by Penny Jordan
Ash was extending his hand to her, and Sophia was far too aware of the need for royal protocol to be observed in public to refuse to take it. It must be because she had been kneeling down for so long that she felt so dizzy, she decided as she got to her feet.
It was Ash who cordially thanked the teachers for permitting them to intrude on the children’s lessons and Ash, too, who shook hands with everyone before exiting the room, leaving her to follow behind him.
Outside, the pungent smell of camel dung stung Sophia’s nose. The animals were tethered close to their owners, as the brightly dressed tribeswomen waited patiently for their children to finish their schooling for the day. The nomad women’s jewellery jangled musically as they made their low bows to Ash, their odhni modestly pulled across their faces to conceal them, the ends fluttering in the dusty breeze.
‘The maharani will travel back with me,’ Ash told her waiting escort, turning to Sophia herself to tell her, ‘There is something I wish to discuss with you.’
‘There is something I want to talk to you about, as well,’ Sophia responded.
Once they were together inside the car, though, heading back to the palace, the darkened windows of the limousine somehow made the interior of the vehicle more secluded and intimate. Sophia didn’t feel quite as confident about broaching with Ash the possibility of taking for herself a more proactive role in his modernisation plans as she had done when she had listened to Aashna on their outward journey. She couldn’t forget how her father had rejected her request to do something on Santina, and how that had made her feel.
Ash looked out of the darkened car window. The sight of Sophia crouching on the floor surrounded by the village children, communicating with them and so plainly loving being with them, had touched a nerve. Only once had he been able to persuade Nasreen to visit one of his schools with him. She had complained that the children were dirty and had refused to have anything to do with them. Ash could still remember the confused, hurt looks he had seen on their faces and those of their mothers. He had sworn that he would never allow that to happen again. Sophia came from a different culture to his own and if anything he would have expected her to be even less inclined to have anything to do with the children than Nasreen. Instead, though … Instead she had reached out to them in such a way that he had seen how happily they had responded to her.
Abruptly he told her, ‘My most senior adviser has suggested that it might be appropriate for you to have a formal role to play. I was wondering how you’d feel about getting more involved in the new-schools programme.’
Immediately Sophia turned towards him, her face alight with delight and excitement. ‘Oh, Ash, I’d love that. In fact, I was going to ask you if I could become involved. I … I love children.’ A small look away from him and a sudden surge of colour into her face told Ash as clearly as though she had spoken the words out loud that she was thinking of their children, of the children he would give her and the children she would conceive for him. The sudden urgency in his body, the slamming thud of his heart and the ache of fierce desire burning in him would have told him exactly what was happening in his own imagination if he hadn’t already known.
‘I was going to ask you if there was a role that I could play, something that might perhaps relieve you of some of the burden of your own royal duties.’
‘There’s also the new hospital plan for women and children,’ Ash answered her. ‘The women, especially those from the nomad tribes, are more likely to be open with you about their medical needs than they are with me. Their culture forbids them contact with men outside their own family circle. In time I want to bring them more into the modern world, but that is complicated and can’t be rushed.’
‘No,’ Sophia agreed. ‘Such things have to be handled sensitively. I could perhaps have lessons in their language—just to learn a few words, you know, to break the ice….’
Suddenly the atmosphere in the car had eased, and Sophia felt able to talk easily to him just as she had done when she was younger. ‘I want to fulfil my role as your wife, your maharani, as fully as I can,’ she told Ash enthusiastically and truthfully. They drove in under the gate which had now become so familiar to her, their car leaving the dust of the open road behind them as the sights and busyness of the walled city closed round them.
‘Since you have said nothing to the contrary I take it that …’
Guessing what he was going to say Sophia interrupted him to confirm, ‘Yes. That is to say, no, I am not pregnant.’
Tonight. Tonight he would allow himself to go to her, Ash decided. He wouldn’t be giving in to an unwanted need within himself if he did. It was, after all, his duty to ensure that he had an heir. Sophia was his. That he should choose to take her to bed to create that heir meant nothing, and did not break his vow to remain emotionally distant from her. Didn’t it? Then why was his heart thudding in such a heavy and impatient manner? Why was his body already aching with its need for her? Physical desire, that was all. Physical desire for her and nothing more.
Sophia would have liked Ash to stay with her after their return to the palace but he had business matters to attend to, and as Parveen told her with some excitement, ‘many boxes’ had arrived from Santina. They were now awaiting her inspection in her bedroom.
Ordering tea and the small sweet biscuits that were a local delicacy and to which she was half afraid she was becoming dangerously addicted, Sophia made her way to her apartment, where the boxes were waiting in her dressing room.
When she opened the first one there was a large rectangular package on top of her clothes with her father’s personal seal on it.
Frowning slightly, Sophia removed it and broke the seal, remembering as she did so how as a small child she had been entranced by the ‘magic’ of stamping her father’s seal in hot wax and then applying it to a piece of paper. She had been happy then, before she had realised that there were doubts about her parentage.
Inside the package was a handwritten letter from her father. His letter would no doubt be a reminder of how she should conduct herself and how angry she had made him, Sophia reflected. She was tempted not to read it but she had been brought up with an observance to duty that prevented her from doing that.
Sitting down she opened the letter and began to read it. To her astonishment, rather than being critical of her and angry, her father’s words were relatively warm and approving.
‘My dear daughter,’ he had written, ‘I write to tell you how delighted I am by your marriage. It is an excellent marriage and one that pleases me a great deal. To have the ties first established via the friendship Alessandro and Ash shared as schoolboys further cemented by your marriage to him can only strengthen the bond between our two states. Such bonds play an important role in the minds of rulers, which is why I have always stressed to all of my children the importance of the right kind of marriages.
‘If I have been overstrict with you then it is because I have been concerned for you. However, I know that in Ash’s care you will be well protected.
‘I know, too, that our two states can look forward to forging even stronger bonds via their shared business, as well as their shared personal interests.’
The letter was signed with her father’s familiar bold and flourishing signature.
The words blurred in front of her as she read them again through the tears she couldn’t hold back. My dear daughter, her father had called her, even if his letter had turned quickly to the more material advantages he hoped her marriage would bring to Santina.
Such small things really, a kind letter from her father, and an acknowledgement earlier in the day from Ash that he trusted her enough to give her a personal role to play with his people. Neither of them could compare with the great love that had once been her goal, but in their way both of them offered her some comfort and some hope for the future.
A young maid arrived with her tea and biscuits. Smiling at the girl as she quietly left the room, Sophia sat down to drink the tea she had po
ured for her. When she’d finished, she put down her cup and then stood, ready to sort through the boxes of clothes that had been sent to her from her home.
Two hours later, she and Parveen had opened all but three of them and filled virtually all her wardrobes and cupboard space with the exception of the small row of wardrobes along the dressing room’s shortest wall.
‘What’s left in these last three boxes can go in there, Parveen,’ Sophia told the maid, indicating the remaining wardrobes.
Immediately her maid looked apprehensive and uncomfortable as she, too, looked at the narrow run of wardrobes, but made no attempt to go and open them.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked her. After a brief struggle where it seemed to Sophia that Parveen wasn’t going to answer her, eventually she managed to blurt out quickly, her head down as though she didn’t want to look directly at Sophia, ‘So sorry, Maharani Sophia, but the clothes of the Maharani Nasreen are in there.’
Nasreen’s clothes were still here all these years after her death. Shock, anger, distaste—Sophia felt them all. A cold shiver ran over her skin, soon followed by an overwhelming feeling she didn’t want to name.
Ash obviously loved his first wife so much that he couldn’t even bear to dispose of her clothes. They were still stored here in the room that was now hers. Nasreen still had Ash’s love; she had his devotion, his loyalty. She had probably been inside his head on their wedding night, and it was probably because of his love for her that he had not been able to bring himself to return to that bed. Well, she might have to put up with all of that, but she was not going to put up with Nasreen’s clothes in what were now her wardrobes, Sophia decided wrathfully.
‘Very well, Parveen,’ she told the maid, adding, ‘you can go now, I will deal with the rest of my own clothes myself.’
The girl looked relieved to be dismissed, Sophia saw.
As soon as Parveen had gone and she was alone in the dressing room, Sophia went over to the short length of wardrobe doors. Standing in front of them, she took a deep breath and then before she could change her mind she yanked open one of the two pairs of double doors. The draft of air caused by the speed with which she had opened the doors caused the delicate silks inside the wardrobe to move sinuously together almost as though someone was actually wearing them. Sophia closed her eyes. The heavy scent escaping from the wardrobe was making her feel slightly sick and dizzy but as desperately as she wanted to close them and to shut away the sight of the delicate garments so different to her own clothes, once worn by the wife Ash had loved, she couldn’t.
Her mood suddenly changed, her earlier fierce, righteous wrath giving way to something more self-destructive and painful. Just seeing the clothes of the woman Ash loved touched those scars within her she knew she must not allow to be reopened. But it was too late. Like serpents escaping from a carelessly sealed basket, the old pain was back.
Reaching out she touched the clothes—red and gold ceremonial saris, sugar-almond-coloured salwar kameez in soft pinks, blues and turquoises. What would she look like dressed in these clothes of another woman? The woman Ash loved. It was as though a terrible compulsion that she couldn’t resist had possessed her.
Unable to stop herself she reached into the wardrobe and removed a pale blue salwar kameez set. Like someone in the grip of a dream—or under hypnosis—she walked into the bedroom with it. She was shaking from head to foot. She knew that what she was doing was wrong—for Nasreen, for Ash and for herself—but somehow she just couldn’t stop herself, and it made her feel sickened and ashamed of her need to see how Nasreen would have looked. Because Ash had wanted Nasreen, desired her as he did not desire Sophia?
No. She did not care about that, but she had her pride and she and Ash must have a child, a son who would one day continue the royal line. That was how it was for them. And besides … Besides, didn’t she herself long for the promise of a new life to love, a child—children—to whom she could give the love she already knew instinctively she would have for them? Quickly she started to undress, despising herself for what she was doing and yet unable to stop herself.
Walking in the private gardens into which his apartment opened, Ash asked himself why the surroundings which normally gave him so much pleasure and solace, this evening made him feel so alone. Was it because their enjoyment, like the enjoyment of the act of love, should be a shared pleasure? His muscles tightened, his body heavy with desire. Sophia. Just thinking about her was enough to send that desire spilling urgently through him.
Every night since their first as a married couple the memory of the way she had looked at his body had tormented him as he tried to find sleep. He wanted to see that look in her eyes again. He wanted to touch her, hold her, lose himself in her as he blotted out the past while together they created their own shared future in the shape of their child. He wanted. He wanted her…. A tormented groan broke from the rigid tension of his throat. He turned back towards the palace, his stride quickening with impatience, just as his body was quickening with his need.
In her bedroom Sophia stared at the stranger looking back at her from the full-length mirror, a stranger wearing another woman’s clothes and smelling of another woman’s scent…. The salwar kameez was slightly loose on her own narrow waist and Nasreen must have been a shade taller than her because the fabric was pooling slightly on the floor around her bare feet. The fine silk shimmered as she walked, subtly hinting at the body that lay beneath it, the diamante beading decorating the scarf with which she had covered her head shimmering as she moved.
Experimentally, Sophia draped the scarf over her lower face, and watched her image in the full-length mirror in front of her. Was this what Ash longed for whenever he had to look at her? Another woman, the woman he truly loved?
He shouldn’t be doing this but he couldn’t help or stop himself, Ash admitted, too impatient to use the public twisting labyrinth of corridors that led to Sophia’s apartments, using instead the passage that his great-grandfather had had installed when the royal apartments had been remodelled so that he and Ash’s great-grandmother could come and go to each other without the knowledge of the servants or the need for formality.
The hidden door in the wall of the entrance hall to Sophia’s apartment, disguised to look like a painting, opened easily to his touch. He might not normally use the passage but that did not mean that it was not kept clean and in order by his household.
Ash pushed open the door to Sophia’s bedroom. And then froze as he stared at the back view of the woman in front of him, not wanting to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
Nasreen. Even though he knew it couldn’t be, a surge of the darkest feelings he thought he had ever experienced eviscerated his guts. His first wife had no place here. Just as she had, in reality, no place in his heart? Just as he now had no right to want to forget that his marriage to her had ever taken place? His own thoughts fell into the darkness of his guilt, trapping him ever deeper in its grip.
The woman moved, and instantly he knew.
Sophia.
Only Sophia with that incredible body of hers could move and walk like that.
Anger. A huge rolling wall of it powered through him. Anger against Nasreen for betraying the duty they had owed each other, anger against Sophia for her intrusion into that place within his conscience where even he could not bear to go, and most of all anger against himself. An anger that came out of nowhere, like a desert storm obliterating reality, destroying the landscape within himself, leaving him alone and defenceless against its power and what it had created. In three strides he was at Sophia’s side, reaching for her to turn her round, to face him as he demanded, ‘Take it off. Take if off now unless you want me to tear it from you.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE shock of Ash’s presence as a witness to something she could only ever want to be private, never mind the fury she could see and feel in him, had Sophia dropping the corner of the scarf, guilt darkening her eyes and burning up under her skin
.
What a dreadful thing to happen. It was bad enough that she had been caught by anyone trying on Nasreen’s clothes, but that it should be Ash who had found her just at the moment when she herself had tasted the acid agony of shame in what she was doing heaped a humiliation on her that she knew was deserved. No wonder Ash was so very, very angry with her. What she had done was surely a violation of something precious and a privacy that should never have been breached by anyone.
She wanted to apologise to Ash. She wanted to tell him that she had only realised too late what an unforgivable thing she was doing in letting her curiosity and envy of Nasreen get the better of her, but Ash was so angry he wouldn’t even let her speak.
The sight of Sophia in Nasreen’s clothes made Ash feel as though raw flesh had been ripped from his body, the anger, the shame, the bitterness he felt infusing that guilt with true darkness. He had no right to blame Nasreen and the memory of their marriage for making him feel like this. And no right to feel that he was being cheated of something that deep down inside he ached for, though he knew he had no right to ache for it. Someone or something? He had come here tonight to be with Sophia after far too many long days—and even longer nights—of battling his own inner demons as he fought to allow himself a logical reason for appeasing the need he knew she aroused in him. That might be a need he had no right to allow himself, but tonight, with the future of his name to the forefront of his mind, he had assured himself that being with Sophia, having sex with her, was permissible under the rules he had laid down for himself after Nasreen’s death.