Kadir was looking at her as though he wanted to lock his hands round her neck and choke the life out of her, Natalia recognised, but she didn’t care. If he hadn’t had the decency to protect their marriage and his new wife from the venom of his mistress, then he could take the consequences. She looked across at him. The lamplight revealed Kadir’s features quite clearly. She could see the harsh down-turned curl of his mouth and the cold glitter of anger in his eyes.
‘You hate this, don’t you?’ she challenged him before he could finish. ‘You hate being married to me. Well, you only have yourself to blame.’ She saw the flash of temper igniting the jade-green darkness of his eyes.
‘I am to blame for your immorality?’
He was as adept as his mistress about changing the direction of a conversation to suit his own ends, Natalia acknowledged, but she was not going to give in to those tactics.
‘The fact that you have chosen to think me immoral does not make me so. And what you are to blame for is insisting on marrying me when you have already judged me to be not good enough to be your wife. You are angry with me, but in reality your anger should be for yourself.’
‘How typical of a woman that you use words with the same deceit with which you use your body.’
‘There is no deceit apart from in your imagination,’ Natalia rejected his accusation.
‘Have you forgotten the wanton way in which you, a woman on the brink of marriage, gave yourself to me?’
‘My physical desire for you had no bearing on my commitment to this marriage. As a single woman, which I was, I had the right to own my own body and my own desires, and besides…’
Just in time Natalia managed to stop herself from admitting that he was the only man she had given herself to in a very long time.
‘And as your husband-to-be, I had the right to expect you to bring yourself to our marriage bed free of any evidence of another man’s possession of you. I will not be cuckolded in the way that my mother—’
‘But there isn’t another man! And it always comes back to what happened with your mother, doesn’t it?’ Natalia retorted. ‘You can’t move forward into the future, Kadir, because you will not let go of the past. Your mother was eighteen,’ she told him grimly, already protective of the young girl who must have suffered dreadfully and been so afraid. A true man, a loving son, surely would have compassion for her and understand how she must have felt. But it was not Kadir’s mother she wanted to discuss. ‘You talk of my supposed immorality. That is so hypocritical when you yourself have a mistress. And by the way,’ she added cuttingly, ‘the next time you feel like discussing my failings as a wife with that mistress, I suggest you at least tell her that you’ve already had sex with me.’
‘What do you mean the next time I feel like discussing you with my mistress? What are you talking about? Tell me!’
‘Tell you? Yes, I will! Zahra couldn’t wait to let me know that she knew I spent last night alone. You’re a fine one to talk to me about morality. And, no, I didn’t descend to her level and spoil the fun she was having letting me know how wonderful you think she is in bed by telling her that I already know that by my standards her idea of fun isn’t anything to write home about.’
‘You must have misunderstood her,’ Kadir stopped her curtly. ‘I did not spend last night with Zahra.’ Kadir could hardly believe what he was admitting, and he certainly did not know why he was admitting it.
‘Oh, come on, you don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?’
Ignoring her, Kadir continued coldly, ‘I spent last night in the desert. My brother had made arrangements for us to visit the tomb of our mother together.’ His voice had become clipped. ‘It was her wish that she was buried with her parents. We spent the night there together in prayer.’
Something—shame, perhaps; regret maybe—fierce and scalding burned its way through her, but she couldn’t let it sway her.
‘You cannot deny that she’s your mistress, though.’
Kadir’s eyebrows rose. ‘You sound more like an emotionally jealous and possessive traditional wife than someone taking part in an acknowledged dynastic marriage.’
Kadir’s criticisms were so close to what Zahra had said to her—so close that it was obvious to Natalia that they had shared a discussion about her and her supposed ‘feelings’ for him. What had they said? And where? In the intimacy of their shared bed? And no doubt when Kadir made love to Zahra he…The pain seized her out of nowhere shocking her rigid; leaving her unable to either fight it or deny it. If she had any sense she would abandon this discussion and now before it got totally out of hand, a warning voice inside Natalia’s head urged her, but she refused to listen to it. Her pride was hurt and demanding recompense for the wound inflicted on it.
‘My concerns are exactly the same as your own,’ she told Kadir furiously. ‘On health grounds alone, you must see that you can’t expect me to share your bed when you are having sex with another woman.’
She saw from the faint widening of his eyes that she had caught him off guard, but he recovered very quickly, telling her coldly, ‘I wasn’t aware that I had asked you to share my bed.’
‘Good, because although Zahra may consider you to be a good lover…’ she began insultingly.
‘You do not?’
How had he managed to get so close to her without her noticing him moving? Too close, she recognised uneasily. ‘No, I do not! But then of course my experience of you as a lover can hardly compare to Zahra’s, can it?’
What
was she doing? What was she saying? She might as well throw herself off the top of one of Niroli’s cliffs, her behaviour had become so self-destructive, Natalia recognised.
‘If that is meant as a request for me to remedy that disparity—’ Kadir began.
‘No, it is not.’ Now look what she had done, fool, fool that she was!