CHAPTER NINE
A WIZENED little old lady, shrunken by age into a bent bundle of black cloth, was approaching them, flapping a hand to harry the servants hurrying behind her. As she creaked down low before Raschid, he tried unsuccessfully to persuade her from the attempt, but down she went, jabbering in shrill excitement, her blackbird-bright eyes avidly pinned to them both.
Under the voluble onslaught of her emotional greeting, Raschid grew oddly tense. His brow furrowed, a curious expression set his hawkish profile for a split second before he produced a distinctly strained smile. Fingers of colour had overlaid his complexion when he turned to Polly. ‘This is Ismeni. She is very old, and her mind wanders now. Would you give her that rose you carry?’ He answered her bewilderment with a charged glance. ‘She believes it is for her because she imagines you to be Louise. The poor creature is quite convinced that we are my grandparents,’ he related under his breath.
‘She’s what?’
‘Dispute will only distress her, but indeed it is a melancholic misapprehension on which to begin our stay,’ he told her.
Tickled pink by his discomfiture, Polly suddenly smiled and bent to bestow the rose on the weeping Ismeni. A clawlike hand clutched hers and dry lips pressed to her knuckles. Raschid gently raised the old lady. Snapping his fingers, he summoned two of the servants, stonily studying the floor nearby, to attend to her. To Polly’s amusement, Ismeni drove them back with a staccato stream of commands and bustled round again to usher her and Raschid personally into a lofty-ceilinged salon, adorned by some very fine pieces of period furniture.
‘Why did she want the rose?’ whispered Polly. ‘There are thousands of them outside.’
‘Louise planted them. Roses have special significance for Ismeni. Her former mistress allowed no one to pick them.’
‘Lord, I feel like a vandal now!’
A disorientating smile slashed his lips. ‘Not at all. The gift of a rose from my grandmother must have been a signal honour. Why am I whispering? You are contagious, Polly.’ Then he raised a brow. ‘Or is this the result of being welcomed as the resurrected? Ismeni must see a doctor, though I doubt if much may be done.’
‘At least she seems happy.’ Polly sat down on a delicate gilded sofa with all the comfort of a rock-face. ‘Tell me the rest of the story,’ she pressed. ‘I assume that Louise had blue eyes.’
‘Yes. She was fair, though not as fair as you.’ His gaze strayed to the glistening veil of silver hair tumbling round her shoulders, lingered ruefully on her attentive stillness. ‘It isn’t a happy story. Salim was young and hot-headed. He persuaded Louise to marry him after only a handful of meetings, but religious and cultural differences soon divided them. After my father was born, Louise came here to live. She came on a visit and she refused to return.’
Polly frowned. ‘What did he do to make her do that?’
‘What did they have in common, Polly?’ Raschid shrugged noncommittally. ‘She hated the way of life here. She was educated, well travelled and independent. She had enjoyed a freedom which was denied to her in marriage. She couldn’t adjust to the cloistered existence of the harem. She was also a devout Catholic, and the continued practice of her faith did not recommend her to female relatives who already resented Salim’s choice of a foreign bride.’
‘I wonder how much of an effort he made to help her adjust.’
‘Who knows? My grandfather was greatly angered when she refused to return to him. He took a second wife,’ Raschid divulged grudgingly.
‘My goodness!’ gasped Polly.
‘Mirsa, my uncle Achmed’s mother,’ Raschid supplied. ‘Undoubtedly there was a desire for revenge in the speed with which he made that marriage, but he was quite within his rights according to his faith. If he wanted to punish Louise he must have suffered for the impulse, for she never forgave him for it.’
‘How could she have?’ Polly demanded hotly.
Raschid sighed. ‘When my father was six, Mirsa died in a cholera epidemic. In the intervening years my grandparents had scarcely spoken. When he came here, she remained in the harem and he would see his son and not her. But after a suitable period of mourning, he approached Louise and begged her to return to him as his wife. She refused him. There was no forgiveness in her heart.’
‘How could there have been? He spends six years with another woman, fathers a child and then condescends to ask her back?’ she interrupted.
Exasperation clouded Raschid’s gaze. ‘He could not abandon Mirsa after marrying her. He still loved Louise. It must have cost him much pride to make that approach when she had deserted him in the first instance. It was my father’s belief that my grandmother still cared for him. However, they did not enjoy a reconciliation. When he was here, she kept to her own apartments. She died of a lung infection, and it is a fact that he grieved very deeply on her death and he did not remarry,’ he completed drily.
Moisture was clogging Polly’s vision. She grimaced over her silliness, but it really was the most miserable story. ‘It was all his fault.’
‘I knew it would make you sad, but why it should also make you argumentative, I do not know. Must we engage in partisan sympathies with two people who died even before we were born?’ He studied her ruefully. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as a trifle fanciful?’
Embarrassed by her sentimentality, she got up and wandered restively across the room. But she was thinking of Louise, making a stand at Aldeza in what must have been a cry for help and rewarded for her defiance by her husband’s cruel resort to another woman.
‘For goodness’ sake, Polly, they couldn’t live together. They were unsuited,’ Raschid pronounced with finality.
An edged laugh fell from her, and she whipped round, her luminous eyes embittered. ‘Like us? Isn’t that how you would describe us? Once he’d tired of her, he didn’t give a damn about her feelings, and I bet that every inch of the way he laid down the law on exactly what suited him. And altered his arguments accordingly! Are you telling me that you can’t see parallels, Raschid?’
He sent her a driven glance from shimmering blue eyes. ‘In the mood that you are in, I will not argue with you.’ Icy constraint marked him. ‘You are not yourself.’
But she was what his handiwork had made of her. He had forced a need into her very skin that did not neatly vanish at his command. He had roused emotions that even she could not control. And now she was to switch off and meekly accept the status quo, swallowing the face-saving lies he had considerately put within her reach.
He didn’t want to take advantage of her; that falsehood had been proven. They had no future because he couldn’t give her a child. That was her decision, not his. That he had not even given her that option proved his insincerity. Their marriage had been just a game for Raschid, a cruel sexual game for a highly sexed male. He had used her—he had admitted it. Now he didn’t want the messy complications. Damn you! she thought, you’re tearing me apart! He was standing there mentally willing her to match his composure and his control called up the devil inside her. Polly was swept by an incensed and bitter urge to smash it.
‘You won’t argue with me?’ With one hand she lifted a vase and slung it across the room, where it shattered noisily against the wall two feet to the left of him. He hadn’t moved an inch. Dazed by her wanton destructiveness and the violence which had suddenly forced a passage through her, she licked her lips. ‘Now we’ve got something relevant to argue about…’
Anger and disbelief vibrated from him. Her breath loosed in a sobbing sound. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered.
‘Come here,’ ordered Raschid.
‘No!’
Her judicious refusal seemed to land a second after he reached her. If she had wanted a reaction, she was getting it now. He had her cornered. Stepping sideways, she met with steel-clad fingers braced against the cold wall. ‘In all my life,’ he gritted, ‘no man and no woman has ever raised a hand to me!’
‘I wasn’t aiming at you!’ she protested.
His hands clamped round her wrists. He wasn’t listening. ‘With the exception of you.’
In one inexorable motion he dragged her against him. His aggressively masculine proximity inflamed her already stirred emotions. Whatever he might have intended to say was forgotten when he stared down at the breathlessly parted invitation of her lips, the unwitting softness of her eyes. Later she didn’t know how it happened. One minute he was glowering down at her, the next his mouth was plundering hers with an explosive hunger that demolished her shaky defences.
Rage and wild ecstasy were one in that embrace. Passionately she yielded to him, melting into boneless acquiescence against his hard male contours. He kissed her until a thunderbeat of crazy excitement had her trembling in his hold, and then he jerked back, thrusting her away from him. Bright sunlight hid his virile figure from her bemused stare. At the far end of the room a servant entered with a tray of refreshments.
‘Forgive me,’ Raschid ground out in a stifled undertone.
Polly could not forgive him. She hadn’t seen the servant, dismissed by a mere motion of his hand; all she had tasted was the raw vehemence of Raschid’s repudiation. The drag in the atmosphere was intense. She was drained like a defeated bird who has beaten its wings too long against the bars of a cage. Last night in a fit of emotional insanity she had confessed her deepest and most private feelings, and had set the stage for her own humiliation. To rise above that awareness now in receipt of another rejection was impossible for her. It was over, it had long been over; he had tried to tell her that diplomatically last night. How many times did he have to hurt her before she would accept the truth? You couldn’t make someone love you, you couldn’t make them care.
‘I don’t think you really understand how I feel. Perhaps I did not express myself well last night, but you must believe that for a long time I have considered only what was best for you,’ he breathed starkly.
Disgusted at this piece of hypocrisy, Polly refused even to look at him. ‘Will you get someone to show me to my room?’ she said coldly.
He uttered her name as though it was torn from him. Only when the dead silence had ticked painfully on did he fulfil her request. He didn’t argue her retreat—he had to be relieved by it. Tact and exquisite manners were not enough to drain the discomfort from dealing with a wife who did not want to let go and who had the most embarrassing habit of opening her mouth to say exactly what she thought.
Half an hour later she lay in the barbaric splendour of a sunken tiled bath, an escape from the excessive attention of several twittering female servants. This was an old-style harem, accessible by a single corridor and sealed behind grilled windows, mesharabiyah screens and an iron-barred gate. An unearthly silence had reigned through the intersecting and richly ornate rooms. They had crossed an echoing expanse, an eerie green marble grotto of still water and shadowy archways. Thinking of Louise sentenced to solitary exclusion here from the outside world made Polly shudder. At least she would be going home eventually, she thought in miserable self-consolation.
She dismissed the servants hovering in the bedroom. The bed was enthroned on three shallow marble steps and on it rested an ensemble that would not have shamed a Twenties film starlet. Surveying the shimmering silk nightdress and the ridiculously extravagant azure satin wrap with its silly feathered trimmings, Polly squirmed. It had been dug from the bottom of her case and pressed. Just three weeks ago that over-the-top glamour had caught her wistful eye in the window of an exclusive lingerie boutique near her father’s hospital, and in a weak moment she had splashed out. For Raschid. Cruel reality had shredded her embarrassing daydreams but, since she didn’t know where the rest of her clothes were, she had to put the outfit on.
A meal was brought to her while she rested on a tasselled ottoman. By then she had examined her surroundings. She was in Louise’s rooms, falsely occupying apartments that Ismeni appeared to have conserved to the best of her ability. Faded sepia photographs adorned the elegant writing desk. A tiny bud vase there contained the rose she had given the old lady. An opened drawer had revealed yellowing notepaper, envelopes inscribed with spiky handwriting and tied with ribbon. On the dressing table monogrammed silver brushes awaited a ghostly hand. It was decidedly creepy.
Shortly after nine Ismeni appeared bearing a tiny cup of hot chocolate. With gnarled hands she turned down the bed and lovingly smoothed pillows embroidered with tiny roses. She became agitated when Polly tried to communicate with her. Polly had to steel herself to get into Louise’s bed. A shiny crescent moon speared pearly, indeterminate shadows into the room and the quiet folded in. Twenty minutes later Polly rebelliously threw the covers back and got up. Dammit, she didn’t have to play up to Ismeni’s batty delusions to this extent! The old dear wouldn’t know if she sneaked off to find another bed, because frankly the hair was starting to prickle at the back of her neck. The unhappy Louise’s spectral presence had got a death-grip on Polly’s imagination.
Leaving the room, she almost tripped over the bundle sleeping across her doorway wrapped in a rug. Shoe-button eyes came alive, and Ismeni gave her a toothless grin. Startled into a gasp, Polly was guiltily put in mind of one of Macbeth’s witches. Tottering upright, the old lady seemed unsurprised to see her. Bowing low as if a command had been issued, she started down the dark corridor in the most peculiar stealthy fashion without putting on a single light.
After a moment’s hesitation Polly followed. Traversing the grotto room, Ismeni disappeared into the shadows where she opened a door, motioning Polly to precede her. Glimpsing a narrow, curving staircase, her curiosity fairly caught by now, Polly went ahead—then flinched when the heavy door thudded shut behind her, sealing her into Stygian gloom. In vain she struggled to open it from the inside. Incredibly, there was no handle.
‘Ismeni!’ she yelled frantically.
There was no answer. Unable to see an inch ahead in the musty darkness, she had to feel her passage clumsily up the climbing wall. There were thirty-two precariously narrow steps. At the top her palms met solid wood. In claustrophobic panic she pushed with all her might, and the panel swung out with a noisy creak. Her own momentum catapulted her forward into the dark room, and she stubbed her bare toes painfully on something and went down with a crash and a very unladylike epithet to clutch her throbbing foot in inexpressible agony.
Sudden light illuminated the scene. Aghast, she stared at Raschid, who had leapt out of a chair by the window. If Polly was astonished to see him, he was equally astonished to see her. His hand dropped back from the tall Persian lamp. He stood there poised, his shirt hanging unbuttoned and loose from the jeans sleekly outlining his long, straight legs, his brown feet bare.
Recognising Ismeni’s gruesome mistake with scarlet-cheeked chagrin, Polly mumbled, ‘I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere.’
Raschid was strangely unresponsive. His brilliant blue eyes fanned over the opulence of her attire. His lashes fanned down. He seemed to breathe in very, very slowly before he unfroze and strode over to crouch down beside her. ‘My apologies. You…er…startled me. Your foot…nothing is broken?’
Above her averted head an anguished twitch threatened his steel-set mouth.
‘I’m sorry if I disturbed you,’ muttered Polly.
Absently he plucked a cobweb from her feathers. ‘I was not in bed. I went for a ride and…came back.’ His voice fractured and slurred as she released her grip on her foot and the over-large wrap lurched off one pale shoulder to reveal the utter transparency of the whisper-thin garment underneath. ‘You came to me…and it went wrong,’ he murmured with husky suddenness. ‘I know how this feels. You must not be embarrassed. It was very sweet, and I am very touched.’
On the brink of glacially disabusing him of the notion that, not content to trail him home to Dharein, she had decided to lay siege to him in his bedroom as well, Polly looked up, connecting with the electrifying intensity of his eyes. Her heartbeat accelerated as if he had turned an ignition key. His forefinger unsteadily skimmed an untidy strand of silver back behind her ear.
‘And also it is very exciting,’ he muttered thickly.
Her brain was in limbo. That straying hand was gliding a tantalising path down over the column of her extended throat and she wanted to move into the warmth of that hand. The potent male scent of him intoxicated her. ‘Ex…citing?’ she echoed.
‘An invitation from one so shy.’ Lean fingers banded round her slender forearms to tug her relentlessly closer. ‘Your generosity shames me. My pride would have kept me from you, but now that you are here…’
‘Yes?’ she croaked.
‘I cannot refuse you when night after night I have ached for you.’ His voice was uneven, sibilant. ‘And to what avail? I cannot deny you. Insh’allah.’
The tip of his tongue traced the sensitive curve of her lower lip, and she shivered violently. Insh’allah. If the Lord wills it, so it will be. Insh’allah. This happens because it is already written. Raschid captured her hands, guiding them down over warm, bronzed flesh, roughened by a crisp haze of dark hair. Beneath her tentative caress he shuddered, venting a shaken groan of satisfaction. He threw back his head, his darkened eyes fiercely searching. ‘Is this what you really want?’
A torture chamber would not have extracted the admission that she had not arrived under her own steam. ‘You’ve…er…changed your mind?’
Her nervous question elicited a rueful laugh. He pulled her to him, sealing her soft curves hungrily to his male heat. ‘Polly, I have never been in doubt of what I want. I have only doubted what was fairest to you, and never more than when I saw you in another man’s arms—a man whom you have always been ready to love, a man whom you might have married had I not come into your life. It did not seem unlikely to me that you should turn to him when I had neglected you, and I wanted to hate you for it,’ he breathed roughly into her hair, ‘because I did not feel I had the right to tear you from him. But now I find there is little of the martyr in me.’
Slumbrously he studied her as he got up, lithely carrying her with him. Silk sheeting cooled her back, as he laid her down as if she was fashioned of spun glass. All that she grasped from that hail of sudden words was that his jealousy of Chris had been much more deep-rooted than she had ever suspected.
‘You are sure?’ he repeated.
As she nodded, still a little dazed by what was happening, his tautness evaporated. He smiled, and her pulses went haywire. He bent over her and the thrumming in the air sizzled with pure electricity. ‘When you are near or far,’ he confessed, ‘I burn for you, night and day. No woman has ever had that power over me.’
Sadness entered her briefly. Berah reigned on upon her pedestal, divorced from earthly pleasures. The incandescent chemistry of the bedroom was Polly’s only weapon. A few weeks ago she would have scorned it. An inner voice jeered at her present frailty. Was this how she would hold him? With the desire that could make him swerve from cool logic in a moment’s temptation? Quote fatalism in smooth excuse for his inconsistency? She wouldn’t listen to that voice. He didn’t love her, and that wasn’t fair, but there were many unfair things in life. This would be enough, she told herself squarely. This time—it would be enough.
His mouth dipped to caress the tempting pink-budded breast invitingly shaped by silk. Her fingers speared deep into his black hair, holding him to her, for she was racked by an intolerable hunger. Almost roughly he found her mouth again, his hands hard on her hips as he raised her to the thrusting evidence of his arousal beneath the tight denim. Passion flared white-hot and uncontrollable and sealed them together. What followed was the most indescribable physical pleasure Polly had ever experienced.
* * *
A rapped-out Arabic command awakened her. Peeping sleepily over Raschid’s restraining arm, she was just in time to see Ismeni vanish through the same concealed panel she had entered by the night before.
‘That woman, she is crazy!’ Raschid declared with a distinct lack of charity. ‘She actually crept in here to try and waken you up and trail you out of my bed—then she argues with me. Why should I care about my wife being found in my bed? Where else should she be? Why should I hide this?’
Polly blushed fierily. ‘I hope you didn’t upset her.’
‘Upset her? When I told her that you were staying, she smiled smugly at me. So why did she argue?’
Polly was having some very strange ideas about what Raschid’s grandparents had got up to in the dead of night when everybody else thought they weren’t speaking. It was time for confession. Polly remained mute. Raschid had succumbed to that wildly seductive siren who had shamelessly thrown herself at his head last night. Now was not the time to stand up and be counted as a fraud. Exciting, she savoured blissfully. She would give Ismeni the most enormous bunch of roses. ‘She still thinks I’m Louise,’ she said.
‘Are you seriously suggesting that my grandfather kicked his wife out of bed at dawn like a concubine…’
‘How do you know he didn’t?’
‘By what I know of my grandmother he would not have survived to see the sun come up,’ he whipped back drily. ‘In any case, they never lived here together.’
‘But he visited.’
‘They were separated,’ he reminded her.
As silence fell, uncertainty reclaimed her. The old lady’s early-morning visit had taken the spotlight off their renewed intimacy. Suddenly she was afraid that Raschid might regret the night that had passed.
Veiled eyes tabulated her fluctuating expression. ‘There’s something I must say…’ he began.
‘Don’t!’ she rushed in nervously.
‘You cannot inhabit an ivory tower forever.’ As his mouth quirked, his thumb gently mocked the protective down-sweep of her lashes. ‘I won’t talk of our parting again, but that option must always remain open to you.’
In astonishment her eyes flew wide, drowned in the proximity of dense blue. ‘You think I need that option?’
A powerful wave of emotion stirred her. In a few words Raschid removed her deepest fear. He settled back against the tumbled pillows and shifted a sinuous shoulder, sudden constraint marking his firm mouth. ‘Who can foretell the future? We must be realistic,’ he murmured. ‘You are very young now, but some day you will want a child. That desire will take you as surely as the dawn follows darkness, and human nature being what it is, what you know you cannot have you will want all the more. But in denying what is between us, I was trying to avoid that dilemma, I was making the decision for you.’
‘That wasn’t your right,’ Polly muttered shakily.
‘I don’t want you to be foolishly blind, aziz.’
She didn’t know how to answer him. What he said was true. It would be some time in the future when she really came to terms with the impossibility of ever bringing her own baby into the world. As she sat up a twinge of nausea irritated her and automatically she lay back again, lost in her serious thoughts. Whatever regrets or pangs might seize her some day, she would keep them to herself. Thanks to Berah she would have to keep them to herself completely. Berah’s failure to accept the situation had left Raschid vulnerable, and Raschid, to put it mildly, did not cope very well with the ignominy of vulnerability. He was much more likely to walk away from any relationship which might expose that weak spot. Was that savage pride of his all that had kept him from her? Oh, how much she wanted to believe that, but in her heart she could not believe it. He had had the power to deny her because she did not have the power to inspire the uncritical love and loyalty he had awarded Berah. Why was she upsetting herself like this? She had enough love for both of them, and, aware of his tension, she muttered something trite about crossing that bridge when or if they came to it.
‘You know, there’s something that I’ve always been curious about,’ she admitted, eager to leave that other subject behind. ‘What did you and your father argue about on our wedding day?’
A sudden, unexpected smile banished his serious aspect. ‘Is that important now?’
Her bosom swelled with chagrin. ‘It was about me, then,’ she condemned. ‘You were complaining about having to marry me, weren’t you?’
He burst out laughing. ‘Polly, your imagination is an unfailing source of entertainment! Very well,’ he capitulated with veiled eyes, ‘I shall tell you what I was told that day. There was never an assassination attempt on my father’s life, and the promise made was not made with serious intent.’
‘There was never an assassination attempt? But that’s impossible!’ Polly exclaimed.
‘Your father mistook one of the guards for an assassin.’ The faintest tremor roughened Raschid’s explanation. ‘When he dragged my father to the ground, the guard concerned shot at him, believing that he was assaulting mine.’
‘But it can’t have happened like that,’ she argued shakily.
‘I am afraid it did. My father was naturally relieved that Ernest sustained only a minor injury. Fearing that a serious diplomatic incident might result from the misunderstanding, my father allowed Ernest to believe that he had saved his life, and he made that pledge in part jest.’
Setting the incongruous truth beside her memory of her father’s overweening delight in recounting the story of his one hour of heroic valour, Polly was almost overtaken by an irreverent tide of mirth. ‘Dad must never find out the truth,’ she whispered tautly.
‘When your father requested an interview with mine, he assumed that he was coming to request that the promise be fulfilled, and it was then that he had enquiries made into your background,’ Raschid went on. ‘Having an undutiful son determined to remain a widower, and being impressed with what he learnt of you, he turned the situation to his advantage.’
‘It was very cruel of him to tell you the truth…’ Suddenly she went off into gales of laughter, unable to hold it any longer. ‘Oh, I wish I’d been there!’ she gasped. ‘I’d love to have seen your father’s face when mine hurled him down on the ground…he must have been absolutely raging!’
‘I confess that at the time I was not very amused.’ Laughing now himself, Raschid caught her to him, rakish eyes brightly appraising her. ‘But now I would concede that he chose you very well.’
He possessed her parted lips in a blindingly hungry kiss, glancing down at her to murmur mockingly, ‘By Allah, I have missed you, but you will not have the advantage of distance again. When next I go abroad, you will come with me. You have become indispensable to my comfort, aziz.’
Polly touched the heights of happiness in the following week. Every morning they went out riding, and under Raschid’s patient tutelage she lost the nervous unease on horseback which had been instilled in her by her father’s neck-or-nothing expectations when she was a child. The third morning they returned to the soft rush of water. The fountains were playing again. Raschid had had the ancient plumbing overhauled to please her.
She was enjoying a kaleidoscopic desert sunset from the vantage point of the terraced gardens one evening when he came to find her. The grey gravel plain surrounding the palace’s hilly basalt setting was bathed in illusory gold and scarlet. The bleak, enduring mystery of the wilderness possessed a savage beauty and an endless, fascinating variation of colour, shape and texture that reminded her potently of Raschid.
‘You look very pensive,’ he commented.
He had had work to do this afternoon. The plane had come in, bringing the mail, and then for some reason it had come back again later. When Polly had walked outside, Raschid had accompanied her on a walk through the gardens. She suspected that he was afraid she had felt neglected, left to her own designs for a few hours. Now here he was again.
Gracefully she arose from the stone seat. ‘I was just relaxing,’ she said.
‘Or were you thinking that it is Christmas Eve and you are far from home? No snow, no holly, no roaring log fires, no stocking,’ he teased, rather unfeelingly, she felt, for she was hopelessly sentimental about Christmas.
‘I’m a little old for a stocking,’ she muttered repressively.
‘I suppose you are.’ Raschid flashed her a slow smile. ‘I almost forgot—we have visitors.’
‘Visitors?’ Polly exclaimed in dismay.
He gripped her hand when she would have parted from him in the hall. ‘You will do very nicely as you are.’
As he guided her determinedly into the salon, she faltered in her steps several feet into the room. Her dazed scrutiny climbed the height of an eight-foot pine tree shimmering with starry lights and glittering baubles. The carpet beneath was heaped with gaily wrapped parcels. Somewhere in the background the strains of ‘Deck the Halls,’ erupted loudly.
Strong arms encircled her from behind. ‘Have I only made you homesick? I would have invited your family, but your father is not fit enough to travel yet.’
Her eyes filled and she swallowed thickly. ‘You did this for me?’
Raschid turned her round. ‘It is a small thing if it makes you happy.’
The pleasure of having overwhelmed her showed in his eyes alone. His head descended in slow motion and she stretched up instinctively for his lips to encircle hers, something vague about visitors receding into her subconscious as wildfire raced through her veins. He lifted his head, still holding her close. ‘I love you,’ he whispered half under his breath.
She didn’t look up. She didn’t believe him. She wished he had kept quiet, although it was herself that she ought to blame. By thoughtlessly hurling her love at him, she had made him uncomfortable, she had made him feel that he had to respond. And with such conviction he did it too, she reflected, torn between pain and amusement. He dropped it in a constrained, unsophisticated aside. He didn’t lie very well.
Somebody coughed noisily. Raschid jerked back from her.
‘Would you like us to go out and come in again?’ Asif grinned from the doorway with Chassa by his side. ‘Then again, I’m not that easily shocked.’
Chassa smiled at Polly’s astonishment. ‘I hope that you don’t mind that we’ve invited ourselves to Christmas lunch?’
‘How could she? We brought it with us, along with a Swiss chef. Airsick, by the way. Just as well he has got until tomorrow to get his act together,’ Asif laughed. ‘Chassa dressed the tree. Have you any idea how much trouble it was to transport that tree out here?’
Warmly embracing Polly, Chassa whispered, ‘Don’t listen to him. Raschid arranged it all, and we have had a lot of fun helping him to surprise you.’
It was a wonderful evening. Delighted by the efforts Raschid had made on her behalf, Polly felt her pleasure was increased by the awareness that she really was accepted as a part of his family. Chassa bubbled with an effervescence which Polly would never have associated with her a brief five weeks ago. She was a different woman, while Asif, once he had finished showing off, seemed curiously quieter. But whatever had strained their marriage had clearly been dealt with and set behind them. Chassa glowed with the confidence of a woman who knew she was loved.
When the other couple left them alone at midnight Polly could no longer resist the heaps of presents. Raschid had even arranged for her family’s gifts to be collected in London and flown out. By one o’clock she was in a welter of torn wrapping paper under his indulgent eye, dazed by the extravagance of all that he had bought her and hard put to it to understand how he had contrived to do so with only a telephone at his disposal.
‘All I’ve got for you is an anthology of poetry, and it’s not even wrapped,’ she confided shakily. ‘I wasn’t sure if I was even going to give it to you. I thought you might think I was being silly.’
Laughing, he gathered her up in his arms. ‘You are my Christmas present, but if you are about to start crying again I shall leave you under the tree!’
‘I’m so happy,’ she sniffed, and it hit her then, a piercing, frightening arrow of foreboding as if she was offending some jealous fate by daring to be so happy. ‘I don’t think I ever want to leave here.’
The stark fear in her eyes had covertly engaged his attention, to etch a faint frown line between his brows. ‘What is really wrong, Polly?’ he asked.
‘Wrong?’ she gulped, staving off that horrible feeling that had briefly attacked her and knowing that she was being ridiculous to pay heed to it. Tensely she laughed. ‘I was just trying to work out where I’ll ever wear all that jewellery!’
‘There is a State banquet next month and there is Paris next week,’ Raschid murmured into her hair. ‘But that was not really what was worrying you, was it?’
Cursing his perception, she buried her face in his shoulder. ‘I can’t help wondering how Dad will bear up to a festive season without parties,’ she lied. ‘I hope he’ll be sensible.’
‘I’m sure he will be. We’ll find time to visit again soon,’ he promised, his tone ever so slightly cool. But Polly didn’t notice. She was thinking what a silly fool she would be to let insecurity plague her, and she looked up at him with a bright smile.