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Was that what she had been doing? ‘You don’t want a relationship, you want a bed partner,’ she condemned.
Raschid was inexorably drawing her down on top of him. ‘If that is true, I have yet to find one. So far I have taken a human sacrifice to bed and awakened to sullen silences—not to mention the disappearing wife act.’
At this Polly’s lips opened on a soundless oh of outraged disbelief.
He smiled. ‘But I live in hope of the sacrifice becoming a partner.’
‘I want to get up!’ she repeated unsteadily.
His response was husky and soft. ‘Lie to yourself, aziz, but never lie to me.’
Her head twisted away. ‘I meant what I said.’
Tumbling her over, he smoothly reversed their positions. Gazing down at her, he indolently laced a brown hand into the wild disarray of her bright hair. ‘Your obstinacy may rival mine, but not, I think, your endurance. Or your powers of self-denial. Exactly where would you be if I didn’t throw you on beds, aziz?’ he demanded with lethal satire.
Pinpointing her deep sense of floundering inadequacy, he held it ruthlessly up to the light. He hurt her as he had never hurt her before. Her susceptibility to his smallest caress was indefensible. ‘You…bastard!’ she muttered.
A formidable cool sharded his intent stare. ‘Even if I should find adoration distinctly boring, how I dislike to hear such language upon my wife’s lips.’
You liar! Did Berah bore you? She was tortured by the memory of the male who had talked of his first wife in a tone the reverential reserved for an early Christian martyr, the male who had sensitively removed to new surroundings to evade distressing reminders. Berah had touched him deeply. Berah had awarded him all that an Arab prince was brought up to expect from a wife—in public and in private. Her love had been acceptable. Her love had been returned. Jealousy laced with pain wrenched at Polly. ‘You won’t be receiving adoration from me!’
Without hesitation Raschid released her, casting her bewildered face a hard, glittering smile. ‘However, there are other things that I will have,’ he declared. ‘There you are, Polly. Just this once I give you what you say you want—your own company and an empty bed. But why is it, I wonder, that you should lack the glow of a woman receiving her heart’s desire?’
Her pallor was pronounced, her pulse suddenly a thunderbeat. Her heart’s desire…Oh, lord, help me! she thought. In that bemused instant of savage rejection and jealousy, she saw. She saw what she had blindly fought for and, conversely, blindly fought against. It was not solely that lean, sunbronzed body that roused the indecently insatiable hunger of her senses. No, it was so much more. That quick and clever brain, that potent aura of leashed animal vitality, that quicksilver humour which could flash out disconcertingly from behind the gravity, that…She could have gone on endlessly, a new convert glorifying her idol. She loved him, head over heels over sanity. Logic had nothing to do with it. Love, she appreciated dazedly, wasn’t something you could control or decide not to feel.
‘Ask me, admit that you want me, and I’ll come back to bed.’
Wrenched from stricken self-analysis, she looked at Raschid weakly. Oh, why does it have to be you? she thought. A lithe, unashamed pagan, already provocatively aware of his physical power over her. She recognised that change in him—that overt, predatory awareness of his sexual magnetism. She could have sworn that it hadn’t always been there. But it must have been. Wasn’t blindness one of her worst failings? And wasn’t perception his strongest talent? How long would it be before he guessed that this wasn’t the full extent of his power?
In the silence he sent her a wolfish smile, amused now, outrageously confident. With it went a look of outright possession. ‘It may not be today, it may not even be tomorrow, but you will make that admission eventually,’ he told her.
‘I hope you have the patience of Job!’ The snappy retort came to her with the saving ease of habit, but he left her sunk in depression.
Even desire didn’t threaten his cool self-dominion. He was as content to sate his high sex drive with Polly as he would have been with a mistress. He was just as safe from emotional involvement. All this fine-sounding talk about wanting to establish a relationship was a subtle counter-manoeuvre aimed at driving her metaphorically to her knees and moulding her into the required image of wifely behaviour.
It wasn’t worth any more than that wretched swimming pool being created for the past ten days at phenomenal expense and incredible noise out in their courtyard. Had she asked for a swimming pool? Even hinted? It was pretty hard to pretend that you didn’t notice a swimming pool being built, but Polly had managed the feat. And now in the midst of a running battle she discovered that she didn’t want to fight Raschid any longer, but she shrank from the danger of him realising how she really felt about him.
* * *
In the middle of the night the call came, shrilling through the veil of her slumber, causing her to mutter crossly, but late phone calls for Raschid were not unusual.
‘I’ll take this on another line.’ Before she drifted back to sleep, she wondered that he should have spoken in English.
It was still dark when he shook her awake. He was fully dressed, his features tautly cast. He gripped her hand firmly, his eyes were steady. ‘You must be brave, aziz,’ he urged. ‘I have bad news to relate. Your father has had a heart attack—a serious one. He is in intensive care.’
‘No!’ Her mind rejected it entirely. Her energetic, jovial father, lying on the boundary between life and death? Impossible! But beneath Raschid’s level gaze, she lost that fragile, futile confidence. ‘Dear heaven!’ she whispered.
‘As soon as you are dressed we will be on our way to England. Zenobia has already packed for you, the arrangements are made. I didn’t wish to waken you before it was necessary.’
Polly gasped, ‘That call…it was for me! Mother…’
Raschid sighed. ‘It was not from Anthea. It was Mrs King, the housekeeper, who contacted me. Your sister Maggie also spoke briefly to me. I understand that your mother is so distraught that she is in bed under sedation. Your family are greatly in need of you.’
Her mother had collapsed—of course she had. She had always leant heavily on her husband. With his life in the balance, she would go to pieces, regardless of how that reaction would affect her family. ‘The children must be terribly frightened,’ she muttered worriedly.
‘Quite so, and though it is very hard for you, that is why you must be strong—for all their sakes. Your father is alive,’ he emphasised. ‘Hold to that. He has tremendous zest for life, and that must be in his favour.’
They landed to a grey, wet London evening. The waiting car ferried them the hundred miles to the local hospital, where the consultant was carefully non-committal. There was, they learnt, a danger of a second attack. Polly was allowed to glance in at her sleeping father. His ruddy face was drained and caved in. She rammed back an undisciplined sob of fear as Raschid’s arm moved bracingly round her. He had been so marvellous, immensely calm and reassuring and sensible. It was second nature for him to advocate the setting aside of personal feelings to consider others more vulnerable.
Maggie rushed down the steps of the house and flung herself into Polly’s arms. The household was in chaos. ‘Why couldn’t Uncle Peter and Aunt Janice have been here?’ she sobbed. ‘Mummy thinks Daddy’s going to die!’
Polly also regretted the absence of Chris’s parents. Had they been in England they would have come to Anthea’s assistance, but they were in South America where Peter Jeffries, a high-flying executive for an international consortium, was engaged on important business. They weren’t free to fly home to support Anthea through her ordeal, and Polly sighed, fearing that her mother would find her presence of little comfort.
The following days were ever after a blur for Polly. A flood of well-wishers, denied access at the hospital, called at the house. Anthea exhausted Polly with her constant demands for reassurance and her pettish refusals to accept i
t. Her visits to her husband’s bedside always resulted in an emotional breakdown when she came home again. Unable as she was to accept a female in a supportive role, the task of soothing Anthea fell upon Raschid. His phenomenal patience with her mother’s hysteria shamed Polly. In her heart she knew that he deemed Anthea a pretty, self-orientated and utterly useless woman, who was failing her children at a time when they most needed her.
On the same day that the consultant cautiously pronounced that Ernest appeared to be out of immediate danger, Raschid was recalled to the Middle East by an attack on a Dhareini tanker in the Gulf. Polly was in the nursery, where she had been spending most of her time trying to keep up her siblings’ spirits. She was reading a story to Elaine with Timothy sleepily curled up on her lap when Raschid came to break the news to her.
In the dull glow of the gas fire his constraint was noticeable. Putting Timothy into Maggie’s reluctant arms, she followed Raschid from the room. ‘Many casualties?’ she asked.
‘The number is not yet certain.’ His angular cheekbones stood out in sharp relief. ‘They have been airlifted to the nearest hospital. I am afraid that this means that I must leave.’
‘Of course. Those poor men…their families.’ Polly’s voice broke, and shamefully it was not out of shocked compassion alone. For a selfish moment, she could not bear the knowledge that they were to be separated.
Timothy’s cantankerous wails flooded the landing as Maggie flounced out. ‘He just won’t settle for me. He wants you.’ Uncomfortably she glanced between Polly and Raschid, for they were several feet apart.
Her brother fastened chubby arms victoriously round her neck and subsided. Over the top of his curly head, Polly took in Raschid’s absorption in a section of unadorned wall and the rigidity of his profile. He really was upset. In fact, she had never seen him so upset about anything that he wouldn’t even look at her.
‘It may also be some time before I can return,’ he related woodenly. ‘Excuse me, I must take my leave of your mother.’
Her heart was heavy as lead. Mrs King was packing for him, and she insisted on helping. When she came down to the hall Raschid was leaving the drawing-room. She could not help but feel neglected at the inordinately long time he had devoted to her mother while she had wasted time upstairs, believing he would return there.
‘I must go now.’
