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

‘I’m sorry, Evie.’ Her mother’s voice sounded unsteady. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘I know,’ she replied. ‘To be honest, I had forgotten about it myself until you touched it.’

‘But it looks so dreadful!’

Evie just smiled bleakly to herself because there was no way she could tell her mother that the blisters which were now broken and weeping were where her fingers had gripped.

‘Was this what you meant when you said she wasn’t well?’

The question was aimed at Raschid, but Evie answered. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly.

‘No,’ Raschid coolly contradicted her. ‘Evie was feeling unwell because she is pregnant…’

On a sigh that came from the weary depths of her body, Evie sank more deeply into the soft-cushioned chair and closed her eyes again as the new silence that followed that announcement began to explode all around her. And for the space of the next thirty teeth-gritting seconds no one moved, no one spoke, while they waited for her mother’s inevitable reaction.

Yet, when it did come, it wasn’t what Evie was expecting. She was expecting anger, disgust, even biting condemnation aimed at both of them. What she got was a groan that had her mother sinking heavily into the nearest chair.

‘Oh, Evie…’ Lucinda sighed out painfully. ‘How could you—how could you?’

Evie’s eyes snapped open, the tone threading through her words bringing a flash of bright anger into her eyes.

‘Are you daring to imply that I got pregnant deliberately?’ she demanded.

Her mother didn’t need to answer the charge because it was already written in large letters across her pained face.

‘I don’t believe,’ she breathed, hurt—so hurt she couldn’t contain it, ‘that my own mother could suspect me of doing something so crass!’

‘Accidents like this just don’t happen in this day and age, Evie.’

‘No?’ she choked, lurching to her feet like a wounded soldier, with her injured arm cradled against her throbbing breasts. ‘Well, just look at me, Mother!’ she commanded furiously. ‘Because what you are seeing is one hell of an accident!’

‘Evie—’ It was Raschid who used that rough-toned appeal on her. ‘Your mother meant no offence. It was a natural assumption to make…’

Was it? Was it really? she thought, turning flashing eyes on him. ‘It hadn’t occurred to me before,’ she breathed shakily. ‘But—have you been secretly thinking the same thing?’

‘No,’ he sighed, but he looked away from her as he said it, and the horrible realisation that the two people she loved most in the world could think she would sink that low struck a severe enough blow to make her sway where she stood.

And suddenly she knew she had taken enough. Her chin came up, her eyes glassing over as she flicked her gaze from one uncomfortable face to the other. ‘I don’t think I will ever forgive either of you for this,’ she told them.

Then, grimly clinging to what was left of her pride after their mutual slaying of it, she turned and walked away.

Asim was just coming back into the room as Evie swept coldly by him. Whatever passed between him and Raschid via the silent clash of their eyes Evie didn’t know or even care. But she had only just sunk weakly down on to the side of the bed when Asim knocked on the bedroom door then let himself into the room.

‘I must see to your arm,’ he quietly explained.

Evie didn’t argue. She didn’t say a single thing, in fact, as she allowed Asim to do what he had to do with the broken weals now adorning her arm. But inside her head she was saying a lot—not to Asim but to just about everyone else she could bring to mind.

Her family. Raschid’s family. The greedy media who would be oh, so very interested to know what a devious and desperate person she had turned out to be!

‘The situation is very stressful for everyone right now,’ Asim remarked with his usual diplomatic neutrality as he bent over her arm. ‘People say things they come to regret later when things are calmer.’

‘Which doesn’t mean they weren’t speaking the truth when they said them,’ Evie pointed out. ‘You think I deliberately set out to trap him with this baby,’ she then accused him. ‘I saw it in your eyes when you were too shocked to hide it.’

Only, she had read his expression for one of simple horror then, not suspicion. Now she knew she was going to see the same expression of horrified pity adorning the shocked features of every single person she looked at from now on.

It made her insides squirm, so much so that she jerked her arm as Asim was reapplying the bandage.

‘I hurt you?’ he asked sharply.

‘Everyone is hurting me,’ Evie replied with a wealth of pained anger.

Surprisingly he seemed to understand the remark because he said nothing else and a few moments later he was getting to his feet.

‘Can I shower with this?’ Evie enquired.

‘It would be better if you didn’t get the arm wet,’ he advised.

She nodded stiffly. ‘Then do you think you could arrange a taxi for me while I go and get dressed?’

It wasn’t a request, though it had been voiced as one, and she didn’t wait for his reply before getting up and walking into the bathroom.

Ten minutes later she was back in the bedroom, washed, dressed in the jeans and tee shirt she had arrived here wearing that same morning. She was in the process of tying back her hair when Raschid stepped into the room.

She glanced at him then away again. But the glance had clung long enough to notice that he had changed too, and was now wearing one of his razor-sharp business suits. She also had time to note an unusual wariness in the way he was studying her—which she gained a nasty kind of satisfaction from seeing, because it meant that he wasn’t quite so sure of her any more.

‘Your mother has gone,’ he informed her.

That didn’t surprise Evie. Her mother was going to need time to come to terms with this next dreadful scandal that was about to fall on their seemingly beleaguered family.

‘Asim tells me you have requested a taxi,’ he said next. ‘Why?’

‘So I can leave here,’ she coolly replied. ‘What else?’

‘Where do you intend to go?’

‘Home, to Westhaven, probably,’ she said. ‘To hide away there as dreaded black sheep do when they’re in deep trouble.’

Her sarcasm was acute; his sigh revealed his impatience with it. ‘Don’t deride yourself like that,’ he snapped.

‘Why not?’ she countered. ‘It’s the truth after all—or at least it is the truth as everyone else is going to see it once this mess gets out.’

‘Don’t be foolish!’ he rasped. ‘You are overwrought and overreacting! Once we marry no one will give a damn when or why our baby was conceived!’

Oh, very tactful, Evie thought acidly. ‘I think I’ve said this to you before,’ she flashed back at him. ‘But this time I mean it—I wouldn’t marry you now if you came gift-wrapped in rubies! I would never be able to live with what you were secretly thinking about me, you see!’

‘I do not suspect you of getting pregnant deliberately!’ he ground out angrily.

Evie didn’t answer, but her cynical expression said a lot as her trembling fingers struggled to capture the final strands of gold hair that had escaped the ribbon she had tied the rest in.

‘Okay,’ he conceded with a heavy sigh. ‘There was a moment—a very brief moment—when the suspicion did occur to me,’ he admitted. ‘What man wouldn’t consider such a proposition given the circumstances of our relationship?’

‘A man who knew me well enough to know I would rather die than use those kind of tactics to trap him?’ Evie suggested.

The sound of his sardonic huff of laughter had Evie spinning around to stare at him. ‘It seems to me that it is you who feels trapped by this situation, Evie, and that is what is really eating away at you.’

Was it? she wondered. Then heavily admitted to herself that he was most probably right. She did feel trapped in a situation that there was no way out of unless she seriously took on board the only other option open to her.

An ice-cold shudder went ripping through her; Raschid saw it and released a heavy sigh. ‘Look…’ he said, walking towards her. His hands came up, gripped her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you earlier. But—don’t you think we have enough problems to deal with between us, without you and I fighting with each other?’

‘It all feels so ugly,’ she shakily confessed. ‘And it’s only promising to get uglier.’

She meant once his father was involved, and Raschid instinctively understood that. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘I will turn this to our advantage if it is the last thing I do.’

But at what expense? His father’s pride? His country’s pride? Their own wretched pride?

‘Already your dear mama is feeling most unexpectedly maternal,’ he added softly.

Lifting her lashes, Evie found herself looking into warm, dark, wryly amused eyes.

‘Her final command to me before she left,’ he explained, ‘was to be sure I took precious care of her daughter or I would have her to contend with.’ He smiled. ‘I think we found a common ground for the first time ever when we both offended you as we did.’

‘You are both more alike than you think,’ Evie murmured. ‘You are both arrogant, both pushy, both too full of yourself.’

‘While you are nothing more than our tragically misunderstood victim; is that what you’re saying?’

Evie grimaced. Put like that, she had made herself sound pathetic. ‘Your own father still has to have his say in this,’ she reminded him.

‘He isn’t some kind of ogre, Evie,’ Raschid replied soberly. ‘If the idea of you carrying a baby can soften your mother’s attitude towards me, then there is a good chance it can soften my father’s attitude to you.’

‘What—so we can all play happy families together?’ Her tone alone said she didn’t see much hope of that ever happening.

‘At least you can give him a chance before you completely condemn him.’

A chance? Oh, yes, Evie could at least give him that. But she didn’t really hold out much hope for a happy ending to this.

‘So, what happens next?’ she asked.

Raschid removed his hands from her and straightened his shoulders in a way that reminded Evie of those occasions she had watched him donning his official robes.

‘I go home to Behran to break the news to him,’ he replied.

‘What—now—today?’

‘Yes.’ He took a quick glance at his watch. ‘In the next ten minutes to be more precise.’ He looked at her then, golden eyes darkened by questions.

‘I really caused you a lot of problems when I didn’t tell you about the baby two weeks ago, didn’t I?’ she murmured penitently.

His shrug said it all. ‘I could have diverted my father from this course he has taken if I had known then, yes.’

‘I was such a miserable coward,’ Evie admitted.

‘No, you were not,’ he denied. ‘You were shocked, you were anxious, and you were trying to do what you believed was the right thing with your brother’s wedding day so close.’

‘Trying to please everyone and pleasing none,’ she translated with a rueful grimace.

‘Well, please me now,’ Raschid requested. ‘And stay here while I am away. As it is, your personal possessions are on their way here from your cottage as we speak, and Asim has agreed to stay here with you. He will vet any visitors or telephone calls.’

Be her guard, in other words. ‘Is he a eunuch?’ she asked dryly.

‘No.’ His mouth twitched appreciatively at the reference. ‘But I trust him with my life so I can therefore trust him with your virtue.’

‘But can you trust me with his?’ Evie threw back provokingly.

His answer came quick and fast—so fast she didn’t even see it coming until she was locked in his arms and being utterly consumed by the kind of kiss only Raschid could issue.

‘I can trust you,’ he affirmed as he drew away.

And why could he sound so smugly confident about that? Because she was clinging to him, lost in him, drowning in him—as always.

But then Raschid had trouble dragging himself away from her, and it was some consolation to feel his mouth come back to hers for a hot, hungry, final kiss before he could bring himself to remove her hands from around his nape and reluctantly step away.

‘I must go,’ he said gently. ‘My flight plan has been filed and I dare not miss my slot.’

Which meant he was intending to fly himself to Behran, Evie realised with a small shaft of alarm that had its roots in the frightening fear that, with their luck right now, anything might happen to him during the long flight.

‘Take care, won’t you? And call me, whenever you can!’

‘I’ll call,’ he promised. ‘And I will see you again within the week.’

Fine words, sincere words. But he didn’t call her, and neither did she see him within the next two weeks.

CHAPTER NINE

BY THEN the isolation was beginning to get to her. She hadn’t dared to so much as step out of the apartment for fear of being waylaid by the press or people she did not want to see.

Oh, her mother called her up every day on the telephone. In her own way, Lucinda was trying to be supportive, but it didn’t come easily to her. And really it was Evie who found herself ladling out calm reassurance to her mother when each new day went by without hearing a single thing from Raschid.

‘If he lets you down in this, I’ll kill him,’ Lucinda vowed when a full week had gone by with no word from Raschid.

‘Trust him, Mother,’ Evie replied. ‘I do. He loves me as much as I love him and he wants this baby. With that kind of incentive men can move mountains.’

But, as the days went by without any word from Raschid, for the first time ever Evie found herself wishing the newspapers would give her some clue as to what was going on in Behran. But they were frustratingly empty of any reference to either Sheikh Raschid or Evie Delahaye for a change. It was a matter of priorities to them. A juicy scandal had suddenly blown up involving two government ministers and the media were busy covering that.

Asim didn’t help. For he too clamped up whenever Evie tried to grill him, feigning no knowledge of what Raschid was doing and advising her to be patient. But he knew more than he was admitting to, Evie was absolutely sure about that, and the fact that he wasn’t prepared to speak could only mean the information filtering back to him from Behran had to be bad.

Oh, he tried his very best to make the wait bearable. In fact, she and Asim became quite close friends during those two wretched weeks. He had duties to attend to at the Behran Embassy for part of each day, but otherwise he devoted his time exclusively to her.

They walked together each morning on the roof garden attached to the apartment. And in the evenings he encouraged Evie to reacquaint herself with the game of chess—something she had played often with her father before he’d been tragically killed in a horse-riding accident when she was only ten years old.

Her arm healed quickly under Asim’s care. He was a good man, a kind man, a pleasant companion, and it was during those two weeks that she began to understand why Raschid kept him close by all the time.

He also talked freely and proudly about his country and all of the changes that had been made during the last twenty years. Life in Behran, she discovered, was not as totalitarian as she had believed it to be. The women were not kept hidden behind locked doors. It was no longer compulsory for them to cover themselves when they ventured out in public. Education was compulsory for both sexes, and women were beginning to find a place for themselves in all aspects of the working society.

Only a very small section of the people wanted to keep things as they used to be, he’d told her. Most people saw the advantages in moving forward with the rest of the world rather than trying to pull against it.

But the most curious point of all she learned from Asim during these talks they shared was that all of the changes made in Behran had been effected through Raschid’s father, which made his old-fashioned attitude towards marriage all the more confusing.

But then, religion did that—divided and fragmented a human race that should be drawing closer together. Religion, colour, social tradition. Her own mother was guilty of discrimination in all three areas, so why should Evie expect Raschid’s father to feel any different?

And Raschid’s father did not feel different—as Evie found out for herself soon enough.

His feelings were made known to her via his personal envoy towards the end of the second week of her enforced isolation.

Asim was out attending to his duties as was his habit during the middle part of the day. Evie hadn’t been feeling too well that morning—sickly and aching as if she might be going to come down with a bug.

‘You are unwell, Miss Delahaye?’ he’d enquired when she’d declined their usual walk on the roof garden before he’d left her.

Evie had just sent him a rueful look. ‘You’re the doctor,’ she’d said dryly. ‘You tell me why I feel sick all the time.’

Asim had grimaced his understanding of her condition, and left her lounging on one of the living-room sofas, apparently content to read a book, which she did, in a halfhearted kind of way—until the sound of steps in the hallway brought her jackknifing to her feet.

Since no one else but Asim had access to the apartment, and he wasn’t due back for ages yet, she thought it was Raschid returning at last. So her eager expression reflected that assumption as the living-room door swung firmly inwards—only to cloud in confusion when two complete strangers stepped boldly into the room.

Two Arabs, to be precise, dressed in smart western suits and looking about as innocuous as two gangsters.

‘Miss Delahaye?’ the taller, sharper-looking of the two enquired.

Evie’s stomach muscles contracted, her shoulders straightening slightly as if in readiness to receive a dreadful blow. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘What are you doing here?’

She was offered an obsequious bow, and Evie didn’t like it. It sent an icy shiver chasing down her spine, as if the cold hand of fate had just touched her shoulder.

‘My apologies for this intrusion,’ the spokesman murmured politely. ‘My name is Jamal Al Kareem. I am come bearing messages for you from Crown Prince Hashim,’ he explained.

‘And Prince Raschid?’ Evie questioned. ‘Is he not with you?’

‘Prince Raschid is engaged on—official business,’ she was informed. ‘In our neighbouring state of Abadilah.’

Abadilah… That cold hand touched her shoulder again. Abadilah was the state Aisha’s father ruled.

‘Then how did you gain access to this apartment?’ she asked coldly.

‘As the Crown Prince’s head of security I have access to all Royal residences. It is, I am afraid, a necessary evil for powerful families to take special precautions to protect themselves,’ he explained, moving ever closer to her as he spoke. ‘For power brings with it its own enemies, and those enemies may decide that trouble can best be served from within, so to speak.’

He came to a stop at the rear of the sofa where Evie had been sitting. In response, Evie found herself taking a defensive step backwards, something in his super-polite, very silky tone making her feel threatened. As if he was subtly informing her that she was classed as an enemy here.

‘Y-you said Crown Prince Hashim sent you,’ she prompted, utilising a cool aloofness in an attempt to offset whatever it was this horrible man was giving off.

Another bow—another shiver. ‘The Crown Prince is most concerned about the—predicament you find yourself in at present,’ the messenger confirmed. ‘He wishes me to relay to you his most sincere apologies for any—distress you have been forced to endure due to his premature announcement to the media.’

‘Th-thank you,’ Evie said, her eyes flicking nervously to where the other man was standing by the door—half in and half out of it as if he was on alert, listening for Asim’s return. ‘But you may assure Crown Prince Hashim that no apology was necessary.’

‘He will be most humbly grateful for your gracious understanding,’ the spokesman returned courteously. ‘But the Crown Prince is—disturbed that your feelings were not taken into account when he released the statement about his son’s forthcoming marriage. It was—insensitive of him, as his revered son pointed out. Now he wishes to make recompense for any distress caused to yourself…’

Watching him lift a hand to his inside pocket, Evie felt the muscles in her shoulders tighten just a little bit more. What she thought he was going to withdraw from that pocket she wasn’t quite sure, but what she didn’t expect to see him holding out towards her was a slender slip of paper.

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