Lynne GRAHAM

is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.

In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!

LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon® reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.

An Arabian Courtship

Lynne Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER ONE

POLLY’S throat constricted when she saw the long limousine turning through the gates of her home. She linked her hands together to stop them trembling. Prince Raschid ibn Saud al Azarin was about to arrive. She turned away from the view.

‘Why are you standing over there?’ her fifteen-year-old sister demanded. ‘You won’t be able to see him.’

‘I think I can wait for that pleasure,’ Polly muttered tightly.

Maggie was swiftly joined by twelve-year-old Joan and four-year-old Elaine, who had not a clue what the excitement was about but was determined not to be left out of it. The window-seat was a tight squeeze for the three of them, each craning their necks for a better view. In an effort to to calm her nerves, Polly breathed in slowly. What her sisters were finding so fascinating was sheer purgatory for her. Could this be real? she asked herself tautly. This was England in the eighties, an era of female liberation. How could she possibly be on the brink of an arranged marriage to a complete stranger? But she was.

‘The car’s stopping…it’s got a little flag on the bonnet. Those must be the colours of the Dhareini royal family.’ It was Maggie cheerfully keeping up the running commentary. ‘The chauffeur’s getting out…oh, he’s very dark, he does look foreign…he’s opening the rear door…I can see a trouser leg…’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake, stop it!’ The plea broke from Polly on the back of a stifled sob, shocking everybody into silence.

Guiltily biting her lower lip, Maggie watched her sister sink down into one of the shabby nursery armchairs, covering her face briefly with her spread hands.

‘He’s not wearing robes,’ complained Joan.

‘Shut up!’ Maggie gave her a pointed nudge. ‘Polly’s not feeling well.’

Joan stared at her eldest sister with unconcealed horror. ‘You can’t be ill now! Daddy will blow a gasket and Mummy’s nearly in orbit as it is!’

‘Polly!’ cried Maggie suddenly. ‘Raschid is gorgeous—I’m not kidding!’

‘Prince Raschid,’ Joan corrected loftily. ‘You can’t be too familiar.’

‘For heaven’s sake, he’s going to be our brother-in-law!’ Maggie shot back witheringly.

Polly flinched visibly. Her temples were pounding with the nagging beat of a tension that no amount of painkillers would put to flight. The morning had crawled past. Hardly anybody had talked over the lunch table. Polly hadn’t eaten. Her father hadn’t eaten either. As if he couldn’t stand the look in Polly’s helplessly accusing eyes any longer, he had taken himself off to the library even before dessert arrived.

Maggie placed an awkward hand on Polly’s taut shoulder. ‘He really is scrumptious-looking, honestly he is.’

‘Then why can’t he buy a wife at home?’ Polly spluttered tearfully into her tissue, her nerves taking her over again.

‘Scram!’ Maggie glowered at Joan and Elaine. ‘And don’t you dare tell Mother that Polly’s crying!’

Irritated by these histrionics, the ever practical and status-conscious Joan frowned. ‘What’s she got to cry about? She’s going to be a princess. I wouldn’t cry, I’d be over the moon.’

‘Well, isn’t it a shame you weren’t the eldest?’ Maggie threw the door wide.

The door slammed. Ashamed of her over-emotional behaviour, Polly pushed an unsteady hand through the silvery blonde curls falling untidily over her brow and wiped at her wet eyes. ‘I still can’t believe this is really happening,’ she confided stiffly. ‘I thought he mightn’t turn up.’

‘Dad said there was no question that he wouldn’t, it being a matter of honour and all that.’ Maggie sounded distinctly vague. ‘Isn’t it strange that we all used to laugh when Dad bored on about the time he saved King Reija’s life by stopping a bullet? I mean, if we’ve heard that story a hundred times, we’ve heard it a thousand,’ she exaggerated. ‘And I used to pull your leg something awful about you becoming Wife Number Two…it was a family joke!’

Well, it certainly wasn’t a joke now, Polly conceded miserably. Thirty-odd years ago Ernest Barrington had been a youthful diplomat attached to an embassy in one of the Gulf States. During his years in the Middle East he had spent his leave exploring neighbouring countries. On one such trip he had ventured into the wilds of Dharein in Southern Arabia, a country still torn by the fierce feuds of warring tribes and relatively little more civilised than it had been a century earlier. Her father had been taken ill on that particular journey and had sought assistance from a nomadic encampment presided over by Prince Achmed, brother of Dharein’s feudal ruler, King Reija.

Fearing for the young Englishman’s health, Achmed had taken him to the palace outside Jumani where he had received proper medical attention. There he had recovered his strength, and shortly before his departure he had been honoured by an invitation to join a royal hunting party.

Out in the desert an assassination attempt had been made on his royal host. The details of that shocking episode were somewhat blurred. Polly’s father tended to embellish the story year by year, pepping it up to keep it fresh. Shorn of extras, the most basic version ran that, seeing a rifle glinting in the sunlight, Ernest had thrown himself in front of the King and dragged him to the ground, suffering a minor head wound in the process. Overcome by gratitude and a sense of masculine fellowship, King Reija had stated there and then that his firstborn son would marry Ernest Barrington’s firstborn daughter.

‘Let me tell you, I was pretty taken aback,’ Ernest was wont to chuckle at that point in the story. ‘I wasn’t even married then! But it was obviously the highest honour the King could think to offer. I should add that, since he’s highly suspicious of Westerners, it was an even bigger mark of esteem.’

Thus the tale had been told to entertain dinner guests—a rather lighthearted anecdote of exotic climes and a bygone age. Ernest had not met King Reija again. He had retired from the Diplomatic Service as soon as his bachelor uncle died, leaving him a country estate several miles outside Worcester. However, twelve years ago he had chortled when he learnt of Raschid’s marriage to Prince Achmed’s daughter, Berah. The news had come by way of an elderly diplomat dining with them. Since then the family had often teased Polly about Raschid, reminding her that the Koran permitted a follower of Islam four wives. But never had anybody seen the idea of Polly marrying an Arab prince as anything other than hilariously funny.

Only when their father found himself in serious financial difficulties a month ago had he thought of renewing his acquaintance with King Reija. As Raschid’s father was coming to London on a diplomatic visit, Ernest had requested an appointment with him. ‘I shall ask him for a loan. I should think he’d be delighted to help,’ he had contended confidently. ‘I can’t understand why I didn’t think of this sooner.’

He had duly gone off to keep his appointment at the Dhareini Embassy. Even before he left home the grey anxiety and strain which had marked him for days had been banished by a very characteristic surge of optimism. Since Ernest had long since forgotten his Arabic, King Reija had talked courteously to him through the offices of an interpreter. Family updates had naturally been exchanged. Ernest had cheerfully produced a photograph of the four daughters and infant son he was so proud of possessing. In return his host had informed him that Raschid had been a widower for four years. Berah had died tragically after tripping and falling down a steep staircase. She had been only twenty-six.

‘Naturally I offered my condolences…it could never have occurred to me that the old boy could be leading up to making a thirty-five-year-old promise good. But once I was on the spot, as it were, it wasn’t that easy to work up to mentioning the loan,’ Ernest had confessed. ‘You could have knocked me down with a feather when he announced that his conscience had long been troubled by his failure to honour that promise. I lost no time in assuring him that no offence had been caused, but he seemed annoyed at that, so I dropped the subject. Even when he began asking questions about Polly, I still hadn’t an idea of what was on his mind.’

Polly had listened, as aghast as her mother initially was, while the older man lumbered at ever slower pace to the climax. ‘He told me that it was his dearest wish to see Raschid married again, and then he shook hands with me and the interpreter said, “It is agreed” and I said, “What’s agreed?”

‘“My son will take your daughter as his bride,” came the reply. I was struck dumb!’ her father had bleated, mopping at his perspiring brow. ‘Then he started talking about the bride price and things just got out of my hands altogether…if they’d ever been in them, for he’s a wily old buzzard. Hard to think, though, where there could be any advantage to him in the arrangement. The chap really does take this honour business very, very seriously.’

Surfacing from these unwelcome memories, Polly emitted a choked laugh. ‘I was sold! Why did I ever believe that white slavery was a thing of the past? It’s a wonder Dad didn’t ask for my weight in gold!’

Maggie’s eyes were reproachful. ‘Polly, that sounds so awful!’

It is awful, Polly reflected bitterly. Why couldn’t the King have offered her father a loan? Why had there had to be conditions attached? Even as she thought that, her saner self intervened to point out that her father was in no position to repay a loan.

‘Dad said there was no pressure on you and that it was a decision that only you could make. I know—I was listening outside the library door,’ Maggie admitted grudgingly. ‘He didn’t say you had to marry Raschid.’

That he had ever entertained the crazy concept at all, however, had been effective proof of his desperation. Maggie was still at the age where she saw no flaws in her parents. The sad truth was that Ernest Barrington was much too fond of the good things in life and had always lived above his income. Ladybright had been a small and prosperous estate when he inherited it, but the income from the land had never been up to the demands of a large family and a busy social calendar. When the bank had announced their intention to foreclose and force the sale of Ladybright to settle a backlog of mortgage repayments and an enormous overdraft, the accumulated debts of years of extravagance had finally been catching up on their father.

King Reija had stunned her desperate parent with the offer of a huge cash settlement, equal to meeting his debts and securing the family fortunes into the next generation. A drowning man thrown a rope does not hesitate. Polly doubted that her father had objected to the terms once the money was mentioned; he had been dazzled by the miraculous solution to all his problems. Within an hour of his return home, his attitude of apology and bluster had changed into one of determined good cheer.

‘I’m not surprised I’ve taken your breath away, Polly,’ he had been saying by then. ‘A prince—what’s more, a prince who will eventually become a king.’

Her mother had already had the stirrings of dreamy abstraction on her face. Ten minutes later she had whispered reverently, ‘My Polly, a princess!’

Anthea Barrington had been in an awed state of ecstasy ever since. Indeed, both of Polly’s parents had a remarkable talent for glossing over unpleasant realities. The jaws of the steel trap had closed round Polly slowly but surely. How could she personally sentence her family to poverty? Her mother was no more capable of coping without money than her father was. And what about her sisters and little Timothy, presently building up his bricks at her feet? Could she deny them the secure and comfortable upbringing which she herself had enjoyed when it was within her power to do otherwise?

And for what good reason could she deny her family her help? It was not as though she was sacrificing the chance of a loving marriage at some time in the future. Why shouldn’t she marry Raschid and make everyone happy? The man she loved did not love her…at least, not in the right way. Chris Jeffries was very fond of her, but he treated her like a sister.

His parents were neighbours and close family friends. Polly had known Chris since childhood. And that, she had grasped dully, was the problem. Chris thought of himself as the big brother she had never had.

Polly’s teenage years had not been painless. She had often turned to Chris for comfort when the going got rough in her own home. A late bloomer, she had been a podgy ugly duckling in her slim and beautiful mother’s eyes. She had been further cursed by shyness in a family where only extroverts were admired. Anthea had never been able to hide the fact that quiet, studious Polly was a distinct disappointment as a daughter. A boy-crazy, clothes-mad teenager always on the trot to parties would have delighted her; one who worked hard at school and went off to university intending to train as a librarian had not. Chris, two years her senior and already enrolled in medical school, had been the only person to understand and support Polly’s academic aspirations.

Loving Chris had been so easy. If she had a problem he was always ready to listen. From adolescence Polly had innocently assumed that she would eventually marry Chris. When her puppy fat had melted away and she miraculously blossomed into a slender young woman with a cloud of pale hair and flawless features, she had shyly awaited the awakening of Chris’s interest in her as a girlfriend. It had never happened, she reflected painfully.

A year ago at her nineteenth birthday party she had been forced to accept that her dreams were that—just dreams. Chris had lightly introduced her to his current girlfriend as ‘Polly, my honorary kid sister,’ affection and warmth in his manner and no hint of any other form of feeling. She had stopped living in her imagination.

Returning to university, she had sensibly thrown herself into the dating scene that she had scrupulously avoided during her first two terms. But the dates she had since ventured out on had without exception turned into disastrous grappling sessions concluded by resentful and bitter accusations that she was frigid and abnormal. Her efforts to forget Chris had got her nowhere. She still loved him; she was convinced that she would always love him.

Since she would never marry Chris, did it really matter who she married? Reasoning on that coldly practical basis, she had agreed to marry Raschid and solve her family’s problems. And once she had agreed, everybody had forgotten the financial bribe and had begun to behave as if she was being singled out for some great honour.

Unfortunately a decision forged in the valiant heat of the moment was tougher to sustain in the hard face of reality. Reality was the arrival of that car outside and the awareness that downstairs was a stranger who was to become her husband, no matter what he was like and no matter how he behaved. She had given her word and she could not go back on it now. Why would she anyway? A spinster in the family would break her mother’s heart. It was ironic that for the very first time she was shining like a bright star on her mother’s ambitious horizon.

‘You’re not dressed yet!’ Anthea’s harassed lament from the door shattered her reverie. ‘You can’t possibly let Raschid see you looking…’

‘The way I usually do?’ Polly slotted in drily. ‘Well, he might as well see what he’s getting, and I’m no fashion-plate.’

‘Don’t be difficult, darling,’ Anthea pleaded, elegantly timeless in her silk suit and pearls. ‘You simply must get changed!’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the library with your father. We discussed the wedding arrangements. St Augustine’s of course, but apparently there’ll have to be a second ceremony after you fly out to Dharein. We had a very interesting chat before I left them,’ she confided with an almost girlish giggle. ‘Do you realise that Raschid didn’t see his first wife’s face until after the wedding? Evidently that’s how they do it over there.’

Polly shuddered. She hadn’t even met Raschid and already the wedding was fixed! In addition her mother was managing to behave as if this peculiar occasion was quite commonplace. ‘It’s barbaric!’ she protested.

‘Now, darling!’ Anthea reproved. ‘At least he’s broken with tradition to come and meet you properly. What may seem strange to us is perfectly normal to him.’

‘You think it’s normal for a male of thirty-two to let his father pick a foreign bride sight unseen?’ Polly exclaimed helplessly. ‘You think he’s doing me a favour in even coming here?’

‘He is a prince, Polly.’

‘I don’t care!’

‘Parents often do know what’s best for their children,’ Anthea was beginning to sound shrill. ‘Remember what your father said—the divorce rate on arranged marriages is very low.’

In receipt of that grim reassurance, Polly was hurried down to her bedroom where the dreaded dress hung on the wardrobe door—powder-pink georgette. She would look like a little girl in a frilly party dress. What flattered Anthea at five foot nine did considerably less for a daughter of five foot one. Outright panic suddenly seethed up inside her. ‘I can’t go through with this…I can’t!’ she burst out.

‘Of course you’re nervous—that’s only natural,’ Anthea soothed. ‘Raschid’s bound to be staying for a few days, and you’ll get over that silliness. You really don’t seem to appreciate how lucky you are.’

‘L-lucky?’ gasped Polly.

‘Any normal girl would be thrilled to be in your position,’ Anthea trilled irritably. ‘At eighteen I was married and at nineteen I was a mother. Believe me, I was a lot more happy and fulfilled than you’ve ever been swotting over boring books. When you have your first baby you’ll understand exactly what I’m talking about.’

The threat of future offspring turned Polly as white as a sheet. ‘A baby?’

‘You love children and he doesn’t have any. Poor Berah must have been barren,’ Anthea remarked cheerfully. ‘Raschid’s father will be very anxious to see a male grandchild born to ensure the succession. Only think of how proud you’ll feel then!’

Her mother was on another plane altogether. Children…intimacy…Polly was feeling physically sick. The prospect of being used to create a baby boom in Dharein did not appeal to her. No wonder King Reija had decided she was suitable! She was one of five children.

‘He’s wonderfully self-assured for his age, so charming and quite fabulously handsome. One can tell simply by looking at him that he’s a prince. He has an air,’ Anthea divulged excitedly. ‘His manners are exquisite—I was very impressed. When one considers that he wasn’t educated over here like his brother Asif, his English is excellent. Not quite colloquial, but…’

The rolling tide of her mother’s boundless enthusiasm was suffocating.

‘I’ll put your hair up—you’ll look taller.’ Hairpins were thrust in with painful thoroughness. ‘He has the most gorgeous blue eyes. Can you believe that?’ Anthea gushed. ‘I was dying to ask where he got those, but I didn’t like to.’

What the heck did Polly care about blue eyes? Her mother had fallen in love with her future son-in-law’s status. He could do no wrong. If he’d been a frog, Anthea would have found something generous to say about him. After all, he was a prince, wasn’t he?

‘I’m so happy for you, so proud.’ With swimming eyes Anthea beamed down at her. ‘And it’s so romantic! Even Princess Diana was an earl’s daughter.’

In appalled fascination Polly stared while Anthea dabbed delicately at her eyes with a lace hanky.

‘Polly!’ Her father’s booming call, polished on the hunting field, thundered up the stairs. ‘Where the devil are you?’

She could practically hear the tumbril pacing out her steps to the execution block. But when she froze at the top of the stairs, only her father’s impatient face greeted her stricken scrutiny.

‘Come on…come on!’ He was all of a fluster, eager to get the introduction over with. That achieved, he could sit back and pretend it was a completely ordinary courtship. Clasping her hand, he spread wide the library door. He was in one of his irrepressible, jovial host moods. ‘Polly,’ he announced expansively.

Ironically the very first thing Polly noticed about the tall, black-haired male, poised with inhuman calm by the fireplace, was his extraordinary eyes—a clear brilliant blue as glacier-cool as an arctic skyline and as piercing as arrows set ruthlessly on target.

Ernest coughed and bowed out. He nudged her pitilessly over the threshold so that he could close the door behind her. Once she was inside the room, Polly’s legs behaved as if they were wedged in solid concrete. She awaited the charm she had been promised, the smooth breaking of the horrible silence. Unable to sustain that hard, penetrating appraisal, she fixed her attention on a vase of flowers slightly to the left of him.

‘You cannot be so shy.’ The accented drawl was velvet on silk and yet she picked up an edge within it. ‘Come here.’

Tensely she edged round a couch. He didn’t move forward a helpful inch. What was more, the nearer she got, the bigger he seemed to get. He had to be well over six feet, unusually tall for one of his race.

‘Now take your hair down.’

Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. ‘M-my h-hair?’

‘If it is your desire to become my wife, you must learn that I do not expect my instructions to be questioned,’ he drawled. ‘When I command, my wife obeys.’

Polly was transfixed to the spot. That cool of absolute conviction carried greater weight than mere arrogance. She flinched when he moved without warning. Long fingers darted down into her hair, and in disbelief she shut her eyes. He was a lunatic, and you didn’t argue with lunatics. He was so close she could smell a trace of expensive aftershave overlying the scent of clean, husky male. In other words, he was ten times closer than she wanted him to be. Her bright hair tumbled down to her shoulders, the pins carelessly cast aside.

‘You are amazingly obedient.’ Abrasion roughened the low-pitched comment.

Reluctantly, fearfully, she looked up. Some treacherously feminine part of her was seized by an almost voyeuristic fascination. He was superbly built, dramatically good-looking. Even Polly would have sneaked a second glance had she seen him somewhere on the street. High cheekbones intensified the aristocratic cast of his features. Sapphire-blue eyes were set beneath flaring dark brows, his pale golden skin stretched over a savagely handsome bone structure. Up close he was simply breathtaking. But in spite of his gravity and the sleek trappings of a sophisticated image, Polly sensed a contradictory dark and compelling animal vibrancy. He had the unstudied allure of a glossy hunting cheetah, naturally beautiful, naturally deadly. He also had a quality of utter stillness which unnerved her. Overpowered, she instinctively retreated a step, steadily tracked by fathomless blue eyes.

His cool, sensual mouth firmed. ‘In the circumstances, your timidity seems rather excessive. I value honesty above all other virtues. It would be wiser if you were to behave normally.’

Silence fell.

‘You are still very young,’ he continued. ‘Can you really have reflected upon the kind of life you will lead as my wife?’

Anybody with the brain power of a dormouse would have run a mile the moment they paused to reflect, Polly decided ferociously. Why did she have to stay put? Because, as Maggie had innocently reminded her, this had been her decision. Her lips moved tremulously into a firmer line. ‘Of course I’ve thought it over.’

‘You are probably aware that as I handle my country’s investment funds, I frequently travel abroad, but as my wife, you will remain in Dharein. You will not accompany me,’ he emphasised. ‘There you will mix only with your own sex. You will not be able to drive a car. Nor will you be allowed to leave the palace either alone or unveiled. From the hour that I take you as my bride, no other man may look upon you if that is my wish. Within our household we will even eat separately. Perhaps you have heard that certain members of my family are less strict in their observances of these traditions. I am not. I would not wish you to be in ignorance of this fact.’

Ignorance suddenly seemed like bliss. He described an existence beyond the reach of Polly’s imagination. Purdah—the segregation of the sexes that resulted in the practice of keeping women in strict seclusion. Sufficiently challenged by the thought of marrying him, all she could produce was a wooden nod.

Audibly he released his breath. ‘You cannot have been accustomed to many restrictions. I understand that your parents regularly entertain here.’

‘I don’t put in much of a presence.’ Polly was thinking of her mother’s wrath when she had hidden in a landing cupboard at the age of eleven sooner than recite poetry to family friends.

A winged jet brow ascended. ‘When I entertain, you will have no choice.’

Her forehead indented. ‘But you can’t entertain women on their own?’

His brows pleated.

‘You just said that I’d never see another man again. I wouldn’t be much use as a hostess,’ she pointed out flatly.

A disconcerting quirk briefly shifted his unsmiling mouth. ‘It is possible that I have been guilty of some exaggeration on that count,’ he conceded. ‘But you must understand my surprise that a young woman, raised in so free a society, should be willing to enter an arranged marriage. I was concerned that you might have erroneously assumed that your position as my wife would grant you an exciting and glamorous existence.’

‘I expect it to be dull.’ The impulsive admission just leapt off Polly’s tongue. She shrank from the incredulous glitter irradiating his narrowed stare. ‘I mean, not dull precisely, but—well, an Arab wife, who has servants and doesn’t get out either…well,’ she was faltering badly, ‘she can’t have very much to do with herself.’

‘An Arab wife concerns herself with the comfort of her husband,’ he intoned coldly.

He was most erratic in his arguments. ‘But you said you wouldn’t be around much.’

Even white teeth showed in an almost feral slash against his bronzed skin. ‘By that I wished to warn you that I will not dance attendance on you.’

But you expect me to dance attendance on you! she thought. He was a male chauvinist pig, an award-winning specimen. He put chauvinism in line with a capital offence. Stonily she studied the carpet. ‘Yes.’

‘Our alliance will be one of extreme practicality,’ he delivered in hard addition. ‘I am not of a romantic disposition. I tell you this…’

‘You didn’t need to. You wouldn’t be here if you were romantic,’ Polly interrupted thinly. ‘I suppose Mother said something which made you worry that I might be suffering from similar delusions. I’m not.’

For a male receiving a reassurance he had surely sought, Raschid looked unrelentingly grim. ‘This becomes clear. Then we are of one mind. I will not receive complaints of neglect when I am involved in the business concerns which take up most of my time.’

By the sound of it, if she ran into him once a week she would be doing well. She smiled. ‘No, I won’t complain.’

‘Had I sacked Dharein from border to border, it appears that I could not have found a more conformist and submissive bride,’ he declared very softly. ‘But I warn you of this now—should we prove incompatible, I will divorce you.’

That was a piece of good news Polly had not even hoped for. How could they be compatible in any field? He intimidated her. A close encounter with an alien would have been less terrifying. The unashamed threat of domestic tyranny echoed in all his stated requirements.

‘You have nothing to say to this either?’ he prompted in a husky growl. ‘You are composed and content with this future?’

‘Are you?’ Glancing up unwarily, Polly encountered a hypnotically intense stare which burned flags of pink into her fair skin. A curious tightening sensation clenched her somewhere down deep inside. It made her feel very uncomfortable.

A chilling smile slanted his well-shaped mouth. ‘Could I be impervious to the allure of such beauty as you possess?’

No doubt this was an example of the charm her mother had mentioned, and it was absolutely meaningless. When Raschid had first seen her in the doorway, neither admiration nor warmth had coloured his impassive appraisal.

‘Although I should confess that I am not in accord with the meeting of East and West in marriage,’ he added smoothly. ‘I will treat you with consideration and respect, but I will not alter my way of life. The adaptation required will, necessarily, be yours alone. I can only accept your word that you feel yourself equal to this challenge.’

Out of the blue the strangest suspicion came to her, infiltrating her self-preoccupation. Could he possibly want her to refuse him? Surely he could not have come here to invite a rejection which would be an intolerable insult to one of his race and status? Polly cast aside that highly unlikely interpretation. A purist might have respected his refusal to offer empty reassurances about their future together. But all he achieved was a deepening of each and every one of Polly’s nervous terrors at the picture of herself, marooned in a strange environment, forced to follow foreign customs while at the mercy of a husband who planned to make no allowances for her.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she mumbled, hating him with every fibre of her being for redoubling her fear of the unknown. He defined an existence which chilled her to the marrow.

He studied her downbent head. ‘I can ask no more of you. One must hope that the sacrifices entailed are not more than you find the elevation worthy of. Since I have established to my own satisfaction that you fully comprehend the nature of our future relationship, there can be no necessity for a further meeting between us.’

Laser-bright eyes met her startled upward glance in cool challenge.

‘But you’ll be staying now…for a while?’ she queried.

‘Unfortunately that will not be possible. Late this evening I am leaving for New York,’ he revealed. ‘Nor will it suit my schedule to return here again before the wedding.’

Nonchalantly untouched by her dismay that he cherished no plans to stay on as her parents expected, he bent down to enclose lean fingers to her wrist and raise her firmly upright. Her knees were cottonwool supports. Dazedly she watched him clamp a heavy bracelet to her wrist.

‘Your betrothal gift,’ he explained, answering her blank stare.

Of beaten gold and studded with precious stones, it was decorated with some primitive form of hieroglyphics. Polly was put grotesquely in mind of a slave manacle. Valiantly she tried to express gratitude.

A cool hand pressed up her chin, enforcing contact with black-lashed eyes of lapis lazuli which were dauntingly enigmatic. Raschid ran the forefinger of his other hand very lightly along the smooth curve of her jawbone, silently studying her, and somehow, while he maintained that magnetic reconnaissance, she could not move. A peculiar disorientation swept her with light-headedness. He dropped his hand almost amusedly. ‘I think you will be very responsive in my bed, Polly. I also suspect that you may find your training as a librarian of small advantage to you there. But I await enlightenment with immense impatience…’

Had the door not opened, framing her parents’ anxious faces, Polly would have fled there and then. A deep crimson had banished her pallor. Raschid turned to them with a brilliant smile. ‘Your daughter is all that I was promised—a pearl beyond price,’ he murmured smoothly. ‘Truly I am blessed that I may claim so perfect a bride.’

CHAPTER TWO

THE ORGAN played Purcell as Polly came down the aisle, parchment-pale, her screened gaze avoiding the tall, exquisitely dressed male watching her with untraditional cool from the altar. Throughout the past fortnight of hectic preparations she had existed in a dream state, her brain protectively hung in an emotional vacuum. That was the only way she had coped.

Her mind shifted inexorably back to her parents’ dismay when they had realised that Raschid was not remaining with them as a house guest. She had hoped…what had she hoped for? Dismay had swiftly become acceptance. In awe of him, her parents had put up no objections. They were not even attending the second ceremony in Dharein. From the moment Polly left the church she would be on her own.

At the altar she received a wide smile from the smaller, younger man to Raschid’s right—presumably his brother Asif. Reddening, she dropped her head and the vicar’s voice droned on in her ears. Beside her lounged a primitive male, who regarded her solely as a piece of sexual merchandise he had bought off a shelf. Involuntarily she shivered. Raschid had made it brutally clear that she would have no place in his life beyond the bedroom door. Her blood had run cold under the intensely sexual slide of those assessing eyes, the appraisal of a natural-born predator.

They were on the church steps when she saw Chris. As he waved, her shuttered face came alive. It was three months since their last meeting. Raw and seething bitterness surged up inside her. It should have been Chris beside her posing for the camera…it should have been Chris inside the church. The ceremony she had just undergone was a mockery. Without hesitation she hurried down the steps towards the slim, fair-haired man smiling at her.

‘Aunt Janice said you mightn’t be able to come,’ she murmured tightly.

Chris laughed. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t have kept me from your wedding! You look stunning.’ Grasping both her hands, he looked her over and grinned. ‘What happened to your ambition to be a career woman?’

‘You tell me.’ Responding to his easy smile took all her concentration as she fought back stinging tears. She was embarrassed by her adolescently eager dash to his side, but the familiar sight of him had drawn her instantly.

‘Hey,’ he scolded, and the underlying seriousness of his gaze deepened, ‘the bride’s not supposed to cry! Whirlwind romance or not, I hope he’s the right man for you. You deserve the best.’

Polly’s throat closed over. The truth of what lay behind her sudden marriage would have appalled him, yet pride kept her silent. What more proof did she require of his indifference to her as a woman? He would dance at her wedding with a light heart. He had never realised how she felt about him, and now he never would. ‘I wouldn’t have settled for less.’ Her over-bright smile stretched to include Asif as he approached them.

‘Sorry, I have to kidnap the bride. The photographer’s fuming,’ he explained in a clipped Oxbridge accent.

‘Oh, lord, I forgot about him!’ Polly gasped.

He steered her away, lustrous dark eyes skimming her guilty face, his appreciative grin widening. ‘Is there anything else that you forgot? Like a new husband? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it’s not terribly tactful to go surging at ex-boyfriends with Raschid around—unless you have a death wish, of course. But I’ll grant you one point. You staggered him—a rare sight to be savoured.’

Reluctantly Polly met Raschid’s veiled gaze a moment later. ‘I’m sorry,’ she lied.

He cast her a grim glance. ‘You don’t appear to know how to behave in public,’ he drawled in an icy undertone that flicked down her spine like the gypsy’s warning. ‘But you will be taught, of that I assure you.’

In angry disbelief, still trembling from the force of her disturbed emotions, she flared, ‘Who the blazes do you…?’

His jawline clenched. ‘I will not tolerate disrespect from you!’

Gritting her teeth, Polly spun to walk away again. The long-suffering photographer had finished. Raschid’s hand closed round hers, denying escape, but she broke her fingers violently free, muttering bitterly, ‘Tell me, what do you do when you’re not bullying women half your size? Beat them? I’d sooner know now!’

The blaze of fury that silvered his gaze shook her rigid. Had they not been surrounded by people she had the certain knowledge that she would have discovered exactly what Raschid did for an encore. Guiltily conscious that hating him for not being Chris was irrational and inexcusable, she retreated hastily.

‘Lordy, what sparked that off?’ Maggie whispered.

‘An unholy temper that I never suspected he had.’ Polly stole a driven glance over her shoulder to check that she hadn’t been followed. A choking sense of trapped misery enfolded her.

She should have apologised on the drive back to the reception at Ladybright, but she didn’t. Like an over-shaken bottle of Coke, she was afraid to uncap her sealed lips lest she explode. Her nerves were jangling a dangerous discordancy. Seeing Chris, so near yet so far, had agonised her, and her self-discipline was threatening to crumble.

Over the meal she did her utmost to ignore Raschid. The tension zapped in the air like static electricity. Unable to face food, she knocked back the champagne. She didn’t even notice how much she was drinking. When everybody began circulating, Polly, who was normally retiring in company, was suddenly to be seen speaking personally to every guest present. Absently marvelling that she no longer felt like throwing herself under a bus, she laughed at another one of Chris’s medical jokes, frowning when Maggie pulled at her sleeve.

‘You have to get changed.’ Maggie hustled her determinedly out of the room. ‘What on earth are you playing at? You’re sozzled! Mother hasn’t even realised—she’s busy telling everybody what wonderful confidence a woman gains from getting married.’

Polly gripped the banister and pronounced with dignity, ‘I have never taken alcohol to ex—excesh in my life.’

‘That’s why it’s gone straight to your head. How could you be so stupid?’ wailed Maggie. ‘Even I can see that Raschid doesn’t like it. Didn’t you notice that he hasn’t touched a drop? He’s not knocking it back like his brother. This just isn’t like you!’

‘But I’m a confident married woman now.’ Polly pirouetted and nearly tripped over her train, remaining dizzily still long enough for Maggie to detach her veil. ‘I shall stand up for myself. I won’t be bullied!’

‘How about strangled?’ her sister groaned, struggling to unzip her. ‘Sometimes you are a klutz, Polly. When Raschid saw you in the church he couldn’t take his eyes off you—and no wonder, you looked ravishing! But now he looks…well, if I were you, I’d eat humble pie.’

‘Rubbish—start as you mean to go on,’ Polly overruled as if her craven evasiveness had been the first step in a deliberate offensive.

‘And as for the way Chris kept on following you about…’

‘Any reason why he shouldn’t have?’ snapped Polly, turning her head away. When would she ever see Chris again? If she had made the best of a last opportunity to be with him, who could blame her?

Maggie frowned uncomfortably. ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off you either. I’ve never seen Chris act like that with you before.’

Polly hadn’t noticed anything. An insane thought occurred to her. Wouldn’t it be simply hysterical if Chris had finally appreciated that she was a woman and not a sister the day she married someone else? Macabre and unlikely, she decided bitterly.

Attired in her elegant going-away outfit, she was propelled out on to the landing to throw her bouquet. She peered down at all the upturned faces and swayed, dropping the bouquet in their general direction. Negotiating the stairs rivalled coming down an escalator the wrong way. On the bottom step she lurched, and strong arms came out of nowhere and caught her.

‘Whoops!’ she giggled, clashing accidentally with sapphire eyes that emanated all the warmth of an icebox. ‘Go on the wagon,’ she mumbled as if she was making a New Year resolution, the remainder of her alcohol-induced euphoria draining away. ‘Promish.’

The hiccups started on the way to the airport. Clapping a hand to her mouth in horror, she tried to hold them in. It was about then that she began to notice the silence. By the time she was steered into the opulent cabin of the private jet, she was sending Raschid’s hard-edged profile unwittingly pleading glances. The derisive charge of the look she received nearly pushed her over the edge into tears. She fumbled for the right words of apology for her outburst on the church steps. After take-off, she voiced them hesitantly.

Raschid leant forward without warning and snapped hard fingers round her narrow wrists to yank her up to face him. ‘You are drunk!’ he raked down at her in disgust.

‘T-tiddly,’ Polly corrected unsteadily, moisture shimmering in her unhappy eyes.

His contempt unconcealed, he released her to sink back white and shaken into her seat. She mumbled another apology, shrinking from the shamed awareness that he was right. But just for a while, under the influence of Dutch courage, her fear of him had vanished. Now it was returning in full force, stronger than ever before.

‘Silence!’ he cut across her stumbling apology. ‘Was it not shame enough that I must accept a bride who sells herself for money like a vendor sells his wares in the street? But that you should dare to turn up at that church and then make an exhibition of yourself as my wife is intolerable!’

‘I’m sorry!’ she sobbed again.

‘I told you to keep quiet,’ he lashed icily down at her. ‘I may have been deceived, but it is you who will suffer for it. After the brazen behaviour I witnessed today, you will find yourself confined to the palace!’

‘I wasn’t going to get out anyway!’ Polly wept all the harder while he towered over her like a hanging judge pronouncing sentence.

‘I will not acknowledge you publicly as my wife until you learn how to conduct yourself like a lady, and I have never seen anything less ladylike than your display this afternoon!’

The harsh condemnation genuinely shattered her. Without warning all the dammed-up tensions and resentments she had been forced by family indifference to suppress exploded from her. Her head flew back. ‘I…hate…you!’ she launched. ‘Don’t you dare insult me. I did my best. I even tried to hide the fact that if it wasn’t for the money, I wouldn’t have married you if you’d been the very last man alive! And if you don’t want me either, I’m just delighted about it! Do you hear me? You’re a domineering, insensitive tyrant, and I shall get down on my knees and beg your father to deport me. No wonder he had to come to England to find you a wife…no wonder!’

During her impassioned tirade, Raschid had frozen. He could not have been more astonished by the diatribe had a chair lifted on its own steam and begun a physical assault on him.

Curled up in a tight ball, Polly squinted up at him through tear-clogged lashes. ‘No woman with an IQ above forty would want to marry you and clank about in chains for the rest of her days, trying not to show how h-happy she is when you’re thousands of miles away…’

‘I believe it is time that you were sobered up.’ He bent down, and Polly was off that seat so fast with a piercing scream that she caught him totally by surprise. Having read brutal retribution into that grim announcement of intent, she lost what control remained to her and squirmed along to the far corner of the couch, tugging off a shoe in the blind, terror-stricken belief that she required a defensive weapon.

The cabin door burst wide, the steward and stewardess rushing in. Polly was quite beyond the reach of embarrassment. Stark fear had her cowering, tears pouring down her cheeks in rivulets.

A dark bar of colour overlaid Raschid’s hard cheekbones. He spoke at length in Arabic and then quietly dismissed their audience. A hand plucked the raised shoe from her stranglehold and tossed it aside. ‘I would not offer a woman violence,’ he ground out with hauteur.

‘I’m numb, I won’t feel it,’ she mumbled incoherently.

A pair of arms firmly scooped her drooping body off the seat. ‘You will feel calmer when you have rested.’

He carried her into the sleeping compartment, settling her down with unexpected care on the built-in bed. Tugging off her stray shoe, he calmly turned her over to unzip her dress. Cooler air washed her spine. In dismay she attempted to escape his attentions, as he glowered down at her. ‘Do you really think that I could be tempted to seize you passionately into my arms at this moment? A hysterical child does not awaken desire within me.’

Having decimated the opposition, he seated himself to divest her smoothly of her dress. Leaving her clad in her slip, he pulled the slippery sheet over her trembling length. Already dazedly recovering from the kind of scene she had never before indulged in, Polly was gripped by remorse. Not only had she affronted him before the cabin staff, she had been unjust. Her resentment would have been more fairly aimed at her parents for cheerfully letting her enter this marriage and blithely ignoring reality.

Could she really even blame them? The pressure on her had been enormous, but she had agreed to marry Raschid. Unfortunately there was a vast gulf between weak resolution and her feelings now that she was on the spot. She swallowed chokily. ‘I don’t know what came over me…I…’

The steady beat of his gaze was unremitting. ‘There is nothing to explain. You were afraid—I should have seen that fear and made allowances for it. But I too have feelings, Polly,’ he delivered with level emphasis. ‘Financial greed may be permissible in a mistress; it is not in a wife. For that reason I have given you little cause to rejoice in the bargain.’

There was something about him in that instant, some deep and fierce emotion behind the icy dignity and hauteur. For the very first time, Polly suffered a driving need to know how he felt. Bitter? Disillusioned? His anger was gone. What she sensed now, she could not name, but it sent a sharp pang of pain winging through her.

She didn’t want to talk about the money. She couldn’t face the reawakening of the chilling distaste he had shown earlier. What would be the point of it? The money lay between them and it could not be removed. But for the money she would not be here. Raschid despised her for her willingness to marry him on that basis alone. The whys and wherefores didn’t abate his harsh judgement. And the revelation that she loved another man would scarcely improve his opinion of her. Suddenly more ashamed than ever, she whispered, ‘I didn’t mean what I said.’

An ebony brow elevated. ‘I am not a fool, but I ask you this—if that is how you feel, why did you marry me?’

She could not bring herself to play the martyr, pleading her family’s need as excuse. Absorbing her unease in the tortured silence, he sighed. Brown fingers brushed a silvery pale tendril of hair back from her warm forehead. ‘I had reason,’ he said softly. ‘To look at you gave me pleasure, and in spite of what you say to the contrary, I could put your aversion to flight so quickly that your head would spin…for when you look at me, Polly, you desire me.’

‘That’s not true!’ Her hostility sprang immediately back to the fore.

The tip of his forefinger skidded languidly along the fullness of her lower lip. His eyes had a richly amused glint now. ‘True, my little Polly,’ he contradicted.

Her mind was a blank. She was shaken by her sudden explosive physical awareness of him. His sexual impact that close was like a punch in the stomach, yet she did not retreat from it. ‘You’re not angry any more,’ she muttered.

‘Be grateful for your visual compensations. I learnt long ago that the perfection Allah denies in the copying of nature is no more easily to be found in human beings, especially in those of your sex,’ he stated quietly. ‘The inviting smile which falsely offers tenderness and understanding—that I do not require from you. You will be as you are with me. That I will respect.’

He slid fluidly upright. ‘We will forget today. I don’t believe you knew what you were doing. Had that been obvious to me, I would not have spoken so harshly.’

Reeling from that imperturbable calm and gravity, Polly was agonisingly conscious of the seismic force of the personality behind the cool front. He had not once lost control. She had behaved appallingly, but he had remained cool-headed enough to see her hysteria for what it was. While grateful for his calm, she squirmed from the lash of his superior perception.

A knock sounded on the door. ‘That will be the meal I requested. You ate very little earlier,’ he reminded her. ‘I also ordered a restorative drink for you—before we parted Asif assured me that it was an infallible cure for a hangover. Drink it and then sleep.’

Disconcerted yet again, Polly couldn’t even look at him. The stewardess entered, darting a nervous glance at Raschid, who appeared to figure in her mind as a wife beater. Guilty pink suffused Polly’s cheeks. He had treated her with a kindness few men would have employed in the circumstances. Dully she reviewed the reckless, thoughtless immaturity of her own showing throughout the day. The contrast did not lift her spirits.

She was wonderfully relaxed when she woke up. Only as she shifted and came into startling contact with a hair-roughened thigh did she realise where she was, and her eyes flew wide.

‘Good morning.’ Raschid leant up on his elbow. Reading her shock, he laughed. He looked ruffled and in need of a shave and unnervingly, undeniably gorgeous. Black hair, golden skin, blue eyes—a devastating combination. Smiling, he moved a hand lazily and tugged a strand of her hair. ‘Come back over here. Or do I have to fetch you?’

‘F-fetch me?’ she quavered.

He snaked out his hand and settled it on her slim waist, his fingers splaying to her hipbone to propel her coolly back towards him.

‘No!’ she gasped in alarm.

‘Yes.’

‘No…I’m not joking!’ she cried feverishly.

Raschid laced his other hand into the tangle of her hair and held her frightened green eyes steadily. ‘Neither am I, Polly.’ He pulled her the last few inches, sealing her into union with his long, hard length. ‘And there is nothing to fear, only much to discover,’ he promised huskily.

Her hand braced against a sleek brown shoulder, only to leap quickly away again. His dark head bent, the brilliance of his eyes somehow sentencing her to stillness. Taking his time, he brushed her lips with his, and she trembled, lying as rigid as a stone statue in his embrace. He strung a line of light, butterfly kisses over the arc of her extended throat, softly, sensuously dipping a smooth passage across the delicate tracery of her collarbone while his fingers skimmed caressingly over the sensitive skin of her back.

Polly’s limbs turned fluid without her knowledge. A strange heat blossomed in her pelvis. She quivered as his palm curved to the swell of her hip and he moved sinuously against her, teaching her the depth of his arousal and momentarily shocking her back into tension. He nuzzled at the tender expanse below her ear and her cheek curved into the pillow, her body awash with fluttering sensations which completely controlled her. With a soft laugh, he finally returned to her mouth, playfully coaxing, introducing her to the myriad textures of his firm lips and sharp teeth and the velvety roughness of his tongue, until the blood drummed in her veins with burning excitement.

Catherine wheels and shooting stars illuminated the darkness of her mind. It was everything she had ever secretly dreamt of, everything she had never expected to feel, except…except…The thought eluded her. Raschid’s hands traced the shape of her breasts with erotic mastery, moulding, stroking, inciting. A tiny moan escaped her. A searing rush of almost painful pleasure arched her body up into the heat and potency of the all-male body over hers. Then as suddenly she was freed.

Her glazed scrutiny rested on her treacherous fingers. Anchored in the springy vitality of his hair, they prevented him from further retreat. Strickenly she retrieved them.

He skated a mocking fingertip over her ripe mouth, his eyes bright pools of incredible blue, tautness etched over his flushed cheekbones. ‘I am very tempted to enjoy the delights of the bridal chamber with you now.’ Straightening with an earthy groan, he looked intently down at her. ‘However, that would not be wise. But at least you may now appreciate that you need have no fear of me tonight.’

Pushing back the sheet, he slid out of bed, not a self-conscious bone in a single line of his lean, sunbronzed body. Tonight. A blush warmed what felt like every inch of her skin. She had lain there and actually let him…at no stage had she objected. But on a level with that shockingly polished technique of his, her experience was nil. Raschid could not be compared to the teenage boys, full of selfish impatience, who had grabbed her roughly, attempting to infuse her with a matching passion, only to fail. Never once had she understood what she was supposed to feel during those embarrassing sessions.

Now, in the arms of a male who was virtually a stranger, she found out, and she was in shock. Had he been Chris she would not have been surprised. But he wasn’t Chris and he wasn’t remotely like Chris. Nor could she ever recall yearning for Chris to touch her. That accidental acknowledgement slid in and jolted her. It was true, she realised in bewilderment. Picturing herself drifting from the altar with Chris, she had then seen them in a dozen cosy settings, but never in one that centred on sexual intimacy. Something in her retreated uneasily from an image of Chris as a lover. Confused by the awareness, she buried it. Hadn’t she seen friends succumb to dangerous physical infatuations that burnt out through the lack of any more lasting fuel? Her feelings for Chris had always seemed infinitely superior. She had felt safe. She knew better, she had thought.

And Raschid taught her differently. Carelessly, easily, with the light touch and control of an expert lover, he had showed her what physical hunger was—a wanting, unreasoning ache without conscience, powerful enough to destroy every scruple. She was disgusted with herself. And dear heaven, he was like Jekyll and Hyde! Whatever she might have expected, it had not been that heart-stoppingly sensual persuasion which had effortlessly overcome her resistance. He bewildered her.

He had calmly referred to the wedding night still to come. Panic reclaimed her. What had she done in marrying him? Suddenly she was waking up to the full portent of what marrying Raschid entailed. How could she go through with it? How could she actually go to bed with a stranger? She was not some medieval maiden raised to be bartered in matrimony. Environment had not conditioned Polly to submissively accept her fate without argument.

She was sitting up when Raschid reappeared from the shower-room, towelling his hair dry. Crimsoning at the amount of masculine flesh on view, Polly lost inches of recaptured poise and studied the bed. ‘We need to talk,’ she muttered.

‘I am here.’

Nervously she breathed in. ‘Earlier you seemed to make it pretty clear that I couldn’t be the sort of wife you want.’ She paused. ‘Maybe you’d prefer to call a halt now.’

‘A halt?’

‘An annulment.’

An unexpected laugh greeted her stilted suggestion. ‘I presume you are trying to amuse me?’

Indignantly she glanced up. He looked totally unfamiliar in flowing robes of soft cream. ‘Actually I’m being constructive,’ she told him.

‘Don’t you think your desire to be—constructive,’ he repeated the word very drily, ‘is a little late?’

Polly bit her lip. The suggestion had been born of cowardly impulse. Undoubtedly it must seem to him as if she wanted to renege on the agreement after having collected the profits. ‘But you said you wouldn’t acknowledge me,’ she protested lamely.

‘I too may say things in anger which I do not mean. I seriously doubt that you have a drink problem, and even if you had,’ his beautifully shaped mouth slanted expressively, ‘you are unlikely to find any outlet for it in Dharein.’

‘I don’t understand you!’ Frustration rose in her.

‘Our meetings to date have not encouraged either of us to behave naturally,’ he returned with infuriating composure. ‘And to talk of annulment now when we are married is really quite ridiculous.’

Defensively she stiffened. ‘That’s the only time you could talk about annulment…you don’t give a damn how I feel, do you?’

He viewed her narrowly. ‘You would like me to be honest? I came to your home with no idea of what reception awaited me there. I cherished no inclination to marry any woman.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ she cut in.

‘I believe you heard me, Polly. Nor can I accept that this news surprises you.’

Hearing was not always believing. He had not wanted to marry her. The information stung and shocked like a sudden slap on the face. A deep sense of incredulous mortification crept over her. ‘Then why did you come?’ she asked.

‘In the hope that you might withdraw as I could not.’ Raschid dealt her an unrelentingly sardonic glance, his mouth cynically set. ‘But that hope was swiftly laid to rest, wasn’t it? However I might have behaved, my proposal would have been acceptable to you and your family. But I am not one to quarrel with what cannot be altered. You are beautiful. Insh’allah. It could have been worse.’

As she listened with a slowly dropping jaw, a tide of rage unfettered by reasoning even of the meanest form was building inside her. ‘How could you marry me thinking like that? It could have been worse,’ she parroted in enraged repetition. ‘And how…dare…you get into bed with me!’

Raschid bound a gold agal round his headress. ‘There may be a certain piquancy to our mutual reservations, but they are unlikely to spill over into the marital bed. There you do not find my attentions offensive.’

‘Don’t you dare throw that at me now! I had no idea what you were thinking then!’ she rebutted stridently.

‘I have explained my feelings to you.’ The inflection was one of definite reproof, clipped and controlled. ‘Now I suggest you dress suitably for your audience with my father. We will be landing soon.’

Sudden moisture gritted her eyelids and she blinked, her anger deflated. Raschid was gone, and she was unutterably crushed by what he had coolly dropped on her. The black joke of the century was on them both. Prince Raschid ibn Saud al Azarin had not wanted to marry her either. Damn him to hell! she thought abruptly. If that was true, why were they here now? Why had he even come to Ladybright? Oh, she wanted to scream! Some outdated code of honour had made him come, had made him refrain from admitting his unwillingness. But now—when he told her it was too late—he had slung it at her with hauteur, as if Polly and her family had gone in pursuit of him with a shotgun. Now she could review his grim and guarded manner at their first encounter. She had fallen hook, line and sinker for an act. The arrogant swine had actually been trying to put her off!

Equating his arrival with unquestioning acceptance of the marriage, she had been too wrapped up in her own anxieties to appraise his attitude logically. But why had he gone through with it? Her thoughts chased in concentric circles, her temper rising afresh. He had the gall to inform her bluntly that her sole saving grace was her face and figure. Suddenly she was dismissed as an individual and reduced to the level of a sexual plaything. It could have been worse—indeed? If it crossed her mind that there was a strong hint of the biter bit in her enraged reaction, she refused to identify it.

‘The obvious solution is a divorce as soon as possible,’ she pronounced, entering the cabin, her slender curves fetchingly attired in a full-length pale green gown which accentuated her air of spun silver delicacy.

‘Don’t be a child, Polly.’ Raschid glanced up from the papers he was studying at his desk, awarding her reappearance the most cursory interest.

She folded her arms, wrathful at being ignored. ‘If the only thing that brought you to Ladybright was that stupid assassination attempt on your father and the crazy promise he made then, I’m not being childish.’

Blue-black lashes swept up like silk fans. ‘I cannot refrain from saying that the attempt might have ended in a death which would have been tragic for my country’s survival and stability,’ he replied abrasively. ‘But I will concede that I too consider that promise to be rather…odd. My father is not a man of ill-judged impulse.’

‘But, like him, you believe in this honour nonsense.’

‘A concept which few of your sex have the unselfishness to hold in esteem. The pursuit of the principle infrequently leads down a self-chosen path,’ he delivered crushingly. ‘Nor was I made aware of the pledge between our fathers until three weeks ago.’

Polly was astonished. ‘Only three weeks ago?’

‘There was no reason for me to be told sooner. When I married at twenty, you were still a child. Since my father could not have supposed that an Englishwoman would desire to enter a polygamous marriage—’ He paused. ‘Although having met you and your family, I would not be so sure.’

It took her a minute to unmask that base insult. She flushed to the roots of her hairline while he spoke on in the same coolly measured tone.

‘My father cannot always have believed in that promise to the degree which he presently contends. Had it been otherwise, I would have been informed of it years ago,’ he asserted. ‘But I understand his motivation and I speak of it now, for it is no secret within the palace. It has long been my father’s aim to force me into marriage again.’

CHAPTER THREE

STUNNED by the unemotionally couched admission, Polly sank down on the other side of the desk. ‘But why me, if he didn’t believe…force?’ she queried.

‘The promise supplied the pressure. The means by which my father attained this conclusion might not be passed by the over-scrupulous.’ Raschid smiled grimly. ‘But be assured that before he even met your father, he would have made exhaustive enquiries as to your character and reputation.’

‘I was investigated?’

‘Without a doubt. You are very na;auive, Polly. You cannot suppose that my father would have risked presenting me with a bride likely to shame or scandalise the family.’ Sardonic amusement brightened his clear gaze.

In retrospect it did seem very foolish of all of them to have believed that King Reija would gaily give consent to his son’s marriage to a woman of whom he knew nothing. Raschid’s revelations put an entirely different complexion on her father’s meeting with him in London. Assured of her unblemished reputation and goodness knew what else, Raschid’s father had calmly manipulated hers at the interview. From the outset he must have known of her father’s debts. They could not have escaped detection.

Too much was bombarding Polly too quickly. The amount of Machiavellian intrigue afoot even between father and son dismayed her. But why had coercion in the form of that promise been required to push Raschid into marriage? While he might still grieve for Berah and appear virtually indifferent to her successor’s identity, he did not strike her as impractical. His position demanded that he marry and father children; that responsibility was inextricably woven into his future as a duty. Could he be so insensible to the necessity?

‘I don’t understand—you don’t really seem angry with your father,’ she said.

‘I must respect the sincerity of his intentions. He truly believes that a man without a wife cannot be content. In his view a married man is also a respectable and stable man,’ he volunteered, an inescapable harshness roughening his intonation.

‘But why didn’t you want to remarry?’ Polly pierced to the heart of the matter, weary of skating round the edges.

‘I preferred my freedom,’ he breathed dismissively. ‘Since I had spent most of my adult life married, what else?’

‘Well, if you’re so darned keen to have your freedom back, I’m not holding you!’ Polly sprang furiously upright.

‘Why this sudden alteration in attitude?’ Raschid studied her quizzically. ‘What has changed between us except a basic understanding? We stand at no different level now from that we stood at within that church.’

Anger shuddered tempestuously through her. ‘Yet somehow you’re behaving as if I trapped you into marriage!’

‘Nobody traps me, least of all a woman. I made a decision. If I had to remarry to satisfy my father’s expectations, why not you?’ he traded softly.

‘I notice too that, while your father mysteriously emerges from all this as morally above reproach when he’s been wheeling and dealing like the Godfather, I’m still being insulted!’

‘How have I insulted you?’ He vented a harsh imprecation. ‘I thought you would be quiet and inoffensive, but the second you left that church you suddenly located a tongue!’

Admittedly Polly had had difficulty in recognising herself over the past twenty-four hours, but the most even temperament would have been inflamed by Raschid. ‘Blame your father. Obviously he didn’t dig deep enough,’ she sniped, nettled by his candid admission that he had deemed her the type to melt mutely into the woodwork. ‘I find you unbelievably insensitive!’

‘And I find you like every other woman I have met in recent years—demanding.’ Exasperation laced his striking features. ‘Were you so sensitive in marrying a stranger purely for his wealth?’

Already very pale, she cringed from the cruel reminder. Pride made her voice the comeback, tilting her chin. ‘Was that how you viewed your first wife as well?’

He was very still. In the dragging quiet, her heart thudded loudly in her eardrums. The fierce chill of his appraisal forced colour up beneath her skin. ‘There can be no comparison. Berah grew up knowing that she would become my wife. Nor was she unaware of the nature of the man she was marrying. You know nothing whatsoever about me.’

Her stricken eyes fell from his. While her reference to Berah had been foolish, she had not been prepared for the charged and telling force of Raschid’s defence of her. His fingers were rigidly braced on the edge of the desk. The comparison she had dared to suggest had deeply angered him.

‘I don’t think you’re being very fair,’ she argued. ‘And I’m not demanding.’

A lean brown hand shifted abruptly. ‘Let us have no further arguments. On this subject they lead nowhere.’

‘What subject? What are we arguing about? I don’t know.’

He lounged indolently back. ‘Really?’ A dubious brow quirked. ‘In the space of an hour you refer to annulment and divorce. This is not, after all, some form of attention-seeking?’ he derided. ‘You want pretences—compliments, gallantry, romance. I disdain all of those, and I won’t play charades. I employed candour with you before today. We each had our price in this marriage. Mine was peace and yours was status and money. Now that that is established, what more can there be worthy of debate?’

‘I can tell you right now,’ Polly slammed back shakily for want of any other brickbat to hurl. ‘Being a princess is not all it’s made out to be!’

‘You may tell me whatever you wish if you reward me with a still tongue and the sound of sweet silence.’

She retreated to the opposite end of the cabin. He had gone over her like an armoured tank and the track marks of the vanquished were on her back. She had reacted emotionally to a male who did not allow emotion to cloud his reasoning. Or his judgement. He thought that she should have left her family to sink in the horrors of bankruptcy rather than sell herself into marriage. He was delicate in his sensibilities—he could afford to be. Bitterly Polly appraised the outright luxury of her surroundings. Without money her family would have fallen apart. Neither of her parents would have had the resilience to pick themselves up and soldier on.

Yet for all his contempt now, Raschid had been remarkably tolerant about a wedding which could have made a hit disaster movie. In bed—she reddened hotly at the recollection—he had been teasing and warm. But both responses had been logically perfect for the occasion. You didn’t calm a hysteric with threats. You didn’t coax a frightened virgin with force. Not unless you were stupid, and Raschid, she was learning by painful and clumsy steps, was far from stupid. He was dauntingly clever and dismayingly complex.

Abstractedly she watched him. Even in violent resentment she remained disturbingly conscious of the dark vibrancy of his potent attraction. In combination with looks and wealth that blazing physical magnetism of his must have stopped many women in their tracks. Polly had always distrusted handsome men; they were normally chockful of vanity. Raschid’s distinct lack of self-awareness puzzled her. He was stunning, but she had the strangest suspicion that the only time he looked in the mirror was to shave.

Abruptly she denied her view of him by removing to a poorer vantage point. She couldn’t understand what was wrong with her. Even when the stewardess served her with a meal, her thoughts marched on. Raschid was beginning to obsess her even as his emotional detachment chilled her. Linked with that raw, overt masculinity of his, that coolness made him an intriguing paradox.

Why had he been so reluctant to remarry? There could only be one reason: a reluctance to set another woman in Berah’s place. But Polly found it hard to attribute the longevity of passionate love beyond death and sentimental scruples to that diamond-cutting intellect. What other reason could there be? Accepting that he had to remarry, he had settled for Polly. He liked looking at her; he didn’t like listening to her. Then he wouldn’t have to listen much, would he? Not with the workload and the travel itinerary he had bent over backwards to outline.

The jet landed with a nasty judder, careening along the runway, the nearest porthole displaying a blur of what looked like desert. Assuming that the airport was oddly sited somewhere out of view, Polly got up. Raschid presented her with a bundle of black cloth. Her blank appraisal roused his impatience. Retrieving it, he shook it out and dropped it over her startled head.

‘I can’t breathe!’ she protested.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Light appeared as he adjusted the set of the suffocating garment. Disorientatingly, he burst out laughing. ‘You look very strange, Polly. This aba was not cut for someone of your height.’

Yanking up the surplus fabric, she stalked after him. Just outside the doorway, as she was interestedly taking in the sight of a line-up of soldiers and the presence of a small military band, striking up the most unmelodic tune she had ever heard, her foot caught in the hem of the aba. Hearing her gasp, Raschid whirled with incredible speed. As she teetered she was abruptly snatched off her feet and pierced by blazing blue eyes. ‘You are the most extraordinarily clumsy female I have ever come across!’

‘I wasn’t planning on wearing a shroud until I went to my coffin!’ she snapped back.

His sudden pallor did not escape her. Too late did she understand the source of his wrath. But before sympathy could touch her normally generous heart, outrage took over. Dear heaven, was Berah never out of his thoughts? Here he was carting Polly home, and all she could think about was his first wife!

‘Put me down, please,’ she demanded icily.

‘It’s only a few steps to the car.’ Indeed it was, and after throwing the unfortunate band an unappreciative glance, he stuffed her inside the limousine like a parcel. In bewilderment she stared out at the huge grey fortress walls rising to sheer heights with no perceivable end only a few hundred yards away.

‘Where’s the airport?’ she queried.

‘That is the palace. A jet-strip was built here for convenience. The airport is on the other side of Jumani.’

‘That’s the city?’

‘I am overwhelmed by the interest you have taken in your future home.’ His scorn for her ignorance was unhidden. ‘Jumani is ten kilometres from here.’

In embarrassment Polly turned to peer out at the gigantic nothingness of the desert terrain stretching in all other directions. It went on into infinity to meet the colourless vault of the sky, a wasteland of emptiness and rolling hills of sand. The isolation was indescribably alien to visual senses trained on green fields and hedgerows.

The limousine whisked them over to the black, shimmering ribbon of road and through the gates of the palace into a vast, cobbled courtyard. Already the heat was making Polly’s clothing stick to her damp skin. Raschid’s door sprang open immediately. He stepped out to be met by a spate of Arabic from the little man bobbing and dipping rather nervously in front of him. He frowned and swept off.

When he halted as if he had forgotten something ten yards on, Polly just wanted to kick him for striding back to haul her out of her death struggle with the aba twisted round her legs. ‘That is not a very graceful fashion in which to descend from a car,’ Raschid commented drily.

He guided her through the crush emerging from the great domed porch ahead. Glimpsing dark faces and avidly inquisitive female stares, she was ironically relieved to be covered from head to toe.

‘I understand that my father wishes to receive us immediately,’ he explained flatly. ‘You will not speak—I don’t trust you to speak lest you offend. On unfamiliar ground I do not believe you are at your most intelligent.’

Burning inside like a bushfire, Polly bit down hard on her tongue. He stopped before a set of carved double doors which were thrown wide by the fearsome armed guards on either side. He strode ahead of her. At a reluctant pace, she followed, to watch him fall down gracefully on his knees and touch his forehead to the carpet. For seventy, the grey-bearded old gentleman seated on a shallow dais at the foot of the room looked admirably hale and hearty. Polly got down on the carpet just as Raschid was signalled up. The King snapped his fingers and barked something in Arabic.

Raschid audibly released his breath. ‘Get up.’

Before she could guess his intention, he had deftly whipped the aba off again. Polly felt like a piece of plundered booty, tumbled out on the carpet for examination and curiously naked under the onslaught of shrewd dark eyes. Reija passed some remark, chuckled and went on to speak at considerable length. Turning pink, Polly slowly sank down again, but not before she noticed the rush of blood to Raschid’s cheekbones. Whatever his father was saying to him was having the most extraordinarily visible effect on him. His knuckles showed white as his hand clenched by his side. A pin-dropping silence stretched long after King Reija had finished speaking.

Suddenly Raschid spat a response. Polly was shocked. A split second later a wall-shaking argument was taking place over her averted head. Father and son set into each other with a ferocity which would have transcended any language barrier. The silences, spiced by what could only be described as Reija’s inflammatory and self-satisfied smiles, grew longer. Abruptly Raschid inclined his head and backed out. Polly nervously looked up again.

A gnarled hand beckoned her closer. ‘A most unfortunate introduction to our household,’ said Reija in heavily accented English. Noting her surprise, he smiled with distinct amusement. ‘I speak your language. However, it has often been of great benefit for me to listen rather than to converse.’

Somehow Polly managed a polite smile. Her gormless father had not had a chance against that level of subtle calculation!

‘You are welcome,’ he pronounced. ‘Such pale beauty as yours can only draw my son more frequently to his home.’

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