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Enraged by his interpretation of her behaviour, she hissed, ‘I wasn’t trying to make you jealous, and I can’t stand it when you say that I belong to you!’
‘It is a fact—why quarrel with it?’ As her eyes fled fearfully to the door, he murmured, ‘The servants won’t enter without my command.’
‘How about if I scream?’ she threatened wildly, her body stiffly refusing to yield to the hard lines of his.
He laughed huskily. ‘They will either think that you are very passionate in my arms or that I am beating you. Neither eventuality will bring them rushing through that door.’
The predatory kindling of his measuring scrutiny was not lost on her. She was terrified of responding to him, terrified of a self-betrayal she would find impossible to forgive or excuse. All that Raschid deserved was a display of cool contempt and indifference. He tasted her angrily parted lips with urgent brevity.
She twisted her head away, fighting the leap of her pulses. ‘No!’
His fingers framed her cheekbone. ‘From the first desire was there between us. A day will come when the very last word you wish to employ with me is no,’ he declared.
As he captured her mouth again, skilled and unhurried, then ravagingly sweet and insistent, the taut stasis of her body heated to the abrasively masculine lure of his. She could not deny him. Within seconds she was lost to that violent and intense mingling of sensation and emotion which thundered through her veins like the beat of stormy seas. Her slender length in thrall to the incredibly sensual exploration of his hands, she clung to him. His breath rasped in his throat as he released her, sinking back to narrowly observe her drugged eyes and hectically flushed cheeks.
‘And truly it is not a word you use when you most need to use it.’ Arrogant mastery burnishing his gaze, his mobile mouth quirked amusedly. ‘Then I shouldn’t begin what I can’t finish. You are not yet convalesced to that degree. But how I wish it were not so!’
Polly pulled the loosened robe clumsily round her again. Her breasts were achingly full from his caresses, a hot, shivery weakness was tremulously besetting her lower limbs. The incisive imprint of him was still on her like a burning brand.
‘Must you look at me as if you have been assaulted against your will?’ Raschid said drily. ‘At least be honest with yourself.’
Her darkened eyes embittered, she whispered, ‘You’d be surprised how honest I can be with myself. I know how a whore feels now.’
After an arrested pause, he disconcerted her entirely by flinging back his imperious dark head and laughing with rich appreciation. Indignantly she leapt up—or at least she tried. He spanned her waist with firm hands that imposed restraint. ‘Forgive me. It was not very kind of me to laugh at your exit line,’ he conceded not quite levelly. ‘But sometimes when you intend to be very rude, you are instead very funny. I was supposed to be angry? Shocked?’
‘With your experience of that breed of women, I guess not!’ she threw in a tempestuous rage. ‘But I have no plans to join the ranks. If you had any decency at all, you’d leave me alone. Now will you get your rotten, womanising hands off me?’
An anger that knocked hers into obscurity had wiped the glimmering warmth from his eyes. It dimmed slightly, however, as she hurled the last line at him. ‘It is fortunate that I have become well acquainted with your habit of speaking first and thinking second. But I warn you, some day that tongue of yours will take you too far.’
‘You aren’t going to keep me quiet!’ Polly gasped furiously. ‘You don’t want a wife—you never did. We both know that divorce is on the cards. Since you’ve been so refreshingly frank, I’ll return the compliment. I’m not playing the game, Raschid. I’m not sharing your bed because you’ve got nothing better to do when you’re here. Our marriage is a total farce, and if you push me, I won’t fit in with the charade in any way. I’m warning you as well.’
‘Don’t threaten me.’ It was velvety soft. ‘Don’t ever threaten me.’
Prickles of alarm were running up and down her spine while he silently studied her. His hands slid from her. ‘I must confess that I forgot my sister’s foolish words to you,’ he breathed in exasperation.
What had preoccupied her unceasingly in recent days was the merest triviality to him. Fiercely she stiffened and thrust up her chin. ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence with the lies your loving sister was happy to swallow!’
‘You know me so little still?’ The hauteur of his look drove colour into her strained face. ‘I might have believed that you had a better knowledge of my character.’
How? He was a law unto himself, a parcel of contradictions. He had a mind with more twists than the Hampton Court maze, a mind which a scheming Borgia would have envied. A mind which tied Polly up in knots.
‘That woman does not exist in my life,’ he said coolly. ‘I do not pretend to have lived as a celibate, but I would not lie with my wife and then lie with another woman. The concept of that fills me with distaste. I would not be unfaithful within marriage.’
She could not hold his dispassionate gaze. Her head lowered, her brain seething. He had the nine lives of a cat. By the time you had sprung the trap, he had already removed himself to a place of safety. He had dispensed with his mistress. King Reija had played a winning hand. You had to take your hat off to the old gentleman—he knew his son. Enter Polly, exit blonde Parisienne. Convinced that he fully intended to carry on the affair, Polly had worked herself up into a state of righteous indignation. Ignominiously routed, she now only longed for escape. ‘I’m tired,’ she told him.
‘Stay where you are.’
‘No, I really feel we’ve done the topic to death,’ she muttered.
A dark brow lifted. ‘Though it was not greatly on your mind when you were in my arms, was it?’ Raschid hazarded grimly. ‘Surely we may deal together better than this?’
A tide of burning moisture stung Polly’s sensitive eyelids. She was all mixed up, but she refused to be ashamed of her suspicion. Raschid sought no closer ties with her. She couldn’t be blamed for distrust. Not when it was so humiliatingly obvious that the only role she was to be permitted to play was that of mistress within marriage.
He released his breath. ‘You do seem tired. This evening has been too great a strain for you.’
Before she could object he had swept her up in his arms. She felt like a toy about to be stowed back on the appropriate shelf in a cupboard, and forgotten. She didn’t speak when he laid her down on the bed.
‘I will phone you while I am away,’ he told her.
‘Don’t bother,’ she retorted from the depths of her bitter turmoil. ‘No pretence—remember? And I certainly don’t want the reminders.’
‘As you wish.’
Even if he had slammed the door it would have made her feel better. But Raschid did not sink to childish displays. He was too disciplined, too self-contained to require the outlet. Dinner had been laden with calamity like the wedding and the wedding night. There was no meeting point between them. He wouldn’t permit one. He wouldn’t give an inch on the terms he had dictated at Ladybright.
With his essential detachment that supplied him with no problems. Polly was different. She couldn’t cope with the knowledge that Raschid expected her to switch her emotions off and let him make love to her. She coped even worse with the awareness that she wanted him, as she had never wanted Chris. The missing ingredient in her response to Chris was all too prominent with Raschid. Sexual attraction.
As the clear call of the muezzin called the faithful to prayer at dawn, Polly was still lying hollow-eyed and wide awake, desperately attempting to calm the fevered rise and fall of her emotions and understand the angry hurt which lay behind her every response to Raschid.
* * *
‘I’ll lend you something.’ Chassa rifled a unit with an obliging smile. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you had no swimsuit? I must have a dozen.’ She dropped a handful on the bed. ‘I can’t wait until I can wear them again.’
Gla
ncing at Chassa’s slim figure in which the evidence of her pregnancy was so slight as to be almost imperceptible, Polly smiled. ‘Can’t you wear them now?’
Chassa wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m always very tired in the first months. It’s unfortunate.’ Her lustrous eyes shadowed. ‘Asif is very active, he loves sports and late nights. I’m not much fun when I’m pregnant, and I shouldn’t complain that he’s out so often. I’m not very attractive like this.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ Polly protested.
