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Smiling brilliantly, Azrael lifted her off her feet and set her down on the side of the bed.
‘How on earth did you get a bed out here?’ she whispered wonderingly.
‘With the help of the same tribe who once brought supplies here for my mother and I,’ he told her, watching as she tugged off her headdress and set it aside, shaking her head so her copper tresses spilled in bright spirals across her pale skin. She toed off her shoes and settled back against the heaped pillows, emerald earrings gleaming in the flickering candle light and acting as a reminder of something he had forgotten.
Azrael dug into his pocket to retrieve the ring box and handed it to her. ‘I had it made to go with the necklace. I intended to give it to you before we signed the marriage contract but we were never left alone.’
‘Better late than never,’ Molly quipped, flipping open the box with inquisitive eyes, which widened at first sight of the huge oval emerald surrounded by diamonds. ‘My word, this is gorgeous.’
Long brown fingers eased the ring out of its velvet bed and installed it on her wedding finger.
‘Thank you,’ Molly said warmly, understanding that the ring, given in private in contrast to the royal emeralds, was a personal gift.
No, she acknowledged, it very definitely wasn’t the right moment for a serious discussion about whether or not their marriage had a future. He had made such an effort to please her that she was touched and surely a lasting future was more than implied by such an approach? I want to keep you. And she very much wanted to keep him, she conceded helplessly, watching him ditch his cloak and his head cloth and visibly shed the tension of the day.
‘Would you mind if I took a dip in the pool?’ Azrael enquired very politely. ‘It’s warm in here and it has been a long day.’
‘Of course not,’ she said, her body starting up a guilty hum at the very idea of him stripping. That very first glimpse of him in the same cave had turned her into a committed voyeur.
It was their wedding night but he was probably exhausted because he rarely enjoyed more than five hours of rest. Determined to get more comfortable, Molly stood up and began to remove the heavy emerald brocade robe.
‘Allow me,’ Azrael murmured, lifting it from her taut shoulders. ‘Keep the emeralds on. It is a joy to see you wear them as I imagined.’
The hands she had been lifting to remove the weighty necklace dropped again and she settled back on the bed, striving not to look as though she was watching him undress when that was exactly what she was doing. He shed his tunic and stepped out of the loose linen pants he wore below, shedding his boxers at the same time, and the light fell on that long, elegant back she had so appreciated when she was half-unconscious and her breath betrayed her with a sudden indrawn hiss that made him whirl around, an ebony brow lifting in query.
‘Your back...’ she muttered hot-faced, sliding off the bed to approach him and step behind him, fingers lifting to trace the paler slashes of old scarring that marred his perfection. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Firuz had me whipped when I was seventeen,’ he admitted tightly. ‘Are the scars still so obvious?’
‘No...no, they’re very much faded,’ she mumbled awkwardly, looking up at him with appalled eyes. ‘Whipped? Literally whipped?’
Azrael jerked his chin in confirmation, clearly not a fan of pursuing the demeaning topic. Naked as a bronze god, he stalked over to the pool and stepped in, evidently expecting the dialogue to end there.
Molly hovered barefoot in the sand, wringing her hands. ‘But...why would he do such a thing?’ She tried but she could not hold the question in.
‘When Firuz married my mother, he made an agreement with Hashem that neither my mother nor I would be allowed to become the focus of any rebel activity in Djalia against Hashem’s rule. You must understand that my stepfather was afraid to anger Hashem because Quarein is a poor country with very little military capacity.’
‘Yes...?’ Molly breathed encouragingly.
But it didn’t work. Azrael stretched out in the pool on the rocks in brooding silence, long black hair tousled around his big stiff shoulders. With a stifled sigh, Molly stripped off and, fighting her self-consciousness about her own body, she padded across the sand and stepped into the pool beside him, sinking down on the nearest flat rock. ‘Yes?’ she said again, refusing to surrender to that silence.
‘From the moment Hashem executed my father, my mother became his most implacable enemy. She was a very brave woman. She raised funds for the rebels and was, until I became old enough, their de facto leader. She used Quarein as a safe house for both of us but, make no mistake, being married to Firuz was tough for my mother. He is a hard, judgemental man, who makes daily life difficult for those around him. When phone messages between his home and the rebels were intercepted by Hashem and brought to my stepfather’s attention, it put my mother in grave danger.’
Molly grimaced. ‘Of course it did.’
‘To protect her I said that I had sent the messages and Firuz had me whipped. I believe he knew the truth and he let it go because in his own limited way he did care for my mother. As long as someone was punished Hashem was satisfied.’
‘That’s one of the secrets you thought I wouldn’t want to know,’ Molly guessed, smoothing a soothing hand down a bulging bicep. He was so modest, so reluctant to acknowledge his own courage for what it was. His sheer strength appealed to her on the most basic level because she knew that no matter what happened she could depend on Azrael. He was very strong and his innate need to protect those weaker than he was ran through him like a vein of solid gold.
‘Why would you want to know such a thing?’ Azrael demanded in honest bewilderment, twisting to study her with glittering dark golden eyes.
‘I don’t know, but I do,’ Molly fielded dry-mouthed, somewhat belatedly noticing that, despite the icy temperature of the rock pool, he was fully aroused.
‘Sometimes you are a very strange woman,’ Azrael breathed thickly.
‘But the differences between us are kind of fascinating,’ Molly told him shakily, wanting so badly to touch him but afraid of doing it wrong.
Could she have but known it, there was no wrong in that line as far as Azrael was concerned. As he bent his head to claim her lush, inviting mouth, he carried her hand down his body, his breath tripping in his throat simply at the brush of her tiny fingers. Molly touched, stroked, in too awkward a position to really explore and he took care of that problem too by springing upright with a noisy splash and scooping her dripping body up to plaster it against his hot, wet body with an enthusiasm that suggested he was not as tired as she had assumed earlier.
