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His luxuriant black hair uncovered, Raschid now wore only a light cream robe. As he approached her, a faint smile softened his firm mouth. His eyes glittered over her. None of her fearful tension was mirrored in his relaxed bearing.
‘I am relieved that you didn’t undress completely and get into bed to await me,’ he mocked, cool palms resting on her shoulders as he studied her with contrasting sombreness. ‘You are my wife now.’
Polly’s brain was woolly, her head was starting to spin. Dimly she grasped that there was something more than nerves amiss with her. Only willpower enabled her to force the weakness back and stand straight. ‘I can’t get into that bed with you!’ she blurted out.
He dropped down fluidly on one knee and unclasped the girdle. ‘I will carry you there,’ he promised, snapping free the first of the countless silver buttons, beginning at the very hem of her kaftan.
‘I can manage those for myself,’ she muttered, stricken by his lack of reaction to her controversial announcement.
Unexpectedly throaty laughter shook him. A hand halted her retreat, tugging her firmly back within reach. ‘The hundred and one buttons are mine to undo. With each I glimpse another…’ He surveyed her in sudden reflective silence. ‘A most provocative custom,’ he completed gently.
‘For a man,’ she interposed tremulously. ‘If you think that I intend to stand here while you strip me…’
The lean brown fingers did not hesitate at their self-appointed task. ‘This I do not think—I know,’ he countered with perfect cool. ‘You are nervous, Polly, but you are my wife.’
The repetition of that brutal fact slid through her unnaturally taut figure. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here, she reflected crazily. His wife. All individuality, all rights of self-determination wrested from her by a single ceremony. ‘This…this is barbaric!’ she whispered.
‘Think before you speak. I will not endure insults tonight.’ Hard warning chased the previous huskiness from his deep, dark drawl.
Shivering, Polly crossed her hands over her breasts. ‘You’re not being very…reasonable, Raschid.’ Her wide eyes implored his understanding. ‘We’re strangers! I can’t just…’
Rising soundlessly, he uncrossed her defensive hands, his gaze silvery and unyielding. ‘You entered this marriage of your own volition, aware that this moment would arrive.’
Oxygen locked in her aching throat. ‘I didn’t think about it…I couldn’t!’
‘You will not refuse me.’
‘I’m not refusing. I…I…’ She faltered to a halt, not really knowing what she was saying but overpoweringly aware of the charge of anger her objections were unleashing in him. He hadn’t raised his voice; he didn’t need to. The atmosphere was dry as tinder ready to burst into crackling flames.
‘I find this emotional display offensive.’
‘I expect you would,’ Polly muttered helplessly. ‘It’s not a problem you’re likely to suffer from, is it?’
Raschid’s hand closed over her wrist, yanking her back from the further retreat she had been unconsciously making. ‘You are my bride. What you seek to deny me is no longer yours to deny,’ he asserted icily.
She trembled. ‘That’s medieval!’
‘Be careful you do not discover just how medieval I can be.’ He sounded the threat with syllabic sibilance, his nostrils flared, his golden features ruthlessly cast. In his proud demeanour he was every inch a barbaric desert prince, the fierce and pagan image of a feudal culture in which it was unthinkable for a wife to disobey her husband. ‘You make an impressive start to our marriage, do you not? For what, after all, did you offer me on our first encounter but this?’
Her fingers pressed to the annoying pulse flickering wildly at the base of her throat. The aggression she had incited utterly intimidated her and she felt incredibly weak. ‘That isn’t the way it was.’
‘How was it?’ Derision brought violet brilliance to his challenging stare. ‘Did you offer me intelligent conversation? Did you try in any fashion to impress me except as a beautiful woman?’
Polly winced from the lash of his contempt. ‘I was nervous…embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say to you.’
‘Yet you cared not what awaited you. You cared only that I took you. You did not even ask me if you would be my only wife,’ he reminded her. ‘And I told you then that I would bed you.’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’ She backed to the corner of the bed, her hand clutching at one of the posts for support. She was tempted to throw her knowledge of his mistress at him but too afraid of sending his temper right over the edge. ‘Don’t you realise how I feel? All you see is…’
‘My bride defying me, and I do not like it,’ he incised succinctly.
‘All you see is an object. Don’t you think I have feelings?’
An imperious brow lifted. ‘Do you consider mine?’
‘You have none.’ She leant back breathlessly while he calmly continued to flick loose the buttons. She did not even have the energy to put up a token fight. ‘A wedding ring,’ she whispered bitterly, ‘does not dignify lust.’
The metallic sheen of Raschid’s suddenly savage scrutiny made her quail. She loosed a gasp of fear as he moved and swept her up to tumble her down on the bed. ‘With that charge on our wedding night you insult me beyond belief. I have tolerated much from you since we left that church; I will tolerate no more.’ His intonation was raw. ‘I bought you. I own you. That is the pact which you made.’
Shattered, she stared up at him. He met her shocked eyes levelly. The declaration had not been made for effect. I own you. Her whole being recoiled from that primal affirmation of possession. As the canopy above her seemed to be revolving, she pushed her hands down on the mattress to lift herself up. The motion took enormous effort of will. She was so cold now that her teeth wanted to chatter. Her silence appeared to have defused his anger.
He came down beside her, reaching up to dim the wall lights before gathering her into his arms. ‘Polly, let us not begin in discord and bitterness. You should not fear what is natural between a man and a woman.’
A draining tide of dizziness tipped her head back, the argent fall of her hair tumbling over his arm. His voice was coming and going like a buzz-saw in her ears.
‘Raschid,’ she framed hoarsely.
‘Listen to me.’ His natural assurance emerged even in the low pitch of his roughened murmur. ‘It is desire which burns in me. That is not lust. There is no giving in lust—it takes and despoils. That is not how I would initiate my bride into the pleasures of lovemaking.’
Her eyes slid shut as his fingers rested against her cheek. He said something harsh in Arabic, his hand skimming up to her brow, but Polly was already becoming limp, slipping without argument down into the emptiness of oblivion.
* * *
‘Awake?’ A thermometer was thrust in her parched mouth. A strange and yet somehow familiar face, thin and topped by a frilly green hat which contrasted violently with the carrot-red hair, swam into clarity above her. ‘Do you know where you are today? Not to worry, you’re over the worst. It’s not often I’ve seen that high a fever with influenza.’ The stark Glaswegian accent increased Polly’s sense of unreality.
Out came the thermometer at last. Polly tried to move, and discovered her limbs were weighted. Her body was weak as a kitten’s. Lethargically she turned her muzzy head. Sunlight was casting lacy shadows through the frieze on to the Persian carpet on the floor. Everywhere she looked, flowers flourished in a riot of colour. Dust motes danced in the air. Her attention wandered back to the nurse. ‘How do you come to be here?’ She winced at the corncrake rasp of her voice.
‘Noticed I’m not a local, have you? Then you’re well on the mend. I’m Susan MacKenzie.’ An almost depressingly cheerful grin came her way. ‘I’m on contract with the Jumani City Hospital. I was brought to the palace on the first night, along with every consultant in the building.’ She laughed uproariously at the recollection. ‘Half the palace in
habitants were crammed outside that door. You didn’t half create a panic!’
Polly grew even paler. ‘What day is it?’
‘Saturday. You couldn’t possibly remember much. You’ve been out of your skull and wandering ever since you became ill. It’s a marvel that nobody realised that you weren’t well. Still, ’flu can take you very suddenly, and with all that make-up you had on, they couldn’t have told just by looking. Talk about the gilded lily!’
Polly’s sluggish brain edged back to the wedding and the wedding night. Embarrassment swallowed her alive. By the sound of it, she had given Raschid the kind of night he would never forget! A dramatic collapse on the marital bed seemed a fitting end to a disastrous wedding. Tears lashed her eyelids, but she was too weak to shed them.
