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‘But I am disgruntled.’ Evie immediately defied the warning. ‘You treat me like a lackey and I don’t like it.’
‘Because I arrive late once in a while?’
‘You arrive late more often than you arrive early,’ she grimly pointed out.
To her annoyance, his mouth twitched, an unexpected dash of wicked amusement entering the battle. ‘And aren’t you ecstatic that I am such a latecomer, hmm?’ he countered lazily.
It took her a few moments, but when his meaning did manage to sink in Evie sighed, wrenching her chin from his grasp as a wave of pink ran into her cheeks. ‘We weren’t talking about your sexual prowess!’ she admonished.
‘Ah,’ he sighed. ‘That is a great shame.’
‘Raschid!’ Evie flashed him a look of irritation. ‘I’m not—!’
In the mood for this, she had been going to snap at him—but he silenced her with a kiss, his arms snaking around her body and crushing her against him while his arrogant mouth took burning possession of hers.
But the real crime here was that she didn’t attempt to make a protest—didn’t even pretend to struggle but simply dived right in there with him. She couldn’t stop herself. For Raschid tapped a hunger inside her that had not abated in two long years of being fed exclusively by him.
Two years involved in a relationship that had kept their two families pulsing in the background in simmering disapproval, and had kept the world’s tabloids waiting with bated breath to see which one of them would eventually end it.
Because it had to end some time, everyone knew that. The heir to a wealthy sheikhdom was expected to marry one of his own one day. While Evie had already blotted her copybook once by turning her back on a marquis to be where she was now. But the pressure was still on for her to do the right thing and marry into her own class—outdated, outmoded and in danger of extinction though that class might be.
But it was the undisputed knowledge that the end was as inevitable as night following day that helped keep their relationship this hot and this fevered.
‘So, do we eat or do we continue to fight?’ Raschid murmured as his kiss-warmed mouth lifted away from hers.
For ‘fight’ read ‘love’, Evie ruefully translated, and knew without a single doubt which one she wanted tonight.
Needed, she thought tragically—oh, how she needed him tonight!
She needed his strength, his dark and driving sensuality. She needed to soak herself in him, drown herself in him—die in him. For this one night she needed to pretend that nothing was different between them. Be the woman he knew and loved so that he could be the man she loved so desperately.
For he was truly all man, this Arabian lover of hers. A man who could make love with just his eyes—as he was doing to her right now. Teasing, knowing, lazily seducing, and so indolently aware of his power over her senses that he didn’t need to read the darkened look in her eyes to know how much she wanted him.
‘Are you wearing anything at all underneath this?’ she asked, playing for time by stroking her palms along the lean, tight contours she could feel beneath the smooth white tunic.
‘Why don’t you open it and take a look?’ he invited, and began nibbling at the corner of her mouth in encouragement while his fingers played tantalisingly with the thin straps that were holding up her dress.
‘And have the world and his wife witness your strip show?’ she mocked, referring to the fact that they were standing in front of a sheet of well-lit glass through which anyone with reasonable eyesight from Battersea to Westminster would be able to see what they were doing.
His solution to that was to reach over her shoulder. A moment later heavy gold silk brocaded curtains came swishing across the glass, smoothly closing down her options so she had nothing left but a straight choice between demanding he feed her stomach or feed her desire.
Evie would have had to be really stupid not to know what his preference was since it was pushing so prominently against the tingling wall of her stomach, but she also knew he was going to leave the final choice to her. He knew she was angry with him for keeping her waiting. He knew that if he tried to make love to her now without her say-so she was likely to start spitting all kinds of accusations at him about the way he used her.
He also knew that, starving for food or not, in the end she would not be able to resist his seduction. For her own body was also showing the signs of a craving it had never been able to suppress in his vicinity.
‘You are so arrogant,’ she complained in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to some pride.
He just grinned, all flashing white teeth and pure male confidence. ‘Say it,’ he prompted, ‘or I shall call for Asim to bring the car round.’
On a driven groan of angry frustration, her hands came up between their bodies and took hold of two fistfuls of his blue outer robe. She used it to tug his mouth back to her own. But she punished him by sinking her teeth into his lower lip before she gave him her complete surrender by fusing her hungry body to his.
An hour later Evie came out of a thoroughly satiated daze to find Raschid lying beside her in an indolent sprawl of naked limbs. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly parted, his breathing a steady rise and fall of a smooth dark gold breastplate liberally smattered with crisp black body hair.
Evie smiled to herself, enjoying the opportunity to lie here like this simply feasting herself on him while he didn’t know she was doing it. In fact, looking at a naked and sleepy Raschid had to be one of the best pastimes she had ever experienced. He had a way of lying there that she found unbearably sexy. Arrogant in his nakedness, conceited about his own beauty, so uninhibited in his presentation of his silky dark self that if an army of reporters had suddenly burst into this room he wouldn’t have dreamed of covering himself up!
‘I need food,’ she announced.
‘Pick up the phone and call Asim,’ he advised, refusing to lift himself out of his satiated stupor.
On a sigh Evie levered herself up on an elbow then stretched across him for the telephone. Her hair, so carefully worked into a sleekly sophisticated pleat not long ago, was now hanging in a curtain of silk that trailed across his cheek as she talked to his personal servant.
‘Just a cold sandwich will do,’ she was saying when Raschid’s hand came up, reaching for the trailing hair to gently comb it behind her ear. ‘No. He will eat what I choose to order since he kept me waiting so long,’ she said, glancing down to send Raschid a defiant smile. ‘And I may just die, Asim, if I have to wait until you cook me something,’ she concluded before replacing the phone.
Those liquid eyes were looking at her in a way that had the muscles around her heart tightening like a coiled spring. He was so beautiful, this man, Evie thought helplessly. His soul talked to her soul in a way she knew she could never survive without now.
‘Why did you miss out on lunch today?’ he asked gravely, his long lean fingers brushing a tender caress across her delicate cheekbone.
‘I didn’t actually miss out on it,’ she confessed. ‘I just didn’t want to eat what was on offer.’
Raschid frowned. ‘Which was—what?’
‘Humble pie,’ she replied, and rolled away from him, her sigh as she did so the heavy kind that took all the softness he had just spent the last hour loving into existence right away again.
‘Explain,’ he commanded.
Evie got up, as exquisite to look at naked as she was dressed—and not many women could promise that. Reaching down, she picked up the robe she had recently taken from his body and dragged it over her own. It almost buried her, but she still looked fantastic. With a flick of a hand, she released her hair so it tumbled in a tangle of golden silk down her back—then turned to face him.
‘Mother,’ she said. That was all. It didn’t need an explanation.
And Raschid didn’t comment, but his expression became grim, and he sat up to run his fingers through his hair in a gesture of weary frustration while she walked off towards his bathroom, trailing the dark blue robe behind her like a queen with her train.
The bedroom was a masterpiece of interior design, blending two cultures into one with the very modern western use of pale wood floors and furnishings given a touch of the exotic with jewel-coloured silks and priceless Persian carpets.
But the bathroom was sheer Arabian luxury, with bright white and royal blue patterned tile-work covering floors and walls alike. A white enamel sunken tub the size of a plunge pool stood on a dais dead centre of the room. Above it was a dome of mirrored glass that was both wickedly naughty and deliciously decadent. The shower cubical took up enough room for three by normal standards, the gold inlaid double glass doors works of art in themselves.
It was the shower that Evie made for, turning on a tap that sent no less than seven power jets of water sluicing around her at the absolute perfect temperature. She stayed in there for ages, aware of Raschid moving around in the other part of the bathroom.
Aware also that he hadn’t come to join her here in the shower because the mood had been ruined. Her mother—his father. It was usually one or the other of them that put this dampener on their pleasure.
But there was worse to come, though Raschid didn’t know it yet. Which was why she had walked away just now rather than have it all out with him there and then.
Coward, she accused herself. Then grimaced in acknowledgement of that very obvious fact. But it was not going to be easy to say what she had to say, because the world was about to topple down upon them both, and she didn’t know how Raschid was going to react to that.
By the time she left the shower, Raschid had left the bathroom, but a turquoise silk caftan had been draped over a stool and she smiled at his thoughtfulness as she dried herself. She had worn it many times before here. It was one among several Raschid had brought her back from his homeland.
Pulling it on over her naked body, she released her hair from the simple knot she had fastened it in before going into the shower, and the long mass fell in a slightly damp tangle down almost to her waist. Finger-combing it as she moved, she went back into the bedroom to discover that Raschid had gone from there also.
She found him in the living room, standing by the drinks cabinet pouring sparkling water on to freshly squeezed orange juice. Neither of them drank much alcohol, she because she didn’t care for it and Raschid because his religion forbade it.
He was dressed, which surprised her. Normally he was hard put to pull on a robe during evenings like this. But that soft checked cotton shirt, buff trousers and casual slip-ons he was wearing on his sockless feet were sending her messages.
Raschid was intending to take her home later rather than keeping her here for the night as he usually would.
Well, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea, Evie told herself heavily when she felt her heart sink in disappointment. For what she had to tell him was going to necessitate some time apart while they both came to terms with what it was going to mean to them.
Hearing her come into the room, he sent her a brief smile over his shoulder. ‘Your food has arrived, ma’am,’ he drawled. ‘Now you may feed that other ravenous appetite of yours.’
It was meant as a joke. But Evie couldn’t laugh. Because the moment she glanced across the room to where an elegant soapstone coffee table stood spread out with a cold meal fit for a king her stomach objected.
Having gone from clutching at her with a demand to be fed, it was now clutching with sickening dread because she knew she couldn’t put it off any longer.
‘Raschid,’ she said huskily. ‘I need to talk to you.’
Glass in hand, he turned, something in her tone perhaps alerting him to trouble, because his eyes had already sharpened. ‘What?’ he demanded.
Her throat dried up, her eyes shifting away from him because she knew she couldn’t look at him and say what she had to say. So instead she walked over to the window where she reached out to send the curtain swishing open so she could fix her gaze on something outside while she decided how to begin.
A tense silence followed. One where Evie could feel Raschid’s quick mind grinding into action, picking up on the vibrations she was giving off, sorting through them and—belatedly perhaps—realising that all was not well with his lover.
After a minute, he put down his glass and walked slowly towards her. He didn’t attempt to touch her—those shrewd instincts of his warning him that she needed her own space.
‘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.
