Julian and Christina were dancing the first waltz when they entered the ballroom. The lights had been dimmed, and a single spotlight followed the bride and groom around while everyone was standing around the dance floor, thankfully too busy clapping and teasing the newly-weds to notice Evie and Raschid’s arrival.
With her hand resting in the crook of Raschid’s arm, Evie watched from the sidelines as gradually other couples began to join the newly-weds. Lord Beverley with his wife, Robert Malvern gallantly inviting Evie’s mother to dance.
‘Shall we?’ Raschid murmured.
‘Why not?’ she replied, but there was a lot of bravado in her tone and he arched his sleek black eyebrows at her as he drew her into his arms then danced off with a lightness of foot that secretly made her breathless.
‘You’re good at this,’ she remarked, keeping her eyes fixed on his face so she didn’t have to see the kind of looks they would be receiving.
‘It is expected of a dashing Arab prince,’ he blandly mocked himself. ‘I can jive too, and I’m not bad at the Gay Gordon.’
‘You don’t have a modest bone in your body, either,’ Evie tagged on dryly.
‘Thank you.’ Arrogant as always, he took the remark as a compliment. ‘Of course, a lack of modesty forces me to say that I am also dancing with the most beautiful woman in the room.’
Her mother danced close by, and Evie stiffened slightly at the glowering look she received. ‘Stop it,’ Raschid admonished. ‘Or I will take you back upstairs again.’
‘Fate worse than death,’ she quipped.
‘So you found her, Raschid.’
Julian and Christina swished up beside them. Christina looked radiant, her gentle eyes sparkling.
‘As you directed,’ Raschid replied. ‘I turned to the east and walked on to the end of the earth.’
Immediately the spark went out of Christina’s eyes. ‘I’m so sorry about your room, Evie,’ she cried in mortification. ‘I didn’t know until Julian told me!’
‘Don’t be silly, the room is fine!’ Evie assured her.
‘And maybe she deserved it after all,’ her brother put in. ‘Since she couldn’t even bring herself to appear in one small photograph with us!’
Raschid’s eyes narrowed. Evie’s cheeks flushed. The information was obviously new to him. ‘Why not?’ he demanded.
‘Because she didn’t like the company,’ Julian suggested tauntingly.
‘Don’t be cruel, Ju,’ his new bride scolded him. ‘You know why Evie did it!’
‘Then perhaps you would like to explain it to me, Christina,’ Raschid drawled. ‘Excuse me, Julian, for I am about to steal your bride for a little while…’
And as deftly as that Raschid swapped partners, and was dancing off with a blushing bride clinging to his tall, lean, elegant frame, leaving sister and brother staring ruefully after them.
‘I think he’s angry,’ Julian remarked.
‘That makes two of you, obviously,’ his sister wearily replied.
‘Three actually,’ Julian said, then sighed as he tugged her into his arms and danced after the other two. ‘Mother came by your room earlier,’ he told her.
‘What?’ Appalled, Evie’s voice left her throat as a half-hysterical squeak. ‘I hope you’re teasing me, Julian!’ she gasped out shakily.
‘Why, what were you doing?’ he asked. Then grinned a typically rakish male grin when Evie blushed from breast to hairline. ‘Oh, wow. No wonder she’s on the warpath again,’ he said. ‘I hope you had the sense to lock the door…’
‘Raschid did,’ she mumbled.
‘Good old Raschid,’ her brother mocked. ‘Always thinking ahead of himself, that guy.’
‘She didn’t actually say she heard us, did she?’ Evie asked anxiously.
Looking down at her with wickedly teasing eyes, Julian drew out the silence while he pondered whether or not to lie—then laughed out loud as his poor sister’s face went from blush-red to paste-white. ‘She heard the two of you talking, that’s all.’ He finally let Evie off the hook.
‘I think I hate you,’ she choked, her chest feeling as if it had just collapsed.
‘Punishment,’ he said unsympathetically. ‘For being so pathetic as to believe your absence from my wedding photos is going to stop the gossip columnists from marking yours and Raschid’s presence here. What they will do,’ he went on grimly, ‘is make a whole lot of mischief out of the way you carefully avoided him. Intrigue,’ he incised, ‘is the spice of their lives, Evie. And you certainly gave them enough spice to make a meal out of your behaviour today.’
‘I didn’t want them splashing photos of me and him all over their papers instead of you and Christina,’ she defended herself.
‘Well, having thwarted them of a photograph, they will instead make much of the fact that they couldn’t catch the two of you together—anywhere. And how do I know that?’ he concluded. ‘Because those were the kind of questions most of our guests were pumped with today by the reporters. Which in turn made your entrance here tonight on Raschid’s arm a real revelation—for everyone.’
‘You noticed?’
‘You are such a naïve little baby sometimes, Evie,’ her brother sighed. Standing several inches taller than her, Julian dropped his gaze to her surprised face. ‘I would think that the whole room noticed—which was why Raschid did it, isn’t it?’ he suggested. ‘He’d had enough of playing the nasty skeleton in your dark little cupboard. The man has more than his fair share of pride, and you kicked it today with your behaviour.’
By the time Raschid came back to graciously return the bride to her new husband, Evie was trying to come to terms with the unpalatable fact that she seemed to have upset just about everyone she cared about today, in one way or another.
He didn’t speak as he danced her away again, but the fingers that held her were saying a lot and he was wearing that cold, hard mask on his face that she knew very well.
‘I did warn you,’ she said, unable to say nothing even when expediency was telling her that silence in this case was the better part of valour.
‘So you did,’ he agreed. ‘It is a shame there were no hidden cameras in your bedroom earlier, for we could have stopped the gossips in their curious tracks then.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a boor, Raschid,’ Evie flashed, guilty conscience giving way to anger. ‘Tell me,’ she demanded. ‘What would you have done if our roles here had been reversed, and this had been Ranya’s wedding day, to which, by some utterly amazing quirk of fate, I had been invited?’
The smooth line of his jaw clenched, the angry outline of his mouth tightening even further as he took the very sarcastic scenario on board.
‘You would have asked me not to attend the wedding.’ She gave the answer for him. ‘And if, like you, I had told you to go to hell, you would then have made a point of completely ignoring me! But—unlike you,’ she then added tightly, ‘I would have accepted your desire for privacy, hurt though I may have been by it. The word is dignity, Raschid,’ she clipped at him coldly. ‘Something you should recognise since you have so much of it. Well, today I was protecting my dignity, not yours. And if you don’t like that, then it’s just too damned bad!’
It was fortunate, perhaps, that the music finished then. Evie flashed his ice-cold mask of a face one final searing glance then walked angrily away. But the sense of tight hurt she experienced as she did so was there because he let her do it.
After that, she went back to