‘No,’ Mariella refused agitatedly. The last thing she felt able to cope with right now was any more time spent in Xavier’s company.
‘Tanya, I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel up to it. I’m rather tired… the flight…’
‘Of course, petite, we understand,’ Madame Flavel was assuring her soothingly, unintentionally coming to her rescue. ‘Don’t we, Xavier?’ she appealed.
‘Perfectly,’ Mariella heard Xavier agreeing harshly.
Abruptly Mariella opened her eyes. Her heart was thumping heavily. She had been dreaming about Xavier. She looked at her watch. It was only just gone ten o’ clock. The others would probably just be sitting down for their evening meal. Her throat ached and felt raw, tight with the intensity of her emotions.
As she slid her feet out of the bed and padded to the window to look out into the shadowy garden she shivered in the coolness of the air-conditioning. It was there by the pool that Xavier had massaged her aching shoulders, and she had realised how much she’d wanted him. Because she had wanted his child, not because she loved him.
Her eyes burned dryly with pain. What she was feeling, what she was having to confront now, went way, way beyond the relief of easy tears.
So she was her mother’s daughter, after all! She was to suffer the same pain as her mother—a pain she had inflicted on herself! How could she have been so stupid? How could she have been so reckless as to challenge fate? How could she have ignored everything that she knew about herself? Surely somewhere she must have realised that it was impossible for her to give herself to a man with the passionate intensity she had given herself to Xavier and not love him?
All she had wanted was to have a child, she insisted stubbornly. A child? No, what she had wanted was Xavier’s child. And that alone should have told her, warned her…
With appalling clarity Mariella suddenly realised what she had done. Not so much to herself but to her child!
One day her child was going to demand to know about its father. When that happened, what answers was she going to be able to give?
Now she could cry. Slow, acid tears of guilt and regret, but it was too late to change things now.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered, her hands on her stomach. ‘Please, please try to forgive me… I love you so much…’
She had stolen the right to choose fatherhood from Xavier, and she had stolen from her child the right to be fathered… loved.
It was gone midnight when she finally stopped pacing the room and crawled into bed to fall into a shallow, exhausted sleep, riddled with guilt and anguished dreams.
‘Well, what do you think? How do I look?’ Tanya demanded excitedly as she twirled round in front of Mariella in her new outfit.
‘You look fabulous,’ Mariella assured her truthfully.
‘And so do you,’ Tanya told her. Mariella forced a smile.
Her own dress with its simple flowing lines did suit her, but she was far more concerned about how well it concealed her shape than how well she looked in it. In less than half an hour they would be on their way to the gala opening of the prince’s new hospitality suite at the racecourse, and Mariella would have given anything not to have to be there!
Tanya, on the other hand, couldn’t wait, her excitement more than making up for Mariella’s lack of it.
The last three days had been total torture for her. It would have been bad enough simply discovering that she loved Xavier without the additional emotional anguish of having to endure his constant presence. Every time she looked at him the pain grew worse and so did her guilt.
She had hardly been able to eat because of her misery and anxiety, and she couldn’t wait to get on the plane that would take her home!
Under different circumstances, although she would have been nervous about the thought of the coming event, it would have been a very different kind of nervousness, caused purely by her anxiety about people’s reaction to her work. Right now, she recognised ruefully, she hardly cared what they thought!
‘Come on,’ Tanya urged her. ‘It’s time to go.’
Reluctantly, Mariella got up.
She could feel Xavier’s gaze burning into her as she walked into the courtyard where he and Khalid were already standing beside the waiting car.
The hot desert wind tugged at the thin silk layers of her full-length dress and immediately Mariella reached anxiously to hold them away from her body.
To her relief Xavier got into the front of the car, but she was still acutely conscious of him as Ali drove them towards the racecourse. Unlike Xavier, Khalid favoured a strong modern male cologne, but she could still smell beneath it the scent of Xavier’s skin, and deep down inside her a part of her cried out in anguished pain and longing, aching despairingly for him.
‘Poor Ella, you must be so nervous.’ Tanya tried to comfort her, sensing her distress, but to Mariella’s relief not realising the real cause of it. ‘You’ve hardly eaten a thing since you arrived, and you look so pale.’
‘Tanya is right—you do look pale,’ Xavier told Mariella grimly several minutes later when they had reached their destination and he had opened the car door for her, leaving her with no alternative but to get out. His hand was beneath her elbow, preventing her from moving away from him. Instinctively Mariella knew that he had been waiting for the opportunity to vent the anger he obviously felt towards her against her. She had seen it in his eyes every time he looked at her, felt it in the tension that crackled between them. ‘What’s wrong, Mariella? If it isn’t food you want, then perhaps it’s another appetite you want to have satisfied. Is that it? Are you hungry for sex?’ he demanded harshly.
‘No,’ Mariella denied immediately, trying again to pull away from him. He was making sure that no one else could hear what he was saying to her, she recognised, and making sure too that she could not get away from him.
Had he deliberately waited until now? Chosen this particular time to launch his attack on her, when he knew she couldn’t escape from him?
‘No?’ he taunted her. ‘Then why are you trembling so much? Why do you look so hungrily at me when you think I am not aware of you doing so?’
‘I am not… I do not,’ Mariella replied. She could feel her face starting to burn and her heart beginning to pound.
‘You’re lying,’ Xavier told her softly. ‘And don’t deny it. Unless you want to provoke me into proving to you that you are! Is that what you want, Mariella?’
‘Stop it! Stop doing this to me,’ Mariella demanded. She could hear her own voice shaking with emotion and was helplessly aware that it wouldn’t be long before her body betrayed her by following suit.
‘I spoke to your agent today. She told me that she was sure you’d be thrilled to learn that I want to commission you for a very special project. She certainly was especially when I told her how much I was prepared to pay to secure your exclusive… services.’
Mariella reeled from the shock of his taunting comment.
‘Xavier, please,’ she begged him fatally, her eyes widening as she saw the look of triumph leaping to life in his eyes.
‘Please?’ he repeated silkily.
‘Xavier, Mariella, come on…’ Tanya urged them.
‘We’re coming. I was just discussing a certain plan with Mariella,’ Xavier said smoothly as he guided Mariella toward the throng of people making for the entrance to the suite.
‘Well, sister-in-law, I think we can safely say that your frieze is an outstanding success,’ Khalid commented,