by Lynne Graham
Azrael breathed in deep. ‘In the days when that law was made women didn’t have equal rights and were treated in law much the same as a piece of property.’
‘This is not the time to be telling jokes, Azrael,’ Molly warned him tartly while throwing back her slim shoulders as if she was trying to make her diminutive stature look more physically impressive.
The movement drew the silk taut across her lush breasts, revealing the crowning peaks of her nipples, and Azrael ached the instant he remembered the succulent taste of those ripe buds. ‘I am not joking,’ he breathed thickly. ‘I wish I was.’
‘You have to get us out of this marriage and fast!’ Molly spelt out fiercely.
‘When my people are already celebrating the fact that I have taken a wife?’ Azrael shot back at her rawly. ‘How would that look?’
Molly tilted her chin, almost tripping over the coffee table when her eyes encountered the shimmering gold of Azrael’s smouldering gaze. ‘That’s really not my problem.’
‘But it is,’ Azrael contradicted, concentrating his attention on her lush full mouth instead, his tension pronounced as he fought his arousal. ‘You are my wife and my people will look to you to be a queen. Are they to pay for my mistake? My misguided attempt to protect you?’
An angry flush mottled Molly’s fair skin and she turned angrily away from him, fury and conflicting feelings pulling her in different directions. He called his attempt to protect her reputation ‘misguided’, but she knew that her grandfather would have called it noble and would have applauded him for his desire to shield her. Of course, Maurice was an old-fashioned man, a former soldier, who had grown up convinced that women were the weaker sex in need of a strong man to defend them from the harsh realities of life. Indeed, her grandfather was the only person who had ever tried to protect Molly from anything...until Azrael came into her life.
She had always had to fight her own survival battles, only leaning on her grandfather while she was a teenager, and she had been so proud once she knew she could stand on her own feet and had felt even stronger when she could repay Maurice’s kindness by fighting to ensure he received the best care possible. In a nutshell it shook her rigid that Azrael would even try to protect her. It made her feel foolishly fragile and feminine and decidedly envious of women who could take it for granted that they had someone supportive by their side. She liked that he had been willing to make that effort and come to her rescue, even if he had chosen a rescue boat that seemed to be full of dangerous holes.
Furiously shrugging off such irrelevant thoughts, Molly spun back to him, breasts heaving as she dragged in a steadying breath. ‘What do you want from me?’
Mesmerised by the voluptuous shift of rounded flesh below the fabric of her dress, Azrael strode over to the window to focus on something less stimulating. He knew what he wanted from her and just then he knew he had never been further from getting it. ‘I want you to stay here for a few months and behave as if you are truly my wife,’ he admitted in a harsh undertone. ‘Then we would be in a better position to reconsider our situation.’
‘But I can’t stay here!’ Molly exclaimed. ‘I’ve got responsibilities back home and I have to work to help cover my grandfather’s care bills.’
‘You could bring your grandfather out to Djalia,’ Azrael informed her.
Startled, Molly shook her head vehemently. ‘No, that wouldn’t work. Change isn’t good for him in his current condition. He needs familiar faces and surroundings or he loses touch with the world altogether because he gets so confused,’ she explained. ‘Moving him is out of the question. I love him dearly. His comfort and contentment for however long he has left have to come first.’
‘Then I pick up the bills for his care and you make regular visits back to London to spend time with him,’ Azrael suggested.
Molly bristled. ‘You can’t just reorganise my entire life to suit you!’ she condemned.
‘If the reorganisation brings a positive result for many, why not? Is your life in London so much better than it could be here? Is there perhaps...a man involved? Someone you want to return to? I know it was Tahir’s belief that you were unattached but who knows whether you told him the truth on that score?’ Azrael quipped in a raw undertone.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, I’m totally single!’ Molly admitted impatiently. ‘I have friends back home but with the three jobs I had I rarely had time to see them. Now at least two of the jobs are gone. Everything that’s happened here has screwed up my life and my ability to keep myself, so why the heck can’t you just put things back the way they were and fix this problem?’
‘You are a very unreasonable woman. You demand the impossible and then look at me accusingly when I fail to deliver.’
‘So, I’m unreasonable?’ Molly pressed a hand to her chest to emphasise that point. ‘Nobody’s asking you to give up your life and independence!’
‘There is nothing I would not sacrifice for my country,’ Azrael countered fiercely.
‘But you don’t own me, so you can’t sacrifice me without my consent!’ Molly shot back at him tempestuously, green eyes alive with hostility. ‘Oh, no, that’s right, we are currently standing in the most primitive place on earth where women are as much a man’s property as his horse. So maybe you can sacrifice me without my consent!’
The very word ‘primitive’ set Azrael’s blood boiling through his veins. He regularly worked eighteen-hour days in his efforts to pull Djalia out of the past and into the future and in that endeavour he had the full support of his people. Hashem had held fast to barbaric practices and laws that had supported his appetite for helpless women and brutality. He had kept a harem of concubines, young females stolen from their families and literally imprisoned. Azrael had been appalled by the stories he had heard after the palace had fallen, but guiltily relieved that Hashem had died of a massive heart attack before he could be put on trial. His country would not have benefitted from a public washing of that amount of dirty laundry.
‘Stop...shouting...at...me,’ he commanded with lethal quietness.
‘I’m a lot more vocal than a horse would be, aren’t I?’ Molly told him with a certain amount of satisfaction.
‘You are my wife and I will treat you with respect,’ Azrael breathed tautly. ‘But you must treat me with respect too.’
‘Not feeling it right now, Azrael...not feeling it at all,’ Molly confided, trembling with rage. ‘If you marry a woman without her consent, you must roll with the punches when she dares to complain. I am not going to stop shouting because you tell me to!’
Azrael took an almost silent step closer and an ebony brow quirked. ‘No?’ he queried, golden eyes bright as polished ingots between black framing lashes.
‘No!’ Molly shouted emphatically back at him.
And Azrael swooped down on her like a hawk, taking her so much by surprise that she yelped in fright as he snatched her off her feet and up into his arms as if she were a lightweight, which she knew she was not.
‘Lesson one,’ he ground out. ‘Do not shout at me when I am tired.’
He kicked open the bedroom door and dropped her down on the bed. ‘Lesson two, do not call Djalia primitive or backward—’
As her lips parted furiously to add even less welcome adjectives to the line-up, Azrael laid a hand across her mouth. ‘Be quiet,’ he told her without hesitation. ‘When you insult my country, you offend me. Stop doing it.’
Rigid with rage, Molly jackknifed in an effort to throw him off her because he had her pinned to the mattress by his superior weight. He knelt over her, her arms held still by his hands, and he was much too strong for her to fight.
‘I may well be a primitive man because I have had to do many primitive things in my life but I would never treat a woman as a piece of property or physically hurt her. And no, you know I am not hurting you at this moment,’ he growled, lean, darkly handsome features grim with warning as he made that point.
Molly dragged in a steadying breath. �
��I will not insult your country again,’ she conceded quietly.
‘Thank you...’ Azrael freed her arms and sprang off the bed, giving her a fleeting view of his taut behind in denim that roused unfortunate memories of her glimpse of his naked back view in the cave.
Molly’s face suffused with burning colour. She watched him lean back against the stone wall by the window like a panther lounging in sunlight. He was so incredibly sexy. Something clenched at her core and she dug her hips into the mattress as if she could squash that feeling, but it filtered up through her in a hot liquid surge, a hungry awareness that refused to die.
‘We can work on the shouting. There are ways of learning better control,’ Azrael told her helpfully.
‘Wanting to slap you won’t help me learn better control,’ Molly told him.
‘You are my wife—’
‘Stop it!’ Molly reared up against the tumbled pillows. ‘Stop saying that!’
‘What is the point of arguing with the truth?’ Azrael murmured sibilantly, his entire attention welded to her as her glorious hair shimmered in the sunlight like highly polished copper. ‘Would you truly strike me in anger?’
Molly shook her shoulders and pursed her lips. ‘Probably not. I’m not the violent type, but you do enrage me.’
‘I am trying to be reasonable,’ Azrael confided, scorching dark golden eyes still locked to her.
‘Your reasonable isn’t like anyone else’s reasonable,’ Molly framed abstractedly, her veiled gaze resting on his sculpted lips as she relived the taste of them.
‘Look on being my wife as a job. I will pay you for your compliance,’ Azrael spelt out softly. ‘I will make it well worth your while to stay here for a few months.’
Molly was mesmerised by his presence and his dark silky voice. He could have been reciting the numeric tables and she would not have reacted. He was offering her the role of wife as a job which paid a salary. That would take care of all her problems at home, she acknowledged reluctantly, but accepting money from him in such circumstances seemed utterly wrong to her.
‘I’m not sure,’ she muttered in bemusement as Azrael approached the side of the bed and settled down on the edge of it within reach.
‘You can trust me,’ Azrael intoned. ‘I will keep my side of the bargain.’
Her brow furrowed into an anxious frown. ‘It’s very expensive keeping Maurice in that care home, but I do only pay weekly top-up fees. The authorities cover most of his costs because he had very little money of his own,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘He’s happy at Winterwood. I sold my mother’s jewellery to pay the extra charges but I have only enough funds left to cover next month’s bill.’
‘I will take all that responsibility from your shoulders,’ Azrael purred, brushing a stray ringlet back from a delicately flushed cheek to gaze down at her. ‘I would be honoured to help you care for your only living relative, but I think it is very sad that you were forced to sell your mother’s jewellery to meet the obligation.’
‘It was only a ring and a brooch that belonged to my grandmother,’ Molly muttered shakily.
The brush of his fingertips across her cheekbone made her want to reach up a hand and touch him back, but she knew, meeting the burning dark gold of his eyes, that what she wanted would only encourage the kind of dangerous intimacy that neither of them should want. There was a burn at the junction of her body, a hot, liquid throb of awareness that made her achingly conscious of a part of her body she had always ignored, and she shifted her hips uneasily. Her breasts were swelling in the cups of her bra, the nipples pushing forward. She sucked in a ragged breath, entrapped by the overwhelming power of what she was feeling.
‘I have emeralds the exact colour of your eyes,’ Azrael told her huskily, dense black lashes low over his bright eyes. ‘You would look magnificent wearing them.’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Azrael...’ Molly breathed helplessly, insanely tempted to reach up and drag him down to her so that her fingers could lace hungrily into his luxuriant black hair. ‘I’ve never worn proper jewellery in my life.’
His hands settled around her waist and he lifted her across him, bringing her down on his lean, powerful thighs. ‘Open your mouth for me,’ he breathed thickly, one hand curling into her hair to tip her head forcibly back over his arm.
He tugged at her lower lip with the edge of his teeth and a low whimper of sound escaped her. She opened her mouth and he delved deep and she jerked, almost pained by the new sensitivity of her awakened body. He claimed her mouth with a sensual savagery that was as intensely erotic as the hand tracing the silken line of her inner thigh. Instinctively she parted her thighs, craving more, needing more.
He traced the taut fabric stretched over her heated core and her heart leapt and her breathing fractured, the craving rising to an unbearable height. He skimmed the edge of her knickers out of his path and gently outlined the tender pink flesh beneath before circling the tight little bud where every nerve ending in her body seemed to reside. Excitement raced through her at a feverish pace, her body shifting restively as he discovered the damp, honeyed slickness between her folds and slid a single finger into her tight opening, gently testing and teasing the entrance at the same time as his thumb rubbed across her. And she cried out, her hips rising to his hand, her body out of her control and rushing for the finish line. The heat and the ache of need combined and she shattered into a sudden intense climax that tore her apart at the seams.
Azrael lowered her limp body back against the pillows and smiled down at her dazed face with satisfaction. ‘Instead of arguing, we should go to bed,’ he murmured persuasively. ‘It would be much more enjoyable.’
‘But not very wise,’ she whispered giddily. ‘We’re not going to have a real marriage.’
Azrael said nothing. He knew what he wanted. He would play a waiting game. He would fight for what he wanted. After all, that was nothing new to him. He had always had to fight for everything that was important to him. She wanted him and he could work with that. Their marriage would be real in every way because nothing less would satisfy him.
Initially he had felt trapped and resentful about a marriage that he had not personally chosen. Azrael had always liked to plan major events, but Molly had come at him much like the sandstorm, throwing his life into turmoil, and it was a turmoil that he was discovering he could actually find exhilarating. Molly with her passion, her hot temper and her quick, enquiring mind. Molly, who had no fear of him, no ridiculous reverence and no desire to flatter him. She treated him like an equal and that was a very precious trait to find in a woman, Azrael acknowledged, because all his life he had been treated as different, separated by his royal birth from other men even when he was a soldier in training. He had always been a loner, but with Molly he no longer felt alone. So, why would he want to part with a woman so uniquely perfect to be his wife?
A knock sounded at the door and he frowned, vaulting upright with a weary sigh. If he didn’t get some sleep soon he would be a zombie.
‘You can fly home to make arrangements in London and pack your possessions up,’ he suggested calmly. ‘Perhaps you should choose a wedding dress there—’
‘A wedding dress?’ Molly repeated in astonishment.
‘We have to stage a proper wedding to please people.’ Azrael opened the door to find Butrus wearing an apologetic expression. ‘Yes?’
‘Prince Firuz is here in person.’
Azrael’s expressive mouth tightened. ‘I’ll join him downstairs in a few minutes.’
Molly slid uneasily off the bed. ‘A proper wedding?’ she questioned.
‘It is expected of us,’ Azrael admitted, shedding his shirt to reveal a muscular torso straight out of a centrefold.
Self-conscious, Molly moved over to the window, turning her back on him, listening to the sound of a closet door being opened. ‘I’m not sure I can meet the sort of expectations which will be focused on me. I’m a very ordinary girl.’
‘You are extraordinary. Lo
ok how you’ve looked after your grandfather, look how you’ve dealt with everything that’s happened here. True, there was a little shouting, but you have great heart and tremendous courage and compassion,’ Azrael countered with ringing conviction.
Molly smiled, whirling round to look at him to discover he was back in formal apparel, his hair covered, a pristine long white buttoned tunic teamed with a gold-braided cloak. ‘I’ll have a go at being your wife,’ she murmured. ‘But that’s the most I can promise.’
Dark golden eyes gleamed over her smiling face. ‘That you agree to try is enough.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I JUST CAN’T believe you’re married,’ her friend Jan carolled, shaking her dark braided head as she cradled her newborn son, Robbie, on her lap. ‘Tell me everything.’
A week had passed since Molly had flown out of Djalia, travelling on a Djalian diplomatic passport. It had been a crazy busy week. She had settled her final bills, packed up her sparse possessions and had spent hours every day sitting with her grandfather, who sadly hadn’t once recognised her as family but had continually talked about how much her face reminded him of someone. In between times she had shopped and spent more money than she ever had for herself before, utilising the string of credit cards Azrael had given her before her departure. She had bought a summer wardrobe more suitable for Djalia’s climate as well as a wedding outfit.
‘I mean, the minute I read about you marrying him in the paper, I knew you must have met him while you were giving English lessons at that foreign embassy, but I can’t believe you never said anything to me... I saw you two months ago and you never once mentioned him!’ Jan complained. ‘You also never mentioned that you were planning a trip to his country.’
‘That opportunity came up unexpectedly,’ Molly admitted wryly.
‘I suppose you weren’t sure he was thinking of marriage and didn’t want to say anything in case nothing came of it. He’s a very good-looking guy,’ Jan proclaimed enviously. ‘I’m not surprised that you kept him to yourself—’
