He couldn’t help playing with the silken strands of her midnight-and-gold hair. “Why do you want to know?”
“It is said that the child will show you the man.” She kissed his chin, the movement causing the strands in his fingers to slide away. Last night she’d been all woman, pure heat and passion. Later, when he’d tried to move away, she’d held on. He’d understood the silent message. His lover needed more than ecstasy. So he, a man who’d never been accused of tenderness, had spent the night happily holding his wife as she slept.
“You’re a hard man to know so I would learn of you from your childhood.”
“Did you ever learn to lie, cher?” Folding one arm behind his head, he ran the other down the warm curve of her back, lingering on the upward slope of her buttocks. When she didn’t protest, he ran his hand back up and then down again, indulging his sense of touch.
Hira nodded vigorously in response to his question and didn’t sound the least repentant when she said, “I told my father many lies.”
He raised a brow.
“Like when he asked me whether I had told the housekeeper to give away Fariz’s old computer. I told him I had.” She propped herself up on her elbows, face cupped between loose fists.
“But?”
“But I kept it hidden in my room. He never came in there. Rayaz was young and spoiled, but Fariz wasn’t a bad brother. He didn’t ever tell Father my secret. He even used to lend me his software.”
Marc frowned. “Don’t females have the same educational rights as males in Zulheil?”
“Of course. My compulsory schooling was given to me, but after that…my father didn’t believe in wasting college fees on a female who would simply be a pretty thing in her husband’s home.” She shrugged as if it hadn’t mattered, though he knew it must’ve broken her heart.
“Why didn’t you complain?”
“It would’ve shamed my entire clan. The Dazirah family is proud, but we’re part of an even prouder clan. The clan is supposed to protect each member within it. To speak out would’ve been to say that they had failed in their duty.”
“They did fail.” His voice was hard. Protecting the vulnerable was the one thing he’d never compromise on.
“Yes, but they had many successes. Last year they sent several students, male and female, to learn advanced mechanical engineering in Britain. If I had spoken out, their honor would’ve fallen in a land where honor is everything.” She gave him a smile full of maturity. “Those who gave the educational fund assistance would’ve sent their money elsewhere. Now, say to me that a single woman’s unhappiness is worth destroying the dreams of many.”
He could see her point. “Was there no one you could’ve asked for help?” How could someone so bright and beautiful, someone with such a gentle heart, have spent a lifetime alone?
Her smile was tight. “I wasn’t popular at school or with my cousins once I was no longer a child. They didn’t want me near their boyfriends and lovers. The only girls who might’ve been my friends were the beauties who had no interest in study, and I couldn’t bear to pretend to be like them. So there was no one.” She paused, as if debating whether to share something else.
When she spoke, what she said sent spikes of temper arcing through his body. “The boys wished to be friendly with me but even the smart ones could never just be content to be my friends. They all wanted more.”
“Did they—?” he began, his eyes locked on hers.
She shook her head almost immediately. “I stopped building friendships with boys very young, before they were old enough to try and do more than steal a kiss. So the boys liked me too much and the girls not at all.” She was attempting to make a joke out of what must have been some very painful years.
He could imagine that lonely girl learning to become ice to survive the exclusions, the whispers behind her back. “There is someone now. You’ll tell me everything.”
“Yes, husband.” Her voice was meek.
He frowned. “Are you laughing at me?”
“Only a little.” Her eyes lit up.
It was an effort to keep his lips straight—she didn’t need any encouragement. Pulling her head down, he kissed her. “So, princess, you want to know about your bayou brat?” he said, against those luscious lips that made him want to bite. Deciding there was no reason to resist, he gently nibbled on her lower lip.
“Why do you call yourself that?” she asked when he released her, her voice breathless.
“Because it’s true. I grew up in the bayou, living in a shack that barely held together when the waters rose. My parents were both alcoholics who didn’t give a damn about me, so long as they had enough money for booze.”
“And if they didn’t?”
He could still remember the blows, the pain and the darkness. “They amused themselves by knocking me around.”
Hira made a sound of distress.
He soothed her with his hands and his voice. “It was okay. I could run pretty fast so I usually just hid out until they were drunk again.”
Gentle feminine fingers traced a scar on his chest, so tender that the touch felt like the brush of a butterfly’s wings. He should’ve been amused that she thought she might hurt him. Instead, his heart thundered as a hint of some powerful understanding hovered just over the edge of his horizon.
“You didn’t get these because you were a fast runner. They hurt you badly.” Her eyes dared him to explain the scars away. This woman he’d married wouldn’t be soothed so easily when someone she cared for was hurt.
It took him a moment to overcome his astonishment at the realization that both his wife’s words and her careful touch arose from a belief that he was hers. He wanted to force her to tell him how strong Beauty’s care was for her Beast of a husband, but restrained himself, unwilling to destroy the fragility of their new accord.
Instead he contented himself with answering her question, telling her something very few people knew. Her unhidden expression of care deserved to be rewarded with honesty. “Actually, I did get them for being a fast runner.” He made a wry face. “When I was about seven, they were desperate for money. So they sold me.”
Eight
Hira jerked up into a sitting position, holding the sheet to her breast. “People cannot be sold! Not in my country and not in yours.”
He ran a hand up her arm, undone by her distress. “It wasn’t so bad. You can imagine the kinds of things a depraved mind could do to a child.”
She nodded, her face lined with worry. “I know.”
His protective instincts urged him to change that look, to take the pain away from her. “Well, nothing like that happened to me. The reason Muddy offered money for me was that I could run like the wind. Thieves need to be quick on their feet.”
Her eyes were huge and round in the early morning light. “You were sold to a thief?”
“An old thief. He couldn’t pick pockets himself anymore but he took me to New Orleans and trained me to do it. We preyed mainly on tourists who wandered off the beaten path in the French Quarter. I was with him for two years and most of these scars come from that work. Not all. Some are actually courtesy of my parents and Muddy’s fists, but the really bad ones are from running the streets.”
He ran his hand over one ragged line that ran diagonally from his left clavicle to the middle of his ribs on his right side. “I got slashed by a knife once when Muddy sent me into someone else’s patch—territory,” he explained, rubbing his hand along the white lines on his face.
“As for these, a gang took offence at my being in their territory, and I had a bottle broken across my face. Both times I got sliced up pretty bad but the wounds didn’t require stitches, which is why the scars are so ugly. No surgeon to make them pretty.”
She laid her hand over his, lips pressed tight. “They are not ugly. I have told you so.”
He turned his palm up and captured her hand, something primitive in him appeased by her lack of resistance. “Not exactly an honorable warri
or’s marks.” His mouth twisted. “But I was a damn good thief.”
Her hand squeezed his, her bones fine but strong in a very feminine way. “They are. How else could you have survived such a life without letting it destroy you, if you didn’t have the soul of a warrior?”
He looked up into that intent, loyal face and found himself believing her. “You’re far too innocent for the likes of me. But I’m keeping you.” That primitive part of him rose to the surface, hotly possessive.
Her smile was pure sunshine, calming the primitive. “You are welcome, husband mine. What happened after two years with the old thief?”
“I was in a really bad street fight. Muddy sent me somewhere he never should have—into drug territory. Anyway, I got opened up pretty bad.” The memories were hazy because of the blood loss he’d suffered. “Muddy disappeared, never to be heard from again. I don’t know if the drug lords got him or he just escaped when I was wheeled into intensive care. A couple of cops found me lying half-dead on the street.”
“But you survived.” Her fingers traced the fine white lines of scars across his abdomen.
“Yes. The doctors did a good job—those scars are the least visible.”
“And yet there are so many. You were not just cut once.” There was such anger in her eyes. “What happened after you recovered?”
“When the cops asked me how I’d ended up in the city, I lied and said I’d run away. So they returned me to my parents, instead of sending me to a foster home.”
Hira frowned. “Why did you wish to return to your parents? They may have tried to sell you again.”
“I knew they wouldn’t, because I’d become their meal ticket.”
“You stole for them?” There was no disapproval in her tone, as if she respected what the boy he’d been had done to survive.
Another sliver of his heart fell into her careful hands without his conscious volition. He just knew it was forever gone. Forever hers.
It was an effort to speak without demanding she give him something to replace what he’d just lost. “No. I stopped stealing as soon as I left Muddy. I got work, any work, and I gave them enough to keep them happy. That’s why I went back. I knew that as long as they were boozed, they wouldn’t care what I was up to, whereas a foster parent might’ve actually made an effort to discipline me.”
Hira lay back down beside him on her side, propping her head up with one arm, her other hand still intertwined with his. “What were you doing that you didn’t wish for discipline?”
“I had plans. I decided in the hospital that I’d never again be anyone’s whipping boy.” Even now he could feel that savagely beaten boy’s grim determination. “That meant I had to have money, and to do that, I needed to work. My parents didn’t care that I was working far too many hours for a kid, working late into the night in factories where the managers ignored my age.
“It took a few more kicks before I got my head screwed on perfectly straight, but once I did, that was it.” One of those kicks had been delivered by Lydia Barnsworthy. “I was young but determined. By the time I’d graduated high school, I’d saved over thirty thousand dollars from working and then investing that money. I went to college on a baseball scholarship. Even though I’d worked on instinct in investing, I knew that some of the men I’d be dealing with in the future would be impressed by a degree.”
Hira began to nod, her midnight-and-gold hair sliding across her bare shoulders. “You started your business with the money you made from your investing.”
“Yes, with a little help from the bank. The first company I bought was a dying little family outfit that produced these unique toys. I busted my gut with it and sold it when I finished college for a profit that was big enough to allow me to buy my next company. Within five years of graduation, I was a multimillionaire.”
“And you did it by saving dying companies, not looting them,” she murmured. “A harder road.”
He shrugged, uncomfortable with the veiled praise. “It’s the way I like to work.” Not by ripping apart but by slowly, painstakingly, gluing a fractured masterpiece together. He’d spent too many years with people who’d tried to destroy him. He couldn’t do that to anyone or anything else.
“You were a very determined boy.” The admiration in those mountain-cat eyes didn’t dim. “How did you get involved with the orphanage?”
He found himself wanting to tell her, when he’d kept his secrets from everyone else. “I met Father Thomas about a year after I returned to my parents. He gave me a steady job cleaning the church after school. He also gave me…hope.” He’d taken a beat-up, hard-as-nails kid and taught him the value of compassion and integrity.
“Later, when I needed to borrow money from the bank to finance that first business, he guaranteed my loan. I tried to pay him back with shares in my next company, but he said that he wouldn’t take money from one of his sons.” Being called “son” by Father Thomas meant far more to Marc than any biological relationship.
“I begin to see why these boys mean so much to you,” Hira murmured. “You wish to give them a chance in life as Father Thomas gave you. You’re a good man, Marc Bordeaux.” A gentle kiss on his cheek sealed her words.
“I’m a man, same as any other.” His tone was husky, not from lust but from the light in her exotic eyes.
His wife smiled at him like he’d given her the moon, when he suddenly realized he’d never given her a single present that wasn’t big and expensive and meaningless.
“Ah, but you’re my man, Marc. That must mean you are blessed.” Her lips curved in a teasing smile.
Chuckling, he rolled over, pressing her into the mattress. “Is that so, princess?” Nothing had ever felt as right as telling his secrets to this woman with her pride and her curious honesty. Perhaps this Beauty might just be willing to love her Beast.
Less than a week later, Marc found himself standing on the verandah, waiting for his wife to return home. She’d left early that morning for her first class and it was now after five. Despite the way the lost boy inside him had wanted to cage her with protection, despite the primitive in him who’d growled mine, he’d tried to be gentle when she’d left, because the past week had been the most wonderful of his misbegotten life. His wife had opened herself to him, heart and soul, mind and body.
It was the first time in his life that he hadn’t been lonely.
Right then he knew that if there ever came a time when Hira rejected him, it would be because he’d decided to let her go. And quite simply, he never would. He’d fight to the death like some feral thing before he watched her walk away.
Second by second, minute by slow minute, his wife had worn down his defenses and made a place for herself in his heart. The vulnerability was so sudden and ran so tearingly deep he didn’t dare release it to the light of day. He just knew that only Hira could calm the ache within him.
But in spite of the new depth of their commitment to each other, a part of his wife remained out of his reach. The crazy thing was, he knew exactly why she sometimes acted as wary as a wild deer. If he could wring Kerim Dazirah’s neck, he would. Hira’s father had planted that fear of trusting the one you married in her, a fear that even now shadowed her eyes.
An engine sounded, snagging his attention. A second later his wife’s cherry-red sports car came around the corner. Parking in the drive, she exited and ran up to him, leaving her books in the car. Dressed in a long denim skirt and plain white shirt, her hair pulled back in a tight braid, she glittered like a perfectly cut diamond.
Delighted when she ran into his waiting arms, he swept her off her feet and spun her around, her laughter wrapping around them like a silken whisper. When he finally slid her slowly down his body, her sparkling eyes had him leaning down to savor the taste of her lips. She opened for him, warm and welcoming. Her fingers spread on his white T-shirt. “I like the way you welcome me home,” she whispered, her tone husky.
The sight of her well-kissed lips, wet and luscious, made him wan
t to ravage her. “Did you have a good day?” He was trying very hard not to demand her whereabouts for the last few hours, since her lecture had finished long before.
She smiled and wrapped her arms around his waist, raising her face for another kiss. Tightening his embrace, he indulged both of them with a slow slide of lips and an even slower stroking of tongues. It was a kiss of lovers, one that left them both breathless.
“My day was interesting but strange.” One hand slipped up to lie against his heart. “I learned many things at their big library, made a friend—” her smile was both surprised and delighted “—and found out that young men today have no morals.”
His whole body tensed at that disapproving sound, the arms around her turning into steel bands. “And how did you learn that?”
“They kept trying to court me when I’m clearly a wife.” She raised the hand with her wedding band on it. The fine gold sparkled in the light of the setting sun. At the same moment, a cool breeze ruffled the fine curls at her temples, causing goose bumps on her arms.
He tugged her inside. “What did you do?” Closing the door, he led her to the living room sofa and sat down. She cuddled up next to him, one hand on his abdomen, while the fingers of her other hand drifted up to play with his hair.
Her look would’ve done justice to a particularly self-satisfied cat. “I told them I was yours and I used your name. They stopped.”
He bit back a grin. “You used my name?” He loved it when she touched him like this.
“Yes. Apparently they are scared of what you might do—it didn’t take me long to find out that you have a reputation, husband.” She scowled, and he knew she’d question him on that reputation later. “Now I’ll have peace. I said that—” her voice dropped a few octaves “—my husband would not be pleased with their attentions.”
He gave up trying to hold in his laughter. “God, you’re amazing!” He tugged her into his arms and kissed her smug little face.
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