handwriting did not even bear the slightest resemblance to her own.
‘A clumsy forgery which would fool nobody,’ Rauf pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Gilman believes that he’s very clever, but he falls down on all the finer details.’
‘Yes, but what’s going to happen about him?’ Lily asked anxiously.
‘I don’t want you to let a single thought of him enter your head.’ His lean, dark features full of purpose, his dark golden eyes rested with concern on her troubled expression. ‘Trust me. He will be dealt with. Never again will he be in a position to hurt you or anyone else in your family.’
By the end of that week, cheerfully anticipating her own family’s arrival for the wedding festivities, Lily hugged an entire series of happy memories to herself and myriad impressions of the rich Turkish culture.
Visiting the
exotic Spice Bazaar in Istanbul where the heady aroma of countless spices mingled in the air had been interesting, but walking hand-in-hand with Rauf had been a quieter and more private pleasure. The fascination of wandering round the amazingly intact ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus had been eclipsed by the preparation with which Rauf had ensured that he could answer her every question as well as any guide and his touching pride and love of the history of his own country.
She had done the tourist trail for her sister: she had bathed in the warm pools on the blinding white travertine terraces at Pammukkale, wandered through an astonishing underground city once inhabited by early Christians in Cappadochia and, at Dalyan, sailed alone with Rauf along the sleepy river bounded on all sides by swaying thickets of reeds. They lunched from a hamper in the shade of a chestnut tree and she listened to him tell her about childhood picnics, attended by anything up to seventy members of his extended family and still a favoured way of entertaining.
‘You like picnics too…’ Rauf made that reminder in a teasing undertone as he banded both arms round her to tug her into closer connection with his long, powerful frame, sending a chain reaction of intense awareness travelling through her. ‘Only a very obstinate male would have fought the inevitable as long as I did. But I must confess that it is three years since I chose the diamond ring you wear on your finger.’
‘Sorry?’ Blue eyes wide, Lily met his burnished golden gaze in pure shock. ‘You bought me an engagement ring then?’
‘Yes…I intended to ask you to marry me that last weekend I spent with you in England,’ Rauf confessed ruefully. ‘But your niece, Gemma, was ill when we arrived and your father was preoccupied with that contract. Even I could see that it wasn’t the right time to stage a romantic proposal…I expected to fly back to see you the following week.’
‘And instead you saw me with Brett at the hotel and assumed the worst.’ Lily was overjoyed that, in spite of their imperfect relationship three years earlier, Rauf had wanted to marry her even then, but she was also hurt that they should still have parted in misunderstanding and lost each other.