AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.
‘What I want to do,’ Razul informed her rawly, pressing her knees apart with his hard thighs as he sank his hands beneath her to hold her in place. ‘If you believe that I have used you, then I might as well commit the sin.’
She sank her unsteady hands into his thick, silky hair, emotions that were at powerful variance with her spoken rejection threatening to tear her in two, until he took her mouth with passionate urgency and with that one act drove every rational thought from her head.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BETHANY shifted in the comfortable bed and shivered convulsively with cold. Her arm was throbbing. She ached all over, she ached in places she hadn’t even known she could ache, but, strangely, she felt drowsily detached from her physical discomforts and her mind was disorientatingly awash with a flood of erotic imagery.
She was remembering the hot, drugging glory of Razul’s mouth on hers, the phenomenal speed at which her treacherously eager body had quickened to melted honey. She was remembering that savage joining as he’d sunk into her over and over again, remorselessly driving her to a pitch of excitement far beyond her wildest fantasies. She was remembering her own wanton ecstasy when he’d chosen to ditch all control and cool...and was shrinking inwardly from the shame of her own weakness.
Yet she was too honest to deny that she had gloried in that sensual intimacy and rejoiced in his hungry need for her and that, most of all, she had loved falling asleep in his arms, knowing that he was there in the night and feeling wonderfully secure in that sense of no longer being alone.
So, it had begun, she sensed wretchedly. This was what love did to you. It levelled your pride and betrayed your principles. It made a sane woman behave insanely. Her mother was an intelligent woman, but intelligence had not once prompted her to break away from her destructive marriage.
No, her mother stayed the course, apparently hooked on the pain and humiliation of possessing a wandering spouse. ‘He’s my husband and I love him,’ she had told her daughter in staunch reproof in the days when Bethany had still been naïve enough to think that she should interfere. Escape to university had been a blessing, and in burying herself in her studies and carving out her career Bethany had gradually let the ties of home wane to their current level of occasional letters.
With a weak hand she tugged at the sheet, trying to warm herself.
Had she really protected herself all these years just to fall flat on her face for a male who was a sexual predator like her father? The kind of man who stoked his inadequate ego with female flattery and surrender, who made an art form out of lying and who was loyal to nothing but his own self-interest. But that wasn’t Razul, she conceded grudgingly, her head aching fit to burst.
It was laughable to think of Razul as inadequate. In the ego line, he was as tough as old boots. He was also fiercely loyal to his family, not to mention being possessed of a nasty habit of brutal candour that was frequently grossly unwelcome to Bethany’s ears. In fact, if there was anything you least wanted to hear about yourself, Razul was most likely to break the bad news, presumably in the hope that you would admit the flaw and work hard to eradicate it.
But not one of those virtues made him any less of a predator, Bethany reminded herself painfully. Indeed, that powerful character made him even more dangerous, for she saw now that it was that innate strength and tenacity of purpose which she found so very attractive. He was the only man who had ever stood up to her, the only man who had ever managed to penetrate her defensive shell...and the only man ever to surprise her by constantly doing the unexpected, refusing to fall into the neat little pigeon-holes into which she had scornfully slotted all men from an early age.
So now she knew why she loved him. But that didn’t blind her to the knowledge that all Razul wanted from her was that wild sexual oblivion which he had introduced her to last night. Only he wasn’t prepared to admit that openly, was he? Presumably, if he did, his own moral scruples would take a battering. Marriage was much more respectable than an affair—which he could not possibly have got away with in Datar—but their marriage was still only a temporary affair.
It was becoming an effort to think, she registered, twisting her head back and forth on the pillow, her mouth as dry as a bone as she fought to concentrate. Her arm gave an unbearable twinge as she moved it, and with an effort, for she felt very weak, she pushed back the sheet and surveyed it with a curiously detached sort of interest. It was swollen and angry-looking, particularly puffy round the plaster covering Fatima’s scratches. Blood poisoning, she decided, and she was probably running a temperature, which explained why she was feeling so cold.
She heard a door open. Had it been locked? She recalled his threat to lock her up and throw away the key and smiled with helpless amusement. She loved his drama, too. Her mind was wandering, she noted with faint irritation—she needed a doctor.
Razul appeared in her field of view, fully dressed in an exquisitely tailored dove-grey suit. In Western mode today. He looked devastatingly handsome but he shimmered a little indistinctly round the edges, as if she was suffering from some form of visual disturbance. She wondered dimly why he was carrying a laden tray complete with flowers, because he had the distinct attitude of someone who didn’t know what to do with it.
‘You are awake...are you hungry?’ he enquired very stiltedly, hovering quite a few feet away and looking staggeringly awkward. ‘I have brought breakfast.’
Doctor, she reminded herself, grateful that Razul would be rock-solid in a crisis.
He cleared his throat in the silence. ‘Naturally you are awaiting an apology.’
Was she? Why was she expecting an apology? She couldn’t imagine, and continued to observe him with glazed green eyes from the depths of the great, shadowy bed.
‘I regret my behaviour last night,’ he delivered, an arc of colour accentuating the strong slant of his cheek-bones and the brilliance of his dark, troubled eyes. ‘I have no excuse to make for myself. I lost control. I lost my temper. I have never done this before.’
She just couldn’t concentrate at all. Doctor, she thought again. ‘I need a doctor,’ she told him weakly.
‘A doctor?’ He frowned uncertainly at her.
She pushed the sheet down from her aching arm. ‘See?’ she pointed out.
The tray dropped with a thunderous crash of smashing china. She blinked in bemusement as Razul suddenly came down on the bed beside her in what could only be described as a flying leap. A flood of volatile Arabic rent the charged silence. He grasped her fingers in a death grip and stared down at her, immobilised by shock. Panic, sheer panic, she registered in astonishment, and then he dug out a mobile phone, but his hand was shaking so badly that he evidently hit the wrong numerals, because he cursed viciously and had to start again. Nor was the call that he eventually managed to make distinguished by any princely form of cool.
‘Sorry to be such a nuisance,’ she sighed in what she hoped was a soothing tone.
He said something in his own language in response, his English obviously failing him. He groaned something in a tone of anguish as he snatched up her nightdress and began to feed her into it. Then he bundled her very gently into first the sheet and then the bedspread and swept her up, wrapped like an Egyptian mummy. About there, she slid into a feverish state of unawareness.
The next time Bethany surfaced she was in a dimly lit room in one of those beds with rails round it and a drip was attached to her arm. She felt terribly hot and uncomfortable, and she didn’t want another thermometer stuck in her mouth and said so loudly. She heard Razul speak and heard a female voice literally snap back at him, which struck her as unusual, and if only it had not been too much effort to do so she might have looked just to see what was going on.
The time after that, she wakened up as if she had been sleeping. Her arm was no longer painful but she felt incredibly drained. The same voices were still talking. She shifted position with a faint mutter over the weakness of
her muscles and opened her eyes. Laila was standing over the bed on one side of her, Razul at the foot, and there was more than a suggestion of acrimony in the air.
‘There you are,’ Laila said with satisfaction to her brother. ‘I told you she was only asleep...as did Mr Khan.’
Bethany frowned in astonishment at Razul. He looked as though he hadn’t shaved in a week and had been sleeping rough. A thick blue-black shadow of stubble covered his aggressive jawline. His eyes were bloodshot, his suit crumpled, his tie missing.
‘How are you feeling?’ he enquired tautly, ignoring his sister.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Almost two days—’
‘The longest days of my life,’ Laila groaned. ‘Please tell him to go home, Bethany, before I am tempted to commit a crime still punishable by death...an assault on his illustrious person—’
‘You will not speak to me like that!’ Razul bit out, making Bethany flinch.
‘No human being can go that long without sleep and expect to retain a sense of proportion...and what has happened to your sense of humour?’ Laila demanded.
‘You expect me to laugh when my wife has been on the brink of death?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Your wife has not been on the brink of death. She has been quite ill but not seriously ill. Now will you please go home before I am reduced to ignoble strategy? You know as well as I do what will happen if I inform our father of your current state of exhaustion. One tiny hint that his beloved son is not rejoicing in robust health and he’ll order you home.’
