While inside she had never felt so lonely in her entire life.
The time came at last for the bride and groom to depart and everyone gathered in the castle’s great hallway to see them off. They were staying at one of the hotels close to Heathrow tonight before flying off to Barbados first thing in the morning.
Christina appeared at the top of the grand staircase dressed in a blush-pink Dior suit. In her hands she carried her wedding bouquet, and behind her Julian was grinning as he listened to the calls for his bride to throw the lucky flowers.
Evie stood and teased and called with the rest of them, but it was only the sudden flash from Christina’s eyes that warned her what was coming—as the bouquet came spiralling through the air and landed against her chest.
If silence could be measured in decibels, then the sudden silence that encompassed the great hall at Beverley Castle hit whole new levels. Everyone just stood there and gaped at Evie. No teasing, no jokes. They simply did not know what to say as Evie’s cheeks mottled with embarrassed colour.
From the back of the hall, Raschid witnessed it all in a kind of frozen stillness, the appalling truth that every single person here knew there was no hope of Evie marrying while she stayed with him hitting him like a punch to the solar plexus.
‘Well…’ Evie’s voice came out light and rueful. ‘We can all live and dream, I suppose.’
And dutifully the crowd laughed, but nervously, tensely.
For Evie it was the worst moment of her life. She kept smiling, though. With a teeth-gritting will-power she kept that darned smile in place. She hugged and kissed her brother, received a penitent Christina into her arms.
‘I’m sorry, Evie,’ the bride whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘Shh,’ she cut in, and kissed Christina’s cheek. ‘Just go away, have a lovely honeymoon!’
By the time the car went off down the driveway, flying streamers and rattling tin cans, Evie had had enough. Seeing her mother making a beeline for her had her turning quickly in the opposite direction and slipping away into the soft summer darkness.
The lake beckoned, its moon-kissed silk-smooth surface acting like a soothing lure to her storm-tossed senses. Walking around the main marquee, she stepped up to the lake rim, and watched bleakly as the view in front of her went out of focus through eyes that slowly filled with tears.
Well, she told herself. She’d done it. She had got through today—though not quite as she’d wanted to get through it. She’d upset many and pleased none. But at least now she could concentrate on pleasing Evie.
And Evie wanted to—
Her heart began to throb. The deep dark well of frustration and misery she had been keeping such a firm hold on all day suddenly burst through its constraints. And with a fierceness that said it all she stretched out the hand still clutching Christina’s bouquet and with as much power as she could muster tossed the flowers as far as she could into the lake.
The bouquet landed with a soft splash, bobbed a couple of times, then lay there floating in a pool of moon-kissed ripples.
‘Feel better for that?’ a dark voice said behind her.
‘Not so you would notice,’ she said, not bothering to turn because she knew who it was. ‘Go away, Raschid,’
she then added flatly. ‘I don’t need another round in the verbal boxing ring with you, right now.’
‘No,’ he murmured gravely. ‘I can see that…’
She heard him move, her body tensed up as muscles tightened in screaming protest. The tears came back, so strong this time that they set her throat working and her soft mouth quivering. She closed her eyes over the tears, clamped her quivering mouth shut and clenched her hands into two tight fists at her sides while she waited for him to take the hint and leave, or ignore the hint with his usual arrogance.
The silence hummed, the tension along with it. After what felt like an age and no more sound came from behind her, Evie began slowly to relax the tension out of her body. He had shown sensitivity for once and left her alone, she assumed.
And on a long, long heavy sigh that seemed to come from the very lowest regions of her she kicked the strappy high-heeled shoes from her aching feet, released her hair from its uncomfortable knot, then lowered herself on to the bone-dry short-shorn grass to sit staring out at the glassy still lake.
In a little while, she told herself, she would go back into the castle and creep away to her room. Then tomorrow—
Another sigh. Tomorrow was just another day fraught with a different set of pressing problems. Tomorrow would be deal with mother time, deal with Raschid time.
Somewhere in the darkness an owl began hooting, sounding bleak and lonely as if it was calling hopelessly for a mate. A fish rose to the water’s surface, its tail making a lazy flapping noise as it rolled over, setting the bouquet of flowers bobbing again in the ripples it left behind.
She really shouldn’t have done that, Evie mused guiltily. Christina would be so hurt to know that her lovely bouquet had finished up in such a watery grave.
She shivered, and her knees came up, her arms wrapping round them, her loosened hair sliding in a thick silk curtain around her slender shoulders as she lowered her weary brow to rest it against her knees.
The feel of a jacket dropping across her hunched shoulders should have surprised her, but oddly it didn’t. She would have been more surprised if Raschid had simply walked away and left her to it.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said.
‘No,’ was all he replied, and dropped down on the grass beside her.
Turning her face on her knees so she could look at him through the curtain of her hair, Evie found herself gazing at a sombre profile that was, even so, the most beautifully structured profile she had ever seen. Like her, his knees were up, but parted so his wrists could rest upon them. His dress shirt stood out bright in the moonlight; his skin was like polished bronze.
Her heart swelled in her breast, swelled and swelled until she thought it was going to burst under the power of her wretched love for him.
He turned to look at her, sombre-eyed and flat-mouthed. ‘Are you ready to tell me what is wrong, now?’
No, she thought miserably. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. And she turned her face to stare moodily at the lake so she didn’t have to look at him.
‘Your mother thinks you are ill,’ he added when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to say anything.
I am, she thought. Soul-sick and heartbroken. ‘I didn’t know you had that kind of conversation with my mother,’ she remarked.
‘I don’t, usually,’ he dryly admitted. ‘But this one took the form of a—confrontation.’
Ah, Evie was very intimate with those kinds of conversations with her mother. ‘I’m not ill,’ she assured him.
‘Then what the hell is the matter with you?’ he rasped, suddenly losing all patience. ‘Because it has been patently obvious to me for weeks now that something certainly is!’
‘I thought I told you I didn’t want another verbal battle tonight!’ she snapped right back.
‘Then don’t turn this into one!’ He turned the tables on her as quick as a flash. ‘You are my life, my heart, my soul, Evie,’ he added gruffly. ‘I would do anything for you; I thought you knew that.’
‘Except marry me,’ she said, then grimaced at herself for stupidly blurting it out like that.
His answering sigh was heavy. It wasn’t words but—good grief—it spoke volumes