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Azrael threw his wide shoulders back. ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’
‘Of course you can,’ Molly shot back at him half an octave higher in her mounting frustration. ‘Of course you can fix it! You told me that you were the law in Djalia.’
‘If only it were that simple, Molly,’ Azrael sliced back. ‘But it is not. Many other factors are involved here—’
‘I don’t care about other factors. I only care about me!’ Molly snapped back roundly, ringlets dancing round her flushed cheeks. ‘You unfix this stupid marriage or I’ll be guilty of murder!’
‘It is unthinkable for me to request an immediate divorce. It would look very bad, as if I am a man who does not know his own mind, a man who casts a woman off without even living with her for a few months—’
/> ‘While the real truth is that you’re nutty as a fruitcake and locked in the ethics of a bygone age!’ Molly threw at him at full volume. ‘Who the heck but you would worry about a woman’s reputation in this day and age?’
‘I am not ashamed of an honourable urge to protect you—’
‘I don’t need protecting!’ Molly yelled at him at the top of her voice. ‘I’m a strong, independent woman, perfectly capable of looking after myself—’
‘But not when you’re being kidnapped and not when you’re lost in the desert,’ Azrael derided.
‘And only you would dare to throw that at me!’
‘It is the truth,’ Azrael pointed out without hesitation. ‘In the space of a few days I have rescued you twice from dangerous situations. Now I find myself in a position where I need to ask you to be understanding and reasonable.’
‘You were not reasonable with me!’ Molly flung at him straight off, green eyes electric with anger. ‘You threatened to keep me a prisoner until I agreed not to slap charges on Tahir, but now I do understand one thing. The Djalian royal family are all crazy as loons. Your brother kidnaps me, you imprison me and tell me we’re married without me even being asked how I feel about that—’
‘I am sure you feel as trapped and resentful as I do,’ Azrael cut in.
Molly lost colour and tossed her head, turning away defensively, wondering why she wasn’t warming to that honest admission of his the way that she should. He felt trapped and resentful at the idea of being married to her. When she didn’t want to be married to him in the first place, how could that acknowledgement hurt her feelings? Why did she feel very much as though he had just smacked her in the face with a wounding truth?
‘We can’t possibly be married when I didn’t agree to it,’ she told him dismissively, taking refuge in a more basic argument.
Azrael breathed in deep. ‘In the days when that law was made women didn’t have equal rights and were treated in law much the same as a piece of property.’
‘This is not the time to be telling jokes, Azrael,’ Molly warned him tartly while throwing back her slim shoulders as if she was trying to make her diminutive stature look more physically impressive.
The movement drew the silk taut across her lush breasts, revealing the crowning peaks of her nipples, and Azrael ached the instant he remembered the succulent taste of those ripe buds. ‘I am not joking,’ he breathed thickly. ‘I wish I was.’
‘You have to get us out of this marriage and fast!’ Molly spelt out fiercely.
‘When my people are already celebrating the fact that I have taken a wife?’ Azrael shot back at her rawly. ‘How would that look?’
Molly tilted her chin, almost tripping over the coffee table when her eyes encountered the shimmering gold of Azrael’s smouldering gaze. ‘That’s really not my problem.’
‘But it is,’ Azrael contradicted, concentrating his attention on her lush full mouth instead, his tension pronounced as he fought his arousal. ‘You are my wife and my people will look to you to be a queen. Are they to pay for my mistake? My misguided attempt to protect you?’
An angry flush mottled Molly’s fair skin and she turned angrily away from him, fury and conflicting feelings pulling her in different directions. He called his attempt to protect her reputation ‘misguided’, but she knew that her grandfather would have called it noble and would have applauded him for his desire to shield her. Of course, Maurice was an old-fashioned man, a former soldier, who had grown up convinced that women were the weaker sex in need of a strong man to defend them from the harsh realities of life. Indeed, her grandfather was the only person who had ever tried to protect Molly from anything...until Azrael came into her life.
She had always had to fight her own survival battles, only leaning on her grandfather while she was a teenager, and she had been so proud once she knew she could stand on her own feet and had felt even stronger when she could repay Maurice’s kindness by fighting to ensure he received the best care possible. In a nutshell it shook her rigid that Azrael would even try to protect her. It made her feel foolishly fragile and feminine and decidedly envious of women who could take it for granted that they had someone supportive by their side. She liked that he had been willing to make that effort and come to her rescue, even if he had chosen a rescue boat that seemed to be full of dangerous holes.
Furiously shrugging off such irrelevant thoughts, Molly spun back to him, breasts heaving as she dragged in a steadying breath. ‘What do you want from me?’
Mesmerised by the voluptuous shift of rounded flesh below the fabric of her dress, Azrael strode over to the window to focus on something less stimulating. He knew what he wanted from her and just then he knew he had never been further from getting it. ‘I want you to stay here for a few months and behave as if you are truly my wife,’ he admitted in a harsh undertone. ‘Then we would be in a better position to reconsider our situation.’
‘But I can’t stay here!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘I’ve got responsibilities back home and I have to work to help cover my grandfather’s care bills.’
‘You could bring your grandfather out to Djalia,’ Azrael informed her.
Startled, Molly shook her head vehemently. ‘No, that wouldn’t work. Change isn’t good for him in his current condition. He needs familiar faces and surroundings or he loses touch with the world altogether because he gets so confused,’ she explained. ‘Moving him is out of the question. I love him dearly. His comfort and contentment for however long he has left have to come first.’
‘Then I pick up the bills for his care and you make regular visits back to London to spend time with him,’ Azrael suggested.
