NABIL FELT AS if he was on fire. He was surprised that there hadn’t been a trail of scorch marks along the floor to mark their progress from the banqueting hall to his private apartments. It was as if he had come alive after ten long years in the dark and he was so hot and hungry that he felt it was about to cause an explosion. He wanted; he ached. And yet he knew that the ending to this night was never going to be the one that he had anticipated earlier.
With the door closed safely between them and his overly attentive servants, he slammed to a halt, swinging Aziza round so that she thudded up against him, the softness of her body colliding with the hardness of his.
And that was a near-fatal mistake because it set his pulse rate into overdrive. The pressure of her breasts crushed against his chest, the scent of her skin and her hair and the way it felt to know the heat and hardness of his arousal cradled in the bowl of her hips made his head swim in sexual need.
Which warned him how right he had been to worry. That all was not as it seemed. Because how the hell could he feel this newly awakened hunger for two women—Aziza and the maid—in such a short time? He knew what the guests at the wedding thought about their precipitous departure. Hell, he wanted them to be right. Wanted them to think that he had thoughts only of taking his wife to bed and setting about the process of creating an heir. But they didn’t know that he’d been here once before. And barely escaped with his life.
He didn’t know what had stayed his hand at the banquet. What had stopped him from wrenching up her veil and exposing the truth to everyone there? The political implications if he was right. The fact that he wasn’t sure. And the thought of doing that to his new bride, to Aziza, if that was truly who she was.
But how was he supposed to think when his mind was wiped clean of anything but the hardness of his body and the hunger that was such a brutal physical need?
She’d come with him easily enough, turning at the tug of his hand on hers, her feet in the jewelled slippers moving silently down the corridor. He couldn’t let her go; he held her crushed up against his side where she was small enough to be slotted underneath his armpit, her head resting against his shoulder, his left arm curved round her ribcage, left hand just below the swell of her left breast. With every movement he could feel the sway of her bosom, the heat from it seeming to burn into his skin. He wanted more—more contact—more of her. But at the same moment he wished she was anywhere but here if what he suspected was true.
He had thought that tonight would go so very differently. He’d believed that he would have to spend their first night as husband and wife persuading her into his bed. That he would need to take time and care with her, initiate her into lovemaking. He’d been prepared for that. He’d even anticipated a sort of extra pleasure in it as it awoke feelings, needs that had been buried in him too long. Now it seemed those needs had woken so fiercely that he was burning up inside just thinking of them. At the moment when he had to doubt, to fight, to recognise the dangers in what he was feeling.
And now, barely inside the room, he stopped and swung round to face Aziza.
‘Come to me, my bride.’
My bride.
Aziza didn’t know whether the shivers that ran down her spine at the sound of the words were the thrill of excitement or blind panic. The wedding night they were meant to share had been looming on the horizon like a heavy cloud, both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. She’d given her heart to this man all those years ago when she was still a child and had adored him from a distance ever since. But, following that meeting on the balcony on the night of the anniversary party, everything she had learned about him had challenged those fantasies.
Challenged but not destroyed them. They had soon pushed through her doubts, and this time they were blended in a dangerous, intoxicating cocktail with the new, adult, intensely female feelings she had for him. The feelings that a woman had for a man—and that she should have for the man who was her husband, who would father her child.
Just the thought of it took the strength from her legs so that she almost collapsed on to the floor. Hastily she covered it up by turning it into a curtsey instead, spreading out the rich golden robes of her wedding dress as she sank into a low sign of deference. It did not get the response she anticipated.
‘No! Is this any way for a wife to greet her husband? On your feet, woman—and greet me as you promised.’
‘As I—promised?’
‘At the banqueting table—in return for the sweet treats I gave you.’
Now she understood. Part of it, at least. He wasn’t just talking about the way she had used his name at his urging but the other, silent, sensual promises she had given him when she had taken the grape from him, moulding her mouth around his fingers.
‘I thought you were angry. That I’d done something wrong.’
She was sure he’d been furious with her and that that had driven him to the unexpectedly hasty departure from his own wedding reception. But there was still something wrong with his tone, something that twisted deep inside her, warning her to tread carefully.
‘Should I be angry?’ Nabil demanded. ‘Tell me—have you done anything wrong?’
‘I thought that you thought perhaps I was too familiar...’
‘You’re the first person—apart from Clementina and Karim—the first person to behave in a real way ever since...’
He was thinking of Sharmila. Of the woman who had been his wife. His love. His life.
For a moment Aziza couldn’t see straight enough to focus on the hand he held out to help her to her feet. Just in the same moment that he had given her something of what she yearned for, he had managed to take it all away again. In the heightened atmosphere of the ceremony, she had allowed herself to think that for once she was someone who mattered. Someone who was not just the ‘other daughter’, the one her father had to find a husband and provide a dowry for.
Now she knew that while she might be his bride, his Queen, she was only a queen of convenience, chosen because his duty to the country demanded it. The wife of his heart was dead, and no one would ever replace her. Certainly not the woman he only remembered as a child all those years before. His ‘other wife’ as she now was.
‘You treated me as a man.’
Nabil’s voice had deepened, grown rough, and his hands tightened on her arms as he hauled her to her feet, holding her so firmly that she felt her skin must bruise where his fingers dug into her.
Why the hell had he had to remember Sharmila now, when those memories could only add to the brutal conflict inside him? It was those memories that stilled his hand, he realised, stopped him from grabbing at that damned veil and flinging it up over her head to see what she really looked like—who she really was. He should have done that immediately, revealed who she was from the start so that he knew what he was dealing with, but the simple fact that he had hesitated told him more than he wanted to know about his own feelings.
Damn it, he should have gone with his first instincts and taken the maid called Zia there and then on the balcony on the night of the celebration, when there would have been no legal, no dynastic, implications involved. If this was indeed Zia who had recognised his hunger for her and used it as part of a plot to trap him.
‘A man you wanted. Was that true?’
‘True?’ Aziza echoed shakenly, the harsh demand in his tone making her see her own behaviour through his eyes, and quail inside at the thought of how brazen it must have seemed. ‘Y-Yes.’
She had been so stunned by her own immediate and urgent response to him that she hadn’t been able to hide it. He was a man whose reputation with women was well-known. He had the freedom to play the field as he wanted, but surely he was