‘I am staying with my wife. While she is unwell, this is my place.’
‘Please go home,’ Bethany muttered, feeling horribly guilty for causing dissension between brother and sister, and even more dismayed by the news that Razul had not slept in forty-eight hours.
His facial muscles clenched hard. His dense lashes screened his strained, dark-as-night eyes but she couldn’t help feeling that he was reacting as though she had stabbed a knife into his back. His strong features harshly set, he withdrew a step. ‘If that is your desire...’
As the door closed on his departure Laila groaned, ‘You should have wrapped that up a bit. Now you’ve offended him and it’s my fault. Ahmed would be cringing if he heard me speaking to Razul like that, but for heaven’s sake...I’m twenty years older, I’ve lived most of my life in London and I keep on forgetting that my kid brother will one day be our king. I always had a big mouth,’ she muttered wearily, ‘but he’s been acting like an idiot since you were brought in—’
‘An idiot?’ Bethany echoed weakly.
‘He was in a blind panic. First of all he wanted to take you to London because he wasn’t convinced we could offer a sufficient standard of care. I told him he really would have something to worry about if you had to wait that long for treatment. Then he wanted to fly in specialists. Then one of the junior staff...a young male,’ she stressed witheringly, ‘accidentally came in here, and Razul went through the roof and threatened to take you home if you could not be adequately chaperoned and protected from such an appalling invasion of your privacy. He has not left your bedside for a moment.
‘He has not eaten, he has not slept and there are four guards standing outside that door... Any minute now I expect the arrival of an official food-taster!’
Bethany stared back at Razul’s sister, wide-eyed. ‘Oh, dear...’ she mumbled.
‘Oh, dear, indeed.’ With a rueful smile Laila sank down on a chair. ‘Now, I can understand that he’s been worried sick about you, but I don’t understand why he’s been behaving as though it was his fault that you were ill!’
Bethany dimly remembered that apology. A sudden attack of conscience had undoubtedly prompted his extraordinary behaviour. Her heart sank like a stone. She would have felt wonderful if she could have believed that his behaviour had stemmed solely from genuine concern and worry about her well-being.
‘As if it could be. You had bad luck, that’s all. How did you get those scratches anyway?’
‘Fatima—’
‘Does Razul know that?’ Laila gasped.
Bethany nodded, locked into her own miserable thoughts.
Disconcertingly, Razul’s sister burst out laughing. ‘That piece of news makes everything I have endured worthwhile,’ she declared with renewed energy, and stood up again to press a button on the wall by the bed. ‘Your specialist, Mr Khan, will want to check you over. Are you hungry yet?’
‘No—’
‘Please try to develop an appetite,’ Laila teased. ‘If you don’t, Razul will import your Dubai cook...and then the next thing you know all our rich patrons will expect to do the same. Actually I’m very glad you are here.’
Bethany gaped at her.
‘What Razul does, everyone else does,’ Laila supplied cheerfully. ‘If he had flown you to London for treatment, our reputation as a hospital would have sunk without trace!’ She turned from the door and grinned widely. ‘I am also depending on you to give birth to the first royal baby within these walls, but please let us make a pact to sedate Razul in advance of the big event, because I will surely strangle him if he starts trying to tell me what to do in my delivery room!’
A royal baby? In mute shock Bethany lay very still. Laila was under the impression that this was a real marriage. Of course she was. Why should Razul let his whole family know that she was only a temporary aberration? There was no necessity when he knew that by the end of the summer she would be gone anyway. But his father knew the truth, she suspected. Presumably that was the only reason why he had allowed Razul to marry her in the first place.
Well, King Azmir needn’t worry himself, and Laila was destined to disappointment this time around. Razul hadn’t run any risk of making his new bride pregnant. Even in the midst of wild passion in that pool, now she came to consider the fact, Razul had not taken any chances. He had carried her back to bed and protected them both from any possibility of her becoming pregnant.
And why the heck should that hurt so much? It was only confirmation of what she had known from the start. They had no future together. So why, when Razul employed a little common sense for a change, should that common sense feel like the ultimate rejection? She ought to be delighted that he had not risked such a development. Why was her mind now throwing up embarrassingly twee little pictures of Razul in miniature?
Her nose wrinkled as her eyes burned. She grimaced, furious with herself. A long time ago she had known that the one real drawback of the celibate life that she had planned would be never, ever having a child of her own when she loved children.
As she loved him...hateful creep that he was, she thought bitterly, turning her convulsing face into the pillow and absolutely despising herself for giving way to her emotions. Just to think of Fatima and him together made her stomach heave. The woman was a maniac! And not one single word of criticism had Razul uttered when Bethany had told him who had inflicted those scratches.
Of course, it didn’t matter to him that Bethany had suffered grievously at that woman’s hands. That nasty piece of work with no control over her temper and murderous impulses was very probably going to be the mother of his children.
All of a sudden Bethany wanted to die and leave him so miserable and so tortured by guilt that he would be totally useless as a husband!
‘I understand that you are not eating very much,’ Razul remarked tautly.
‘I’m just not very hungry.’ In the twenty-four hours it had taken him to show up again and visit her, Bethany had sunk deep into her misery, and when he had walked through the door looking as grim and tense as she felt it had been the last straw.
‘I can understand that...’ he breathed in an even tauter undertone. ‘But you must be sensible.’
The silence was oppressive. She turned her face to the wall. He deserved Fatima, she decided wretchedly, trying to hate him, but somehow that only made her own pain bite all the deeper.
‘I made a mistake in bringing you to Datar,’ he
conceded heavily.
Bethany went rigid, and emerged from the tumbled cloud of her veiling hair with a frown.
‘I believed I could make you happy...for a while anyway,’ Razul framed even more tightly, ferocious tension in every lean, hard angle of his features. ‘I know now that that was very arrogant of me...and stupid—unforgivably stupid. I allowed my passions to carry me away. I have never wanted a woman as much as I wanted you. You were my dream... In the name of Allah, I sound like an adolescent boy!’
With a harsh laugh of angry embarrassment he strode restively over to the window. ‘I was naive enough to believe that we could have this special time together and that it would cost you nothing. I had so little time left. I have no freedom of choice. I have to marry and father children. I am thirty. That is quite an age to still be single in my position...’
‘Yes,’ she whispered unsteadily, absolutely ripped apart by a depth of honesty that she had not expected to receive.
‘You were my dream...’ she reflected on a tide of almost unbearable pain; if only she had been. He had exquisite tact. What he was really saying was what she had known all along. She had been his sexual fantasy, the desirable conquest who had refused to be caught, becoming even more highly desired as a result. He had wanted one last fling with a woman who was not of his world—a strong, independent woman who would scarcely fall apart at the seams or make a fuss when it was over—and he had never at any stage contemplated that one last fling turning into anything more meaningful or lasting.
‘If it were not for my family I would have you flown back to England, for that is what you must want now,’ Razul intoned almost jerkily. ‘But for their sake I ask you to stay for a little while longer. The too sudden departure of my bride would cause them severe embarrassment.’
Bethany did not dare look at him. The thought of being transported home immediately filled her with horror. Yet it was cowardly to want to put off the inevitable. ‘This special time together’...why couldn’t she have been the type of woman who could accept that? And suddenly, finally, she understood why she had not accepted it.