by Lynne Graham
An unholy grin slashed Raj’s often serious features as he awaited her reappearance.
* * *
The one-time home of the former Banian royal family was huge and sprawling and, although the building had been carefully conserved, it was not used for any purpose other than to house a small museum on the history of Bania and provide the public with the chance to tour Princess Azra’s former apartments.
‘I wish she hadn’t died before I was born.’ Zoe sighed, studying old black and white photos of a youthful blonde in local dress. ‘Grandad showed me pictures of her. He totally adored her, you know,’ she told Raj cheerfully. ‘He cast off my father for refusing to do a degree in business and come and work for him. My grandmother told him he was doing the wrong thing and that he should let my dad make his own path but Grandad was too proud and stubborn to listen.’
‘It is a challenge for one generation to understand what drives the next. It was years before I could appreciate that in demanding that I marry a woman he chose my father was only asking me to do what he had done himself.’
‘But you were in love with someone else,’ Zoe reminded him. ‘You couldn’t possibly have married another woman and made a success of it. You would’ve been full of bitterness and resentment.’
‘My father believes that in our privileged position emotions cannot be allowed to make our decisions for us. I learned the hard way that he was correct,’ Raj completed with a harsh edge to his voice.
‘You still have to tell me about you and Nabila,’ Zoe told him.
‘I thought women didn’t like a man to talk about previous affairs,’ Raj countered in surprise, shooting her a disconcerted glance.
‘I’d have to be in love with you to mind that sort of thing and all jealous and possessive and I’m not,’ Zoe pointed out calmly. ‘I’m just being nosy.’
Raj nodded, although the concept shook him because he was unconsciously accustomed to women wanting more from him than he was willing to give, which was why his sensual past consisted of more fleeting encounters than anything else. ‘I studied business at one of the Gulf state universities. That’s where I met her. Have you ever been in love?’ he heard himself ask with astonishing abruptness, but he was, without warning, equally curious.
‘No, not even close,’ Zoe admitted tightly. ‘What happened to me at twelve put me off trying to have a relationship with a man, and then I watched my sisters fall in love and didn’t fancy it for myself. There seems to be a lot of angst and drama involved and I’m not into either. So you met Nabila at uni?’
‘We were together for two years. I fell hard for her,’ Raj bit out grudgingly, while wondering what superhuman qualities it would take to make Zoe fall in love with a man, and then his thoughts became even more tangled because he questioned why he was even thinking along that line. Was it exposure to Zoe? His cousin, Omar, had confided that following his marriage he’d found himself thinking weird thoughts, more like a woman, and that constant female company had that effect on the average man. Raj had to shake his head to clear it and he couldn’t grasp how such random ruminations were arising in his usually logical brain.
‘Obviously,’ Zoe conceded. ‘I mean, you weren’t likely to defy your father’s command for anything less...so you lived together for two years?’
‘No, such intimacy was out of the question. If I expected my father to take my wish to marry Nabila seriously, it had to be non-sexual,’ Raj proffered curtly. ‘He would not have respected anything else.’
Zoe stopped dead and gazed up at him in wonderment. ‘Are you saying you didn’t sleep with her?’
‘Of course, I didn’t. My bride had to have an unsullied reputation. It would’ve been disrespectful to ask my father to countenance any other kind of relationship. He is from a different generation. He does not understand female liberation. In his day a woman’s main claim to fame was her purity and a decent woman didn’t give it up for anything less than a wedding ring.’
‘Gosh, I was cheap,’ his bride chipped in, her face suddenly on fire. ‘Because as you pointed out, we’re not really married in the truest sense of the word.’
‘You weren’t cheap,’ Raj breathed as the museum custodian nervously watched their progress round the exhibits from the other side of the room. Long fingers stroked down her face and lingered below her chin to lift it. ‘You were totally incredible and I was unworthy of the gift.’
‘That’s just flannel,’ Zoe informed him, her face warming even more as she connected with brilliant dark eyes that sent butterflies fluttering in her tummy. ‘We did what we did because we wanted to.’
‘And every time I look at you,’ Raj confided thickly, ‘I want to do it again.’
‘You were telling me about Nabila,’ Zoe reminded him doggedly, tiny tingles of arousal coursing through her slight taut length while she fought to suppress those untimely urges. ‘Not trying to turn me into a sex maniac.’
‘Could I?’ Raj asked in a roughened undertone, those gorgeous eyes pinned to her with a feverish intensity that scorched.
‘It’s possible,’ she downplayed in haste. ‘Nabila?’
‘She told me she was a virgin because she probably assumed that that was what I wanted to hear. But it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have cared,’ Raj admitted ruefully. ‘So naturally I respected what she told me and I was prepared to wait until we were man and wife, but she got bored.’
‘Hard to be set on a pedestal and to pretend to be something you’re not,’ Zoe put in thoughtfully.
‘Yes, I did have her on a pedestal.’ Raj grimaced. ‘I was very idealistic at the age of twenty.’
‘You were too young for that size of a commitment,’ Zoe commented. ‘What happened?’
‘I refused to give her up and my father exiled me. It was my final visit and I left Maraban in a hurry. Nabila had given me a key to her apartment and my sudden return was unexpected. That was when I found her in bed with one of her so-called friends. It was clearly a long-standing arrangement and what an idiot I felt!’ Raj relived, his superb cheekbones rigid. ‘I had surrendered everything for her and there she was, the absolute antithesis of the woman I believed her to be—a shameless cheat and a liar, who only wanted me for my status!’
‘And your body, probably,’ Zoe told him abstractedly, winning a startled sidewise scrutiny. ‘You must’ve been devastated. I’m lucky. I’ve never been hurt like that, don’t want to be either.’
Raj stared down into her beautiful expressive face and wondered why it was so very easy to talk to her about Nabila, whom he had never discussed with anyone before. It was because she didn’t have a personal stake in their marriage, at least not one that he understood, because from what he had observed her new royal status and the awe it inspired meant precious little to her. ‘The meet and greet downstairs starts in thirty minutes. You can put on the skyscraper heels if you must.’
‘If I must?’ Zoe queried, slinging him a look of annoyance.
‘You struggle to walk in very high heels,’ Raj pointed out bluntly.
‘Because I never went out anywhere until I came to Maraban. I had this fabulous collection of gorgeous shoes and my sisters borrowed them and I never got to wear them until now,’ Zoe told him hotly. ‘I’ll learn to walk in them!’
‘Obviously,’ Raj countered, realising that he had been tactless in the extreme. ‘But why didn’t you go out anywhere?’
‘I panicked if men came onto me, couldn’t handle it,’ she confided reluctantly. ‘But you don’t do that to me for some reason.’
‘Maybe because you’re not falling for me,’ Raj suggested glibly, while cherishing the obvious fact that she felt safer and more protected in his company.
‘Yes, that could well be it,’ Zoe responded cheerfully as she slid her feet into her high heels while leaning on both his arm and a door handle to balance. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much more confident I
Watching her sip coffee and smilingly chat by his side only minutes later, Raj decided it had nothing to do with the stupid shoes. He remembered their first meeting and her panic attack and marvelled at how much she had already changed. He had merely met her at a bad moment in a scenario that would have frightened any woman, he recognised. His fingers splayed across her spine and he concealed a grin, thinking about the scratches on his back, badges of pride for a man who knew he had satisfied his woman. Not his woman, he immediately corrected himself. Well, she sort of was his for the present, an acceptance that somehow lightened the cloud threatening his mood.
It seemed no time at all to Zoe before they were being posed in the palace’s grand reception room for the photographs and then they were done, and it was a relief to not be on show any more and know that they had only a holiday ahead of them, she reflected sunnily. They were walking back to the car when a photographer popped out from behind some trees and shouted at them. Half of Raj’s security team took off in pursuit of him. At the same time Raj’s phone started shrilling and one of the diplomats she had met at the reception emerged with a grim face and moved in their direction with something clutched in his hand.
‘What the hell?’ Raj groused only half under his breath, pulling out his phone while ensuring that Zoe was safely tucked into the car awaiting them.
She watched as the diplomat proffered the magazine to Raj, saw him glance at it with patent incredulity and then compress his lips so flat they went bloodless. After that he strode back and forth in front of the car talking on his phone, his lean brown hands making angry gestures, his whole stance telegraphing his tense, dissatisfied mood.
‘What’s happened?’ Zoe asked anxiously when he finally came off the phone and climbed in beside her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘A STORM IN a teacup but it’s put my father in a real rage.’ Raj expelled a stark breath, impatience and exasperation lacing his intonation. ‘Last year my father drove Maraban’s only gossip magazine out of the country. Now they’re based in Dubai and what they publish about us has steadily become more shocking. He should’ve left them alone. He has to accept that these days everything we do is watched and reported on and our family cannot hope to keep secrets the way we did when he was a boy.’
‘I guess he’s a bit behind the times. The press are more disrespectful of institutions nowadays. So, what’s in that magazine?’ she prompted, thoroughly puzzled. ‘Some forgotten scandal?’
‘Not even a scandal, merely an intrusion.’ He had crushed the magazine between his hands and now he smoothed it out with difficulty and handed it to her. ‘Of course, you can’t read it but the photos are self-explanatory and this article coming out the same week as our wedding, suggesting that I wasn’t allowed to marry the woman I loved because she was a commoner, may be embarrassing for my father but it is also an absurd allegation.’
Dry-mouthed now, Zoe stared down at the splash of photographs, depicting Raj with Nabila. Old photos, of course. She could see that they were younger but what she had not been prepared to see was the look of adoration in Raj’s face as he gazed down at the other woman. He was studying Nabila as if she’d hung the moon for him and for some reason, Zoe registered, seeing those youthful carefree photos of them holding hands, larking about beside a fountain and smiling at each other hurt. She couldn’t explain why those photos hurt but the instant she scrutinised them in detail she felt as though someone had punched her hard in the stomach because the pain was almost physical in its intensity.
What the heck was wrong with her? Was she starting to care for Raj? Was she suffering from jealousy, despite her earlier reassurance to him that she felt no such emotion concerning him? Those questions made her feel as shaky as if the ground had suddenly disappeared from under her feet. Yes, she was starting to care in the way you did begin to care more for someone when you got closer to them, she reasoned frantically and, yes, she had been jealous when she saw those photos. But none of that meant that she was necessarily falling for him.
‘She was my first love and that was all,’ Raj continued, wonderfully impervious to his bride’s pallor and her silence. ‘Very few people marry their first love and what does it matter anyway what I was doing eight years ago? It’s a really stupid article but it is revealing a relationship that only our families knew about to the public. What I can’t understand is how they got a hold of such private photos. I had copies but I destroyed them after we parted and the friend who took the photos—Omar—would never have shared them with anyone.’
‘You said it was an absurd allegation,’ Zoe recalled dully. ‘How so when it’s true? Your father wouldn’t agree to you marrying her.’
‘Not because of her parentage but because I suspect he had had her checked out and knew a great deal more about her than I knew at the time,’ Raj admitted wryly. ‘At least he had the consideration not to throw what he had found out in my face.’
‘As you said...a storm in a teacup,’ Zoe remarked rather stiffly, because all of a sudden she was tired of hearing about anything that related to Nabila and she could only marvel at her previous curiosity. Just then she thought she would be happier if she never heard the wretched woman’s name spoken out loud again. As for seeing those stupid photos of her with Raj regarding her as if he had been poleaxed, well, that had been anything but a pleasure for a woman already labelled as a friend with benefits. No doubt that was why she had felt envious of the other woman.
No doubt, right at this very moment Raj was thinking about Nabila, remembering how much he had loved and wanted her, positively wallowing in sentimental memories! And on that note, Zoe decided that she would be very, very tired that night, in fact throughout the day, so that Raj would not dare to think she was in the mood to provide any of those benefits he had mentioned!
* * *
‘You still haven’t told me how it happened,’ Raj reminded Zoe stubbornly.
Raj was like a dog with a bone when he wanted information, he just kept on landing back on that same avoidance spot of hers, an area of memory where she never ever travelled if she could help it. She breathed in deep, a little bit of a challenge when he was still flattening her to the wall of the shower. Shower sex? Yes, she had gained a lot of experience she had never expected to have over the past two weeks. Resolving to keep her paws off Raj hadn’t worked when he was behaving like lover of the year. It was the only analogy she could make when she refused to let herself think of him as a husband.
But there it was: her watch broke, so a new one studded with diamonds arrived within the hour; phone kept on running out of charge, and a new phone was there by bedtime so that she could talk to her sisters as usual. She preferred flowers growing in the ground to those cut off in their prime and stuffed for a short shelf life into vases, and so he took her into the hills of Bania to stage a luxury picnic beside a glorious field of wild flowers. That had been only one of the blinders Raj had played over the past fortnight. He hated her high heels, seemed to be convinced she was going to plunge down steps and, at the very least, break her neck, but he had still bought her shoes, the dreamiest, absolutely over-the-top jewel-studded sandals with soaring heels. She had worn them out to dinner last night in a little mountainside inn, where everyone around them had pretended—not very well—not to know who they were to give them their privacy.
The only problem for Zoe, who was blossoming in receipt of such treatment, was that it was a constant battle not to start caring too much about Raj. She kept on reminding herself that none of this was real. Yes, he was her husband, but this was a convenient arrangement that they’d both agreed to. At best, he was just a friend, an intimate friend certainly, but beyond that she knew she dared not go. She was terrified of falling for him and if she made that mistake, she would be rejected and her heart would be broken.
‘Zoe...’ Raj growled, nipping a teasing trail across the soft skin of her nape to her shoulder with his lips and his teeth, sending a shudder of response through her that even very recent fulfilment could not suppress. ‘I want to know how it happened.’
‘And I don’t want to revisit it.’
‘It would be healthier for you to talk about it,’ Raj told her doggedly.
‘Like you talk about being bullied at military school!’ Zoe flung even as she wriggled back into his lean, powerful body, registering that he was ready to go again while conceding that there was nothing new about that because Raj appeared to be insatiable. ‘I practically had to cut the story out of you with a knife at your throat,’ she reminded him with spirit. ‘And by the way, Raj, it wasn’t bullying. What you and Omar went through was abuse of the worst kind!’
‘If I talked you can talk too,’ Raj traded, running a long-fingered hand down over her spine, setting her alight without hesitation.
‘This is sexual torture,’ she told him shakily.
‘All you have to do is say no,’ Raj whispered, nipping at the soft lobe of her ear, flipping her long hair over his shoulder as he had learned to do, lost in the magic of her and her response for, as he had learned, it was enthralling to have that much power over a woman, as long as he never ever looked at the other side of the coin and acknowledged the reality that it was mutual.
Zoe straightened her shoulders and breathed, ‘Right... I’m saying no...but you’re not allowed to look at me like that!’
‘Like what?’ Raj prompted.
Those stunning dark silvered eyes of his shimmered with hunger and a tiny hint of hurt, and even a hint of hurt on show grabbed Zoe’s heart hard and squeezed the breath out of her. She wanted him; every time she looked at him she wanted him.
But that was fine, absolutely fine, she told herself soothingly. It was just sex. She’d had a friend at university who went on a girls’ holiday once purely to have sex with a lot of different men. That had been Claire’s idea of fun: Raj was Zoe’s idea of fun. And the world of sensual freedom she had learned to explore with Raj was the best reward of all. After the shocking attack she had survived as an adolescent, she had never dreamt that she could aspire to such freedom in her own body. Now she could only look back with a sigh when she recalled the frightened, broken young woman she had still been when she’d first met Raj.
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