A Mediterranean Marriage

‘But if you saw me why didn’t you mention it?’ Lily studied him in growing bewilderment and annoyance. ‘Why didn’t you just approach me?’

‘Yet you later claimed that you hadn’t left the travel agency at all that morning,’ Rauf completed, ignoring her interruption.

The awful silence that fell sawed at Lily’s ragged nerves like a knife. But as she understood how Rauf had set her up, pure unvarnished anger lit her eyes with sapphire fire. ‘So, you sat and watched me and you deliberately didn’t let me know you were there. Then you encouraged me to believe that it was safe to tell a harmless fib…and all the time,’ she condemned with rising volume, ‘all the time, it was a trap!’

‘You lied to me…if you’d told the truth, the trap couldn’t have touched you,’ Rauf countered, outraged that she should dare to question his behaviour when she was the one who had been in the wrong.

Lily thrust back the sheet and threw herself out of the bed. ‘Are you telling me that in your whole life you have never once told a lie to avoid embarrassment?’

His riveting golden eyes hardened. ‘You’re evading the issue—’

‘As far as I’m concerned the real issue here is your downright devious lack of decency in setting me up to fall like that!’ Lily flung. ‘What about trust? What about honesty?’

‘You proved yourself unworthy of my trust,’ Rauf spelt out with a contempt that stung her sensitive skin like a whiplash.

As Lily snatched in a deep, quivering breath, his brilliant gaze lodged to the natural prominence and movement of her breasts as she filled her lungs with air. Her face flamed at that male sexual appraisal and, even as he looked, her weak flesh tingled and swelled and the tender peaks pinched shamefully tight. In a defensive movement, Lily folded her arms over her chest. ‘Did I really?’

‘Entertain me…’ Rauf traded with derision. ‘Give me an innocent reason for telling me that harmless little fib!’

Lily compressed her lips so hard on that invitation that pallor spread round her mouth. That day three years back she had mounted a cover-up for the sake of appearances. She had lied sooner than admit that her supposedly happy family had been, from her point of view at least, very far from being what it had seemed.

‘Brett was having an affair,’ Lily admitted with a bone-deep bitterness that made Rauf’s gaze lock to her angry, defiant face with even keener attention. ‘Not for the first time either. Unfortunately that day Hilary was desperate to get hold of him because Gemma had been rushed into hospital and he wasn’t answering his mobile phone. But I had a fair idea where he would be. Local gossip suggested he always took his little tramps to the same hotel!’

‘You’re saying that, while you and others knew that he was a womaniser, your sister didn’t and you chose to protect her from that knowledge?’

‘Why not?’ Lily tilted her chin, knowing that Rauf, whose principles had about as much bend as ice, would concede no excuse for her concealment of the truth. But she had been much too scared of what the consequences of betraying Brett might have been and of how Rauf might have reacted to the reality that Brett’s threats had trapped her into keeping that silence.

‘And protect him too?’

Lily sent him a furious look for daring to attack her from that angle. Her father’s unswerving belief t

hat what went on in Hilary’s marriage was none of their business had been the first chain that had bound her to secrecy. ‘Of course not…Brett didn’t come into it…Gemma was crying for her daddy. That’s all I cared about that day!’

‘It was a hell of a long time before you came out of that hotel with Gilman,’ Rauf reminded her with sardonic bite.

‘Because I had Reception ring his room and nobody answered,’ Lily explained with angry embarrassment. ‘I checked the bar and the restaurant but he wasn’t there. I didn’t want to go up to the room myself and I hung about for ages, but in the end, I had to sneak past the receptionist into the lift and knock on the door of that room to get hold of him!’

Rauf found that account extraordinary, yet she told her story as though what she had done had been her only obvious choice. He could have believed that she might have chosen to stay silent the first time that she’d been confronted with her brother-in-law’s infidelity. But to ask him to accept that she would turn a blind eye to more than one affair and indeed lower herself to the level of tracking Gilman down to the place where he’d been staging his adulterous tryst stretched his credulity too far. Yet he registered that Lily saw nothing strange in what she had just confessed, saw nothing questionable in her own behaviour. Yet in forewarning Gilman, she had engaged in a complicit act of protecting his position in her family circle and shielding him from the consequences that he had so richly deserved.

‘Why don’t you just tell me the whole truth? You were infatuated with Brett Gilman!’ Rauf condemned with icy, derisive force.

At that shattering allegation, Lily stared back at Rauf in horror and it was a second or two before she could even get her vocal cords to work for her again. ‘How can you accuse me of something that sick?’

‘In what you’ve just told me that’s the only explanation that makes sense!’ Rauf shot back at her with chilling conviction, his eyes cold and dark as a winter pool. ‘I’m going to the hamam before I lose my head with you!’

The hamam? The bath house, she recalled abstractedly, that big domed building that she had noticed in the old courtyard and assumed to be no longer in use. There he was, the ultimate contemporary sophisticated male, about to go and immerse himself in the kind of ancient cultural experience that Hilary had urged her to try out as a tourist. As the door thudded shut in Rauf’s imperious wake, Lily lifted a trembling hand to her pounding brow and sucked in a jagged breath.

You were infatuated with Brett! She shuddered in angry recoil. How very wise she had been not to tell Rauf about the distasteful treatment she had had to withstand from Brett until she had left home to attend college! No doubt, Rauf would be all too happy to construe those facts as proof of an inappropriate sexual attraction and credit his own outrageous accusation as being founded in fact.

But even aside of that concern, Lily was still in considerable shock at what Rauf had revealed about his side of events three years ago. Rauf had seen her at that hotel, had known that she had lied to him and, after she had seen him off at the airport on his flight home that same day, she had never heard from Rauf again. Was it possible that Rauf had dumped her because of that lie? At that idea, a storm of powerful emotion seized hold of Lily: anger, fierce regret, incredulous frustration. Could Rauf not understand that she had not had a choice?

No way was he taking refuge in the hamam where he no doubt believed that she would leave him in peace! Snatching up her light robe and pulling it on, Lily left the bedroom. Sonngul was silent and dim behind the closed shutters. Entering the old whitewashed passage that appeared to lead out to the bath house, she opened the door at the foot of it and found herself in an opulent changing room with a line of shower and changing cubicles, luxurious built-in cupboards and shelves of fleecy towels waiting in readiness. It was obvious that the facilities were still very much in current use. Shedding her nightwear, Lily yanked a bath towel from the nearest shelf, wrapped it round herself and, having opened one door to discover that it led into a massage room complete with couch, stepped through the other into the bath house itself. There she fell still in astonishment at the magnificence of her surroundings.

The giant domed roof, supported on a circle of superb marble pillars, was studded with little star-shaped glass inserts that filtered the dimness with shards of golden dawn light. The walls were a glorious rich expanse of antique tiles beneath which sat marble washing wells into which water flowed in constant refreshment. Round the perimeter of the central raised and stepped platform ran a walkway and in a further expanse a flight of steps ran down into a sizeable pool.

A towel lay abandoned there and even as she watched, Rauf’s dark head broke the surface of the pool and he swam over to the steps to mount them. Nude and magnificent, water streaming from his big, powerful bronzed length and quite unaware of her presence, Rauf swept up the towel.

Her mouth running dry, Lily stared at him, watched his sleek muscles flex taut as he towelled his hair, burning colour warming her cheeks. ‘Rauf…?’ she breathed, disconcerted embarrassment engulfing the angry sense of frustration that had made her follow him.