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‘OK... I’ll tell you,’ she conceded, stepping out of the shower, surrendering to his demand but unable to do so when he was still touching her, something in her shying away in revulsion at any association between making love with Raj and what had happened to traumatise her when she was still a complete innocent.
Zoe settled down on the side of the vast bed, still wet and dripping and not noticing. But Raj noticed, pale beneath his bronzed skin, his sculpted bone structure rigid because he was worried that he had pushed too hard for her confidences. Lifting her up, he carefully wound her like a doll into a giant fleecy towel, but when he tried to keep a soothing hold on her body, she broke away from him and dropped down into a bedside chair instead.
‘There was an older boy, well, not much older, he was fourteen and I was twelve,’ she trotted out shakily. ‘In the same foster home. We used to play video games together... I thought he was a friend. There was a film I wanted to see, a stupid romantic comedy, and my foster mum said he could go with me, look out for me...but he didn’t take me to the cinema.’
‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,’ Raj incised in a hoarse undertone.
‘No, my sisters used to say I needed to talk about it, which is why I went to therapy. He didn’t take me to the cinema. He took me what he said was a shortcut across wasteland and there was this old hut...and I was complaining because there was a storm and I was getting soaked.’
Her breathing was sawing noisily in and out of her struggling lungs.
‘In the hut all these boys were waiting. They were a gang and the price of his entry into the gang was to bring a virgin, any virgin. They beat me up when I tried to get away and I was so badly hurt I couldn’t move. They cut off my clothes with a kn-knife...and I had nothing even for them to see b-because I was a l-late developer,’ she muttered brokenly, almost back there, reliving the terror, the pain and the shame of that public exposure.
Raj grasped both her trembling hands to pull her back into the present. ‘It’s in the past, and it can’t hurt you now unless you let it... And, as you’ve already told me, you were lucky—you’re a survivor.’
‘Yes...’ Her voice was stronger when she encountered shimmering dark-as-night eyes that seemed full of all the strength and calm she herself so often lacked. ‘Yes, you’re right. You have to be wondering how I escaped being raped. The police forced their way in to arrest one of the gang and I was rescued. But now you know why I suffer the panic attacks and why I eventually had the nervous breakdown at university—because I hadn’t really dealt with what had happened to me. That was when I went for therapy and it helped enormously.’
Raj lifted her fingers to his mouth and kissed them. His hands were unsteady. All his emotions were swimming dangerously close to the surface and he was fighting to suppress them with every breath in his body. Hers was a distressing story and he now more than understood her fear of men, but there was no need for the rage inside him at those who had been ready to prey on a child for a few moments of vicious entertainment. She had been saved and they had been punished by the law. Only it wasn’t enough, he thought fiercely, nowhere nearly enough punishment for the damage that had been inflicted on Zoe. In Maraban, the punishment would have been the death penalty.
As they travelled back to the palace, their honeymoon, as such, at an end, Zoe could see that telling Raj what had happened to her had made him settle back in behind his former reserve. Her small face tightened and her hands gripped together hard. She was questioning why she had shared all her secrets with him and anxious about why she was allowing herself to feel so close to him. Wasn’t she acting foolishly? Wasn’t it unwise in the circumstances to let every barrier between them drop?
‘A surprise awaits you on your return to the palace,’ Raj announced, trying to sound upbeat about what he was about to reveal, but failing miserably because he was no idiot and Vivi’s cold reaction to him at the wedding had told him all he needed to know about how he was viewed by Zoe’s family.
‘A surprise?’ Zoe queried.
He would have to hope that his own surprise went unnoticed while her sister was present. Dark blood highlighted Raj’s exotic cheekbones as he thought about the fainting couch he had succumbed to buying and he had to wonder how he had drifted so far from his original intentions. Logic, good judgement and self-control had gone out of the proverbial window the minute he’d laid eyes on Zoe. It was that simple, that basic, he acknowledged grimly.
‘Raffaele, Vivi’s husband, is apparently attending a business meeting in Tasit and your sister accompanied him to visit you.’
To his surprise, Zoe’s mouth down-curved and her chin came up, scarcely the display of uninhibited delight he had expected to see in receipt of such news. After all, she was in daily contact with her siblings, revealing a very close bond with them.
* * *
Zoe’s rarely stirred temper was humming at the prospect of seeing Vivi. Vivi was only coming to visit to check up on her.
‘This is a lovely surprise,’ Zoe said, smiling and lying through her teeth as she hugged her older sister, wondering when her redheaded sibling would finally accept that she was a grown woman but, by nature, Vivi, a forceful personality, was very protective of those she considered weaker. It stung Zoe’s pride to see herself as weak and breakable in Vivi’s eyes.
‘I wanted to see how you were managing.’
‘My phone calls should’ve reassured you on that score,’ Zoe pointed out as a maid brought in coffee and tiny cakes.
Vivi winced. ‘Well, to be frank, they had the opposite effect because you sound so gosh-darned happy all the time.’
‘My goodness, when did being happy become a sign that there was something to worry about?’
‘It’s a sign because I’ve never really heard you this happy before,’ Vivi admitted ruefully. ‘You can smile and laugh and seem happy on the surface but it’s usually very brief and now, all of a sudden, when nobody’s expecting it...’
‘Have you noticed all the changes I’ve made around here?’ Zoe interrupted abruptly, setting down her cup and springing up to indicate all the additional furniture in the room. ‘The staff took photos of the unused rooms and sent them while we were away and I made selections. It’s a big improvement, don’t you think?’
‘If medieval makes you hot to trot,’ Vivi remarked with a sniff, strolling across the room to flick a heavily carved piece that in her opinion would have looked fabulous in a horror movie of some creepy old house.
‘Let me show you around,’ Zoe urged, willing to do anything to evade Vivi’s curiosity, because in truth she was happy and she didn’t really want to think too deeply about why.
Vivi glanced into the bedroom, her attention locking straight onto the male and female apparel currently being unpacked by staff. ‘So, what happened to the—?’
In haste, Zoe thrust open the bathroom door, although she hadn’t yet added anything to its décor, and then froze at the sight of the very opulent tasselled purple fainting couch in the centre.
‘Oh, I like that...it’s sort of sexy and decadent!’ Vivi carolled, walking over to smooth a hand across the rich buttoned upholstery and flick a braided gold tassel.
Zoe was recalling her conversation with Raj and her face was burning hot as hellfire even while a little flicker of heat at her core flamed at the gesture...the challenge. Would she or wouldn’t she? He would be wondering all day about that, she knew he would be, and a dreamy smile at the knowledge of that erotic prospect removed the tension that Vivi’s arrival and awkward questions had induced.
‘You know, I don’t even need to ask you any more.’ Vivi sighed as she returned to her coffee. ‘Obviously, the separate bedroom deal crashed very quickly and you’re sleeping with him. Whose idea was that? I hardly think it was yours! If you get too involved with Raj, Zoe...there will be consequences, because what you have together isn’t supposed to
last...and where will you be when the marriage ends?’
‘It doesn’t matter whose idea it was,’ Zoe argued quietly. ‘All that matters is that there isn’t a problem of any kind with Raj and I, and our present arrangements are our private business.’
Vivi groaned out loud. ‘You’re besotted with him. It’s written all over you,’ she condemned, her concern palpable. ‘That smooth bastard took advantage of you just as I feared he would!’
‘Vivi!’ Zoe blistered across the room in a furious voice her sister had never heard from her before. ‘You do not talk about Raj like that!’
‘I’m not saying anything I wouldn’t say to his face!’ Vivi shot back at her defensively. ‘I’m trying to protect you but it looks like I got here a little too late for that. Damn Grandad, this is all his fault, his wretched snobbery pushing you into this marriage, and now you’re going to get hurt.’
Zoe drew herself up to her full unimpressive height. ‘There is no reason why I should get hurt.’
‘I know what I saw in your face...you’re in love with this guy, who only married you to please his father and use our fancy-schmancy grandmother’s ancestry to enhance his standing.’
‘I’m not in love with him,’ Zoe argued fiercely. ‘It sounds slutty but we’re just having sex for the sake of it!’
Vivi unleashed a pained and unimpressed sigh. ‘And what would you know about a relationship like that?’
Zoe lifted her head high. ‘I’m learning as I go along, just like every other woman has to. I need that freedom, even if I make mistakes... It’s part of growing up,’ she reasoned.
