‘As I—promised?’
‘At the banqueting table—in return for the sweet treats I gave you.’
Now she understood. Part of it, at least. He wasn’t just talking about the way she had used his name at his urging but the other, silent, sensual promises she had given him when she had taken the grape from him, moulding her mouth around his fingers.
‘I thought you were angry. That I’d done something wrong.’
She was sure he’d been furious with her and that that had driven him to the unexpectedly hasty departure from his own wedding reception. But there was still something wrong with his tone, something that twisted deep inside her, warning her to tread carefully.
‘Should I be angry?’ Nabil demanded. ‘Tell me—have you done anything wrong?’
‘I thought that you thought perhaps I was too familiar...’
‘You’re the first person—apart from Clementina and Karim—the first person to behave in a real way ever since...’
He was thinking of Sharmila. Of the woman who had been his wife. His love. His life.
For a moment Aziza couldn’t see straight enough to focus on the hand he held out to help her to her feet. Just in the same moment that he had given her something of what she yearned for, he had managed to take it all away again. In the heightened atmosphere of the ceremony, she had allowed herself to think that for once she was someone who mattered. Someone who was not just the ‘other daughter’, the one her father had to find a husband and provide a dowry for.
Now she knew that while she might be his bride, his Queen, she was only a queen of convenience, chosen because his duty to the country demanded it. The wife of his heart was dead, and no one would ever replace her. Certainly not the woman he only remembered as a child all those years before. His ‘other wife’ as she now was.
‘You treated me as a man.’
Nabil’s voice had deepened, grown rough, and his hands tightened on her arms as he hauled her to her feet, holding her so firmly that she felt her skin must bruise where his fingers dug into her.
Why the hell had he had to remember Sharmila now, when those memories could only add to the brutal conflict inside him? It was those memories that stilled his hand, he realised, stopped him from grabbing at that damned veil and flinging it up over her head to see what she really looked like—who she really was. He should have done that immediately, revealed who she was from the start so that he knew what he was dealing with, but the simple fact that he had hesitated told him more than he wanted to know about his own feelings.
Damn it, he should have gone with his first instincts and taken the maid called Zia there and then on the balcony on the night of the celebration, when there would have been no legal, no dynastic, implications involved. If this was indeed Zia who had recognised his hunger for her and used it as part of a plot to trap him.
‘A man you wanted. Was that true?’
‘True?’ Aziza echoed shakenly, the harsh demand in his tone making her see her own behaviour through his eyes, and quail inside at the thought of how brazen it must have seemed. ‘Y-Yes.’
She had been so stunned by her own immediate and urgent response to him that she hadn’t been able to hide it. He was a man whose reputation with women was well-known. He had the freedom to play the field as he wanted, but surely he was traditional enough to expect a virgin, innocent bride? She was definitely the former; any daughter brought up under her father’s strict regime would have to be untouched until married.
But what would Nabil want? How would he view her after that admission? The whole reality of the moment in her life she had come to ricocheted around her head. She was married. To the most gorgeous, devastating male she had ever met, and this was her wedding night. When her husband would have the right to take her, to make her his. Uncertainty flooded through her at the thought. Was it possible that he was regretting his choice?
‘And I want you.’
Nabil’s voice, rough and raw, broke into her whirling thoughts, setting her mind spinning off on to another track altogether. Was it possible that she could have this effect on this powerful, forceful male?
‘But—everyone thought... Jamalia...’
‘Your sister?’ A brusque, almost violent gesture of rejection underlined his words in a way that startled and confused. ‘Sure, she’d look wonderful on the stamps. But you...’
The word sounded thick and raw, making a stunned excitement start to uncoil in her stomach. The sting of need that tightened her breasts was like an electric current passing through her so that she shifted uncomfortably where she stood.