Читать книгу Michelle Reid Collection - Michelle Reid - Страница 11

AS ANNOUNCEMENTS went, this one truly took the trophy. To his credit, Raschid didn’t groan in horror or curse and shout, or demand to know how the hell she had allowed such a stupid thing to happen. All the things he certainly had a right to do.

In fact, he didn’t do anything. He just continued to sit there, as silent as death, as still as stone, utilising that impressive bank of self-discipline Evie knew he possessed to hold himself in check while he attempted to take the shocking news in.

And it was awful—worse, much worse than she’d even envisaged this moment was going to be because she knew this man so very well, and knowing him meant she understood exactly what his silence was actually saying.

Raschid’s world and all it meant to him had just been effectively brought tumbling down around him. And this was more than just the noble Arab prince holding his emotions in check as he had been trained from birth to do in times of disaster.

He was sitting there like that because he was literally paralysed with dismay.

‘Say something,’ she prompted when she could stand his silence no longer.

‘Like what?’ he asked, then admitted grimacingly, ‘I find I am struck speechless.’

Well, speechless just about covered it, Evie thought painfully. ‘How, where and when seem good places to start,’ she huskily suggested.

‘Okay…’ At last he moved, turning his head to look at her—though Evie couldn’t bring herself to look back at him now.

‘How?’ He began with her first suggestion.

Her hunched shoulders gave a helpless shrug. ‘I don’t know how,’ she answered honestly. ‘Somewhere along the line, my birth control has let me down but I just don’t know how it did. The where depends on the when,’ she went on huskily. ‘Which was about six weeks ago,’ she calculated. ‘Which in turn probably means it happened during the weekend we spent together on your yacht in the Mediterranean,’ she assumed. ‘Though I will know better when I see a doctor…’

‘So this is not yet confirmed?’

Did he have to sound so damned hopeful? Her chest began to hurt with the tension she was putting on it, her throat locking up on a tight ball of emotion she didn’t dare release.

‘Home testing sets are pretty accurate these days,’ she informed him flatly.

Another long silence followed that, one that throbbed and pulled and picked at the flesh like an animal chewing on a dead carcass. Only Evie’s carcass wasn’t dead. It was alive and hurting in more ways than she would have believed possible.

Out on the lake the owl hooted its lonely call for a mate again. The moon slithered its eerie way across the glass-smooth waters—and Christina’s bouquet continued to float right there in front of them, making really heavy irony now of its good-luck significance.

‘You knew about this two weeks ago, didn’t you?’ he said suddenly.

What was the use in lying? ‘Yes,’ she replied.

‘Damn it, Evie!’ His control suddenly exploded, launching him to his feet as shock gave way to a burst of anger. ‘Why didn’t you tell me then? Do you have any conception of what those two weeks are going to mean to me?’ He lashed at her. ‘The problems they are going to cause?’ A sigh shot from him, his dark face contorting with blistering condemnation as he violently spun his back on her. ‘What a mess!’ he muttered thickly. ‘What a damned mess!’

White-faced and shaken by his scorching response, Evie came more slowly to her feet to stand staring at him in utter dismay. For, no matter how terrible she had expected his reaction to be, she hadn’t expected anything quite so brutal as this.

‘What difference can two weeks possibly make to the situation?’ she demanded shakily.

He didn’t answer; instead a hand went up to grip the back of his angry neck, the action showing all the horror and frustration he was currently experiencing.

In fact, he couldn’t have been more horrified if she’d told him she’d infected him with some dreadful social disease.

‘Unless, of course, you’re hoping I may offer to do something about it?’ she then suggested, wanting to twist the knife she could almost see sticking out of his ribs where she had apparently plunged it.

It worked. He flinched. ‘No!’ he ground out, spinning round to glare at her. ‘Don’t ever,’ he gritted, ‘make a suggestion like that again!’

Well, at least that was something, Evie grimly acknowledged as she stood there staring into those glitter-hard golden eyes. But then, if he had said anything else—so much as glanced at her with a hopeful look in those wretched eyes—she would never have forgiven him.

As it was, Evie shuddered on a wave of sickening self-disgust for voicing such an option just because she wanted to score points off him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It was never a choice you were going to be offered.’

‘Then why say it?’ he lashed at her.

Her small laugh was forced and shrill. ‘You couldn’t make your horror clearer if you were being faced with the end of my brother’s shotgun!’ She angrily derided the question.

‘You expect me to be ecstatic?’

‘No,’ she said heavily, turning away from him to stare bleakly out across the moon-kissed lake because looking at him now hurt just too damned much. ‘But a bit of tender concern at some point wouldn’t have gone amiss…’

The dry remark had his chest expanding on a strained intake of air. When he let it out again most of his anger went with it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised gruffly. ‘But, as you can no doubt appreciate, it is going to take me some time to get my head around this.’

‘Get your head around what exactly?’ Evie drawled, withdrawing behind her own stone-cold shell of selfprotection. ‘The problematic mistress who has stupidly gone and got herself pregnant?’

‘It takes two to make a baby,’ he sighed.

‘But only one to bring it safely into the world,’ Evie pointed out. ‘Your part is done. Mine is just starting.’

A small silence followed that remark. Then Raschid demanded, ‘Are you suggesting that I ignore the fact that you are having my baby?’

Why? Evie thought bitterly. Are you offering up a suitable alternative? ‘I am suggesting that you get your priorities right,’ she said. ‘And remember your duty.’

Raschid stood staring into cold-cut lavender-blue eyes set in an excruciatingly beautiful face that showed not a hint of emotion anywhere on it—and at last it began to hit him just what she was saying here.

‘Don’t be foolish!’ he snapped. ‘In this case my duty is to you and the child!’ A long-fingered hand flicked out in a grim, tight throw-away gesture. ‘We will have to get married, of course.’

Still no words of love, Evie noted painfully. Still no words of caring. But oh, so arrogant, she observed. So damned sure of himself—so utterly dismayed by what he was so magnanimously offering.

‘We don’t have to do anything,’ she countered, feeling so cold inside now that she wished she hadn’t let his jacket slip to the grass when she’d got to her feet earlier.

‘I will have to speak to my father…’ he muttered, too busy lost in his own frowning thoughts to have heard her. ‘It is going to cause problems at home, but that cannot be helped now. I will…’

‘Excuse me,’ Evie inserted, and this time the sheer coldness of her voice managed to gain his attention. ‘But the way I see it, Raschid,’ she said firmly, ‘you don’t have a problem here. I do.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ he jerked out, beginning to look just a little shell-shocked now.

‘I’ve never expected marriage from you,’ Evie informed him. ‘And I am not asking you for it now.’

‘Are you mad?’ he choked. ‘Of course you will marry me! What else can we do?’

Oh, his sensitivity knew no bounds! Evie mocked him bitterly as she bent to retrieve her discarded shoes. ‘I wouldn’t marry you, Sheikh Raschid Al Kadah, if you came gift-wrapped in rubies!’ she hissed as she straightened up again. ‘I have too much damned respect for myself, you see!’

‘Are you saying that I don’t respect you?’

‘Do you?’ Evie flashed back. ‘You see, I find it hard to reconcile the fact that I wasn’t fit to marry before I became pregnant with your child!’

At last those angry golden eyes began to burn with a pained understanding of what was actually going on here. Remorse tightened his arrogant features.

‘Evie…’ he sighed, the hand he used to capture her wrist tense with frustration. ‘I have handled this badly,’ he acknowledged. ‘I apologise.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Evie snapped, tugging angrily at her imprisoned wrist. ‘Let go of me,’ she commanded shakily.

‘Not until you listen to me,’ he refused. The hand pulled her closer, drawing her fully against his powerful chest. ‘You cannot expect me to pretend to be pleased about a baby when you know as well as I do the kind of problems that are going to erupt around us!’

‘Funny really,’ she said, lifting lavender eyes turned into dark purple pools by the sudden flood of tears washing across them. ‘But I expected nothing more than I got from you, Raschid. Which just about says it all, doesn’t it?’

His sigh was driven, the hand he brought around her waist there to stop her from pulling against her captive wrist. ‘I thought we loved each other well enough to be honest with each other.’

‘There is honest and there is brutal,’ Evie said thickly. ‘I feel frightened. I feel vulnerable. I feel as if I’ve ruined both our lives. And all you can do is worry about how this is all going to affect you!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he sighed yet again.

But—too late, Evie thought, and pulled herself free of him.

‘Listen to me,’ he pleaded. ‘We need—What are you doing?’ he raked out in disbelief as Evie began to walk away. ‘Come back here, you exasperating creature!’ he growled after her. ‘You cannot just walk away from this!’

Just watch me! Evie thought wretchedly. ‘In the profound words of a certain arrogant swine I know,’ she tossed at him over her shoulder, ‘go to hell!’

Two people knocked on her bedroom door that night. Both tried the handle when they received no response. Both discovered that the door was locked.

One was her mother; Evie knew that because Lucinda had called out to her, the usual sharpness honed out of her voice by the thickness of the wood. The other was Raschid. She knew that because he didn’t call out, he just stood on the other side of that door like a silent but dark presence—and used other means to make her aware that he was there and hadn’t given up on this.

Evie didn’t sleep that night; she merely dozed, shifting restlessly about the lumpy old bed that had been her mother’s idea of a punishment for a daughter who refused to toe the moral line.

So, what would the punishment be for conceiving an illegitimate baby? she wondered grimly. Total excommunication from the family?

And Raschid, she moved on to consider with the same sense of wretched derision. Did he really expect her to be grateful for his belated and very reluctant offer of marriage?

And don’t forget the ever-vigilant press, Evie reminded herself as she lay there in the darkness. They were going to make a real meal out of all of this if or when they ever found out about it. And neither excommunication nor marriage was going to stop their acid pens from writing their poison.

Maybe the other option was the better one. Maybe a quick if bloody end to this was the only way to save everyone’s embarrassment. But even as the thought popped into her head Evie dismissed it with a telling shudder. She was whole, she was healthy, and she had no excuse—moral or otherwise—to put an end to a life before it had barely started.

And this little life had been conceived with love, even if that love now lay floundering somewhere between here and the Beverleys’ private lake. She loved this baby. She loved where he came from and who he was going to be. She wanted to be there to watch him become that person. And, no matter what his father, grandmother or even his grandfather thought about it, she would make sure her child grew up feeling pride in his mixed heritage, she vowed fiercely.

By dawn she’d had enough of lying there trying to sleep when it was clear that sleep was a million miles away. Getting up, she showered in the antiquated bathroom, pulled on fresh underwear, a pair of jeans and a white tee shirt. Brushing her hair back into a simple ponytail, she then pushed her feet into lightweight slip-ons, and quietly let herself out of her room with the intention of going for a long walk before she had to face Raschid again.

There was no one about as she walked down the stairs. The hour was too early for most people after last night’s partying, so she wasn’t particularly surprised about that. But the house had been carefully locked up for the night, she realised belatedly, and the huge cast-iron bolts that were still rammed across the double front doors looked lethal, much too big for her to attempt to shift them.

Luckily a servant appeared in the hallway. He looked a trifle disconcerted when he saw Evie standing there so early. But he recovered quickly.

‘Good morning, Miss Delahaye,’ he greeted politely. ‘If you’re looking for the breakfast room, it’s this way…’

‘No—’ He was about to move off when Evie stopped him. ‘I was hoping to go outside for some fresh air before breakfast, but the bolts on that door look pretty much beyond me,’ she explained with a rueful glance at the door.

He smiled back, half relieved he wasn’t going to have to serve her yet, and came quickly towards her. Two minutes later the front door stood open, and Evie was stepping out into one of the soft, still, slightly misty mornings that were so typical of an English summer.

About to walk off to the right with the intention of making for the lake, she was stalled by the sound of a car coming up the driveway that skirted the lake on its left-hand side. A moment later the car appeared around the side of the chapel, where it stopped and the driver got out.

He saw her, and waved. It was Harry. ‘Morning, Evie,’ he called out, striding briskly towards her. ‘You’re an early bird!’

‘So are you.’ She found a tight smile from somewhere.

‘Force of habit in my business.’ He grimaced.

‘But—didn’t you stay here last night?’ Evie asked frowningly.

He shook his head. ‘I bunked down with some friends a couple of miles away,’ he told her. ‘But I left my jacket here last night, so I decided to collect it on my way home.’

‘You’re going home?’ Evie’s heart stopped beating for a moment, a sudden, very cowardly idea popping into her head. Harry lived only ten miles outside London.

‘I have a mare due to foal at any minute,’ he nodded. ‘It will be her first, so I want to be there just in case there are any problems.’

‘Harry—can you give me a lift home?’ she asked, suddenly very sure it was what she desperately needed to do. Get away—escape.

‘Of course,’ he agreed, frowning slightly when he noticed belatedly the bruises around her eyes and the strained pallor of her skin.

‘Can you wait while I throw my things into my bag?’ Evie was already turning eagerly back to the house. ‘Five minutes, Harry. I just need five minutes.’

But she was back down the stairs in only three, looking flushed rather than pale now and ever so slightly hunted as she came towards Harry who was waiting by the door with his recovered dinner jacket draped over one arm.

‘Is everything all right, Evie?’ he asked worriedly.

She nodded, allowing him to take her bag from her. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him. ‘I left a note in my room for my mother, explaining where I’ve gone.’

‘And Sheikh Raschid?’

Evie didn’t answer; instead she walked out of the house again, head down, back straight, the tension apparent in her slender frame enough to snap wire cables.

She was already sitting in the front passenger seat by the time he’d stashed away her things then climbed in beside her. Wisely holding his own counsel, Harry started the engine and turned them around. Neither spoke until they had put several long miles between them and Beverley Castle.

Then, ‘Thank you,’ Evie whispered.

Harry sent her a concerned glance. He had known her for most of her life, so he recognised distress when she was suffering it. ‘Would you like to talk about it?’ he asked.

‘It’s over between Raschid and I,’ she heard herself announce, and wondered how she was able to say the words without breaking up inside.

But what was worse was that Harry was painfully unsurprised by the announcement. ‘The rumours about it were rife last night,’ he nodded. ‘Something to do with his father being ill and him having to go home and marry before he can officially take over from the old man…’

For a space of thirty long, dreadful seconds, Evie didn’t move—didn’t breathe—didn’t function on any basic level. Harry’s words simply hung there in block letters in front of her while other words uttered in the heat of the moment began to take on an entirely different shape.

Words like: ‘Do you have any conception of what those two weeks are going to mean to me? The problems they are going to cause?’

Had his father laid down an ultimatum during Raschid’s last visit home? Was that why those two weeks had been so important?

‘And what does rumour say, exactly?’ she asked carefully.

Changing gear with a flourish, he sent her a small grimace. ‘That he has a month to sort his life out before he goes home to marry some cousin of a cousin or some such person. Is it true?’ he asked curiously. ‘Is that why he’s finished it?’

Evie didn’t answer. She didn’t do anything but sit there staring directly ahead of her while new horrors settled over old horrors. Some cousin of a cousin being the new horror.

For Evie knew all about Aisha. Raschid had never been anything but honest about his cousin of a cousin who had been nothing more than a shadow in the wings of his life while she grew from child to woman enough to marry a prince.

‘Are you okay?’ Harry asked. ‘You’ve gone awfully pale…’

No, Evie thought. I’m not okay. ‘What a mess!’ Raschid had muttered. ‘What a damned mess!’

He hadn’t been joking. The whole thing was a mess! She had already been living on borrowed time with him when she’d broken her news last night.

And, what was worse, she had probably been the last one to know it!

It didn’t matter. Nothing seemed to matter any more. It was over. In every which way she looked at it, the affair was most definitely over. She only wished now that she had kept her stupid mouth shut about the baby. At least then she could have walked away from him with some semblance of dignity intact.

Now?

The whole wretched thing was just destined to get ugly. With their families, with the press, between themselves.

For she was not going to go down in history as the woman who held her Arab sheikh lover to ransom with a baby! Evie grimly promised herself. And Raschid, she was sure, was not going to go down in history as the Arab sheikh who deserted his pregnant mistress to marry elsewhere!

The car ate up the miles while Evie sat there so sunk in the wallowing mire of her own muddy thinking that she wasn’t aware of the frequent worried glances Harry kept on sending her, or what he was seeing when he did look at her.

She didn’t look well. There were bruises around her eyes and a white ring of tension around her mouth. Her skin was too pale, and her fingers trembled where they rested on her lap.

They arrived in Chelsea where her mews cottage stood only a short walk away from the World Aid Foundation, where she worked on a purely voluntary basis, drumming up gifts of money from the wealthy.

The cottage belonged to Julian. It was one of several properties the family owned in and around London. Her mother resided in something similar in Kensington. And Julian himself used a classy apartment not far from Hyde Park.

Great to have money, Evie bleakly acknowledged. Great to able to do what you wanted when you wanted to do it without having to consider the cost.

Great to know that she could bring up her baby without having to accept a single penny from Raschid to do it, she tagged on cynically.

The car had stopped. Looking around a little dazedly, Evie realised that Harry had already got out and was striding towards the boot.

She climbed out too, the sunlight just managing to seep over the rooftops feeling warm on her icy face. Walking to the back of the car, she waited until Harry had closed the boot lid then went to take her bag from him.

‘Thanks for the lift, Harry. I…’

The bag was swung out of her reach. ‘I’m coming in with you,’ he insisted.

‘But your foal. You should…’

‘The least you can do is offer me a cup of coffee for my trouble,’ he pointed out gently.

‘Of course, I’m sorry,’ she murmured contritely, and turned to cross the pavement to her white-painted front door.

The telephone was ringing even as she stepped into the house with Harry right behind her. Evie froze where she stood, counting off the rings until the answering machine took over. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears as the machine chanted out her recorded message. A moment after that and her mother’s voice came whipping across the room towards her.

‘Evie, I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, walking out like this. God knows what the Beverleys are going to think!’ A sigh rasped like sandpaper across the room. ‘I don’t care what a mess your private life is in, this is so bad-mannered! Now I suppose I will have to make up excuses for you. It just isn’t fair, Evie! Don’t you think I spend enough time making excuses for you as it is?’

Another sigh, then came a few tense moments when nothing happened while her mother seemed to be getting a hold on her temper. ‘Look,’ she said, sounding marginally less aggressive. ‘Call me here when you get home. I need to know you arrived there safely…’

‘You didn’t tell her you came away with me?’ Harry asked when the call had finished.

Evie shook her head. ‘I just said I’d got a lift home,’ she explained, forcing her stiff legs to move towards the kitchen.

She hadn’t wanted to involve Harry’s name in all of this; it would cause too many complications when things were complicated enough. Her mother didn’t need any help to cast Harry in the role of saviour. Give Lucinda an inch and she would take a mile…

‘Are you going to call her back?’

Evie didn’t answer. Instead she picked up the kettle and took it over to the sink to fill it with fresh water. She didn’t want to talk to anyone—not even Harry—though it would be churlish under the circumstances to tell him that.

‘Evie…’

The phone started ringing again, cutting off whatever Harry had been about to say and turning Evie to stone again where she stood clutching the kettle while she waited to hear who was trying to contact her this time.

A moment after that and Raschid’s voice came, sounding hard and tight and very, very weary. ‘Pick up the phone, Evie,’ he commanded. ‘I know you are there…’

Evie didn’t move. The seconds ticked by, the silence picking at tautly stretched nerve-ends.

‘Evie!’ Impatience roughened his voice now. ‘This is foolish! You are being foolish! Pick up the phone!’

‘How does he know you are here?’ Harry asked curiously. ‘Would your mother have told him?’

Incapable of speech, Evie gave a small shake of her head. Her mother would rather die than tell Raschid anything. No, Raschid must have seen her leave, she decided.

Like herself, she presumed, he must have spent a lousy sleepless night wondering what the hell he was going to do about her, and had probably been staring out of his bedroom window when she and Harry took off together.

A disembodied sigh rushed impatiently around the room when her refusal to comply made Raschid angry. Teeth clenched, body—the very muscles that made her heart beat—all locked into a dreadful straining paralysis, Evie waited to hear what was going to come next.

‘I am on my way to you,’ he grimly informed her. ‘Make sure you get rid of that fool who is there with you, or I will not be responsible for what may happen to him!’

‘What the…?’ Harry burst out in disbelief.

Snap, the line went dead. Evie jumped, almost dropping the kettle.

‘How did he know I was here?’ Harry gasped. ‘Does the man have special powers or something?’

‘Or something,’ Evie tightly replied. And from being frozen the muscles around her heart were now accelerating wildly as anger began to take her over. Putting down the kettle, she walked out of the open-plan kitchen and across the sitting room to glance out of the window.

There were several cars parked in the mews, but only one had somebody sitting inside it.

‘He must have seen us leave Beverley together,’ she told Harry as he came to stand beside her. Then she nodded her head towards the occupied car. ‘There is the object of his special powers,’ she dryly concluded.

‘You mean—he’s having you watched?’ Harry was beginning to look hunted. ‘But why should he bother to do that? The man is marrying another woman!’

But this one is having his baby, Evie added grimly to herself as she winced at Harry’s thoughtless reminder.

‘Look,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘I’m very grateful to you for bringing me home. But I think you should leave before he gets here.’

‘I’m not leaving you alone with him!’ he declared, coming over all macho and protective. ‘The man sounded damned dangerous,’ he added. ‘For all I know, he may have plans to spirit you away to his harem, or something.’

Evie allowed herself a wry smile at that scenario—though the real joke of it was that Raschid might well be planning to do just that. She wasn’t sure. She didn’t understand him any more. After two years of believing that she knew him inside out and back to front, she was now discovering that he had hidden depths she had never allowed for.

The main one being his determination to hang on to something that he hadn’t even wanted.

The baby—the baby. Not Evie or what they felt for each other, but a baby that he deemed as his possession. And it wasn’t in Raschid’s nature to let go of something he believed belonged to him.

So, maybe the harem theory wasn’t so far-fetched. Maybe he could see her hidden away there with only his eunuchs for company while his new wife lived in complete ignorance of her new husband’s intimate prisoner.

Or maybe not so ignorant, Evie then amended, remembering his sister Ranya’s meek obedience to the men in her life.

A different world, a different culture, a different view of life.

She shuddered. ‘He’s started the car engine,’ Harry said.

Evie turned to see tell-tale blink of an amber indicator—and felt a tiny quiver of alarm go slinking through her blood. It could only mean that Raschid was mere seconds away.

‘Harry—!’ she pleaded urgently. ‘Get out of here before Raschid arrives. Please…’

‘But—’

‘But nothing,’ Evie interrupted, already moving to open the front door. ‘He won’t hurt me, but I can’t say what he may do to you.’

She was nervous, she was anxious. Harry didn’t like the look of either. And her slender fingers had that open front door in a death grip.

A black Mercedes drove slowly by them.

‘Take the lady’s advice,’ a deep voice dropped smoothly into the tension. ‘She knows what she is talking about…’

They both jumped, both turned, both stared at the man who was now filling the doorway.