Czytaj książkę: «The Mistress Bride»

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS getting late. Almost too late to bother going anywhere now.

Yet Evie stood staring out at London’s twinkling night skyline without any outward signs of irritation. After all, there was nothing particularly unusual in her lover keeping her waiting like this; he did it all the time—duty being the altar at which he worshipped, usually at the expense of everything else in his life.

And that included his woman. Beautiful though she might be, special though he might insist she was to him, Evie knew she would always have to take second place to what was really important in his life.

So, like some priceless piece of life-size porcelain draped in sensual blood-red silk, she stood there in front of the drawing-room window in his very luxurious penthouse apartment—and waited. She waited for her man as she had been waiting for the last forty-five minutes now, calmly, patiently.

Or so it might seem, for it wasn’t in her nature to show what she was really feeling—a habit drummed into her by a very strict upbringing.

But only fools took that calmness at its serene-faced value.

Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah was nobody’s fool, but he wasn’t here to note the tell-tale signs to Evie’s real mood. And the one person who was attempting to keep her company rarely lifted his eyes high enough to read those signs.

He stood by the white marble fireplace with his hands quietly folded across his robed front and his tongue wisely silent, all attempts at polite conversation abandoned long ago, when apologetically late had become unforgivably late.

He caught her taking a quick glance at her slender gold wristwatch, though. ‘I am certain he cannot be many more minutes, Miss Delahaye,’ Asim assured her with that quietly soothing diplomatic voice of his. ‘Some things are, I am afraid, unavoidable, and a telephone call from his revered father is most definitely one of those things.’

Or a call from New York, Paris or Rome, Evie silently tagged on. The Al Kadah business interests were far-flung and varied. The fact that Raschid, as his father’s only son, now shouldered the burden for most of those interests since the old man’s minor heart attack last year meant that Evie was seeing less and less of Raschid—her position in the pecking order being as low as it was.

A sigh whispered from her. The kind of sigh she would normally only allow herself when she was sure she was alone. But tonight was different. Tonight she was fretting over a very worrying problem of her own, and she could have done without the added aggravation of a long wait like this when she had, in truth, had to force herself into coming here at all tonight.

Because she knew that Raschid was not going to like what she had to tell him. In fact, she could positively say that he was going to hate it.

Oh, hell, Evie thought heavily, and was just in the process of lifting a decidedly shaky hand to cover the throbbing ache that was taking place behind her eyes when a door at the far end of the room suddenly opened.

The raised hand paused then snapped downwards to form a small fist at her side, her body tensing fractionally as she felt the full stinging impact of Raschid’s sharp golden gaze lancing into her slender spine.

A taut silence prevailed as Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah paused in the doorway to his own sumptuous cream and gold living room while sharp shrewd eyes quickly assessed the mood of the room’s two occupants. The arrow-straight set of Evie’s spine was, to him, eloquent, his servant’s clear relief at his arrival profound.

Grimacing slightly in acknowledgement of both, Raschid dismissed the other man with a silent gesture of his head. But the look in Asim’s dark eyes spoke volumes as he walked towards him. ‘You are in deep trouble, Sheikh,’ those wise old eyes told him. ‘The lady is not happy.’ Asim left them alone with a rather sardonic bow of respect.

Which left only Evie, who was taking her time in turning to face him—a message in itself that he completely misread because he was expecting to see anger, so anger was what he saw in the slow, stiff movement of her body.

Yet, despite her expected irritation and his own weary mood after having just had to endure one of the worst telephone conversations of his entire life with his father, despite the lateness of the hour, and everything else that seemed to be conspiring against him in an effort to turn his complicated life into absolute turmoil—despite all of that, when their eyes actually met down the length of the beautiful white and gold room there was a single sweet moment when everything came to a delicious standstill for both of them. Evie because she was being assailed by that hot, tight burst of sexual awakening that was always her first response to this man. And Raschid because his own response to Evie was no different at all.

The air between them began to pulse, Raschid’s eyes darkening with a very possessive sense of pleasure as he stood taking in the shattering impact of Evie’s beauty, framed as it was by the darkness outside his apartment window.

So tall, those glittering eyes measured. So incredibly slender yet so beautifully rounded in all the right places. The whole person so inherently sensual to this man who knew every inch of her as intimately as he knew himself.

Skin he knew was as smooth as satin seemed to shine like a pearl against the draping of wine-red silk. Her wonderful hair shone like a coronet of pure gold that had been sleekly contained to frame the most delicately perfect face he had ever seen in his life. Perfect bone structure, perfect nose, perfectly seductive heart-shaped mouth—and those wonderful cold-cut lavender-blue eyes that, even in anger, could not quite disguise what was happening to her as she stood there gazing back at her opposite in every way.

For where her skin was pale his was dark, as dark as lovingly cared for wood that had been honed and planed and carefully polished to create the most exotically beautiful male structure Evie had ever set eyes upon. And if she was tall then he was taller, wider, stronger—tougher. His hair was a smooth, slick, uncompromising black, cut to perfection to make the best of his lethally attractive face—a face with a superbly sculpted long thin nose, acutely defined sensual mouth—and eyes like liquid gold that easily countered cold-cut lavender-blue by seeming to induce her to dive right in.

Opposites—complete and utter opposites. One as English as afternoon tea, the other as Arabian as a Bedouin warrior.

Two years they had been together—two years—and the very air between them could still crackle with that hot, tight sizzle of a fierce sexual awakening that was as strong now as it had been when it began.

But then, it had had to be, or the relationship would not have survived the disapproving rumblings across two very proud cultures.

‘My apologies.’ Raschid spoke at last and, like the eyes, his voice was so golden it slid over the senses like warm dark honey. ‘I have just this moment returned from my embassy.’

Which accounted for his eastern attire, Evie assumed as she ran her cool eyes over the long straight white tunic he was wearing beneath a dark blue, loosely flowing top robe. Though he had delayed long enough to remove his headgear, she noted as she watched a small grimace touch the moulded shape of his mouth at her continuing silence.

‘You’re angry with me.’ Dryly he stated the obvious.

‘No,’ Evie countered. ‘Bored.’

‘Ah,’ he drawled. ‘In one of those moods, are we?’ Stepping further into the room, he closed the door. ‘What would you like me to do?’ he enquired, ever so politely. ‘Grovel at your beautiful feet?’

Which was his own unique brand of sarcasm, Evie made rueful note. Quite deliberately she took the words at their face value.

‘Right now, I would much rather you feed me,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast this morning, and it is now...’ she paused to glance at her watch ‘...almost nine o‘clock.’

‘So, you do want me to grovel,’ he assumed from all of that, not in the least bit fooled by her cold manner.

What he wasn’t seeing was the anxiety lurking behind the coldness—thank goodness—because now that she actually had him here in the flesh Evie had cravenly decided she needed time before she said what she had to say to him.

So her barely perceptible shrug sent one of his sleekly defined black silk brows arching, and in two very economical and outwardly innocent gestures war between them was declared. It was not a new aspect of their relationship. In fact the whole foundation of it had been built on a refusal on both parts to pander to the arrogance of the other. Evie refused to pander to his god-like ego and Raschid refused to pander to her ice-princess image.

‘I have responsibilities,’ he clipped out.

‘Really?’ Evie drawled.

His eyes began to spark. ‘My time is not always my own to do with as I please.’

‘So it didn’t please you to keep me waiting for almost an hour?’ Her turn to use sarcasm, his to respond—or not—depending on his mood.

What he chose to do was to begin walking towards her with the sleek soft tread of a predator ruthlessly stalking its prey. Her nerve-ends began to tighten, sending out electric signals to all parts of her body as she watched him grow in height, in power, in skin-flaying mastery the closer he came to her.

The man was sheer poetry in motion. So lean and lithe and dark and deliciously dangerous that, by the time he came to a stop mere inches away from her, the breath had completely seized in her chest, and tiny tight tingles of a very familiar excitement were beginning to shimmer through her blood.

And this, Evie told herself helplessly, was why she could not bear to consider the prospect of giving up this man.

He touched parts of her no other living being had ever touched.

Liquid gold eyes held iced blue in challenge. A hand with long, lean brown fingers that knew how to be cruel if the moment presented itself came up to take hold of her tilted chin.

‘Word of warning,’ Raschid murmured softly. ‘I am in no mood for temperament tonight. So be wise, my darling, and drop the disgruntled act.’

‘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.’