An Arabian Courtship

At the altar she received a wide smile from the smaller, younger man to Raschid’s right—presumably his brother Asif. Reddening, she dropped her head and the vicar’s voice droned on in her ears. Beside her lounged a primitive male, who regarded her solely as a piece of sexual merchandise he had bought off a shelf. Involuntarily she shivered. Raschid had made it brutally clear that she would have no place in his life beyond the bedroom door. Her blood had run cold under the intensely sexual slide of those assessing eyes, the appraisal of a natural-born predator.

They were on the church steps when she saw Chris. As he waved, her shuttered face came alive. It was three months since their last meeting. Raw and seething bitterness surged up inside her. It should have been Chris beside her posing for the camera…it should have been Chris inside the church. The ceremony she had just undergone was a mockery. Without hesitation she hurried down the steps towards the slim, fair-haired man smiling at her.

‘Aunt Janice said you mightn’t be able to come,’ she murmured tightly.

Chris laughed. ‘Wild horses wouldn’t have kept me from your wedding! You look stunning.’ Grasping both her hands, he looked her over and grinned. ‘What happened to your ambition to be a career woman?’

‘You tell me.’ Responding to his easy smile took all her concentration as she fought back stinging tears. She was embarrassed by her adolescently eager dash to his side, but the familiar sight of him had drawn her instantly.

‘Hey,’ he scolded, and the underlying seriousness of his gaze deepened, ‘the bride’s not supposed to cry! Whirlwind romance or not, I hope he’s the right man for you. You deserve the best.’

Polly’s throat closed over. The truth of what lay behind her sudden marriage would have appalled him, yet pride kept her silent. What more proof did she require of his indifference to her as a woman? He would dance at her wedding with a light heart. He had never realised how she felt about him, and now he never would. ‘I wouldn’t have settled for less.’ Her over-bright smile stretched to include Asif as he approached them.

‘Sorry, I have to kidnap the bride. The photographer’s fuming,’ he explained in a clipped Oxbridge accent.

‘Oh, lord, I forgot about him!’ Polly gasped.

He steered her away, lustrous dark eyes skimming her guilty face, his appreciative grin widening. ‘Is there anything else that you forgot? Like a new husband? If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it’s not terribly tactful to go surging at ex-boyfriends with Raschid around—unless you have a death wish, of course. But I’ll grant you one point. You staggered him—a rare sight to be savoured.’

Reluctantly Polly met Raschid’s veiled gaze a moment later. ‘I’m sorry,’ she lied.

He cast her a grim glance. ‘You don’t appear to know how to behave in public,’ he drawled in an icy undertone that flicked down her spine like the gypsy’s warning. ‘But you will be taught, of that I assure you.’

In angry disbelief, still trembling from the force of her disturbed emotions, she flared, ‘Who the blazes do you…?’

His jawline clenched. ‘I will not tolerate disrespect from you!’

Gritting her teeth, Polly spun to walk away again. The long-suffering photographer had finished. Raschid’s hand closed round hers, denying escape, but she broke her fingers violently free, muttering bitterly, ‘Tell me, what do you do when you’re not bullying women half your size? Beat them? I’d sooner know now!’

The blaze of fury that silvered his gaze shook her rigid. Had they not been surrounded by people she had the certain knowledge that she would have discovered exactly what Raschid did for an encore. Guiltily conscious that hating him for not being Chris was irrational and inexcusable, she retreated hastily.

‘Lordy, what sparked that off?’ Maggie whispered.

‘An unholy temper that I never suspected he had.’ Polly stole a driven glance over her shoulder to check that she hadn’t been followed. A choking sense of trapped misery enfolded her.

She should have apologised on the drive back to the reception at Ladybright, but she didn’t. Like an over-shaken bottle of Coke, she was afraid to uncap her sealed lips lest she explode. Her nerves were jangling a dangerous discordancy. Seeing Chris, so near yet so far, had agonised her, and her self-discipline was threatening to crumble.

Over the meal she did her utmost to ignore Raschid. The tension zapped in the air like static electricity. Unable to face food, she knocked back the champagne. She didn’t even notice how much she was drinking. When everybody began circulating, Polly, who was normally retiring in company, was suddenly to be seen speaking personally to every guest present. Absently marvelling that she no longer felt like throwing herself under a bus, she laughed at another one of Chris’s medical jokes, frowning when Maggie pulled at her sleeve.

‘You have to get changed.’ Maggie hustled her determinedly out of the room. ‘What on earth are you playing at? You’re sozzled! Mother hasn’t even realised—she’s busy telling everybody what wonderful confidence a woman gains from getting married.’

Polly gripped the banister and pronounced with dignity, ‘I have never taken alcohol to ex—excesh in my life.’

‘That’s why it’s gone straight to your head. How could you be so stupid?’ wailed Maggie. ‘Even I can see that Raschid doesn’t like it. Didn’t you notice that he hasn’t touched a drop? He’s not knocking it back like his brother. This just isn’t like you!’

‘But I’m a confident married woman now.’ Polly pirouetted and nearly tripped over her train, remaining dizzily still long enough for Maggie to detach her veil. ‘I shall stand up for myself. I won’t be bullied!’

‘How about strangled?’ her sister groaned, struggling to unzip her. ‘Sometimes you are a klutz, Polly. When Raschid saw you in the church he couldn’t take his eyes off you—and no wonder, you looked ravishing! But now he looks…well, if I were you, I’d eat humble pie.’

‘Rubbish—start as you mean to go on,’ Polly overruled as if her craven evasiveness had been the first step in a deliberate offensive.

‘And as for the way Chris kept on following you about…’

‘Any reason why he shouldn’t have?’ snapped Polly, turning her head away. When would she ever see Chris again? If she had made the best of a last opportunity to be with him, who could blame her?

Maggie frowned uncomfortably. ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off you either. I’ve never seen Chris act like that with you before.’

Polly hadn’t noticed anything. An insane thought occurred to her. Wouldn’t it be simply hysterical if Chris had finally appreciated that she was a woman and not a sister the day she married someone else? Macabre and unlikely, she decided bitterly.

Attired in her elegant going-away outfit, she was propelled out on to the landing to throw her bouquet. She peered down at all the upturned faces and swayed, dropping the bouquet in their general direction. Negotiating the stairs rivalled coming down an escalator the wrong way. On the bottom step she lurched, and strong arms came out of nowhere and caught her.

‘Whoops!’ she giggled, clashing accidentally with sapphire eyes that emanated all the warmth of an icebox. ‘Go on the wagon,’ she mumbled as if she was making a New Year resolution, the remainder of her alcohol-induced euphoria draining away. ‘Promish.’

The hiccups started on the way to the airport. Clapping a hand to her mouth in horror, she tried to hold them in. It was about then that she began to notice the silence. By the time she was steered into the opulent cabin of the private jet, she was sending Raschid’s hard-edged profile unwittingly pleading glances. The derisive charge of the look she received nearly pushed her over the edge into tears. She fumbled for the right words of apology for her outburst on the church steps. After take-off, she voiced them hesitantly.

Raschid leant forward without warning and snapped hard fingers round her narrow wrists to yank her up to face him. ‘You are drunk!’ he raked down at her in disgust.

‘T-tiddly,’ Polly corrected unsteadily, moisture shimmering in her unhappy eyes.

His contempt unconcealed, he released her to sink back white and shaken into her seat. She mumbled another apology, shrinking from the shamed awareness that he was right. But just for a while, under the influence of Dutch courage, her fear of him had vanished. Now it was returning in full force, stronger than ever before.

‘Silence!’ he cut across her stumbling apology. ‘Was it not shame enough that I must accept a bride who sells herself for money like a vendor sells his wares in the street? But that you should dare to turn up at that church and then make an exhibition of yourself as my wife is intolerable!’

‘I’m sorry!’ she sobbed again.

‘I told you to keep quiet,’ he lashed icily down at her. ‘I may have been deceived, but it is you who will suffer for it. After the brazen behaviour I witnessed today, you will find yourself confined to the palace!’

‘I wasn’t going to get out anyway!’ Polly wept all the harder while he towered over her like a hanging judge pronouncing sentence.

‘I will not acknowledge you publicly as my wife until you learn how to conduct yourself like a lady, and I have never seen anything less ladylike than your display this afternoon!’

The harsh condemnation genuinely shattered her. Without warning all the dammed-up tensions and resentments she had been forced by family indifference to suppress exploded from her. Her head flew back. ‘I…hate…you!’ she launched. ‘Don’t you dare insult me. I did my best. I even tried to hide the fact that if it wasn’t for the money, I wouldn’t have married you if you’d been the very last man alive! And if you don’t want me either, I’m just delighted about it! Do you hear me? You’re a domineering, insensitive tyrant, and I shall get down on my knees and beg your father to deport me. No wonder he had to come to England to find you a wife…no wonder!’

During her impassioned tirade, Raschid had frozen. He could not have been more astonished by the diatribe had a chair lifted on its own steam and begun a physical assault on him.

Curled up in a tight ball, Polly squinted up at him through tear-clogged lashes. ‘No woman with an IQ above forty would want to marry you and clank about in chains for the rest of her days, trying not to show how h-happy she is when you’re thousands of miles away…’

‘I believe it is time that you were sobered up.’ He bent down, and Polly was off that seat so fast with a piercing scream that she caught him totally by surprise. Having read brutal retribution into that grim announcement of intent, she lost what control remained to her and squirmed along to the far corner of the couch, tugging off a shoe in the blind, terror-stricken belief that she required a defensive weapon.

The cabin door burst wide, the steward and stewardess rushing in. Polly was quite beyond the reach of embarrassment. Stark fear had her cowering, tears pouring down her cheeks in rivulets.

A dark bar of colour overlaid Raschid’s hard cheekbones. He spoke at length in Arabic and then quietly dismissed their audience. A hand plucked the raised shoe from her stranglehold and tossed it aside. ‘I would not offer a woman violence,’ he ground out with hauteur.

‘I’m numb, I won’t feel it,’ she mumbled incoherently.

A pair of arms firmly scooped her drooping body off the seat. ‘You will feel calmer when you have rested.’

He carried her into the sleeping compartment, settling her down with unexpected care on the built-in bed. Tugging off her stray shoe, he calmly turned her over to unzip her dress. Cooler air washed her spine. In dismay she attempted to escape his attentions, as he glowered down at her. ‘Do you really think that I could be tempted to seize you passionately into my arms at this moment? A hysterical child does not awaken desire within me.’