Closing her eyes, she lifted an arm up to cover them, and pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling on the tears she was having to fight. For this was not a new situation she was dealing with here. It had happened before—often—and was just one of the many reasons why she had left him in the end. The pain had been too great to go on taking it time after time. His pain, her pain—she had never been able to distinguish where one ended and the other began. The only difference here tonight was that she’d somehow managed to let herself forget that, until this cold, solitary moment.
Hassan stood beneath the pulsing jet of the power shower and wanted to hit something so badly that he had to brace his hands against the tiles and lock every muscle to keep the murderous feeling in. His body was replete but his heart was grinding against his ribcage with a frustration that nothing could cure.
Silence. He hated that silence. He hated knowing he had nothing worth saying with which to fill it in. And he still had to go back in there and face it. Face the dragging sense of his own helplessness and—worse—he had to face hers.
His wife. His woman. The other half of him. Head lowered so the water sluiced onto his shoulders and down his back, he tried to predict what her next move was going to be, and came up with only one grim answer. She was not going to stay. He could bully her as much as he liked, but in the end she was still going to walk away from him unless he could come up with something important enough to make her stay.
Maybe he should have used more of his father’s illness, he told himself. A man she loved, a man she’d used to spend hours of every day with, talking, playing board games or just quietly reading to him when he was too weak to enjoy anything else.
But his father had not been enough to make her want to stay the last time. The old fool had given her his blessing, had missed her terribly, yet even on the day he’d gone to see him before he left the palace he had still maintained that Leona had had to do what she’d believed was right.
So who was in the wrong here? Him for wanting to spend his life with one particular woman, or Leona for wanting to do what was right?
He hated that phrase, doing what was right. It reeked of duty at the expense of everything: duty to his family, duty to his country, duty to produce the next Al-Qadim son and heir.
Well, I don’t need a son. I don’t need a second wife to produce one for me like some specially selected brood mare! I need a beautiful red-haired creature who makes my heart ache each time I look at her. I don’t need to see that glazed look of emptiness she wears after we make love!
On a sigh he turned round, swapped braced hands for braced shoulders against the shower wall. The water hit his face and stopped him breathing. He didn’t care if he never breathed again—until instinct took over from grim stubbornness and forced him to move again.
Coming out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he had to scan the room before he spotted her sitting curled up in one of the chairs. She had opened the curtains and was just sitting there staring out, with her wonderful hair gleaming hot against the pale damask upholstery. She had wrapped herself in a swathe of white and a glance at the tumbled bed told him she had dragged free the sheet of Egyptian cotton to wear.
His gaze dropped to the floor by the bed, where their clothes still lay in an intimate huddle that was a lot more honest than the two of them were with each other.
‘Find out how Ethan is.’
The sound of her voice brought his attention back to her. She hadn’t moved, had not turned to look at him, and the demand spoke volumes as to what was really being said. Barter and exchange. She had given him more of herself than she had intended to do; now she wanted something back by return.
Without a word he crossed to the internal telephone and found out what she wanted to know, ordered some food to be sent in to them, then strode across the room to sit down in the chair next to hers. ‘He caught an accidental blow to the jaw which knocked him out for a minute or two, but he is fine now,’ he assured her. ‘And is dining with Rafiq as we speak.’
‘So he wasn’t part of this great plan of abduction you plotted with my father.’ It wasn’t a question, it was a sign of relief.
‘I am devious and underhand on occasion but not quite that devious and underhand,’ he countered dryly.
Her chin was resting on her bent knees, but she turned her head to look at him through dark, dark eyes. Her hair flowed across her white-swathed shoulders, and her soft mouth looked vulnerable enough to conquer in one smooth swoop. His body quickened, temptation clawing across flesh hidden beneath his short robe of sand-coloured silk.
‘Convincing my own father to plot against me wasn’t devious or underhand?’ she questioned.
‘He was relieved I was ready to break the deadlock,’ he informed her. ‘He wished me well, then offered me all the help he could give.’
Her lack of comment was one in itself. Her following sigh punctuated it. She was seeing betrayal from her own father, but it just was not true. ‘You knew he worried about you,’ he inserted huskily. ‘Yet you didn’t tell him why you left me, did you?’
The remark lost him contact with her eyes as she turned them frontward again, and the way she stared out into the inky blackness beyond the window closed up his throat, because he knew what she was really seeing as she looked out there.
‘Coming to terms with being a failure is not something I wanted to share with anyone,’ she murmured dully.
‘You are not a failure,’ he denied.
‘I am infertile!’ She flashed out the one word neither of them wanted to hear.
It launched Hassan to his feet on a surge of anger. ‘You are not infertile!’ he ground out harshly. ‘That is not what the doctors said, and you know it is not!’
‘Will you stop hiding from it?’ she cried, scrambling to her feet to stand facing him, with her face as white as the sheet she clutched around her and her eyes as black as the darkness outside. ‘I have one defunct ovary and the other one ovulates only when it feels like it!’ She spelt it out for him.
‘Which does not add up to infertility,’ he countered forcefully.
‘After all of these years of nothing, you can still bring yourself to say that?’
She was staring up at him as if he was deliberately trying to hurt her. And, because he had no answer to that final charge, he had to ask himself if that had been his subconscious intention. The last year had been hell to live through and the year preceding only marginally better. Married life had become a place in which they’d walked with the darkness of disappointment shadowing their past and future. In the end, Leona had not been able to take it any more so she’d left him. If she wanted to know what failure really felt like then she should have trodden in his shoes as he’d battled with his own failure to relieve this woman he loved of the heavy burden she was forced to carry.
‘We will try other methods of conception,’ he stated grimly.
If it was possible her face went even whiter. ‘My eggs harvested like grains of wheat and your son conceived in a test tube? Your people would never forgive me for putting you through such an indignity, and those who keep the Al-Qadim family in power will view the whole process with deep suspicion.’
Her voice had begun to wobble. His own throat closed on the need to swallow, because she was right, though he did not want her to be. For she was talking about the old ones, those tribal leaders of the desert who really maintained the balance of power in Rahman. They lived by the old ways and regarded anything remotely modern as necessary evil to be embraced only if all other sources had been exhausted. Hassan had taken a big risk when he’d married a western woman. The old ones had surprised him by deciding to see his decision to do so as a sign of strength. But that had been the only concession they had offered him with regard to his choice of wife. For why go to such extremes to father a son he could conceive as easily by taking a second wife?
Which was why this subject had always been so sensitive, and why Leona suddenly shook her head an
d said, ‘Oh, why did you have to bring me back here?’ Then she turned and walked quickly away from him, making unerringly for the bathroom he had so recently used for the same purpose—to be alone with her pain.
CHAPTER FOUR
TWO hours, Leona noticed, as she removed her slender gold watch from her wrist with badly trembling fingers and laid it on the marble surface along with the diamonds from her ears and throat. Two hours together and already they were tearing each other to pieces.
On a sigh she swivelled round to sink down onto the toilet seat and stare dully at her surroundings. White. Everything was white. White-tiled walls and floor, white ceramics—even the sheet she had discarded lay in a soft white heap on the floor. The room needed a bit of colour to add some—
She stopped herself right there, closing her eyes on the knowledge that she had slipped into professional mode and knowing she had done it to escape from what she should really be thinking about.
This situation, this mad, foolish, heart-flaying situation, which was also so bitter-sweet and special. She didn’t know whether to laugh at Hassan’s outrageous method of bringing them together, or sob at the unnecessary agony he was causing the both of them.
In the end she did both, released a laugh that turned into a sob and buried the sound in her hands. Each look, each touch, was an act of love that bound them together. Each word, each thought, was an act of pain that tore them apart at the seams.
Then she remembered his face when he had made the ultimate sacrifice. Chin up, face carved, mouth so flat it was hardly a mouth any more. When the man had had to turn himself into a prince before he could utter the words, ‘We will try other methods of conception,’ she had known they had nothing left to fight for.
What was she supposed to have done? Made the reciprocal sacrifice to their love and offered to remain his first wife while he took a second? She just could not do it, could not live with the agony of knowing that when he wasn’t in her bed he would be lying in another. The very idea was enough to set her insides curling up in pained dismay while her covered eyes caught nightmare visions of him trying to be fair, trying to pretend it wasn’t really happening, that he wasn’t over the moon when the new wife conceived his first child. How long after that before his love began to shift from her to this other woman with whom he could relax—enjoy her without feeling pain every time he looked at her?
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘Stop it.’ She began to shiver. It just wasn’t even an option, so she must stop thinking about it! He knew that—he knew it! It was why he had taunted her with the suggestion earlier. He had been angry and had gone for the jugular and had enjoyed watching her die in front of him! It had always been like this: exploding flashes of anger and frustration, followed by wild leaps into sensual forgetfulness, followed by the low-of-low moments when neither could even look at the other because the empty truth was always still waiting there for them to re-emerge.
Empty.
On a groan she stood up, and groaned again as tiny muscles all over her body protested at being forced into movement. The fall, the lovemaking, or just the sheer stress of it all? she wondered, then wearily supposed it was a combination of all three.
So why do it? Why put them both back into a situation they had played so many times before it was wretched? Or was that it? she then thought on a sudden chill that shot down her backbone. Had he needed to play out the scene this one last time before he could finally accept that their marriage was over?
Sick. She felt sick. On trembling legs she headed quickly for the shower cubicle and switched the jet on so water sluiced over her body. Duty. It was all down to duty. His duty to produce an heir, her duty to let him. With any other man the love would be enough; those other methods of conception would be made bearable by the strength of that love. But she’d fallen in love with a prince not a man. And the prince had fallen in love with a barren woman.
Barren. How ugly that word was. How cold and bitter and horribly cheap. For there was nothing barren about the way she was feeling, nor did those feelings come cheap. They cost her a part of herself each time she experienced them. Like now, as they ate away at her insides until it was all she could do to slide down into a pathetic huddle in the corner of the shower cubicle and wait for it all to recede.
Where was she? What was she doing in there? She had been shut inside the bathroom for half an hour, and with a glance at his watch, Hassan continued to pace the floor on the vow that if she didn’t come out in two minutes he was going in there after her.
None of this—none of it—was going the way he had planned it. How had he managed to trick himself into diluting just how deep their emotions ran, how painful the whole thing was going to be? He hit his brow with the palm of his hand, then uttered a few choice curses at his arrogant belief that all he’d needed to do was hook her up and haul her back in for the rest to fall into place around them.
All he’d wanted to do was make sure she was safe, back here where she belonged, no matter what the problems. So instead he’d scared the life out of her, almost lost her to the depths of the ocean, fought like the devil over issues that were so old they did not need raking over! He’d even lied to score points, had watched her run in a flood of tears, watched her fly through the air down a set of stairs he now wished had never been put there. Shocked, winded and dazed by the whole crazy situation, he had then committed his worst sin and had ravished her. Now she had locked herself away behind a bathroom door because she could not deal with him daring to make an offer they both knew was not, and never had been, a real option!
What was left? Did he unsheath his ceremonial scabbard and offer to finish them both off like two tragic lovers?
Oh, may Allah forgive him, he prayed as his blood ran cold and he leapt towards the bathroom door. She wouldn’t. She was made of stronger stuff, he told himself as he lifted a clenched fist to bang on the door just as it came open.
She was wearing only a towel and her hair was wet, slicked to her beautiful head like a ruby satin veil. Momentarily shocked by the unexpected face-to-face confrontation, they both just stared at each other. Then he bit out, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’
He had no answer to offer that did not sound insane, so he took another way out and reached for her, pulled her into his arms and kissed her—hard. By the time he let her up for air again she was breathless.
‘Hassan—’
‘No,’ he interrupted. ‘We have talked enough for one night.’
Turning away, he went over to the bed to retrieve the pearl-white silk robe he had laid out ready for her. During her absence the room had been returned to its natural neatness, at his instruction, and a table had been laid for dinner in the centre, with the food waiting for them on a heated trolley standing beside it.
He saw her eyes taking all of this in as he walked back to where she was standing. She also noticed that the lights had been turned down and candles had been lit on the table. She was no fool; she knew he had set the scene with a second seduction in mind and he didn’t bother to deny it.
‘Here,’ he said, and opened the robe up between his hands, inviting her to slip into it.
There was a pause where she kept her eyes hidden beneath the sweep of her dusky lashes. She was trying to decide how to deal with this and he waited in silence, more than willing to let the decision be hers after having spent the previous few minutes listing every other wrong move he had made until now.
‘Just for tonight,’ she said, and lifted those lashes to show him the firmness of that decision. ‘Tomorrow you take me back to San Estéban.’
His mouth flexed as the urge to say, Never, throbbed on the end of his tongue. ‘Tomorrow we—talk about it,’ he offered as his only compromise, though he knew it was no compromise at all and wondered if she knew it too.
He suspected she did, suspected she knew he had not gone to all of this trouble just to snatch a single night with her. But those wonderful
lashes fluttered down again. Her soft mouth, still pulsing from his kiss, closed over words she decided not to say, and with only a nod of her head she lost the towel, stepped forward and turned to allow him to help feed her arms into the kimono-type sleeves of the robe.
It was a concession he knew he did not deserve. A concession he wanted to repay with a kiss of another kind, where bodies met and senses took over. Instead, he turned her to face him, smoothed his fingers down the robe’s silken border from slender shoulders to narrow waist, then reached for the belt and tied it for her.
His gentle ministrations brought a reluctant smile to her lips. ‘The calm before the storm,’ she likened dryly.
‘Better this than what I really want to do,’ he very ruefully replied.
‘You mean this?’ she asked, and lifted her eyes to his to let him see what was running through her head, then reached up and kissed him, before drawing away again with a very mocking smile.
As she turned to walk towards the food trolley she managed to trail her fingers over that part of him that was already so hard it was almost an embarrassment. The little vixen. He released a soft laugh. She might appear subdued on the surface, but underneath she still possessed enough spirit to play the tease.
They ate poached salmon on a bed of spinach, and beef stroganoff laden with cream. Hassan kept her glass filled with the crisp dry white wine she liked, while he drank sparkling water. As the wine helped mellow her mood some more, Leona managed to completely convince herself that all she wanted was this one wonderful night and she was prepared to live on it for ever. By the time the meal was finished and he suggested a walk on the deck, she was happy to go with him.
Outside the air was warm and as silken as the darkness that surrounded them. Both in bare feet, dressed only in their robes, they strolled along the deck and could have been the only two people on board it was so quiet and deserted.
Hot-Blooded Husbands Bundle Page 5