‘Lovers,’ she repeated inwardly, stifling an odd little stab of pain. Funny how Razul never, ever referred to her now as his wife or to himself as her husband, or, indeed, in any way to the fact that they were actually married. Funny how those surely deliberate omissions could now fill her with a sense of rejection and deep insecurity and, no matter how hard she tried, an ever present awareness that she was living on borrowed time.
He leant over her and her heartbeat thundered so wildly that she was convinced he would be able to hear it. Brilliant golden eyes flamed over her with primitive satisfaction, and she trembled, feeling the spreading languor of desire constrict her breathing and flush her skin. The level of awareness between them now was so intense that he only had to look at her or she at him and the heat surged, closing. out everything else.
‘Allah has truly blessed us with passion.’
A tide of hotter colour embellished her cheeks; her guilty conscience stirred as she shamefacedly recalled a certain three days just over a fortnight ago when they had not got out of bed at all except to eat, and he had no doubt come to the conclusion that he had been blessed by an absolutely insatiably passionate woman. And admittedly he did make her feel insatiable, but she had the sinking, horrible suspicion that Razul would be appalled if he were ever to find out that she had had a rather more scientific purpose for ensuring that he stayed in that bed those particular days, and that even now she was anxiously waiting to find out whether or not all that passion had metaphorically borne fruit.
‘You are very quiet.’ He skimmed a blunt forefinger along the ripe curve of her lower lip. ‘What do you think of?’
Her guilty conscience attacked her, releasing a sudden, dismaying cloud of uncertainty. Had she made a very selfish decision in trying to become pregnant? If Razul ever found out he would totally despise her for it. Was it fair to bring a child into the world without a father and without a father’s knowledge simply to give herself some comfort? It seemed to her now that it was anything but fair, and what would she tell that child when it grew old enough to ask awkward questions? That she had deprived him or her of his birthright and heritage?
‘What is wrong aziz?’ Razul frowned down at her.
He called her ‘beloved’. Ever since she had discovered from a smiling Zulema what that particular word meant she had hugged it jealously to herself and tried not to think that Razul might use it as casually as some men used such endearments in English. She looked up at him with swimming eyes, studied that hard-boned, sun-bronzed face which was so terrifyingly dear to her, and her awareness of her own deception bit hard. He had been so honest with her from the beginning.
‘Nothing—’
‘That was not nothing which I saw in your eyes,’ he incised. ‘You are becoming homesick?’ His usually level drawl fractured on the last word.
Home? She didn’t have a home, she decided wretchedly. She had a cat in a cattery and three bonsai trees being lovingly looked after by her neighbour. Nowhere was ever going to feel like home again without Razul. ‘No.’
‘I think you are not telling the truth—’
She read the fierce tension stamped into his lean features and it frightened her. She could not bear to talk about losing him, had become an utter coward where that subject was concerned. It was as if talking about it would somehow bring the time closer and kill the happiness they did have. Now reacting to the sudden turmoil of her emotions, she reached up to him, smoothing unsteady fingers across his high cheek-bones and pressing her lips passionately, desperately to his with the tears still damp and stinging on her cheeks.
For a paralysing moment Razul was tense and savagely unresponsive, and then, with a hungry groan, he caught her to him with strong hands and ravished her soft mouth with hot, hard insistence, and it was a relief when she felt that wild, wanton need fill her with a drowning sweetness that locked out her ability to think.
But there had been something disturbingly different in their lovemaking, she thought dimly in the aftermath. Certainly her own heightened emotions had lent a painful and yet immensely greater depth to her response, and just as she was striving to work out exactly what had been different she was shocked back into full awareness by what happened next. Razul literally thrust her away from him, sprang up and began to dress.
The tension in the air was so thick that it brought her out in a cold sweat. The silence was unbelievably oppressive. Sitting up, Bethany drew her discarded dress against her, suddenly agonisingly unsure of herself. ‘Razul?’
‘This is how you would say goodbye to me. You still think of the end of the summer, do you not?’ he demanded fiercely.
Bewilderment gripped her as she focused on the muscles rippling on his smooth brown back as he tugged on his shirt. ‘What are you trying to say?’ she whispered.
He swung round, his bronzed features a frozen mask but tension emanating from every aggressively poised line of his lean, powerful. body. ‘You still think of leaving...I see it in your eyes!’ he grated.
‘How can I help thinking about it?’ Bethany was plunged into a vortex of all the pain that she had struggled to hold off for weeks and she lowered her head to conceal her anguish.
‘I can no longer live with this hangman’s rope swinging above my head. It is intolerable. You are like a curse upon me!’ Razul bit out with an embittered savagery that cut her to the bone. ‘But I will no longer endure this curse. I am leaving you.’
She was in so much shock that she could barely hear him. A curse? She was a curse? He was leaving her? But it’s not time yet, she wanted to scream at him in torment, and she wasn’t ready yet, not prepared, not able yet to face that severance. ‘You are leaving me?’
‘I should have thrown you onto that helicopter!’ Razul seethed back at her. ‘It would have been wiser to end it then than now.’
‘And now you’re running home to Daddy,’ Bethany mumbled thickly, helplessly.
An expression of such naked and incredulous outrage flashed across his strong, dark features that she was transfixed. ‘You are not fit to be my wife,’ he murmured with chilling emphasis, his self-discipline asserting itself with an immediacy that cruelly mocked her own loss of control.
And then he was gone, and she was left sitting there staring into space, sick with pain and completely at the mercy of it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BETHANY lurched nauseously out of bed like a drunk and only just managed to make it to the bathroom in time. After she had finished being horribly ill she sank down in a heap on the floor and sobbed her heart out.
Razul had been gone a week—the worst week of her life—and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do next. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to stay. Most of the time she just wanted to die. In any case how could she even get home without that visa signed in triplicate which he had mentioned? She couldn’t even leave Datar without his permission. Her teeth ground together at that humiliating awareness.
For seven utterly miserable days she had lurched between hating him and loving him, but it was extraordinarily hard to hate someone whom you missed more with every passing hour.
. And she was pregnant. She had got her wish and right now there was a lot of repetition of that old adage about being careful about what you wished for washing around in her mind. Her breasts ached and her stomach heaved every morning, and somehow there was no joy in the discovery that she was expecting the baby of a male who had rejected her on the cruellest, most inexcusable terms. She had thought that she knew Razul and in the space of minutes had been forced to face the fact that she did not know him at all!
He had been wildly infatuated with her but now that had burnt out. Once her mystery and challenge had gone, the pleasant little fling had run its course. After all that specious talk about her being precious and beloved he had rejected her and gone home to that hateful, vicious, nasty old man, and she now saw very clearly the resemblance between Razul a
nd his hateful father. She had let herself be used and this was her reward and it served her right, didn’t it? But, unsurprisingly, lashing that hard reality home to herself only made her feel more wretched than ever.
It was a couple of hours later that Zulema came to tell her that the Princess Laila was waiting for her downstairs. ‘Tell her I’m not well,’ Bethany instructed, and then groaned, recalling that Razul’s sister was a doctor. ‘No, tell her I’m very sorry but I don’t want to see anyone right now.’
Zulema’s dismay was unhidden. ‘This will cause very grave offence, my lady.’
Her mistress reddened, recalling Laila’s kindness to her while she had been in hospital. It wasn’t Laila’s fault that her brother was a creep of the lowest denomination or that Bethany was still incomprehensibly and insanely attached to that same creep. In fact, maybe she could mention that visa problem to Laila and employ her as a go-between.
Laila stood up as soon as she entered the room. ‘You will be wondering why I am here.’
‘Yes.’
‘You look unhappy.’ Laila surveyed her pallor and shadowed eyes with grim satisfaction.
‘All I want now is to go home,’ Bethany stated tightly.
‘But if you are pregnant you cannot possibly go home,’ Laila said very drily.
The assurance with which the older woman made that statement shattered Bethany. She found herself staring back at Laila in wide-eyed dismay. How on earth could she know or even suspect such a secret?
Razul’s sister gave a humourless laugh. ‘Bethany...you cannot walk into a chemist in the centre of Al Kabibi and purchase a pregnancy test and expect it to remain a secret. Naturally you were recognised, naturally such an interesting purchase was eagerly noted and discussed—’