Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride / The Spanish Husband / The Bellini Bride. Michelle Reid

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СКАЧАТЬ squirm, so much so that she jerked her arm as Asim was reapplying the bandage.

      ‘I hurt you?’ he asked sharply.

      ‘Everyone is hurting me,’ Evie replied with a wealth of pained anger.

      Surprisingly he seemed to understand the remark because he said nothing else and a few moments later he was getting to his feet.

      ‘Can I shower with this?’ Evie enquired.

      ‘It would be better if you didn’t get the arm wet,’ he advised.

      She nodded stiffly. ‘Then do you think you could arrange a taxi for me while I go and get dressed?’

      It wasn’t a request, though it had been voiced as one, and she didn’t wait for his reply before getting up and walking into the bathroom.

      Ten minutes later she was back in the bedroom, washed, dressed in the jeans and tee shirt she had arrived here wearing that same morning. She was in the process of tying back her hair when Raschid stepped into the room.

      She glanced at him then away again. But the glance had clung long enough to notice that he had changed too, and was now wearing one of his razor-sharp business suits. She also had time to note an unusual wariness in the way he was studying her—which she gained a nasty kind of satisfaction from seeing, because it meant that he wasn’t quite so sure of her any more.

      ‘Your mother has gone,’ he informed her.

      That didn’t surprise Evie. Her mother was going to need time to come to terms with this next dreadful scandal that was about to fall on their seemingly beleaguered family.

      ‘Asim tells me you have requested a taxi,’ he said next. ‘Why?’

      ‘So I can leave here,’ she coolly replied. ‘What else?’

      ‘Where do you intend to go?’

      ‘Home, to Westhaven, probably,’ she said. ‘To hide away there as dreaded black sheep do when they’re in deep trouble.’

      Her sarcasm was acute; his sigh revealed his impatience with it. ‘Don’t deride yourself like that,’ he snapped.

      ‘Why not?’ she countered. ‘It’s the truth after all—or at least it is the truth as everyone else is going to see it once this mess gets out.’

      ‘Don’t be foolish!’ he rasped. ‘You are overwrought and overreacting! Once we marry no one will give a damn when or why our baby was conceived!’

      Oh, very tactful, Evie thought acidly. ‘I think I’ve said this to you before,’ she flashed back at him. ‘But this time I mean it—I wouldn’t marry you now if you came gift-wrapped in rubies! I would never be able to live with what you were secretly thinking about me, you see!’

      ‘I do not suspect you of getting pregnant deliberately!’ he ground out angrily.

      Evie didn’t answer, but her cynical expression said a lot as her trembling fingers struggled to capture the final strands of gold hair that had escaped the ribbon she had tied the rest in.

      ‘Okay,’ he conceded with a heavy sigh. ‘There was a moment—a very brief moment—when the suspicion did occur to me,’ he admitted. ‘What man wouldn’t consider such a proposition given the circumstances of our relationship?’

      ‘A man who knew me well enough to know I would rather die than use those kind of tactics to trap him?’ Evie suggested.

      The sound of his sardonic huff of laughter had Evie spinning around to stare at him. ‘It seems to me that it is you who feels trapped by this situation, Evie, and that is what is really eating away at you.’

      Was it? she wondered. Then heavily admitted to herself that he was most probably right. She did feel trapped in a situation that there was no way out of unless she seriously took on board the only other option open to her.

      An ice-cold shudder went ripping through her; Raschid saw it and released a heavy sigh. ‘Look…’ he said, walking towards her. His hands came up, gripped her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry if I offended you earlier. But—don’t you think we have enough problems to deal with between us, without you and I fighting with each other?’

      ‘It all feels so ugly,’ she shakily confessed. ‘And it’s only promising to get uglier.’

      She meant once his father was involved, and Raschid instinctively understood that. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘I will turn this to our advantage if it is the last thing I do.’

      But at what expense? His father’s pride? His country’s pride? Their own wretched pride?

      ‘Already your dear mama is feeling most unexpectedly maternal,’ he added softly.

      Lifting her lashes, Evie found herself looking into warm, dark, wryly amused eyes.

      ‘Her final command to me before she left,’ he explained, ‘was to be sure I took precious care of her daughter or I would have her to contend with.’ He smiled. ‘I think we found a common ground for the first time ever when we both offended you as we did.’

      ‘You are both more alike than you think,’ Evie murmured. ‘You are both arrogant, both pushy, both too full of yourself.’

      ‘While you are nothing more than our tragically misunderstood victim; is that what you’re saying?’

      Evie grimaced. Put like that, she had made herself sound pathetic. ‘Your own father still has to have his say in this,’ she reminded him.

      ‘He isn’t some kind of ogre, Evie,’ Raschid replied soberly. ‘If the idea of you carrying a baby can soften your mother’s attitude towards me, then there is a good chance it can soften my father’s attitude to you.’

      ‘What—so we can all play happy families together?’ Her tone alone said she didn’t see much hope of that ever happening.

      ‘At least you can give him a chance before you completely condemn him.’

      A chance? Oh, yes, Evie could at least give him that. But she didn’t really hold out much hope for a happy ending to this.

      ‘So, what happens next?’ she asked.

      Raschid removed his hands from her and straightened his shoulders in a way that reminded Evie of those occasions she had watched him donning his official robes.

      ‘I go home to Behran to break the news to him,’ he replied.

      ‘What—now—today?’

      ‘Yes.’ He took a quick glance at his watch. ‘In the next ten minutes to be more precise.’ He looked at her then, golden eyes darkened by questions.

      ‘I really caused you a lot of problems when I didn’t tell you about the baby two weeks ago, didn’t I?’ she murmured penitently.

      His shrug said it all. ‘I could have diverted my father from this course he has taken if I had known then, yes.’

      ‘I was such a miserable coward,’ СКАЧАТЬ