Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride / The Spanish Husband / The Bellini Bride

‘What’s wrong, Evie?’ he prompted soberly.

Tears washed across her eyes and stayed there. ‘We have a problem,’ she began huskily—only to go silent again when she found she couldn’t continue.

Raschid said nothing, waiting patiently for her to go on. Evie could see his face reflected in the darkened window. He looked grave, the smoothly handsome lines of his features so very still that she knew he had already prepared himself for something dire to come.

And, to her wretched despair, she found she couldn’t do it. He was too important to her. She loved him so deeply that she discovered she couldn’t risk the chance of losing him.

Not yet, she thought achingly. Please, not yet.

‘My mother wants you to find an excuse not to attend my brother’s wedding,’ she said, dragging the half-truth out from the depths of a real desperation.

Another silence. Evie watched that face via its darkened reflection and saw a frown mar its smooth lines. Her heart began to beat with a sickly pump. He wasn’t a fool, this man of hers. His highly tuned instincts where she was concerned had been warning him of something far more disastrous than a silly problem with her mother.

Oh, there was truth in the lie, she grimly acknowledged as she stood there waiting for his response. Her mother had spent the whole of their lunch together today telling Evie in no uncertain terms how much she would prefer it if Sheikh Raschid stayed away from Julian’s high-profile wedding in two weeks’ time.

‘The notoriety that the two of you generate is bound to shift emphasis away from the bride and groom and on to yourselves,’ Lucinda Delahaye had predicted. ‘If he had the smallest amount of sensitivity he would have realised that himself and graciously declined the invitation. But since he has no sensitivity I feel it is your place to tell him.’

But, as both Raschid and her mother knew, Evie was not open to that kind of petty manipulation. Under normal circumstances she wouldn’t have even bothered mentioning such a conversation to Raschid.

So, what had been normal about today? she asked herself starkly as she watched that reflected face shift from puzzlement into annoyance. Within minutes of her getting up this morning the whole day had gone rocketing out of control. Since then she’d felt as if she’d been in a car accident, so shocked and dazed that she’d been barely able to function on a normal level.

In fact, the whole day had gone by in a fog. Until Raschid had taken her to bed of course, she mused ruefully. There the fog had cleared up remarkably—only to be replaced with a different kind of fog.

The glorious fog of loving.

Now even that fog had cleared, she noted heavily, and Raschid was standing behind her looking as if she had really let him down after such a tense build-up.

Which was, in effect, what she had just done.

‘Is that it?’ he said eventually.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, pitifully aware of the depth of her own wretched cowardice.

‘Then go to hell,’ he murmured succinctly, refusing the request without any compunction. And turned his back on her to walk away.

Her heart took a lurching leap to her throat. The way he had said that told her he knew she had just chickened out over something. She turned too, staring anxiously after him as he crossed the room with that long, lithe, graceful stride of his that always set her pulses racing no matter what the mood was like between them.

‘Raschid, you—’

‘I refuse to discuss it,’ he cut in, sounding annoyed, offended and just downright disgusted, which made Evie wonder how he would have reacted to what she had cravenly backed out from saying. ‘Your mother is not your keeper and she certainly isn’t mine!’

‘It’s a fair request,’ she said, surprising herself by jumping to the defence of her mother. It seemed that anything was better than confessing the truth, she ruefully acknowledged. ‘You know as well as I do the kind of interest we generate when we go anywhere together. In this case, it has to be Julian and Christina my mother must consider, not your feelings or mine.’

‘And my father is a very close friend of Christina’s father,’ Raschid coldly countered. ‘In fact, Lord Beverley is almost solely responsible for helping my father overcome some very awkward political and diplomatic obstacles in his quest to reform and modernise my country. I will not offend Christina’s father simply because your mother wants me to.’

The chin was up, Evie noted. The passionate lover was now in full Noble Prince mode.

‘In the face of my father’s failing health,’ Prince Raschid concluded, ‘it is my duty to be there as my father’s representative.’

Duty. Evie knew all about Raschid’s dedication to duty! It was a shame that sense of duty did not extend to encompass the woman who was his lover.

‘So be it,’ she said, suddenly sounding as cold as ever she could sound when she felt like it. ‘But don’t be surprised if I put into place some contingency plans of my own to keep the gossip to its minimum.’

His eyes narrowed on her. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Evie shrugged. ‘Duty,’ she quoted right back at him. ‘I have a duty to ensure that my brother and his bride maintain centre stage on the day of their wedding.’

‘And how do you intend to do that?’ he mocked her. ‘By pretending I don’t exist?’

‘Would you notice if I did?’ Evie threw back cynically.

She could have bitten off her tongue when his sharp eyes narrowed. ‘Was that it?’ he demanded. ‘Was that remark a big hint to what is actually eating at you tonight, Evie?’ He clarified the question. ‘That I don’t give you enough of my attention?’

So he had guessed that she’d just dissembled. Evie smiled to herself and wondered how he would react if she told him he couldn’t be any further from the truth.

‘Would you care that much if it was?’ she countered, throwing him yet another red herring.

He didn’t answer—which was, she supposed bleakly, an answer in itself.

‘I’m tired,’ she said wearily. ‘I think I’ll go home…’

Which was just another provoking remark he let float pointedly by him. ‘I have to go away tomorrow,’ he informed her instead. ‘I will be gone for about a week. When I get back I think we need to talk.’

Evie shivered, feeling the icy fingers of a terrible foreboding go trailing down her spine. ‘Fine,’ she said, moving towards the door.

He said not a word, but his eyes did as they followed her passage across the room. He was sharp, he was shrewd, he had a mind like a multi-million-dollar computer that was programmed to make very accurate assessments at lightning speed.

He knew as well as she knew that there was something going on here that she wasn’t telling him.

‘Evie…’

He was a master of timing, too, Evie tagged on to her list of attributes as she paused in the doorway. She didn’t turn, and the silence between them lengthened like a wire being stretched to its absolute limit. Unspoken emotions beating out a throbbing tattoo that made her want to just break down, right here and now, and sob her wretched heart out.

‘I would care,’ he murmured gruffly.

It was too much. On a whisper of silk, Evie turned and ran to him.

I love you so very much, she wanted to cry out, but didn’t dare in case the evocative words started the avalanche she knew would bury that love without a single trace.

So instead she wrapped her arms around him and buried her misery in the warmth of his solid presence.

I’ll tell him after Julian’s wedding, she promised herself weakly. It can easily wait until then…

CHAPTER TWO

IT HAD been billed as the wedding of the year, and anyone who was anyone was expected to be there to watch Sir Julian Delahaye and Lady Christina Beverley tie the sacred knot: the rich, the famous, titled nobility, not to mention a heavy presence of foreign dignitaries who had flown in from all over the world to be here—out of respect for Christina’s father, whose diplomatic skills had earned him lifelong friends in far-flung places.

The weather was glorious, the location a picture-perfect English castle complete with ramparts and moat set in its very own ten-thousand-acre estate right in the heart of Royal Berkshire.

You really couldn’t get any more romantic than that. It was no wonder some people were willing to sell their souls to acquire an invitation.

Which made Evie very much the odd one out here today, because she would have sold her soul to be anywhere but here.

She should, in fact, have been heading up an entourage of six lovely bridesmaids. You could even say that it had been expected of her. But she’d turned the invitation down, upsetting several and annoying many, but…

A sigh broke from her—the pair of lavender-blue eyes staring back at her via the dressing-table mirror she was sitting in front of mocking to say the least.

She just couldn’t have done it to the happy couple. After all, how much bad luck did you invite on yourself by having the family black sheep play a major role at your marriage? It just wouldn’t do and they all knew it wouldn’t do—which was why Christina’s mother had found it difficult to hide her relief when Evie had turned the request down.

But neither did it mean she could escape her duty altogether. As sister to the groom she had an obligation to be here—if only for Julian’s sake. And, black sheep of the family or not, she was not about to disappoint her brother. She loved and respected him too much.

So here she was, quietly preparing herself for the event ahead, in the room allotted to her by the Beverley family in the east wing of their beautiful home—very much aware that her mother was doing the same in another room not that far away, because she could feel the waves of resentment reaching out to her through several layers of solid stone.

And why was her mother so resentful? Evie asked that pair of eyes in the mirror. Because Lady Lucinda Delahaye had once been thwarted of the chance to put on a day like this for her own daughter when Evie had turned her back on the chance to marry a marquis so she could be with her lover.

‘He won’t marry you!’ her mother had angrily predicted two years ago. ‘He’s an Arab prince for goodness’ sake! And unlike you he will know his duty! When the time comes he will turn his back on you and marry one of his own. You mark my words, Evie. You mark my words.’

Well, she’d marked them all right—and to this very day she was still marking them. Though the moment of their parting now loomed so very large on the horizon that it actually blocked out her view of anything else.

Two weeks you’ve had—two long wretched weeks to find enough courage to tell Raschid what he needs to be told, she castigated those mocking eyes in the mirror. And what do you do? You avoid him. You let him fly home to Behran for a week without saying a single thing, then spend the next week not even daring to let yourself see him.

Excuses—excuses. Her life recently had become one long round of lying excuses.

Another sigh whispered from her, one of those heavy sighs she had caught herself releasing a lot recently. She looked bruised around the eyes, she noticed, even with the very professional job she had done on her make-up. But then, a worry and lack of sleep had a habit of doing that.

Coward, she derided those eyes in the mirror.

A knock sounding at the door to her room forced her to put her thoughts aside as she turned on her dressing stool to invite whoever was there to come in. The heavy oak door swung smoothly inwards on well-oiled hinges, and her brother Julian stepped into the room.

He looked gorgeous, already dressed in his formal grey morning suit with its dashing silver silk waistcoat and cravat.

‘Hi,’ he greeted. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘It should be me asking you that question,’ Evie smiled.

His answering shrug showed that Julian was not in the least bit nervous about what was to come. He loved Christina to distraction and Christina openly adored him. This was no carefully arranged union between two noble dynasties.

‘Mother’s having a panic attack over the state of her hat or some such thing,’ he drawled. ‘So I thought I would come and hide in here.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Evie murmured, following him with wryly understanding eyes as he went to stand by her window.

Their mother could be an absolute tyrant when she was stressed out or angry. Today she would be feeling stressed out, worrying that she didn’t let the family down, that her choice of outfit was absolutely perfect, that she looked exactly what she was—the upper-class super-elegant mother of the handsome baronet groom.

‘I can’t believe they’ve stuck you right out here on the edge of the world,’ Julian complained, checking out the view she had of the stable block that had been temporarily turned into a car park.

The vast fifty-bedroom castle had been split into two pieces for the wedding, the east wing housing guests of the groom while the guests of the bride occupied the west wing. The further east you went, the smaller the rooms became until—this one, where the old tester bed almost filled it and the plumbing was antiquated—a message in itself to the dreaded black sheep.

Smiling to herself, Evie turned back to the mirror. ‘I have been put here because this is so obviously a single room,’ she explained, using the exact same words Christina’s stiffly smiling mother had used when she’d shown her in here earlier that morning. ‘And I am so obviously a single woman,’ she tagged on in mockery of herself.

‘They’re all such damned hypocrites,’ Julian grunted in disgust. ‘They might disapprove of you and what you do in your private life, but they don’t have to be so obvious about it. I wouldn’t mind,’ he added, ‘but they had the damned barefaced cheek to invite him!’

‘Not for my benefit.’

‘No,’ her brother acknowledged grimly. ‘They invited him because they can’t afford to offend him—despite what he is to you.’

‘And he had the damned bad taste to accept,’ Evie said.

‘Your doing?’ Julian asked.

‘No,’ she denied, her voice cooling considerably because she’d wondered if Julian had been suspecting her of trying to manipulate the situation. ‘Actually, I asked him not to come.’

And he told me to go to hell, she recalled with a weary grimace. Not that she had expected anything less from him. Raschid was arrogant by birth. It was built into his genes to ignore what it did not suit him to see.

And refusing to see his presence here today as an embarrassment to her stupid mother was, perhaps, one of his more understandable bouts of blindness. After all who, in this day and age, condemned a man and woman for wanting to be together so long as they were both free and single?

Free and single, she repeated wryly to herself. What a worn-out cliché. For there was nothing free in the way she and Raschid conducted their relationship. It had cost them both dearly in family respect and personal privacy. And she hadn’t felt single since the day she met him, which explained why she had put off telling him what she knew she had to tell him one day.

But not today, she told herself as she glanced around at her brother. For today belonged to Christina and this precious brother of hers—who was standing there with his back to her, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets in what she considered his disgruntled pose.

Which meant he was cross, and she didn’t want him looking cross. She didn’t want him looking anything but happy today—for they would only blame her if he did.

‘Hey,’ she said, getting up to go and link her arm through one of his. ‘Stop grouching,’ she scolded. ‘It spoils your handsome features.’

He turned a rakish grin on her. Her heart swelled to bursting because she so loved this big brother of hers who she knew loved her unreservedly in return.

‘You look stunning,’ Julian murmured softly. ‘I love the dress.’

‘Thank you,’ she smiled. ‘I bought it specially for the occasion.’

And to make a statement—a rather obvious statement that announced to everyone that, although she was not playing a major role at this wedding, neither was she about to fade into the background as she was sure most of them would prefer her to do.

The dress was short and it was clingy, made of a fine silk jersey material that moulded every slender line of her body from shoulder to well above the knee and so left more than enough of her wonderful legs on show. It was also red. A dramatically unapologetic letterbox-red, with a scooped neck, and a thin gold belt that hugged her narrow waistline. On her feet she was wearing very high-heeled strappy gold sandals, and waiting for her on the bed was a tiny bolero jacket in the same red as the dress.

Plus her hat—a wide and floppy-brimmed gold gauzy affair, bought to use as a prop to hide her thoughts and feelings beneath while she got herself through what promised to be one hell of an ordeal of a day.

‘They certainly won’t miss the fact that you’re here,’ Julian observed. Her brother was no fool; he knew what she was trying to do here.

‘The wicked lady in red,’ she grinned. ‘I can’t fight them so I have no choice but to join them in condemning myself.’

‘Will he mind you taking them on in public like this?’ he asked curiously.

Evie’s slender shoulders lifted and fell in a gesture of indifference. ‘He may be my lover but he is not my keeper.’

‘Ah. I scent trouble in the air,’ Julian sighed. ‘Is this his punishment for refusing to stay away?’

She didn’t answer, her hand sliding away from his arm so she could go back to the dressing table and finish getting ready. There was a moment’s silence, the kind taut with words she didn’t want him to utter.

‘Evie—’

‘No,’ she cut in. ‘Don’t start, Julian. Not today of all days; I’m just not up to it.’

‘But—’

‘But nothing,’ she inserted firmly. ‘What goes on between Raschid and myself is our business. Keep out of it.’

‘Well, that’s telling me,’ he drawled after a moment. ‘Makes me wonder what you told our dear mother…’

‘Is that why you’re here, Julian?’ she sighed. ‘To find out if it was me who put her in a temper?’

‘Was it?’ he asked.

‘I haven’t even seen her since she drove me down here this morning.’

‘And she didn’t have a go at you then?’

‘We had guests with us,’ Evie explained.

‘That’s it, then.’ Julian nodded sagely. ‘Poor old thing is feeling frustrated because she’s not had a chance to deliver the big lecture.’

‘You mean the one about nicely brought up young ladies not sleeping with wicked Arabs?’ Evie enquired innocently while applying a touch of mascara to her lashes.

‘She’s such a social snob,’ Julian sighed.

‘Not a social snob, Julian. A cultural snob,’ Evie amended. ‘If she were just a social snob she would be pulling out all the stops possible to get the dreadful Arab to marry me—a genuine prince with more money than sense being better than an impoverished marquis—socially speaking.’

‘Actually—’ Julian grimaced ‘—I wasn’t referring to that lecture. I was referring to the one about the two of you not showing the family up by openly fawning all over each other today.’

Surprisingly Evie let out a laugh, her eyes suddenly alight with sardonic merriment as she looked at her brother via the mirror. ‘The day hasn’t arrived when you’ll see Raschid fawning over anyone—in public or out of it!’ she said. ‘He’s too damned arrogant. Too aware of his own worth to stoop that low. Odd really,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘that Mother can’t stand the sight of him, because they’re two of a kind in that respect.’

‘You make it sound as if you dislike the man,’ Julian murmured dryly.

Dislike him? She adored him, Evie admitted silently. It was herself she didn’t like very much. ‘He’s great in bed,’ she offered as a light diversion from where this conversation was threatening to lead her.

Another knock sounded on her bedroom door then, and both brother and sister turned to watch the door swing open—and their mother step gracefully inside.

Tall like themselves, slender and fair like themselves, she looked the most stylish mother-of-the-groom that had ever been presented, in a pale blue and cream suit that shrieked classical Chanel.

‘I thought I would find you here, Julian,’ she said. ‘Your guests are beginning to arrive. And it’s time for you to be taking your place.’

In other words, she wanted to be alone with Evie so she could deliver the expected lecture. Julian opened his mouth to warn her off the idea, felt Evie’s hand give his arm a warning pinch—and reluctantly smothered the urge.

He knew as well as Evie did that to upset their mother today of all days was just asking for trouble.

So with a shrug and a kiss dropped fondly on Evie’s cheek he took his leave, though he was unable to do it without issuing a warning of his own as he passed by his mother. Not with words, but the cool look in his eyes had his mother’s lashes fluttering downwards and her mouth staying shut as he left, closing the door behind him.

The air in the room suddenly felt very frosty. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’ Lucinda Delahaye enquired.

Evie sucked in a deep breath of air then let it out again carefully before replying. ‘Yes.’

Disapproval was rife in the kind of expression her mother had perfected beautifully. ‘It isn’t quite what I would call appropriate, Evie. Couldn’t you have come up with something less—eye catching?’

‘I promise not to outshine Christina,’ Evie vowed with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. ‘But you look wonderful, Mother,’ she added. ‘The epitome of grace and style in fact.’

‘Yes…’ Lucinda Delahaye drawled and walked over to her daughter’s wardrobe, leaving that single word to hang in the air between them as a cutting reference to her daughter’s lack of both.

Evie looked on mutely as her mother opened the wardrobe door then stood eyeing its few contents in silent disfavour. Evie knew what she was doing, of course; she was searching for an alternative to the red dress—which was why Evie had made sure she had nothing else with her she could wear to her brother’s wedding.

She had been through scenes similar to this before, after all.

‘There is nothing here for the grand ball tonight,’ her mother remarked finally.

Evie stared across the room at this woman who was her mother—and sadly wondered if she would ever learn to forgive her daughter for falling in love with the wrong man. She supposed not, she conceded bleakly. Especially not while her mother could blind her eyes to the exquisite length of spun gold silk hanging in the wardrobe that had Raschid and the East written all over it.

He had brought it back with him from a visit home a couple of months ago. ‘I saw this when I took Ranya shopping, and immediately thought of you,’ he’d explained.

Ranya was Raschid’s sister with whom Evie felt very intimate—though she had never so much as clapped eyes on her. But she was the same age as Evie and maybe because of that Raschid talked about her a lot. He admired Ranya’s unquestioning sense of duty—but whether Raschid also admired the way Ranya’s husband kept a mistress tucked away here in London Evie wasn’t sure. He tended to go all stiff and eastern on her when she brought up the subject—usually in the middle of a row—and their rows tended to be about their respective families’ disapproval of their relationship.

But the dress really was a sensational creation, made of gossamer-fine pure silk chiffon that seemed to drip to the floor like gold-spangled toffee. Long-sleeved, low-necked and gathered at the waist, it had a way of moving in opposition to her body that was intensely alluring.

‘Don’t be a bore, Mother,’ Evie said wearily, sighing. ‘Skirting around the subject of Raschid is not going to make him go away, you know.’

‘Then what will?’

Startled because there had been a definite note of wry sardonicism in her mother’s tone then, Evie glanced warily at her—saw the wryness was showing in her eyes as well—and matched it with a similar look of her own.