Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride / The Spanish Husband / The Bellini Bride

‘Thank you.’ Arrogant as always, he took the remark as a compliment. ‘Of course, a lack of modesty forces me to say that I am also dancing with the most beautiful woman in the room.’

Her mother danced close by, and Evie stiffened slightly at the glowering look she received. ‘Stop it,’ Raschid admonished. ‘Or I will take you back upstairs again.’

‘Fate worse than death,’ she quipped.

‘So you found her, Raschid.’

Julian and Christina swished up beside them. Christina looked radiant, her gentle eyes sparkling.

‘As you directed,’ Raschid replied. ‘I turned to the east and walked on to the end of the earth.’

Immediately the spark went out of Christina’s eyes. ‘I’m so sorry about your room, Evie,’ she cried in mortification. ‘I didn’t know until Julian told me!’

‘Don’t be silly, the room is fine!’ Evie assured her.

‘And maybe she deserved it after all,’ her brother put in. ‘Since she couldn’t even bring herself to appear in one small photograph with us!’

Raschid’s eyes narrowed. Evie’s cheeks flushed. The information was obviously new to him. ‘Why not?’ he demanded.

‘Because she didn’t like the company,’ Julian suggested tauntingly.

‘Don’t be cruel, Ju,’ his new bride scolded him. ‘You know why Evie did it!’

‘Then perhaps you would like to explain it to me, Christina,’ Raschid drawled. ‘Excuse me, Julian, for I am about to steal your bride for a little while…’

And as deftly as that Raschid swapped partners, and was dancing off with a blushing bride clinging to his tall, lean, elegant frame, leaving sister and brother staring ruefully after them.

‘I think he’s angry,’ Julian remarked.

‘That makes two of you, obviously,’ his sister wearily replied.

‘Three actually,’ Julian said, then sighed as he tugged her into his arms and danced after the other two. ‘Mother came by your room earlier,’ he told her.

‘What?’ Appalled, Evie’s voice left her throat as a half-hysterical squeak. ‘I hope you’re teasing me, Julian!’ she gasped out shakily.

‘Why, what were you doing?’ he asked. Then grinned a typically rakish male grin when Evie blushed from breast to hairline. ‘Oh, wow. No wonder she’s on the warpath again,’ he said. ‘I hope you had the sense to lock the door…’

‘Raschid did,’ she mumbled.

‘Good old Raschid,’ her brother mocked. ‘Always thinking ahead of himself, that guy.’

‘She didn’t actually say she heard us, did she?’ Evie asked anxiously.

Looking down at her with wickedly teasing eyes, Julian drew out the silence while he pondered whether or not to lie—then laughed out loud as his poor sister’s face went from blush-red to paste-white. ‘She heard the two of you talking, that’s all.’ He finally let Evie off the hook.

‘I think I hate you,’ she choked, her chest feeling as if it had just collapsed.

‘Punishment,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘For being so pathetic as to believe your absence from my wedding photos is going to stop the gossip columnists from marking yours and Raschid’s presence here. What they will do,’ he went on grimly, ‘is make a whole lot of mischief out of the way you carefully avoided him. Intrigue,’ he incised, ‘is the spice of their lives, Evie. And you certainly gave them enough spice to make a meal out of your behaviour today.’

‘I didn’t want them splashing photos of me and him all over their papers instead of you and Christina,’ she defended herself.

‘Well, having thwarted them of a photograph, they will instead make much of the fact that they couldn’t catch the two of you together—anywhere. And how do I know that?’ he concluded. ‘Because those were the kind of questions most of our guests were pumped with today by the reporters. Which in turn made your entrance here tonight on Raschid’s arm a real revelation—for everyone.’

‘You noticed?’

‘You are such a naïve little baby sometimes, Evie,’ her brother sighed. Standing several inches taller than her, Julian dropped his gaze to her surprised face. ‘I would think that the whole room noticed—which was why Raschid did it, isn’t it?’ he suggested. ‘He’d had enough of playing the nasty skeleton in your dark little cupboard. The man has more than his fair share of pride, and you kicked it today with your behaviour.’

By the time Raschid came back to graciously return the bride to her new husband, Evie was trying to come to terms with the unpalatable fact that she seemed to have upset just about everyone she cared about today, in one way or another.

He didn’t speak as he danced her away again, but the fingers that held her were saying a lot and he was wearing that cold, hard mask on his face that she knew very well.

‘I did warn you,’ she said, unable to say nothing even when expediency was telling her that silence in this case was the better part of valour.

‘So you did,’ he agreed. ‘It is a shame there were no hidden cameras in your bedroom earlier, for we could have stopped the gossips in their curious tracks then.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a boor, Raschid,’ Evie flashed, guilty conscience giving way to anger. ‘Tell me,’ she demanded. ‘What would you have done if our roles here had been reversed, and this had been Ranya’s wedding day, to which, by some utterly amazing quirk of fate, I had been invited?’

The smooth line of his jaw clenched, the angry outline of his mouth tightening even further as he took the very sarcastic scenario on board.

‘You would have asked me not to attend the wedding.’ She gave the answer for him. ‘And if, like you, I had told you to go to hell, you would then have made a point of completely ignoring me! But—unlike you,’ she then added tightly, ‘I would have accepted your desire for privacy, hurt though I may have been by it. The word is dignity, Raschid,’ she clipped at him coldly. ‘Something you should recognise since you have so much of it. Well, today I was protecting my dignity, not yours. And if you don’t like that, then it’s just too damned bad!’

It was fortunate, perhaps, that the music finished then. Evie flashed his ice-cold mask of a face one final searing glance then walked angrily away. But the sense of tight hurt she experienced as she did so was there because he let her do it.

After that, she went back to avoiding him—as she did anyone who might think it was their right to castigate her for one sin or another! Instead she stuck to those people who couldn’t care less what she did in her private life. She laughed, she danced, she chatted and teased and generally sparkled like a golden icon to beauty and social charm.

While inside she had never felt so lonely in her entire life.

The time came at last for the bride and groom to depart and everyone gathered in the castle’s great hallway to see them off. They were staying at one of the hotels close to Heathrow tonight before flying off to Barbados first thing in the morning.

Christina appeared at the top of the grand staircase dressed in a blush-pink Dior suit. In her hands she carried her wedding bouquet, and behind her Julian was grinning as he listened to the calls for his bride to throw the lucky flowers.

Evie stood and teased and called with the rest of them, but it was only the sudden flash from Christina’s eyes that warned her what was coming—as the bouquet came spiralling through the air and landed against her chest.

If silence could be measured in decibels, then the sudden silence that encompassed the great hall at Beverley Castle hit whole new levels. Everyone just stood there and gaped at Evie. No teasing, no jokes. They simply did not know what to say as Evie’s cheeks mottled with embarrassed colour.

From the back of the hall, Raschid witnessed it all in a kind of frozen stillness, the appalling truth that every single person here knew there was no hope of Evie marrying while she stayed with him hitting him like a punch to the solar plexus.

‘Well…’ Evie’s voice came out light and rueful. ‘We can all live and dream, I suppose.’

And dutifully the crowd laughed, but nervously, tensely.

For Evie it was the worst moment of her life. She kept smiling, though. With a teeth-gritting will-power she kept that darned smile in place. She hugged and kissed her brother, received a penitent Christina into her arms.

‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ the bride whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘Shh,’ she cut in, and kissed Christina’s cheek. ‘Just go away, have a lovely honeymoon!’

By the time the car went off down the driveway, flying streamers and rattling tin cans, Evie had had enough. Seeing her mother making a beeline for her had her turning quickly in the opposite direction and slipping away into the soft summer darkness.

The lake beckoned, its moon-kissed silk-smooth surface acting like a soothing lure to her storm-tossed senses. Walking around the main marquee, she stepped up to the lake rim, and watched bleakly as the view in front of her went out of focus through eyes that slowly filled with tears.

Well, she told herself. She’d done it. She had got through today—though not quite as she’d wanted to get through it. She’d upset many and pleased none. But at least now she could concentrate on pleasing Evie.

And Evie wanted to—

Her heart began to throb. The deep dark well of frustration and misery she had been keeping such a firm hold on all day suddenly burst through its constraints. And with a fierceness that said it all she stretched out the hand still clutching Christina’s bouquet and with as much power as she could muster tossed the flowers as far as she could into the lake.

The bouquet landed with a soft splash, bobbed a couple of times, then lay there floating in a pool of moon-kissed ripples.

‘Feel better for that?’ a dark voice said behind her.

‘Not so you would notice,’ she said, not bothering to turn because she knew who it was. ‘Go away, Raschid,’

she then added flatly. ‘I don’t need another round in the verbal boxing ring with you, right now.’

‘No,’ he murmured gravely. ‘I can see that…’

She heard him move, her body tensed up as muscles tightened in screaming protest. The tears came back, so strong this time that they set her throat working and her soft mouth quivering. She closed her eyes over the tears, clamped her quivering mouth shut and clenched her hands into two tight fists at her sides while she waited for him to take the hint and leave, or ignore the hint with his usual arrogance.

The silence hummed, the tension along with it. After what felt like an age and no more sound came from behind her, Evie began slowly to relax the tension out of her body. He had shown sensitivity for once and left her alone, she assumed.

And on a long, long heavy sigh that seemed to come from the very lowest regions of her she kicked the strappy high-heeled shoes from her aching feet, released her hair from its uncomfortable knot, then lowered herself on to the bone-dry short-shorn grass to sit staring out at the glassy still lake.

In a little while, she told herself, she would go back into the castle and creep away to her room. Then tomorrow—

Another sigh. Tomorrow was just another day fraught with a different set of pressing problems. Tomorrow would be deal with mother time, deal with Raschid time.

Somewhere in the darkness an owl began hooting, sounding bleak and lonely as if it was calling hopelessly for a mate. A fish rose to the water’s surface, its tail making a lazy flapping noise as it rolled over, setting the bouquet of flowers bobbing again in the ripples it left behind.

She really shouldn’t have done that, Evie mused guiltily. Christina would be so hurt to know that her lovely bouquet had finished up in such a watery grave.

She shivered, and her knees came up, her arms wrapping round them, her loosened hair sliding in a thick silk curtain around her slender shoulders as she lowered her weary brow to rest it against her knees.

The feel of a jacket dropping across her hunched shoulders should have surprised her, but oddly it didn’t. She would have been more surprised if Raschid had simply walked away and left her to it.

‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said.

‘No,’ was all he replied, and dropped down on the grass beside her.

Turning her face on her knees so she could look at him through the curtain of her hair, Evie found herself gazing at a sombre profile that was, even so, the most beautifully structured profile she had ever seen. Like her, his knees were up, but parted so his wrists could rest upon them. His dress shirt stood out bright in the moonlight; his skin was like polished bronze.

Her heart swelled in her breast, swelled and swelled until she thought it was going to burst under the power of her wretched love for him.

He turned to look at her, sombre-eyed and flat-mouthed. ‘Are you ready to tell me what is wrong, now?’

No, she thought miserably. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. And she turned her face to stare moodily at the lake so she didn’t have to look at him.

‘Your mother thinks you are ill,’ he added when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to say anything.

I am, she thought. Soul-sick and heartbroken. ‘I didn’t know you had that kind of conversation with my mother,’ she remarked.

‘I don’t, usually,’ he dryly admitted. ‘But this one took the form of a—confrontation.’

Ah, Evie was very intimate with those kinds of conversations with her mother. ‘I’m not ill,’ she assured him.

‘Then what the hell is the matter with you?’ he rasped, suddenly losing all patience. ‘Because it has been patently obvious to me for weeks now that something certainly is!’

‘I thought I told you I didn’t want another verbal battle tonight!’ she snapped right back.

‘Then don’t turn this into one!’ He turned the tables on her as quick as a flash. ‘You are my life, my heart, my soul, Evie,’ he added gruffly. ‘I would do anything for you; I thought you knew that.’

‘Except marry me,’ she said, then grimaced at herself for stupidly blurting it out like that.

His answering sigh was heavy. It wasn’t words but—good grief—it spoke volumes in other ways. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

‘No,’ she denied, and went to get up, but his hand came out to press her down again.

‘Talk,’ he commanded. ‘Or reconcile yourself to the uncomfortable prospect of spending the night right here.’

He meant it, too; that tough macho gleam was in his eyes again. On a sigh she subsided. He let go of her, recognising the sigh as a gesture of defeat. Evie turned her gaze back to the moonlit lake once again, felt a tightness pull around her chest, and said flatly, ‘I’m pregnant.’

CHAPTER FIVE

AS ANNOUNCEMENTS went, this one truly took the trophy. To his credit, Raschid didn’t groan in horror or curse and shout, or demand to know how the hell she had allowed such a stupid thing to happen. All the things he certainly had a right to do.

In fact, he didn’t do anything. He just continued to sit there, as silent as death, as still as stone, utilising that impressive bank of self-discipline Evie knew he possessed to hold himself in check while he attempted to take the shocking news in.

And it was awful—worse, much worse than she’d even envisaged this moment was going to be because she knew this man so very well, and knowing him meant she understood exactly what his silence was actually saying.

Raschid’s world and all it meant to him had just been effectively brought tumbling down around him. And this was more than just the noble Arab prince holding his emotions in check as he had been trained from birth to do in times of disaster.

He was sitting there like that because he was literally paralysed with dismay.

‘Say something,’ she prompted when she could stand his silence no longer.

‘Like what?’ he asked, then admitted grimacingly, ‘I find I am struck speechless.’

Well, speechless just about covered it, Evie thought painfully. ‘How, where and when seem good places to start,’ she huskily suggested.

‘Okay…’ At last he moved, turning his head to look at her—though Evie couldn’t bring herself to look back at him now.

‘How?’ He began with her first suggestion.

Her hunched shoulders gave a helpless shrug. ‘I don’t know how,’ she answered honestly. ‘Somewhere along the line, my birth control has let me down but I just don’t know how it did. The where depends on the when,’ she went on huskily. ‘Which was about six weeks ago,’ she calculated. ‘Which in turn probably means it happened during the weekend we spent together on your yacht in the Mediterranean,’ she assumed. ‘Though I will know better when I see a doctor…’

‘So this is not yet confirmed?’

Did he have to sound so damned hopeful? Her chest began to hurt with the tension she was putting on it, her throat locking up on a tight ball of emotion she didn’t dare release.

‘Home testing sets are pretty accurate these days,’ she informed him flatly.

Another long silence followed that, one that throbbed and pulled and picked at the flesh like an animal chewing on a dead carcass. Only Evie’s carcass wasn’t dead. It was alive and hurting in more ways than she would have believed possible.

Out on the lake the owl hooted its lonely call for a mate again. The moon slithered its eerie way across the glass-smooth waters—and Christina’s bouquet continued to float right there in front of them, making really heavy irony now of its good-luck significance.

‘You knew about this two weeks ago, didn’t you?’ he said suddenly.

What was the use in lying? ‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Damn it, Evie!’ His control suddenly exploded, launching him to his feet as shock gave way to a burst of anger. ‘Why didn’t you tell me then? Do you have any conception of what those two weeks are going to mean to me?’ He lashed at her. ‘The problems they are going to cause?’ A sigh shot from him, his dark face contorting with blistering condemnation as he violently spun his back on her. ‘What a mess!’ he muttered thickly. ‘What a damned mess!’

White-faced and shaken by his scorching response, Evie came more slowly to her feet to stand staring at him in utter dismay. For, no matter how terrible she had expected his reaction to be, she hadn’t expected anything quite so brutal as this.

‘What difference can two weeks possibly make to the situation?’ she demanded shakily.

He didn’t answer; instead a hand went up to grip the back of his angry neck, the action showing all the horror and frustration he was currently experiencing.

In fact, he couldn’t have been more horrified if she’d told him she’d infected him with some dreadful social disease.

‘Unless, of course, you’re hoping I may offer to do something about it?’ she then suggested, wanting to twist the knife she could almost see sticking out of his ribs where she had apparently plunged it.

It worked. He flinched. ‘No!’ he ground out, spinning round to glare at her. ‘Don’t ever,’ he gritted, ‘make a suggestion like that again!’

Well, at least that was something, Evie grimly acknowledged as she stood there staring into those glitter-hard golden eyes. But then, if he had said anything else—so much as glanced at her with a hopeful look in those wretched eyes—she would never have forgiven him.

As it was, Evie shuddered on a wave of sickening self-disgust for voicing such an option just because she wanted to score points off him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It was never a choice you were going to be offered.’

‘Then why say it?’ he lashed at her.

Her small laugh was forced and shrill. ‘You couldn’t make your horror clearer if you were being faced with the end of my brother’s shotgun!’ She angrily derided the question.

‘You expect me to be ecstatic?’

‘No,’ she said heavily, turning away from him to stare bleakly out across the moon-kissed lake because looking at him now hurt just too damned much. ‘But a bit of tender concern at some point wouldn’t have gone amiss…’

The dry remark had his chest expanding on a strained intake of air. When he let it out again most of his anger went with it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised gruffly. ‘But, as you can no doubt appreciate, it is going to take me some time to get my head around this.’

‘Get your head around what exactly?’ Evie drawled, withdrawing behind her own stone-cold shell of self-protection. ‘The problematic mistress who has stupidly gone and got herself pregnant?’

‘It takes two to make a baby,’ he sighed.

‘But only one to bring it safely into the world,’ Evie pointed out. ‘Your part is done. Mine is just starting.’

A small silence followed that remark. Then Raschid demanded, ‘Are you suggesting that I ignore the fact that you are having my baby?’

Why? Evie thought bitterly. Are you offering up a suitable alternative? ‘I am suggesting that you get your priorities right,’ she said. ‘And remember your duty.’

Raschid stood staring into cold-cut lavender-blue eyes set in an excruciatingly beautiful face that showed not a hint of emotion anywhere on it—and at last it began to hit him just what she was saying here.

‘Don’t be foolish!’ he snapped. ‘In this case my duty is to you and the child!’ A long-fingered hand flicked out in a grim, tight throw-away gesture. ‘We will have to get married, of course.’

Still no words of love, Evie noted painfully. Still no words of caring. But oh, so arrogant, she observed. So damned sure of himself—so utterly dismayed by what he was so magnanimously offering.

‘We don’t have to do anything,’ she countered, feeling so cold inside now that she wished she hadn’t let his jacket slip to the grass when she’d got to her feet earlier.

‘I will have to speak to my father…’ he muttered, too busy lost in his own frowning thoughts to have heard her. ‘It is going to cause problems at home, but that cannot be helped now. I will…’

‘Excuse me,’ Evie inserted, and this time the sheer coldness of her voice managed to gain his attention. ‘But the way I see it, Raschid,’ she said firmly, ‘you don’t have a problem here. I do.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he jerked out, beginning to look just a little shell-shocked now.

‘I’ve never expected marriage from you,’ Evie informed him. ‘And I am not asking you for it now.’

‘Are you mad?’ he choked. ‘Of course you will marry me! What else can we do?’

Oh, his sensitivity knew no bounds! Evie mocked him bitterly as she bent to retrieve her discarded shoes. ‘I wouldn’t marry you, Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah, if you came gift-wrapped in rubies!’ she hissed as she straightened up again. ‘I have too much damned respect for myself, you see!’

‘Are you saying that I don’t respect you?’

‘Do you?’ Evie flashed back. ‘You see, I find it hard to reconcile the fact that I wasn’t fit to marry before I became pregnant with your child!’

At last those angry golden eyes began to burn with a pained understanding of what was actually going on here. Remorse tightened his arrogant features.

‘Evie…’ he sighed, the hand he used to capture her wrist tense with frustration. ‘I have handled this badly,’ he acknowledged. ‘I apologise.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Evie snapped, tugging angrily at her imprisoned wrist. ‘Let go of me,’ she commanded shakily.

‘Not until you listen to me,’ he refused. The hand pulled her closer, drawing her fully against his powerful chest. ‘You cannot expect me to pretend to be pleased about a baby when you know as well as I do the kind of problems that are going to erupt around us!’

‘Funny really,’ she said, lifting lavender eyes turned into dark purple pools by the sudden flood of tears washing across them. ‘But I expected nothing more than I got from you, Raschid. Which just about says it all, doesn’t it?’

His sigh was driven, the hand he brought around her waist there to stop her from pulling against her captive wrist. ‘I thought we loved each other well enough to be honest with each other.’

‘There is honest and there is brutal,’ Evie said thickly. ‘I feel frightened. I feel vulnerable. I feel as if I’ve ruined both our lives. And all you can do is worry about how this is all going to affect you!’