Читать книгу The Scandalous Collection - Кейт Хьюит, Пенни Джордан - Страница 29

THE shock of Ash’s presence as a witness to something she could only ever want to be private, never mind the fury she could see and feel in him, had Sophia dropping the corner of the scarf, guilt darkening her eyes and burning up under her skin.

What a dreadful thing to happen. It was bad enough that she had been caught by anyone trying on Nasreen’s clothes, but that it should be Ash who had found her just at the moment when she herself had tasted the acid agony of shame in what she was doing heaped a humiliation on her that she knew was deserved. No wonder Ash was so very, very angry with her. What she had done was surely a violation of something precious and a privacy that should never have been breached by anyone.

She wanted to apologise to Ash. She wanted to tell him that she had only realised too late what an unforgivable thing she was doing in letting her curiosity and envy of Nasreen get the better of her, but Ash was so angry he wouldn’t even let her speak.

The sight of Sophia in Nasreen’s clothes made Ash feel as though raw flesh had been ripped from his body, the anger, the shame, the bitterness he felt infusing that guilt with true darkness. He had no right to blame Nasreen and the memory of their marriage for making him feel like this. And no right to feel that he was being cheated of something that deep down inside he ached for, though he knew he had no right to ache for it. Someone or something? He had come here tonight to be with Sophia after far too many long days—and even longer nights—of battling his own inner demons as he fought to allow himself a logical reason for appeasing the need he knew she aroused in him. That might be a need he had no right to allow himself, but tonight, with the future of his name to the forefront of his mind, he had assured himself that being with Sophia, having sex with her, was permissible under the rules he had laid down for himself after Nasreen’s death.

Now with the anger boiling inside him, at what unforgivably his senses were now seeing as an unwanted intrusion of Nasreen, and the past into the intimacy he ached to share with Sophia, his guilt could only increase. He had no right even to have such feelings, never mind seek to satisfy them. He had no right to want Sophia. He had no right to anything other than the burden of the guilt he must never, ever forget. And by rights now he should turn round and walk away as a punishment to himself, not returning to Sophia until he had stripped from himself every vestige of personal desire and need for her.

The movement of Sophia’s body as she tried to pull away from his hold on her wrist disturbed the air around her, releasing into it the sickeningly familiar odour of Nasreen’s scent. He could still remember how it had hung between them on their wedding night after he had realised that he could never love her. Heavy and oversweet, it clung now to the air, draining it of oxygen, cloying and all-pervading, filling him with revulsion.

‘Take it off. All of it,’ he demanded again, his voice harsh with the emotional weight of years of guilt, anger and despair added to the even more burdensome weight of his desire for Sophia herself.

Ash released her abruptly, the revulsion he felt for her behaviour written plainly on his face. He couldn’t bear to touch her and he couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with her. She couldn’t blame him for that. What she had done had been unforgivable, but it was too late now to wish that she had been stronger and that she had resisted temptation. If she had … Ash had plainly come to her intending to take her to bed. Against all logic her body reacted to that knowledge with a surge of fierce longing. Longing for a man who’d had sex with her once and then hadn’t come near her for three weeks? Sex with a man who had shown her body what sensual pleasure could be, the only man—thanks to the vows she had made—who would ever have sex with her. She was a normal, modern healthily functioning woman, so wasn’t it only natural that her body should want to know again that sensual pleasure? Without love? Without respect? Without Ash wanting anything from her other than an heir?

Where was her pride? This was not the right time for them to come together as prospective parents-to-be. She must remember that she was a Santina. She must remember the role to which she was now committed. She wanted Ash to leave so that she could rid herself of Nasreen’s clothes and her shame in private. She made to walk past him. She was trembling from head to foot, desperate now to remove the silk garments.

Thinking that Sophia was ignoring him, half maddened by his own unbearable feelings, Ash reached for Sophia again, dragging her towards him as though the very sight of her in Nasreen’s clothes maddened him beyond all sanity, tearing the scarf from her, and then, to Sophia’s shock, reaching for the neck of the tunic and starting to rip it apart.

‘No, Ash,’ Sophia pleaded with him. He would hate himself later for the destruction of Nasreen’s beautiful outfit, she knew, and he would hate her even more for being the cause of that destruction. He wasn’t listening to her, though, wasn’t paying her any attention at all, as she struggled in his hold. He refused to let her go, his knuckles pale against his skin with the pressure of his grip as he wrenched the delicate silk apart. The awful tearing sound of the fabric made Sophia cry out in protest, and as though that one small sound somehow penetrated the red mist of his fury Ash turned his back to her and ordered her, again, ‘Take it off. Now. All of it.’

From out of nowhere Sophia felt a surge of white-hot anger of her own rise up inside her to meet Ash’s fury. It burned along her veins swiftly, reaching the unstable powder keg of her jangling emotions.

‘You want me to take it off. Fine, then I will!’ she yelled furiously at Ash as she pulled and tugged at the clothes that she now loathed so much because of all they represented, as though they were shackles that bound and imprisoned her, flinging the garments down on the floor as she removed them. Her face was flushed, her temper was up and her dark brown eyes burned with her emotions. Within seconds the floor around her was strewn with discarded garments as she hurled them away from her, and Sophia herself was left standing virtually naked in nothing but her own tiny briefs, out of breath, her chest heaving, the full force of her fury leaving Ash momentarily lost for words. She was. She was … She was magnificent, he found himself admitting, magnificent. Her anger had somehow cleansed her completely of the taint of Nasreen which had so appalled him, just as her feisty removal of her own clothes had left her revealed to him as exactly what and who she was. Herself. Magnificent. And right now he wanted her so badly that the force of that wanting was ripping him apart inside.

‘Satisfied now, are you?’ Sophia challenged into the silence that had fallen between them, but Ash’s unmoving silence had definitely brought its heat down a few degrees.

‘Satisfied?’ Why was he having difficulty framing the word? Why was his body giving him a thousand messages about just what would bring him satisfaction right now, when it and he knew that he couldn’t give in to those illogical needs? And yet … His desire still roiled and thundered inside him, refusing to be subdued.

He took a step towards Sophia and then another, his actions shocking her because she had expected him to leave.

‘No, I am not satisfied,’ she heard him telling her. ‘And I shall not be satisfied until you have conceived our child.’

Then she was in his arms, and he was kissing her, angrily, savagely, humiliatingly, and yet she couldn’t find the willpower to resist him. Something within her own anger had ignited a force inside her that was overwhelming all her deep-rooted senses of self-preservation. There was a wildness in the air and in her body, a deep hot fiercely female urgent need that refused to listen to reason and insisted instead that it must and would be appeased. That need was carrying her with it, taking her as passionately as it was telling her that she wanted Ash to take her, as herself, as a woman whose desire was so powerful that it was impossible for him to resist or deny his need to match it. With such thoughts, such hungers, swirling around inside her it was impossible for Sophia to hold on to reality or sanity, especially not when Ash was kissing her with such scorching intensity. Or rather, he was kissing the woman he really wished were here with such scorching intensity, Sophia warned herself.

Under his dark mastery of her senses, and the spell it cast on them, she still couldn’t stop herself from responding to him, even though she knew that inside Ash’s head the woman on whom he was pouring out his passionate need was cast in Nasreen’s image and not her own. All that mattered was the white-hot heat his kiss and his touch were creating inside her. Her body knew him now and knew the power and delight of the pleasure he could give it. Her body had no conscience and no pride, all it knew was that the touch on it was a touch that sent coded messages of past and future pleasure surging along its most intimate pathways, condemning to oblivion anything that might have tried to stand in its way. It was pointless for her to try to tell herself that the fiercely possessive hunger of Ash’s touch belonged in reality to another woman. Foolishly her body wasn’t willing to listen, not when Ash’s obvious desire for it was laying out in front of her a positive banquet of intimate delight. From the curl of his hand in her hair as he pushed it back from her neck so that he could kiss its slender stem, to the strength of that hand on her as he smoothed his thumb over her skin, trapping the betraying rash of goose bumps that gave away her sensual vulnerability to him, every touch aroused a storm of sensual longing and delight.

He should stop, and right now. Every rational and responsible thought in his head told him that; Ash struggled to obey those voices but when he tried to pull away from her Sophia moved closer to him.

Ash was going to leave her but he mustn’t. He couldn’t. Not when the female hunger and need he had aroused was such an intense longing ache inside her. Sophia wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing small, eager, pleading kisses of her own against the dark sensuality of his throat, shivering with pleasure as she tasted the salty male tang of him on her lips, that taste feeding her appetite for more. His shirt was unfastened at the neck allowing her to slide her hand against the lower buttons and unfasten them, which in turn allowed her to kiss her way along the hard jutting angle of his shoulder.

No. No. A thousand times, no. He might be voicing that denial inside his head but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say those words out loud, Ash realised as his flesh burned raw with the hunger that Sophia’s kisses were igniting. How long had it been since a woman had affected him like this, made him hunger and ache like this?

A groan of torment—for past guilts and present longings—tortured his throat. Sophia’s kisses, the soft sweetly passionate kisses of a woman to whom the deepest dark mysteries of the raw heat of sexual intimacy were still unknown, filled him with a need to take her and show her how he longed to be touched, how intimately and possessively he wanted to be taken and owned by her feminine desire.

He had never known a need like this, never allowed himself to imagine it could exist. Now he wanted to lie naked beneath Sophia’s learning touch, to give himself up completely to her tender exploration, give himself over to her innocent possession. Then when she had had her fill, he wanted to turn things around and show her, teach her, give her the full power of his male desire until their mutual possession of each other took them beyond time and space.

It was too late. Things had gone too far. He couldn’t pull back now. He couldn’t give her up now. Ash felt Sophia’s hand tremble as she battled with his shirt buttons.

The feeling of Ash’s chest lifting as he drew in a deep breath and then trapped her hand against his body filled Sophia with despair. He didn’t want her touching him. He was going to stop her. But to her shock and disbelief when he lifted her hand from his shirt, instead of releasing it, he placed it flat against the hardness of his erection. For a handful of seconds Sophia allowed herself the erotic joy of knowing him so intimately, of feeling the life force of his maleness beneath her hand, of letting that hand curl against the breadth of his arousal. She felt slightly dizzy, giddy with the swift rush of the responsive desire that was pounding through her own lower body, setting up a rhythm she could feel pulsing into the very heart of her sex.

‘Ash …’

His name on her lips was a soft sound of agonised need, her breath rushing his skin. In the dimly lit bedroom her skin gleamed a soft gold, the almost pagan sight of her naked breasts full and taut, their nipples swollen and dark, wrenching away the remnants of Ash’s self-control. In between possessively intimate and erotic kisses he undressed himself, watching with raw male pride when Sophia shuddered softly at the sight of his own naked body, her eyes slipping helplessly to his sex, her small tremble of longing mingled with uncertainty answering a need in him as old as time itself.

‘Touch me,’ he commanded her softly. ‘Touch me and know me.’

There was something almost hypnotic about Ash’s voice, or was it her own desire that was hypnotising her, Sophia wondered helplessly as she went towards Ash. Letting him take her hand and draw her down onto the bed with him where he put her hand back on his body, he told her again, ‘Touch me.’

Just the sound of the words was enough to send quivers of eager desire darting through her as she bent towards him. The feel of his hard hot flesh beneath her uncertain fingers was both alien and yet somehow in some way already known, as though in her dreams she had touched him like this a thousand plus times before. Each touch, each discovery, each sound of pleasure wrenched from Ash’s locked throat felt like a marker put in place on a territory that she had been destined to call her own.

Growing braver, she leaned over and brushed her lips against the taut plain of Ash’s flat muscular stomach, hot wilful pleasure possessing her when the slide of his hand into her hair and the raw gasp her touch drew from him told her that despite his stillness his body ached as much as her own.

A few more kisses, scattered daringly against the hair-roughened tautness of his thigh, a tentative caress of the hot tension of his erection, an awareness of the damp heat and the ache between her own thighs, and the coil of need within her had become a full-blown ravening demand.

Inside her head, images formed: the temptation to straddle Ash where he lay and let her body demand the upward thrust of his body into her own and the satisfaction it yearned for, a relentless unceasing hunger that grew with every breath she took.

How long before his self-control broke—how many seconds, how many heartbeats. How much could one man bear and not give in to such an intensity of need? Like a dam breaking, Ash felt his self-control give way. Reaching for Sophia he pulled her down against him, kissing her throat, her jaw, her mouth, taking the sobbed breath of pleasure she exhaled as he covered her breasts with his hands, kneading their soft warmth, letting his thumbs and fingertips mimic the intimate movement of his tongue within the soft damp heat of her mouth,

When he made to lift her on top of him she moved eagerly, almost knowingly, to his guidance, one fierce tremor of her body and the flash of desire in her eyes her response to his removal of her briefs. Her sex was open and naked to his gaze and his touch and it was impossible for Ash to withstand the temptation to caress its soft inviting warmth, his touch drawing a wild shudder of pleasure from Sophia married to a sweetly agonised cry of female longing. The need to pull her down on top of him and pleasure her aroused flesh with his lips and his tongue had Ash sliding his hands along her thighs before he could stop himself, his hunger for the intimate taste of her overwhelming him, as much as Sophia’s moan of shocked delight overwhelmed her.

How could she endure such pleasure? How could her body hold back the tide of longing that swept her or the convulsive tremors of preorgasmic sensitivity it unleashed? A fine dew of aching arousal bathed her skin. Her nails raked Ash’s skin as he lowered her onto his body, a small mewling sound escaping her lips in her exquisite agony of relief as her muscles welcomed the full hard thrust of him within their embrace, her body rising and falling in concert with his as passion gripped them both.

Without thinking about what he was doing as they lay together in the aftermath of their shared ecstasy, Ash instinctively ran his hand down Sophia’s still-damp back, and let it come to rest on the curve of her hip. It was only a small gesture, a natural one, he suspected, for a man who had just shared so much pleasure with his partner, and who wanted to draw that partner closer for the intimacy that came after such intensely satisfying sex, but it was not one with which he was familiar, not one he had ever been tempted to indulge in ever before. Abruptly he withdrew his hand and moved back from her. Moved back but did not leave the bed. They were husband and wife; he was not a machine, and he was certainly not without respect for Sophia or her role in his life. She had just given herself to their marriage, to their commitment to each other to create the next generation, not just with her natural sensuality but also with generosity. He owed her something at least for that.

And that was why he was staying? For Sophia’s sake? For the sake of their marriage, for the sake of the duty they had both agreed they would share. For them he would stay, but he would not allow himself the emotional pleasure of drawing her back into his arms to hold her there whilst her heartbeat stilled and he breathed in the warm Sophia-scent of her skin. No, he would not allow himself that, because he did not deserve it.

It was over, and despite the—to her, at least—intense intimacy and closeness of what they had just shared, Ash was already withdrawing from her, still sharing her bed but not touching her, not showing her any tenderness, not saying a word about what to her had been an experience of true unimaginable wonder and delight. And he had wanted what had happened between them; he had wanted it badly. She might not be experienced but no woman could misunderstand the messages his body had given to hers.

To hers?

The sharp sound of Sophia’s indrawn breath with its raw note of pain had Ash frowning, his voice harsh as he demanded, ‘What’s wrong?’ Their lovemaking had been intense and passionate and she had given herself fiercely over to it; if he had accidentally caused her discomfort, that was the last thing he had wanted to happen.

‘Do you really need to ask?’ Sophia challenged him. ‘It wasn’t me you took to bed tonight, was it, Ash? It was Nasreen. That’s my fault for wearing her clothes. I don’t know why I did that. It was wrong. I know you still love her.’

Sophia thought he would do something like that? She thought that he could have the kind of powerful, all-consuming sex they had just had and want anyone but her in his arms? Something—a force, a need, a tidal wave of something he could not suppress—rose up inside him.

‘No,’ he told her. ‘I do not still love Nasreen.’

He paused as though his words had somehow caused a seismic movement within himself over which he had no control, and which had now set in motion an unstoppable force within him—a shift in the weight of his burden and its pressure on the dam behind which he had sealed it away. Like an unstoppable landslide it plunged down on that dam, smashing it apart, tearing at its foundations, words he had never expected to hear himself utter in the privacy of his own thoughts, never mind to anyone else, bursting past its barriers in an unchecked torrent, dragged from the depths by the sheer force of the reaction Sophia’s accusation had aroused within him.

‘The truth is that I never loved Nasreen.’

Shock, disbelief, confusion—Sophia felt them all, but on some deeper level and with the new maturity the short weeks of their marriage had brought her, she could hear the starkness of the truth in Ash’s voice. Those words were dragged from him against his wish or control, the first time she had ever seen any break in that control when it came to his silence on the subject of his first wife. The first time he had allowed her to see what lay behind that silence, and what she could see was a man in torment.

Now that he had started to speak, to his own shock Ash discovered that he couldn’t stop, the words tumbling from him one after the other, as though desperate to finally be heard.

‘I should have loved her. It was my duty to love her.’ His voice was raw with the burden of past pain. ‘It was my duty to make our marriage as filled with love for each other as my great-grandparents’ marriage was. As a boy growing up, orphaned, with only my nurse’s stories of that love to show me what adult love could be, I believed that it was enough for me merely to want to love my chosen bride. I was both naive and arrogant. I made promises to myself for our marriage that I was unable to keep. Over the course of our wedding celebrations when I looked at my bride, despite her undoubted beauty, despite the fact that our marriage was one arranged for us with our best interests at heart, when I listened to her, when I saw how different our goals in life were, when I dismissed her as shallow and empty-headed, selfish and greedy, unkind to those who served her, and not worthy of the great love I had promised myself I would have for her, I showed that I was the one who was not worthy, not worthy of my duty, not worthy of the gift of love shared by my great-grandparents.’

The words were pouring from him with an uncontrollable force now, increasingly desperate to escape and be heard, desperate to escape his desire to have them silenced, as though a part of him had yearned for this escape, this stripping down of himself to the bare bones at the root of his angry contempt for himself, so that his failings could finally be seen in the clear light of day. As though somehow he had been waiting for this moment and this one woman to lay bare his dreadful weakness and shame, because only she would understand, because only she …

‘I should never have married her.’

‘You had no choice,’ Sophia felt bound to point out.

‘I had the choice of choosing another path once I realised that my original goals for our marriage were not achievable. I could and should have chosen then to forge our marriage along different lines, practical royal lines.’

Like their marriage, he meant, Sophia thought. That pain inside her meant nothing. She was as resolved to make their practical marriage work as he was. In fact, she preferred not loving him because not loving him meant that she could not suffer the pain of not being loved back.

‘I didn’t do that, though. I allowed myself to be directed by my own emotions, by my anger at myself for all that our marriage could never be instead of focusing on what it could be.

‘Nasreen was far more practical in that regard. She told me on our wedding night that for her our marriage was merely a diplomatic dynastic union and that her heart along with her body had been given forever to another man.’

Ash heard the shocked indrawn gasp of Sophia’s breath.

‘She told you that she loved someone else?’

‘You pity me? There is no need. The truth is that I was relieved to discover that I would not have to bear the burden of a love from her that I already knew I could not return. However, since I was not prepared to countenance a continuation of their relationship and Nasreen was equally determined that it would continue despite the fact that he was married, there were frequent quarrels and much ill feeling between us. Nasreen’s plan for her married life was that she would live the life of a wealthy titled young woman in Mumbai, socialising with her friends. I, on the other hand, wanted her to spend more time here in Nailpur as my maharani, helping me to improve the quality of the lives of my people.

‘The night she died we had quarrelled even more than usual. I had gone to Mumbai and brought her back with me against her will to attend a formal court event. I had even insisted that she wear a sari that had been embroidered for her by some of the tribeswomen as a wedding gift.

‘Nasreen had objected to all of this. She had further told me that she had no intention of conceiving a child any time soon because being pregnant would stop her from living the life she wanted to live, and that I would have to wait until she was ready.

‘I was furious with her, and told her that I would not allow her to return to Mumbai. Whilst I was engaged in a business meeting she left the palace in the sports car she insisted on keeping here because she said that driving it was the only freedom she could have outside of the city. By the time I was alerted to the fact that she had gone, intending to return to Mumbai, it was too late to stop her. And too late to save her.’

Instinctively Sophia reached out towards him in a gesture of sympathy and compassion. How could the touch of such a cool, healing hand on his own burn him with such intense pain? It was his guilt that was responsible for that pain, Ash told himself, that and the knowledge that he did not deserve Sophia’s compassion, because he did not deserve anything other than to endure the burden of his terrible guilt. That was the payment he had to make for his arrogance and his pride.

She wasn’t hurt by Ash’s immediate avoidance of her touch, Sophia assured herself. What she was doing now was simply fulfilling part of her role as his consort. She may not love him as she had done as a teenager, but that did not mean that she could not feel for him, and be touched by this unexpected vulnerability he was showing her.

The promise of the comfort of Sophia’s touch had been withdrawn from him. He deserved that loss, Ash berated himself inwardly. He deserved to suffer. He deserved to be punished for setting himself against Nasreen and not finding a way for them to make their marriage work, just because his pride had not been able to tolerate finding any success in their marriage once he had realised he could not love her. He had said too much to Sophia, expressed things he had always sworn to keep to himself, and yet even now, somehow, he could not stop allowing the words he knew damaged him from being said. It was as though he was being driven by a compulsion that wouldn’t let him go, a need to reveal to Sophia the very worst of himself in the aftermath of a shared intimacy that had taken him to a place he had never imagined he might find. Because he needed to punish himself for that experience? Because he needed to hear the words out loud to remind himself of exactly what he had done? Ash didn’t know. He only knew that he needed to reveal the true horror of what had happened, and that he was culpable.

The deep breath he took tasted acidic in his lungs. Unable to look at Sophia he continued, ‘Nasreen must have had the top of the convertible down, because when they found her they discovered that she had been strangled by the scarf of her sari—the sari I insisted she had to wear—as it caught in the wheels of the car.’

Tears burned the backs of Sophia’s eyes. Poor Nasreen and poor Ash, too. What a dreadful, dreadful tragedy. No wonder it had marked Ash so strongly. But Sophia still felt that he was being too hard on himself. That, of course, was typical of the man he was and typical, too, in its way of the younger Ash she remembered, the Ash who believed in doing the right thing and in being honourable, the Ash who had had his idealistic dreams.

‘I may not have been able to behave as a man of honour in my duty to love Nasreen,’ he continued bleakly, ‘but I can and will fulfil my duty to bear my guilt for her death.’

Sophia’s heart ached for him. His revelations had shocked her, but more shocking, and far more dangerous, was her awareness of how keenly her own emotions had been touched by his pain.

The danger of that feeling was brought home to her within seconds when Ash told her grimly, ‘It was because of my failure to find within myself the love I should have had for Nasreen that this marriage, our marriage, and indeed any second marriage I might have made, is based on practicalities. Emotions are dangerous when they take control of our lives.’

Sophia could agree with that. She knew even now just how dangerous her emotions had been to her when she had loved him so passionately as a girl.

‘There is something else I must say. Tonight has again proved to us both, I hope, that we are sexually compatible. That will help to strengthen our marriage. I have also to say how much I appreciate the commitment you are making to my people in your role as maharani. You have an instinctive way with the women and the children. I have watched how they respond to you. It is through you I believe that I will be able to put into effect my plans to improve the education of the poorest amongst the people. I am grateful to you for that, Sophia.’

How truly he was humbling himself, Sophia recognised as she savoured the sweetness of his unexpected praise.

‘I am enjoying what I am doing.’ It was the truth and she was happy to say so. ‘I want to feel that I am making a contribution to the children’s future and that I have a useful role to play here in Nailpur, Ash, aside, of course, from that of giving you an heir. Perhaps there is more Santina in me than I ever thought. I don’t know. But I do know that my royal role here as your consort is one that I value. The education of the next generation is vitally important and everything I can do to help with that I want to do. I dare say there are plenty of other royal princesses who could have fulfilled the role as well, if not better, than me but—’

‘No.’ Ash stopped her, cutting across her immediately. ‘No. I cannot think of anyone who would make a better maharani than you, Sophia, or who would make a better and more loving mother to our children.’

It was the truth, Ash recognised.

‘And there is no one who will make them a more honourable father.’ Sophia returned the compliment.

An honourable father, she reflected later, after Ash had left her, but would he be a loving one? Her own father was honourable, but children needed love. There was no doubt that Ash had been badly affected by his marriage to Nasreen, and she could understand why. Remembering the idealistic young man he had been it was easy for her to see how dreadful it would have been for him to be forced to admit that he could not love the bride he had so confidently believed he would love because it was his duty, his destiny, almost, to do so. To have those ideals smashed by his own emotional inability to give Nasreen love would have destroyed the deepest of his core beliefs about himself. She knew how that felt in her own way. She had suffered a terrible loss of sense of self when she had understood the meaning of the gossip about her mother’s relationship with the English architect she had admired so much.

But Ash had praised her as his maharani. He had shown her a desire that she could now accept belonged to their relationship. She had responded to that desire; she had welcomed it. These were the foundations on which she must now build her new life, and those foundations would no longer be overshadowed or undermined by her own previous false beliefs about his relationship with Nasreen. There had been a cleansing of that wound, and this was an opportunity for a fresh start between them. Just as long as she remembered and respected the fact that that relationship would be without love.

But that was what she, too, wanted. She didn’t want to love Ash all over again and she wasn’t going to do so.