LITMIR.BIZ

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with which he stood there by the closed door studying her with absolutely no hint of remorse written anywhere on his lean dark face.

      ‘How are you?’ he enquired.

      ‘I’m sure everyone has told you exactly how I am,’ Evie replied, in no mood for pleasantries.

      He nodded politely, taking the words at their face value, then strode smoothly forward to pull out and sit down on the chair beside the bed.

      It was only when he came this close to her that Evie saw the slight bruising around his eyes, which showed that the man had been going without sleep—but even those bruises added to his dark brooding sensuality, she noted resentfully.

      That gut-wrenching sensuality that had been catching her out from the first time that she’d ever looked at him.

      In an effort to stop herself from feeling like that, Evie dragged her eyes away and slid her knees up so she could hug them loosely with her arms. Then, head lowered, mouth clamped shut, she grimly waited for him to say what he had waited around this long to say.

      Yet he didn’t speak. He dragged out that silence like a taut piece of string that seemed to be trying to tug her chin up so she would look at him. But Evie refused to look at him, because looking meant communicating, as they had always been able to do with just the merest clash of their eyes. And she didn’t want that kind of communication with him any more.

      ‘I won’t go away just because you wish it, you know,’ he murmured eventually.

      ‘I can’t deal with you right now,’ she answered flatly. ‘Anyone with a bit of sensitivity would have understood that and left me to myself.’

      ‘Because you blame me for what happened?’

      Yes, she blamed him. She’d felt used, ignored, abandoned and abused by the time those two men had left her alone. Raschid had promised her protection. He had promised to call her. He had vowed to make everything work for them.

      ‘I’m sorry my father’s people frightened you so badly.’

      ‘Your father’s people are also your people,’ Evie reminded him. ‘I don’t particularly want you to differentiate between yourself and them.’

      ‘Why not?’

      Why not? she repeated grimly to herself. ‘Because you are no different, and I don’t want to see you as such any more.’

      ‘Meaning?’

      ‘Meaning, I have been shown the light,’ she answered with spiked mockery. ‘And will you stop throwing questions at me as if I am the one standing on trial?’ she flashed. ‘In case you haven’t realised it yet—I am the victim here!’

      ‘And you think I am not just as much a victim?’ His wide chest heaved, lifting and falling on a tense pull of air. ‘I had no idea my father could stoop so low as to pull a lousy stunt like that!’ he said savagely. ‘He now deeply regrets what he did,’ he added, sounding so short and clipped that if she had been anyone else Evie would have read stiff reluctance to offer that information in that haughty tone.

      But she wasn’t anyone else. And she knew this man inside out, so she also knew what that tone of voice really meant.

      Raschid was struggling to keep his real feelings about his father under tight wraps.

      ‘He sends you his most sincere apologies—’

      ‘He’s already done that,’ she clipped, her face going white when she remembered the last person who had said those words to her.

      ‘And begs your forgiveness,’ Raschid doggedly continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

      Evie clamped her lips together and forbore to repeat that his father had also done that before.

      ‘He will, of course, tell you these things personally as soon as he is fit enough to leave hospital.’

      That brought her eyes up and around to stare at him. ‘What hospital?’ she gasped.

      ‘The one I put him in,’ he replied, the words hard with a mockery that had no hint of humour. ‘When he refused to accept that I intended to marry you and not Aisha,’ he went on to explain, ‘I abdicated my right to succession. The shock almost killed him.’

      ‘Oh, Raschid, no,’ Evie groaned, and wondered wretchedly how many people this whole horror story was going to hurt before it was done.

      ‘Still,’ he went on coolly, ‘all’s well that ends well, as you British like to say. My father now has a heart which beats as healthily as my own does, and he is also reconciled to the fact that I will marry where I choose to marry.’

      ‘Not if that marriage includes me, you will not,’ Evie said stiffly.

      His dark head turned, and it was only as it did so that Evie realised that he too had been avoiding all eye contact between them.

      But not now. Those liquid gold eyes now pierced her with a deep, dark, grim intent. ‘You will marry me,’ he proclaimed. ‘I have not spent millions of pounds and too many precious days scouring the Middle East searching for a suitable substitute to take my place as Aisha’s husband, nor did I almost put my own father in his grave and place at risk both you and the child you carry simply to hear you now tell me it was all for nothing!’

      ‘Did I ask you to do all that?’ Evie countered tersely.

      ‘Yes!’ he declared. ‘Every time you told me you loved me, you asked me to do those things!’ he rasped. ‘Every time we simply look at each other, we are demanding from the other that we go to any lengths necessary to be together!’

      He got up, the passion sounding in his voice reflected in the angry movement of his body as he walked across the room to stand glaring out of the window.

      While Evie sat, stunned into utter silence by his vehemence.

      And the worst of it was that he was right! The kind of love they had shared during the last two years had demanded that they go to any lengths to hold on to it!

      But not any more, Evie thought on a shudder. Recent events had gone too far and turned too nasty to hang on to romantic ideals that had no place in reality.

      ‘I can learn to live without your love,’ she told him huskily. ‘I can even live without people’s respect!’ Hadn’t she been doing that very successfully for two whole years now? ‘But I’ve discovered that I cannot live with hatred.’

      ‘My father doesn’t hate you,’ he sighed. ‘He simply saw you as a pawn he could use in the battle he was waging with me.’

      ‘That makes it all right, does it?’ Evie flashed back bitterly.

      ‘No,’ he heavily conceded.

      ‘And I wasn’t the real pawn,’ Evie added. ‘My baby was.’

      ‘Our baby,’ Raschid grimly corrected.

      But Evie shook her head. ‘No matter how you want to cover it up, Raschid, your father wanted this baby dead. I can’t forgive that. I refuse to forgive that! So as far as I am concerned for him this baby is dead,’ she announced. ‘I will not acknowledge you as his father, and he will not bear your name. I will not place his life at risk like that from anyone again.’

      ‘And I have no say in this? Is that what you’re saying?’

      ‘I am saying,’ Evie wearily asserted, ‘that if you care for this child then you will do the right thing by him and forget you ever conceived him.’

      He didn’t say anything for a long time after that. And the silence pealed like the toll of a funeral bell while Evie waited to find out what he was going to do.

      And he looked every inch the heir to a kingdom, she noted helplessly. Body straight, chin high, that lean dark aquiline profile revealing absolutely nothing when in actual fact she knew she had just cut deep into the very heart of him with

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