The Mistress Bride

'A vow?' Evie repeated shrilly, beginning to shake all over in reaction. 'What kind of vow?'

'Cover yourself,' he commanded roughly.

Having recently devoured her with his eyes, he was now looking anywhere but at her, his dark face a mask of bone gripping tension. Evie knew that look. He was hurting, and at this precise moment she was glad he was hurting! 'What kind of vow?' she angrily insisted.

'A vow to Allah,' he confessed. 'That I would treat you with respect.'

'I've got news for you, Raschid,' Evie informed him, grimly dragging the nightdress over her trembling flesh. 'This doesn't feel like respect, it feels like rejection!'

He winced as if she'd hit him, but it didn't stop that wonderful chest Evie had just eagerly exposed for herself from disappearing behind snowy white linen.

'That is because you misunderstand my motive,' he explained, bending to retrieve his jacket and his tie next. 'For too long I have undervalued your importance to me. It is a sin I am determined to put right.'

'What sin?' she demanded bewilderedly. 'The sin of wanting to make love to me?' She sounded so damned offended that his mask of a face seemed to turn to iron. Yet he nodded his dark head in sombre confirmation. 'And the sinful lack of understanding as to what our relationship was doing to your pride, your self-esteem and your reputation.'

'Is this explanation supposed to make me feel better?' 'It will, when I've finished,' he said, dragging his jacket back on. He didn't look so elegant now, Evie noted caustically, with half the buttons on his precious shirt missing! 'Then by all means please go on!' she invited. 'For I find myself completely enthralled by all of this humility!' He muttered something she didn't catch, an Arab curse aimed

at sarcastic females, she suspected.

'I exposed you to mockery, humiliation and danger,' he nonetheless continued. 'I stood by and watched your own family shun you at your brother's wedding. I witnessed the whole party freeze in horror when you caught Christina's bridal bouquet! I then watched you stand alone by a moonlit lake and toss those damn flowers into the water as if you were tossing away all hope for you and me!' His chest heaved on an angry rasp of air. 'Yet, seeing all of this,' he grimly went on, 'knowing exactly how wretched you must have been feeling, I still responded badly to your news about the baby! How you could bring yourself to speak to me after that performance,' he concluded gruffly, 'I will never comprehend!'

Evie said nothing, what could she say? He was only telling it as it was, after all. She had been tossing away hope with those flowers. He had reacted badly about the baby.

'You didn't even carry a bouquet to our wedding,' he then inserted huskily. 'Do you think I did not see the significance in that omission? I have this dreadful suspicion that if you ever hold another flower in your hand you are always going to see that cursedly doomed bouquet in its stead!' He was probably right, so Evie didn't argue the point with him. 'I still don't see what any of this has to do with you and I making love now that we are married.'

'I made a vow to Allah,' he said, bringing the whole unbelievable conversation reeling back to where it had begun. 'While I waited out my vigil in that hospital waiting room, I promised Him that if He gave me a final chance with you I would never, ever undervalue your worth to me again. And since sex is all I ever gave to you before,' he finally concluded, 'then sex will now await its pleasure, until I have proved to you that you mean more to me than just a source of physical gratification.'

And that was what this was really all about? He'd made some silly vow to Allah while sitting in a hospital waiting room turning himself inside out with guilt and worry?

'In case it has escaped your notice,' Evie dryly mocked, 'I tended to use you in exactly the same way.' To her surprise, he laughed one of those warm, husky, very male laughs that eased some of the tension out of him.

'Then take pity on me,' he pleaded, turning rueful eyes on her. 'And make this penance I have set myself easier to bear by lusting after me when I cannot see you doing it.'

Evie relaxed back into the pillows, no longer angry, but studying him thoughtfully. 'You won't be placing the baby at risk by making love to me, you know,' she said. 'If that's what this is really all about.'

'It isn't,' he denied.

'I asked the doctor last week when I went for my check-up,' she persisted regardless. 'And he assured me that physical intimacy would not be a problem.'

He wasn't blind; he could see exactly what her lavender eyes were offering him. 'The world is full of practised sirens,' he remarked wearily. 'But why did I have to marry myself to one?'

'Kismet,' Evie said, her eyes openly provoking him now.

'Purdah is beginning to take on a whole new appeal where you are concerned,' he warned. Then, on a sigh, he came to sit down beside her, and leant down to softly kiss her cheek. 'Why don't you put me out of my misery and go to sleep?' he suggested.

'I can't convince you to change your mind and join me?' A delicate finger came up to gently play with his mouth. 'No.'

'Even though this is my wedding day and I am feeling terribly neglected?' The finger moved to his jaw line, and began trailing downwards to where the whorls of crisp dark hair were showing above the gap in his open shirt. 'I promise not to try to seduce you.'

'You are seducing me already.' He utterly derided that promise, pointedly removed the trailing finger, and got to his feet again.

'How can you make a pact with Allah about something as important to us as sex?' Evie cried, losing all patience. 'Rest,' he commanded, moving back to the door.

'All right,' she snapped, sitting up again. 'I'll rest when you tell me how long this penance of yours is to last.' For some reason the question put tension back into his shoulders. Alarm shot through her, the horrible suspicion that he was hiding something from her chilling her blood. 'Raschid .. .' she murmured as a sudden frightening thought struck her. 'There isn't something wrong with me or the baby that people aren't telling me, is there?'

'Of course not!' he snapped, spinning round to frown at her. 'You and the baby are perfectly healthy!' he stated tersely. 'No one has lied to you about that!'

'Then what are you hiding?'