Читать книгу Penny Jordan Tribute Collection - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 27

A LITTLE apprehensively, Petra surveyed the other women crowding into the exclusive enclosure.

It was the start of the horse racing season and Petra suspected that by now, after over a month of marriage, she ought to be familiar with the high-octane and very glamorous nature of the social events to which her position as Rashid’s wife gave her an entrée.

In the short time they had been married they had already had the tennis championships, and a celebrity golf tournament, in addition to a whole host of business events sponsored by the Royal Family in which Rashid, as one of their most favoured architects and a business partner, had played a high-profile role.

And now, within a few days, it would be the most prestigious event of the Zuran social calendar—the Zuran Cup, the world’s most glamorous horse race.

Horses, trainers, jockeys, owners and their elegant wives had been pouring into Zuran all month—the whole city was in a state of excited expectancy over the race and its eventual winner.

Rashid was entering his own horse, an American-bred and Irish-trained three-year-old stabled at his training yard close to the racecourse. Along with a mere handful of other specially favoured owners, Rashid was permitted to use the actual racecourse itself for training purposes.

Petra and Rashid were due to entertain a group of businessmen and diplomats and their partners from America and Europe, and for the duration of Race Week they would be staying at the hotel complex with their guests.

Unlike some of the other wives, Petra had not found it necessary to fly to Paris or Milan to order a series of one-off couture outfits for the event—although she had taken her aunt’s advice and been to see a visiting top milliner to ensure that her hat for the occasion was ‘special’ enough for her position as the wife of an owner of one of the competing horses.

At the breathtakingly stunning villa he had designed and had built, in its equally breathtaking setting of his private oasis, they had entertained a variety of prominent politicians, sportsmen and women and businessmen from all over the world, including the UK, and never once on any of those occasions had Rashid faltered in enacting his own chosen role of devoted husband.

But in private things were very different. Rashid kept to his own suite of rooms in the villa, as she did hers, and when they were not entertaining or being entertained Petra hardly saw him.

He was either working, visiting various projects he was involved in virtually all over the world or, when he was at home, he would be down in the stables where he kept the racehorses he had in training, discussing their progress with his racing manager.

Of course Petra had commitments of her own. She had been invited to join the Zuran Ladies Club, headed by Her Highness—the club’s remit being to provide a common ground for the exchange of ideas between women belonging to different nationalities and cultures. She had gone to women’s lunches and fund-raising events, and an embryo friendship was developing between her and her most senior wedding attendant—a relative of her aunt by marriage. But these were the outer layers of her married life.

The inner ones were very different and very painful.

Common sense told her that the discovery she had not conceived Rashid’s child should have been greeted with relief. Instead she had spent the night silently weeping with anguished disappointment. His child would at least have been something of him she would have been allowed to publicly love.

And that was the private pain which was slowly destroying her.

Outwardly, in the eyes of other people, she must seem as though she had everything anyone could possibly want, Petra reflected as she checked her appearance in her bedroom mirror.

Rashid, who was currently away on business and was not due to return for another two days, had kept his promise not to touch her. Indeed, he quite obviously found it a very easy promise to keep; his relaxed calm politeness whenever they were together made her grit her teeth together against the fury of physical and emotional confusion she herself was enduring.

How was it possible for her to want him so much when he quite obviously did not want her? She lay in bed at night aching for him. Longing for him, thinking about him—fantasising about him, if she was honest—and then in the morning was filled with such a sense of self-revulsion and despair at her own lack of self-control that she despised herself even more than she did him.

He treated her as distantly as though she were merely a visiting house guest—an outsider to his world and life to whom he was obliged to be polite. She had absolutely no idea what he might be thinking or feeling about their marriage, or about her, and that further intensified her sense of loneliness and frustration. It was not natural to live in the way they were doing, and her body, her mind, her heart, her spirit rebelled against it.

She wanted to share her life and herself fully with the man she loved, but how could she do that when that man was Rashid, a man who did not love her in return? A man she could not trust!

She paused in the process of packing her clothes for their Race Week stay in the hotel complex, a tiny, fine tremble of sensation electrifying her at the thought of seeing Rashid. Angrily she dismissed it. She reminded herself firmly instead that she was due to visit the racecourse stables to discuss with Rashid’s trainer what arrangements needed to be made with regard to guests visiting the stables to view the horses.

Already, although they were still in March, the temperature had climbed well into the high thirties, and Petra dressed accordingly, in cotton jeans and a long sleeved tee shirt, plus a hat to protect her head from the sun.

The young man Rashid had appointed as her driver smiled happily at her as he opened the car door for her.

Petra had timed her visit to coincide with the end of the morning exercise session, and when she walked into the yard it was bustling with activity as the newly exercised horses were returned to their stables.

Rashid’s manager and trainer were standing together on the far side of the stable yard talking to one another as Petra walked in. Several other groups of people were in the stable yard, including two small dark-haired children.

Smiling at them, Petra started to make her way towards Rashid’s manager and trainer, but as she did so she saw one of the children suddenly dart across the yard, right into the path of the highly strung, nervously sweating young horse being led across the yard by his handler.

As the horse reared up Petra reacted instinctively, making a grab for the child and snatching him from beneath the horse’s hooves.

She could hear the uproar going on all around her; the shrill squeal of fear from the horse and the even shriller scream of panic from the child, the groom’s anxious voice, the voices of the onlookers, and then the breath was driven out of her lungs as the world exploded in an agonising red mist of searing pain followed by a terrifying sensation of whirling darkness as she hit the ground.

Blearily Petra opened her eyes.

‘Ah, good, you’ve finally come round properly.’

A uniformed nurse smiled at her. Weakly Petra began to move, and then winced as she felt the pain in her shoulder.

‘Don’t worry, it isn’t serious. Just a very nasty bruise, that’s all,’ the nurse comforted her cheerfully. ‘You were lucky, though, and the little boy you rescued was even luckier.’

The child! Petra sat up anxiously and then gasped as pain ripped through her shoulder.

‘Are you sure he’s okay?’ she pressed the nurse.

‘He’s fine—in fact I think his father is in a worse state of shock than he was. They are related to the Royal Family, you know. Cousins, I think. The father couldn’t sing your praises highly enough. He is convinced that if you hadn’t acted so promptly the horse might have killed his son.’

‘It wasn’t the horse’s fault!’ Petra protested. ‘The yard was busy, and he was obviously nervous… Ouch!’ She winced as the nurse readjusted the strapping holding the protective pad in place against her skin.

‘Don’t worry, I’m just checking to see if you’ve stopped bleeding.’

‘Bleeding?’ Petra frowned.

‘The horse’s shoe caught your shoulderblade, and as well as inflicting a wonderful-looking bruise it’s also broken the skin. It looks fine now, though.’

‘Good—in that case, I can get dressed and go home,’ Petra said.

‘Not until the doctor has given you the all-clear,’ the nurse warned her.

Half an hour later Petra was sitting fully dressed on the side of her bed, frowning mutinously at the young doctor confronting her.

‘Look, I can’t stay in overnight,’ she told him firmly. ‘We’re less than a week away from Race Week, and I’ve got a hundred things I have to do. You’ve said yourself that you’re ninety-nine per cent sure that I don’t have concussion, and—’

‘I would still prefer you to stay in overnight, just to be on the safe side,’ the doctor was telling her insistently.

Petra shook her head.

‘There really isn’t any need. I promise you I feel fine.’

‘We should at least alert your husband to what has happened,’ the doctor persisted.

Rashid. Petra tensed. Right now he was in London, overseeing some problem with the alterations to the hotel which the Royal Family had just acquired to add to their portfolio of hotel properties. He wasn’t due back for another two days, and she could just imagine how he was going to feel if he was dragged back on account of a wife who emotionally meant nothing whatsoever to him at all!

Determinedly she set about convincing the young doctor that there was no reason why Rashid should be unnecessarily alarmed about a mere minor accident, when he would be home within a couple of days anyway, and to Petra’s relief he seemed to accept her argument.

When it came to allowing her to go home, though, he was harder to persuade, but in the end he gave in and said that provided she was not going to be left on her own, and that there was someone there to keep an eye on her, he would agree to discharge her.

Assuring him that there was, Petra held her breath whilst he checked her bruised shoulder, and then wrote her a prescription for some painkillers, before finally agreeing to her discharge.

An hour later she was on her way home, gritting her teeth against the unexpectedly intense pain in her shoulder as she was driven slowly and carefully back to the villa by her very protective and anxious young driver.

Once there, she was fussed over by Rashid’s staff to an extent that made her grit her teeth a little and insist that they stop treating her as though she was a fragile piece of china.

Within an hour of her return she had received so many concerned telephone calls that she was refusing to take any more, and the largest reception room of the villa was filled with floral tributes—including an enormous display from the Royal Family, thanking her for rescuing one of their family.

Ignoring the dull, nagging ache which even the strong painkillers she had been given at the hospital had not totally suppressed, Petra went into the room she used as her office and started to go through the sample menus submitted to her by the hotel’s senior chef.

Their guests would be dining in one of the hotel’s private dining rooms, and Petra worked into the evening, meticulously checking the profiles she had been given of their guests against the chef’s suggested menus, stopping only to eat the light meal which Rashid’s housekeeper brought her and to reassure her that she was feeling completely fine apart from having an aching shoulder. At midnight Petra decided that she had had enough and tidied away her papers before making her way to her suite.

The live-in staff had their own quarters, separate from the main villa. Quite what the housekeeper thought of a newly married couple who slept apart Petra had no idea, but the housekeeper had confided to her that Rashid had had her suite of rooms completely redecorated prior to their marriage, even though the villa was brand-new and the rooms had previously been unoccupied.

The villa embraced the best of both Eastern and Western cultures, and had a clean, almost minimalistic look that reminded her of certain exclusive West Coast American homes belonging to friends of her parents, where modern simplicity was broken up and softened by the intriguing addition of single antique pieces. In the case of Rashid’s villa, there was an underlying sense of traditional Moorish décor which really appealed to Petra’s senses. Even the colours he had chosen were sympathetic to the eye and the landscape: pale sands, soft terracottas, a delicate watery blue-green here and there to break up the neutral natural colours.

Stunning sculptures and pieces of artwork made subtle statements about Rashid’s wealth and taste, fabrics made to delight the touch as well as the eye softened any starkness—and yet the villa felt alien and unwelcoming to Petra.

Despite its elegance and comfort, something essential was missing from it. It was a house empty of love, with no sense of being a home, of having a heart! To Petra, acutely sensitive about such things, it lacked that aura of being a place where people who loved one another lived.

She winced a little as she removed the bandage from her back and shoulder, but when she peered over her shoulder to study her reflection in the mirror in her bathroom she was relieved to see that, despite the livid bruising swelling her skin, the raw scrape on her flesh looked clean and had stopped bleeding. As she stood beneath the warm spray of a shower that was large enough for two people to share with comfort she winced a little with pain. She would have some discomfort for some days to come, the doctor had warned her.

It was the horse she felt most sorry for, Petra decided ruefully a little later as she discarded her wrap and slid naked into her bed. The poor animal had been nervous enough before the incident.

Her bed felt deliciously cool. It had been made up with clean, immaculate linen sheets that day. Forlornly Petra turned onto her side. The bed was huge, making her feel acutely conscious of the fact that, despite her marriage, she was still living the life of a partnerless woman. A woman whose husband did not want her, did not desire her, did not love her. Whilst she…

Whilst she had not gone one single night since her marriage without longing for Rashid to be here with her, without giving in to the hopeless, helpless temptation to recreate those hours she had spent in his arms at the oasis. Tiredly Petra closed her eyes against the slow fall of threatening tears.

Abruptly Petra opened her eyes, wincing as she tried to move her painfully stiff shoulder.

‘Petra, are you all right?’

She gave a small gasp of shock as she stared into the darkness to where Rashid was sitting beside the bed.

‘Rashid!’

Immediately she struggled to sit up, ignoring the dull nagging ache from her shoulder as she clutched the bedclothes to her body, her heart thudding furiously.

‘You weren’t supposed to be coming back yet! What are you doing here?’

‘What do you think I’m doing here?’ he answered her grimly. ‘I received a message to say that you had been involved in an accident and that there were grave concerns that you could be suffering from concussion. Naturally I caught the first flight back that I could.’

‘You didn’t need to do that.’ Petra protested. ‘I’m perfectly all right… apart from a stiff shoulder,’ she added ruefully.

Whilst she had been speaking Rashid had switched on the lamp at the side of her bed.

Petra sucked in her breath as she saw him properly for the first time. She had never seen him looking so formidably severe, harsh lines etched from his nose to his mouth, his expression wintry and bleak.

‘I’m sorry that you had to come back—’ she began.

‘What on earth were you thinking about?’ Rashid overrode her apology. ‘Is marriage to me really so unbearable that you prefer to throw yourself under the hooves of a horse and be trampled to death?’

Petra stared at him, stunned by the bleak bitterness in his voice.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested. ‘There was a child… I simply acted instinctively, as anyone would have done.’

His frown deepened.

‘I hadn’t heard about a child, only that there had nearly been a terrible tragedy and that you had insisted on leaving the hospital even though there was concern that you might not be well enough to do so.’

‘I have a bruised shoulder, that is all.’ Petra told, him making light of her injury. The truth was that she was far more interested in discovering why the thought of her being injured had brought him all the way home from London than in discussing her very minor bruises with him.

‘When I spoke to the hospital the doctor said that he was concerned there was a risk that you might experience concussion.’

‘You came back because of that?’ Petra was openly incredulous.

‘He warned you that you should not be on your own,’ Rashid told her grimly.

‘He admitted that the risk was minimal and that he was virtually one hundred per cent sure that I would be okay. And anyway I’m not on my own—the staff—’ Petra began.

‘Are not here to keep a proper watch over you,’ Rashid interrupted her. ‘But I am.’

As he spoke he moved, and Petra saw how tired he looked.

‘Rashid, I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘Look, why don’t you go to bed and—’

‘I’m staying right here,’ he told her flatly.

Petra sighed. ‘I promise you, there is no need. If I hadn’t felt completely well I would not have come back to the villa.’

‘That’s fine. But, like I just said, until I’m convinced that you’re okay I’m staying here,’ Rashid reiterated.

Petra sighed again, hunching her uninjured shoulder defensively as she told him tiredly, ‘Have it your own way, Rashid, but honestly there’s no need for you to stay.’

As he reached out to switch off the light Rashid instructed her flatly, ‘Go back to sleep.’

Quietly Petra moved her head. She could hear Rashid breathing, but she couldn’t see him sitting in the chair beside her bed. And then, as she looked across the bed, she saw him.

He was lying on his back on the bed beside her fast asleep.

The moon was up and full, casting a soft silvery light through the gauzy curtains of her room. Propping herself up on one elbow, she studied Rashid’s sleeping form. Watching him sleep and seeing him so vulnerable sent a huge wave of tenderness aching through her.

At some stage he had unfastened the shirt he had been wearing and the white fabric was a pale blur against the darkness of his skin. There was evidence of his long day in the dark shadow bearding his jaw, and her muscles tensed a little in female response to such evidence of his maleness. Before she could stop herself she was reaching out to touch his jaw experimentally with her fingertips, and she felt her tenderness give way to sharply spiked desire.

As her fingers started to tremble she snatched them away, curling them into a fist and imprisoning them with her other hand. But, although she had managed to stop herself from touching him, she couldn’t stop herself from looking at him, her love-hungry gaze fastening greedily on his mouth, his throat, the exposed flesh of his torso.

Now it wasn’t just her fingers that were trembling, it was her whole body! She could feel the hot urgency of her own desire seeping into every nerve-ending—seeping, flowing, flooding through her until it swamped her completely.

Rashid! Tormentedly she mouthed his name, and then jumped back as he stirred in his sleep, his eyes starting to open.

By the time he had fully opened them she had retreated to her own side of the bed and was lying defensively still as she tried to feign sleep.

‘Petra?’ She heard the anxiety in his sleep-thickened voice as he leaned towards her. His hand touched her throat, checking her pulse, monitoring its frantic race.

‘Petra, wake up,’ he was commanding her.

‘Rashid, it’s all right—I do not have concussion,’ she told him briefly, guessing what he was thinking, turning her head to look at him and trying to shrug off his hand as she did so.

But suddenly he had gone completely still, his hand lying against her throat with heavy immobility. His gaze was fixed on her breasts, naked and exposed by her inadvertent negligence in failing to pull the covers up over her body.

She knew immediately and instinctively that he wanted her, and she knew just as instinctively that he would keep to the promise he had made her on the day of their wedding not to force himself on her.

All she needed to do was to reach for her covers and turn away from him. If that was what she wanted…

And if it wasn’t? Hardly daring to acknowledge what was going through her mind, Petra held his gaze. She could feel the longing and need curling through her, gaining force and power, filling her until her whole body felt like a highly tuned instrument of desire, openly aching for his touch. She could feel her breasts swell and lift, her nipples tighten and ache, her belly sink in slightly against the desire flooding her sex.

Lifting her hand, she curled her fingers around his forearm, slowly caressing it, her eyes wide open as she gazed up into his.

She could feel the open tremor of his body at her touch, see the way he was fighting to draw extra air into his lungs. What was he thinking? Feeling? A fierce surge of excitement and power filled her as she read the answer in the hot gleam of his eyes and the immediate response of his body!

‘Hold me, Rashid,’ she commanded him boldly, shuddering violently as he did so, tightening his arms around her so that they were body to body, so that she could feel the heavy, exciting thud of his heart.

‘Love me!’ she whispered passionately against his hot skin, knowing that he could not hear the betraying words, only feel the warmth of her breath.

She heard—and felt—the low growl of sound he made deep in his throat! Frustration? Longing?

Her body responded to it immediately, her lips parting eagerly for the savage sweet pleasure of his kiss.

Instantly she was plunged into a spiral of aching need, a swift descent into the thick velvet heat of her own most primitive longings. Her hand pressed to the back of Rashid’s head, she urged him to increase the pressure of his mouth against her own, until all rational thought was suspended beneath its bruisingly passionate heat.

Petra knew that she should have been horrified by and contemptuous of her own behaviour, that she should have totally resisted her own desire. But instead she could feel her heart turning over inside her chest and then slamming heavily into her ribs as shockingly elemental and savage emotions exploded into life inside her. She had wanted this so much, she recognised dizzily. She had wanted, needed him so much!

‘Petra,’ Rashid groaned against her mouth. ‘This isn’t…’

He moved, his hand accidentally brushing against her breast, and Petra froze. In the darkness she could feel his gaze searching the distance between them, penetrating the moon-silvered darkness and then fixing unerringly on the betraying peak of her nipple, where it pouted with deliberate invitation so dangerously close to his stilled hand.

‘Petra?’ This time when he said her name it held a different note, a male huskiness and timbre that her sensitive female ears interpreted as an open acknowledgement of his desire for her.

She could feel the power that his desire for her gave her. She was all Eve, a wanton temptress, holding her breath whilst she willed him to reach out to her, for her, already knowing the pleasure he would give her.

Very slowly his hand moved back towards her breast. Petra exhaled shakily, and then closed her eyes as he stroked her skin with the lightest of touches—so light that it was little more than a breath, and yet so sensual that her whole breast seemed to swell and yearn towards him.

‘Petra.’

This time her name was muffled beneath the slow, lingering kisses he was threading around the base of her throat like a necklace. A necklace that reached down between her breasts and was then strung from the upper curve of one breast to the other.

At some stage Petra had started to tremble. Tiny little inner secret tremors at first, but by the time Rashid was cupping one breast in his hand, laving the delighted pink-flushed crest of the other with his tongue, they had turned into galvanic shudders of uncontrollable mute delight. And then not so mute, when Petra was forced to bite down hard on her bottom lip to prevent herself from crying out aloud.

When Rashid saw what she was doing he lifted his mouth from her nipple to watch her, and then slid his finger into her mouth, freeing her bottom lip whilst he told her thickly, ‘Taste me instead, Petra!’

Her whole body reacted to his words, swept with a molten need that burned openly in her eyes.

‘Yes! Yes!’ he told her savagely, even though she had said nothing, spoken no question. But Petra knew that he had heard the silent hungry longing of her body, seen her need for him in her eyes.

‘Yes,’ he repeated more softly. ‘Whatever… However… Every which way you want, Petra. Every way, until you beg me to end our mutual torment.’

As he was speaking he was kissing her. Tiny slow kisses that were a torment in themselves as his hands shaped her body, effortlessly drawing from it everything that it ached so wantonly to give him and everything that she herself did not.

Her need, herself, her life. Her love…

She cried out in shocked denial under the touch of his tongue against her sex, and then cried out again in a low, guttural woman’s cry of acknowledgement of the pleasure he was showing her. But when he moaned in response, and placed her hand on his body, her reaction caused him to lift his head and demand rawly, ‘Did you think you are the only one to have pleasure in what I’m doing, in the feel of you, the heat of you, the taste of you? I’ve hungered for you like this Petra, for this intimacy with you… this possession of you.’

As he stopped speaking he turned his head and kissed the inside of her thigh. Petra trembled and then moaned as he kissed her again, more intimately. Her longing for his physical possession of her overwhelmed every other emotion she felt surging through her in an unstoppable, undammable torrent.

Petra didn’t know if she had actually reached for Rashid or if he had simply known how she felt, how she ached… how she loved and needed. But suddenly he was there, where she most wanted him to be. Where she most needed him to be. Filling her with surge after powerful surge of exquisite sensation and unparallelled ecstasy.

She wanted it to never end. And yet she knew she would die if she did not reach the summit, the frantic crescendo of her completion. She thought she already knew the sensation, the pleasure, the fulfilment, but when the spasms began and she felt the hot sweet thickness of Rashid’s own release within her she knew that all she had known had been a pale remembered shadow of real pleasure.