LITMIR.BIZ

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in a thick silk curtain around her slender shoulders as she lowered her weary brow to rest it against her knees.

      The feel of a jacket dropping across her hunched shoulders should have surprised her, but oddly it didn’t. She would have been more surprised if Raschid had simply walked away and left her to it.

      ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said.

      ‘No,’ was all he replied, and dropped down on the grass beside her.

      Turning her face on her knees so she could look at him through the curtain of her hair, Evie found herself gazing at a sombre profile that was, even so, the most beautifully structured profile she had ever seen. Like her, his knees were up, but parted so his wrists could rest upon them. His dress shirt stood out bright in the moonlight; his skin was like polished bronze.

      Her heart swelled in her breast, swelled and swelled until she thought it was going to burst under the power of her wretched love for him.

      He turned to look at her, sombre-eyed and flat-mouthed. ‘Are you ready to tell me what is wrong, now?’

      No, she thought miserably. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready. And she turned her face to stare moodily at the lake so she didn’t have to look at him.

      ‘Your mother thinks you are ill,’ he added when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to say anything.

      I am, she thought. Soul-sick and heartbroken. ‘I didn’t know you had that kind of conversation with my mother,’ she remarked.

      ‘I don’t, usually,’ he dryly admitted. ‘But this one took the form of a—confrontation.’

      Ah, Evie was very intimate with those kinds of conversations with her mother. ‘I’m not ill,’ she assured him.

      ‘Then what the hell is the matter with you?’ he rasped, suddenly losing all patience. ‘Because it has been patently obvious to me for weeks now that something certainly is!’

      ‘I thought I told you I didn’t want another verbal battle tonight!’ she snapped right back.

      ‘Then don’t turn this into one!’ He turned the tables on her as quick as a flash. ‘You are my life, my heart, my soul, Evie,’ he added gruffly. ‘I would do anything for you; I thought you knew that.’

      ‘Except marry me,’ she said, then grimaced at herself for stupidly blurting it out like that.

      His answering sigh was heavy. It wasn’t words but—good grief—it spoke volumes in other ways. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

      ‘No,’ she denied, and went to get up, but his hand came out to press her down again.

      ‘Talk,’ he commanded. ‘Or reconcile yourself to the uncomfortable prospect of spending the night right here.’

      He meant it, too; that tough macho gleam was in his eyes again. On a sigh she subsided. He let go of her, recognising the sigh as a gesture of defeat. Evie turned her gaze back to the moonlit lake once again, felt a tightness pull around her chest, and said flatly, ‘I’m pregnant.’

      CHAPTER FIVE

      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

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