He stared at her, and his voice grew quiet and serious. ‘I needed to live a little, to experience something of the world—to give in to some of the temptations of the flesh so that those temptations would not haunt me for the rest of my life. Does that sound incredibly selfish?’
She thought about it. ‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ she said honestly. Jenna had a pragmatic streak herself, and she was now beginning to see why Rashid had acted as he had. She might not like it, but she could understand it. Not that she was going to let him know that. Not yet. ‘Particularly as you would have gone berserk if I had done the same thing.’
‘This much is true,’ he admitted, and his eyes were rueful as he touched the tips of her fingers to his lips. ‘You think it unfair?’ he questioned.
‘I don’t think it’s unfair, I know it’s unfair!’ she retorted, knowing in her heart that it had not seemed that way to her. But then, she had never really wanted any other man in the way that she wanted her Sheikh.
He nodded. ‘Yes. As in so much of life, sweet Jenna mine.’ He looked down into her upturned face and saw the question in her beautiful eyes.
Say it, she thought, unable to look away from his glittering ebony gaze. Please just say it. Tell me that all these years I haven’t cherished false hopes. Tell me what I felt on our honeymoon was real. Even if it is incomplete, tell me that there is something between us which could grow and grow.
‘I love you, Jenna,’ he said simply, but she heard the unfamiliar tremble of emotion in his voice.
Tears brightened her eyes and then his voice became urgent. ‘Don’t you know that, my own sweet love? Believe me when I tell you that I have always loved you. Always,’ he breathed, but his face tightened with a fleeting look of regret. ‘I thought I needed to find out what I was missing,’ he sighed. ‘Only now I realise that I wasn’t missing anything at all.’
‘But you let me go away to America,’ she accused, though as accusations went it was pretty much on the gentle side.
‘Don’t you know why?’ he demanded. ‘I had just inherited a country in turmoil—so how in heaven’s name could I have taken on a wife at the same time?’
‘And if I’d stayed then you couldn’t have gone on having all your other women, could you?’ she asked jealously.
‘If you’d stayed I would have been unable to think or eat or sleep or breathe with the frustration of wanting you,’ he admitted heatedly. ‘Your beauty exploded into life like a flower, my sweet Jenna, and it so captured me with its sweet perfume that I was unable to think of anything else. And certainly not about Quador.’ He bent his face close to hers. ‘Oh, Jenna—can you still find it in your heart to love me, my wife?’
For the first time in her life she saw vulnerability written on the proud, cold face of a man whom she had always considered to be invulnerable.
But beneath the magnificent body and the heavy weight of his destiny he was reaching out for her in a way she had always dreamed of. Stripping away the proud and arrogant exterior to show her, and only her, the heart of the man which lay beneath.
‘Can you?’ he repeated huskily. ‘Love me?’
She felt filled with a new and heady kind of power, and she curved her lips into a thoughtful smile.
‘I can,’ she agreed serenely.
He briefly closed his eyes and expelled a long, shuddering breath, unaware that he had been holding it. ‘And I will spend the rest of my life showing you how much I love you,’ he promised shakily.
It was time to test out her new power! ‘I shall look forward to that,’ she purred, but shook her head as he lowered his mouth to claim hers in a kiss. ‘On two conditions, Rashid.’
‘Conditions?’ He frowned the frown of a man who was unused to making concessions of any kind. ‘What kind of conditions?’ he asked suspiciously. ‘And how many?’
‘Only two,’ she answered demurely.
‘Then name them!’
‘Firstly, I want to use my law training to help negotiate the freedom of the Quador press.’
‘A free press?’ Rashid demanded. ‘It is unheard of!’
‘In the past, yes. But the internet has made news so accessible,’ she argued. ‘You know it has! So why must we be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, my love? Why not embrace change willingly?’
He frowned, unable to fault her logic. ‘And the second condition?’ he growled.
‘I want you to persuade my father to allow my sister to marry the man she loves.’
CHAPTER TEN
THE band was playing as Rashid smiled down into his wife’s eyes. ‘A very different wedding from our own,’ he observed softly.
She smiled back at him. These days she never seemed to stop smiling! ‘Outwardly, very different indeed,’ she agreed, her voice low. ‘But you were the one who once told me that a wedding is a wedding is a wedding. And the emotion is the same for everyone, surely?’