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A little pale, very tense, his left hand bandaged, he was informally clad in black jeans and as physically arresting as a panther rather sheepishly at bay. Incandescent eyes travelled over her with aching slowness and she needed no words to tell her that her explanation, her proof was not required. That look was extraordinarily expressive. If only he had given it to her two days ago! she thought with helpless bitterness.
‘I expect you found out while you were gathering your evidence for a court case. You would have needed a doctor’s report,’ Polly attacked.
Raschid had changed colour at her taunting words. He moved. ‘Polly, I…’
‘Don’t you dare come near me!’ she said fiercely.
Shorn of his usual sweeping aplomb, he hovered, and she bent her head, determined not to be swayed by the sight of him. She could not compete with Berah’s shadow. She could not be second best. The intensity of her own feelings for him demanded more, and after all she had gone through, being accepted simply because she could give him the child he had thought he could never have, wasn’t enough. ‘You can skip the apologies, the heartfelt regrets and the smoothie persuasions,’ she whispered painfully. ‘You can have access, but I really don’t think we could ever live together again.’
He shifted. ‘Try to imagine how I felt.’
‘Stay where you are!’ Polly snapped shakily. ‘I’m being sensible, and I’m never sensible when you get close.’
He drew his hand from behind his back and laid a single white rose on the carpet along with a small pink furry teddy bear. ‘I am at your feet with them,’ he muttered hoarsely.
Polly surveyed the offerings in horror. Her throat closed over. She had underestimated the depths to which he would sink in a tight corner. Her hand flew up to her convulsing mouth. Her eyes watered accusingly. ‘I am not touched,’ she spluttered. ‘Do you hear me?’
He took immediate advantage of her emotional disarray by striding forward to match the declaration he had made with the action. His arms enclosed her tightly and he buried his head in her lap. ‘Forgive me,’ he implored gruffly. ‘If I could not believe in a miracle, it is because I have never experienced one before. I would give all that I had to steal those accusations I made from your memory, but I cannot. I can only ask you to try to understand that for ten years I believed that I could not father a child. I never doubted it, and I never forgot this fact. It haunted me with Berah, and it haunted me even more after her death.’
Black silky hair, dark as a raven’s wing, was brushing her clenched hands. She ached to touch him, to hold him. It was a craving that stormed through her every defence. The harsh sincerity of his plea was more than she could withstand. Her hand crept up on to his taut shoulder as she whispered, ‘You hurt me so much. I was so happy, and then all of a sudden it was like a bad dream.’
Raschid looked up at her with anguished azure eyes. ‘It should have been beautiful, and I spoilt it—but ten years, Polly,’ he repeated, ‘it is a long time. When he said you were pregnant it almost destroyed me.’
‘Your first thought was that I…’
‘My first thought was that I had driven you into his arms,’ he interrupted, roughly insistent. ‘I was so shocked that I could see no other explanation.’
Polly reddened. ‘It wasn’t all your fault,’ she said ruefully. ‘When I married you I did think I was in love with Chris, and when I realised that I wasn’t, I just wanted to forget about it. I’d made myself so miserable for so long…well, it left me feeling rather stupid.’
He buried his mouth heatedly in the centre of one of her palms. ‘I had seen the bond of affection between you at the wedding,’ he breathed, lifting his head. ‘I did not suspect you then. He was flirting with you, but you were not flirting with him. It must seem very arrogant of me, but I did not really believe that you might love him until I saw you with him at your home. Then I wanted to rip him asunder…slowly.’
Polly gulped. ‘It was just one of those things. He didn’t mean to kiss…’
‘We have talked enough about him,’ Raschid interrupted with a subdued flash in his clear gaze. ‘He is unimportant. It is Berah we must talk about. It was only when I was on the plane that it occurred to me that she could have lied.’
‘Lied?’ she echoed.
He gave a harsh laugh. ‘Yes—lied. At first it was hard for me to accept that she could have done that. Two years into our marriage she had shown very few signs of her illness. I had no reason to suspect that she could practice such an appalling deception, but I should have suspected later. I should have, but by then I had other problems with which to concern myself. I have never been honest with you about Berah. I always felt the need until now to defend her memory from criticism.’
‘I can understand that. Asif explained…’
As Polly compressed her lips in dismay over the admission, Raschid sighed. ‘It is all right—I know he was here. Having given my father those letters last night, he could not hide where he had been, and he told me exactly what he had told you. It was not all true. Asif likes to exaggerate.’
He released her hand and stood upright. ‘Berah did not commit suicide. She fell, Polly. She was extremely distressed, crying, hysterical. It was an accident. I am not denying that she had suicidal impulses, but if she had wanted to die, she would not have chosen such a method. She fell,’ he said again. ‘But that did not make me feel that I had failed her any less. When I left you here, I flew to London.’
She frowned. ‘Why?’
‘To see the specialist whom she had seen,’ he explained, a muscle jerking tight at the corner of his mouth. ‘It was not to check up on whether or not you could be telling me the truth. I had to know. I had to know for my own peace of mind whether or not Berah had lied or somehow misunderstood, and when I spoke with that man, the irrational guilt of years left me.’
‘It must have been very upsetting for you to discover that she could have done that to you,’ Polly remarked brittly.
Bleakly Raschid looked back at her. ‘No, it was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard in my life. It set me free of my conscience.’ He moved a broad shoulder jerkily. ‘You see, I never loved her. I cared for her, she was my wife, but I was never able to love her as she loved me. She would never meet me as an equal. She would not mix with other people, and she took a dislike to every member of my family. Although she was quiet with me, she was vicious with the servants. Of course she was not well, but I did not know that when we were first married. The time when I might have learned to love her went past.’
Pale with a mixture of guilt and regret, he watched her anxiously, and she knew that he had never admitted those feelings to another living soul. ‘Shortly after she informed me that I was sterile,’ he continued in a clipped undertone, ‘it became clear that she no longer wished to share my bed. I needed her desperately then. It wasn’t until I understood that she was ill that I could forgive her for that.’
So much that she had never understood was now painfully obvious to Polly. Instinctively she stood up and crossed over to him, wrapping her arms round him tightly, thinking how ironic it was that she should want to cry for Berah. Berah had lied to Raschid because she didn’t want to lose him. ‘She is at peace now,’ she muttered against his shirt-front, drowning in the evocative heat and scent of him, the petty bite of her consuming jealousy finally laid to rest.
‘But I am not at peace, aziz. I cannot live without you by my side,’ Raschid confessed harshly. A fear and an aching loneliness that put talon claws into her heart was in his eyes as he looked down at her. ‘I love you,’ he said fiercely.
‘Yes,’ Polly mumbled shakily, seeing that so very clearly now.
‘How could you have doubted it?’ he groaned, enfolding her slender body to the muscular hardness of his taut length. ‘I fell in love with you when you had the flu—that is not very romantic, is it? But I couldn’t stay away from you, I couldn’t pass the door. Just to hear the sound of your voice, to see you. I couldn’t help myself. But
I didn’t know I was in love until I saw you with the children. Then I knew, and I fought it. How could I ask you to spend the rest of your life with me?’
She smiled tremulously. ‘You can ask me.’
His dark head bent. ‘I am not asking you now, I am telling you that I will never let you leave me.’ Lifting her up against him, he found her mouth hungrily, and it was a long time before either of them was in the mood for conversation again.
Sleepily Polly asked about the letters Asif had carried off.
‘No doubt we will hear all about them when we go back, but it seems that Louise did forgive my grandfather in the end. However, she wouldn’t return to live with the rest of the family. Salim was a very proud man. He did not even want his son to realise that he had accepted her terms,’ Raschid clarified, viewing her lazily with unreserved adoration. ‘I think it pleased my father greatly, for he was full of it last night when I went to speak with him, but he did not get to tell me very much, for I had more important news.’
‘Like what?’ Polly enquired.
