‘Even now, I don’t know whether or not Hilary would ever have accepted my word against Brett’s. She was crazy about him and she thought he was very handsome and was always saying how other women flirted with him. So I kept quiet but that wasn’t enough for Brett. He hated me and he liked to make me squirm,’ Lily muttered through compressed lips. ‘For three years until I was able to leave home to go to college, Brett tormented me.’
‘How?’ The demand left Rauf like a bullet and his hands closed taut over hers.
‘When there was nobody else within hearing, he’d make sick comments and stuff…’ Lily grimaced and had to steel herself to continue. ‘About how my body was shaping up…and crack dirty jokes…he never laid a hand on me but I was very scared that, some day, he would.’
Rauf closed supportive arms round her slight, shivering figure and eased her close. He himself was literally shaking with rage. He knew that if he ever got within twenty feet of Gilman, he would want to kill him. He snatched in a great, shuddering lungful of fresh air in an effort to get a grip on himself. What a blind fool he had been not to put what he already knew together and come up with a more likely scenario than Lily having been in love with her sister’s husband! Now he knew what his former accountant, Tecer Godian, had been warning him about: the older man had seen Lily’s fear of her brother-in-law.
‘I didn’t tell Dad because I was afraid that Brett might carry out that threat he’d made and say that I had been trying to tempt him. How could I prove that he was lying when the truth would have wrecked Hilary’s marriage? Who was going to even want to believe me? I couldn’t cope with the situation—’
‘Of course you couldn’t…’ Rauf breathed in a fierce undertone. ‘You should have told me about all this three years ago.’
‘I was afraid you might think that I’d encouraged him and, anyway, keeping it all a secret was too much of a habit by then,’ Lily confessed jaggedly. ‘It was because of Brett that I started to dress the way I do—I was trying not to attract his attention. It was only when I went to college that I realised how different I was from other girls. I was so nervous around the boys…I didn’t even like being looked at because that reminded me of Brett and it made me feel unclean.’
‘It’s all right…all right,’ Rauf muttered thickly, attacked by a raw mixture of guilt and even fiercer regret for his own lack of understanding.
‘But I fell in love with you, so I tried harder with you,’ Lily admitted painfully. ‘After you…well, a good while after you, I went for counselling because I knew it wasn’t normal to feel the way I did.’
For a long time, Rauf just held her close. When the sound of voices warned that they were about to be disturbed, Rauf took her to the restaurant. At a quiet table on the garden terrace, he asked her about the counselling sessions she had attended.
‘Realising that I was letting Brett ruin my life was the start of my recovery,’ Lily said with a wry grimace. ‘All that awful secrecy in my family, the trapped feeling I used to have in our home when he was around, the feeling of helplessness…that was what made me the way I was. I let Brett turn me into a victim—’
‘I didn’t help…’ Rauf closed a hand over hers, his dark-as-midnight eyes overbright with unashamed pain at what she had endured. ‘All along I sensed your reserve with me and it made me uneasy and too quick to ascribe other motives to your behaviour. But I did nothing to encourage your trust, güzelim.’
Her throat thickened and she swallowed hard. It felt good that there were no more secrets between them. He had not doubted her either; no, he had not doubted her for even a moment. A winging sense of joyous relief filled her, natural colour warming her cheeks again, any lingering tension banished.
The days that followed in the run-up to their wedding were a hive of constant activity. Having given her a whistle-stop tour of the main sights of Istanbul, Rauf whisked Lily off to the sites that lay further afield. She made initially nervous inroads into her new wardrobe and discovered that, although the clothes Rauf had chosen for her were a feast of designer style, none could be deemed either revealing or daring, and she teased him about the reality that his great-grandmother admired most of the outfits too.
Midweek, Rauf brought her the evidence of Brett’s attempt to involve her in the fake bank account he had set up at that Turkish bank in London. Rauf had obtained a copy of the signature purporting to have been hers and the handwriting did not even bear the slightest resemblance to her own.
‘A clumsy forgery which would fool nobody,’ Rauf pronounced with satisfaction. ‘Gilman believes that he’s very clever, but he falls down on all the finer details.’
‘Yes, but what’s going to happen about him?’ Lily asked anxiously.
‘I don’t want you to let a single thought of him enter your head.’ His lean, dark features full of purpose, his dark golden eyes rested with concern on her troubled expression. ‘Trust me. He will be dealt with. Never again will he be in a position to hurt you or anyone else in your family.’
By the end of that week, cheerfully anticipating her own family’s arrival for the wedding festivities, Lily hugged an entire series of happy memories to herself and myriad impressions of the rich Turkish culture.
Visiting the
exotic Spice Bazaar in Istanbul where the heady aroma of countless spices mingled in the air had been interesting, but walking hand-in-hand with Rauf had been a quieter and more private pleasure. The fascination of wandering round the amazingly intact ruins of the ancient city of Ephesus had been eclipsed by the preparation with which Rauf had ensured that he could answer her every question as well as any guide and his touching pride and love of the history of his own country.
She had done the tourist trail for her sister: she had bathed in the warm pools on the blinding white travertine terraces at Pammukkale, wandered through an astonishing underground city once inhabited by early Christians in Cappadochia and, at Dalyan, sailed alone with Rauf along the sleepy river bounded on all sides by swaying thickets of reeds. They lunched from a hamper in the shade of a chestnut tree and she listened to him tell her about childhood picnics, attended by anything up to seventy members of his extended family and still a favoured way of entertaining.
‘You like picnics too…’ Rauf made that reminder in a teasing undertone as he banded both arms round her to tug her into closer connection with his long, powerful frame, sending a chain reaction of intense awareness travelling through her. ‘Only a very obstinate male would have fought the inevitable as long as I did. But I must confess that it is three years since I chose the diamond ring you wear on your finger.’
‘Sorry?’ Blue eyes wide, Lily met his burnished golden gaze in pure shock. ‘You bought me an engagement ring then?’
‘Yes…I intended to ask you to marry me that last weekend I spent with you in England,’ Rauf confessed ruefully. ‘But your niece, Gemma, was ill when we arrived and your father was preoccupied with that contract. Even I could see that it wasn’t the right time to stage a romantic proposal…I expected to fly back to see you the following week.’
‘And instead you saw me with Brett at the hotel and assumed the worst.’ Lily was overjoyed that, in spite of their imperfect relationship three years earlier, Rauf had wanted to marry her even then, but she was also hurt that they should still have parted in misunderstanding and lost each other.
‘I was too proud to confront you with my suspicions. I will regret that for the rest of my life,’ Rauf admitted in a roughened undertone, his hard-boned, devastatingly handsome features taut. ‘But the conviction that you could never have felt for me what I felt for you because you loved someone else made the most sense to me then. I was devastated…too devastated to judge the facts with intelligence or even keep them in proportion. To save face, I said nothing.’
‘Oh, Rauf…’ Lily whispered unsteadily, her gaze clinging to his remorseful gaze. ‘Do all Turkish men have such colourful imaginations?’
‘We’re a passionate people. But, between you and I, the greatest weakness was that too much had been left unsaid,’ Rauf conceded half under his breath, rational thought receding as he met her beautiful eyes and struggled to concentrate.
Electric tension hummed between them in the stillness of the grassy glade.