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‘Tension, emotion…’
‘That I’ve failed to get under control,’ Rashad pronounced, his beautiful mouth tightening with dissatisfaction.
‘But you don’t need to control it, not with me. With me, you don’t have to put up a front, you don’t have to impress.’ Polly wrapped a possessive arm round his lean, damp body, small fingers smoothing down soothingly over his ribcage. ‘I want you to be yourself.’
‘Be careful what you wish for.’ Rashad turned his tousled dark head away from her. ‘Ferah chose to die sooner than remain with me,’ he said flatly, no emotion whatsoever in the statement.
Completely taken aback by that shockingly sudden change of topic, Polly tensed. ‘Chose?’ she queried with a frown.
‘A few weeks before she was bitten by the snake she took an overdose. Fortunately she was found in time and I arranged for her to have treatment and therapy but sadly it wasn’t enough. When she was bitten she concealed the bite until it was too late for the antidote to work,’ Rashad revealed. ‘She died in my arms. She told me that she was setting me free…’
Polly was appalled, belatedly grasping why any memory of Ferah was liable to upset him. She almost spoke her mind to say that she thought that that was a dreadfully cruel and martyred thing to have said to him in such circumstances but common sense made her bite her lip rather than speak in insensitive haste. ‘Setting you free?’ she whispered instead.
‘Free to marry another woman, one who could give me a child as she could not,’ Rashad extended curtly. ‘She knew her father had been trying to persuade me to divorce her and take another wife and that I had refused—’
‘Her own father was willing to do that to her?’ Polly pressed in disgust.
‘All my uncle saw was the end game and that was the restoration of the monarchy. He saw a king with an heir in tow as a safer bet than one with a barren wife,’ Rashad advanced bitterly. ‘Ferah knew how he felt because he told her that it was her duty to let me go. She was already depressed. All she ever wanted was to be a mother and when that was denied her she felt worthless. Being made to feel like a burden as well was too much for her. She wasn’t a strong person.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Polly muttered, feeling inadequate because he had told her a much more unhappy story than she had expected and for the first time she understood that Rashad had been as much wounded by his first marriage as he had been by the traumatic changes and injuries inflicted on him by his dysfunctional childhood. The sheer extent of the losses he had endured turned her stomach over sickly, making her feel outrageously naïve.
‘I should’ve given her more support. It’s my fault that she died,’ Rashad murmured with grave simplicity.
‘It wasn’t your fault!’ Polly argued vehemently. ‘She was depressed. You got her professional help. What more could you have done? By the sound of it, her own family did nothing to help her recover!’
Rashad stretched out with a heavy sigh. ‘It’s in the past and can’t be changed, aziz. Let us leave it there.’
But although Polly sealed her lips on further comment she couldn’t leave it there because she felt ashamed that she had come over all jealous and possessive
about his attachment to Ferah and his memories of his first marriage. Her sister had tried to warn her that Rashad had been through the emotional grinder in the past and she hadn’t really listened. He had also trained himself to control his emotions and keep his secrets and in his position that was hardly surprising. That he had let the barriers down just for a few minutes with her was a promising sign, she told herself with determined positivity.
CHAPTER NINE
POLLY SHIFTED IN the early hours, partially wakening to the sound of Rashad having a terse conversation with someone on the phone. Blinking, she turned over, eyes drowsy in the half-light before dawn as he put the phone down again and sat up.
‘There was an incident on the border during the night.’ He sighed, raking long brown fingers through his sleep-tousled jet-black hair. ‘A man was shot but mercifully not killed. I’ll be in meetings all day trying to calm this down, but first I have to fly out there and get the facts.’
He dropped a kiss on her brow and urged her to go back to sleep. A few hours later, Polly rolled out of bed with her usual energy and then stopped dead as a roiling wave of sick dizziness assailed her. There was nothing she could do but rush for the bathroom where she knelt on the cold tiled floor to be ignominiously sick. In the aftermath, she felt weak and shaky and it was a few minutes before she took the risk of standing up again.
She couldn’t have fallen pregnant so quickly, she reasoned with herself as she stepped into the shower, needing to feel clean from head to toe. Ellie had said the average conception took around six months but that it could just as easily take longer. No, it was much more likely that she had caught some bug or eaten something at dinner that had disagreed with her digestion. Even so, she thought that it would be sensible to consult the palace doctor.
She dried her hair and got dressed, wondering if Rashad would be gone as long as he had feared. No matter what was on his agenda he generally managed to share breakfast with her and she had learned to cherish their quiet moments together. Her period was a week overdue, she recalled with sudden reluctance, but she hadn’t paid any heed to that because she’d suspected that the radical change of diet and climate was playing havoc with her system. After all, last month she had been early so possibly this month her cycle would be late to compensate for that.
Hayat awaited her in the reception room next door with a list of Polly’s phone calls and her emails, each starred in terms of what Hayat deemed important. That her sister, Ellie’s call only rated the bottom of the list was telling. She learned that she had received an invitation to open the new wing of the hospital in Kashan and asked Hayat if she would arrange an appointment for her with Dr Wasem.
‘You are unwell?’ Hayat questioned, studying her with a frown.
‘No. I simply wish to consult the doctor,’ Polly replied.
After a busy half-hour of tests and an examination with Dr Wasem Polly discovered that she was pregnant. Her idle musings to that effect were proven when she had least expected it. In truth she was stunned because Rashad’s admission about Ferah’s sterility and his laid-back assumption allied to her own that it would take months for her to conceive had all combined to make her look on motherhood as a distinctly distant possibility. Instead it had suddenly become her new reality.
‘I am honoured beyond words to break this news to you,’ Dr Wasem informed her, his huge smile warm with genuine pleasure on her behalf.
‘I’ll tell Rashad tonight so I would be grateful if this remains confidential,’ Polly responded tactfully, well aware that in the claustrophobic gossip mill of the royal household the good doctor probably wanted to shout her announcement from the rooftops.
‘Of course.’
Polly positively floated out of his ultra-modern surgery on the ground floor of the palace. A baby, Rashad’s baby. He would be so happy, so relieved, she reflected ruefully. He had lived through the pressure of a childless first marriage and all the fertility testing that had gone with it, and she knew that he considered the entire process stressful and potentially disastrous. Now he would be able to relax and forget about worrying, she thought tenderly.
