In her bedroom Sophia stared at the stranger looking back at her from the full-length mirror, a stranger wearing another woman’s clothes and smelling of another woman’s scent…. The salwar kameez was slightly loose on her own narrow waist and Nasreen must have been a shade taller than her because the fabric was pooling slightly on the floor around her bare feet. The fine silk shimmered as she walked, subtly hinting at the body that lay beneath it, the diamante beading decorating the scarf with which she had covered her head shimmering as she moved.
Experimentally, Sophia draped the scarf over her lower face, and watched her image in the full-length mirror in front of her. Was this what Ash longed for whenever he had to look at her? Another woman, the woman he truly loved?
He shouldn’t be doing this but he couldn’t help or stop himself, Ash admitted, too impatient to use the public twisting labyrinth of corridors that led to Sophia’s apartments, using instead the passage that his great-grandfather had had installed when the royal apartments had been remodelled so that he and Ash’s great-grandmother could come and go to each other without the knowledge of the servants or the need for formality.
The hidden door in the wall of the entrance hall to Sophia’s apartment, disguised to look like a painting, opened easily to his touch. He might not normally use the passage but that did not mean that it was not kept clean and in order by his household.
Ash pushed open the door to Sophia’s bedroom. And then froze as he stared at the back view of the woman in front of him, not wanting to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
Nasreen. Even though he knew it couldn’t be, a surge of the darkest feelings he thought he had ever experienced eviscerated his guts. His first wife had no place here. Just as she had, in reality, no place in his heart? Just as he now had no right to want to forget that his marriage to her had ever taken place? His own thoughts fell into the darkness of his guilt, trapping him ever deeper in its grip.
The woman moved, and instantly he knew.
Sophia.
Only Sophia with that incredible body of hers could move and walk like that.
Anger. A huge rolling wall of it powered through him. Anger against Nasreen for betraying the duty they had owed each other, anger against Sophia for her intrusion into that place within his conscience where even he could not bear to go, and most of all anger against himself. An anger that came out of nowhere, like a desert storm obliterating reality, destroying the landscape within himself, leaving him alone and defenceless against its power and what it had created. In three strides he was at Sophia’s side, reaching for her to turn her round, to face him as he demanded, ‘Take it off. Take if off now unless you want me to tear it from you.’
THE shock of Ash’s presence as a witness to something she could only ever want to be private, never mind the fury she could see and feel in him, had Sophia dropping the corner of the scarf, guilt darkening her eyes and burning up under her skin.
What a dreadful thing to happen. It was bad enough that she had been caught by anyone trying on Nasreen’s clothes, but that it should be Ash who had found her just at the moment when she herself had tasted the acid agony of shame in what she was doing heaped a humiliation on her that she knew was deserved. No wonder Ash was so very, very angry with her. What she had done was surely a violation of something precious and a privacy that should never have been breached by anyone.
She wanted to apologise to Ash. She wanted to tell him that she had only realised too late what an unforgivable thing she was doing in letting her curiosity and envy of Nasreen get the better of her, but Ash was so angry he wouldn’t even let her speak.
The sight of Sophia in Nasreen’s clothes made Ash feel as though raw flesh had been ripped from his body, the anger, the shame, the bitterness he felt infusing that guilt with true darkness. He had no right to blame Nasreen and the memory of their marriage for making him feel like this. And no right to feel that he was being cheated of something that deep down inside he ached for, though he knew he had no right to ache for it. Someone or something? He had come here tonight to be with Sophia after far too many long days—and even longer nights—of battling his own inner demons as he fought to allow himself a logical reason for appeasing the need he knew she aroused in him. That might be a need he had no right to allow himself, but tonight, with the future of his name to the forefront of his mind, he had assured himself that being with Sophia, having sex with her, was permissible under the rules he had laid down for himself after Nasreen’s death.
Now with the anger boiling inside him, at what unforgivably his senses were now seeing as an unwanted intrusion of Nasreen, and the past into the intimacy he ached to share with Sophia, his guilt could only increase. He had no right even to have such feelings, never mind seek to satisfy them. He had no right to want Sophia. He had no right to anything other than the burden of the guilt he must never, ever forget. And by rights now he should turn round and walk away as a punishment to himself, not returning to Sophia until he had stripped from himself every vestige of personal desire and need for her.
The movement of Sophia’s body as she tried to pull away from his hold on her wrist disturbed the air around her, releasing into it the sickeningly familiar odour of Nasreen’s scent. He could still remember how it had hung between them on their wedding night after he had realised that he could never love her. Heavy and oversweet, it clung now to the air, draining it of oxygen, cloying and all-pervading, filling him with revulsion.
‘Take it off. All of it,’ he demanded again, his voice harsh with the emotional weight of years of guilt, anger and despair added to the even more burdensome weight of his desire for Sophia herself.
Ash released her abruptly, the revulsion he felt for her behaviour written plainly on his face. He couldn’t bear to touch her and he couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with her. She couldn’t blame him for that. What she had done had been unforgivable, but it was too late now to wish that she had been stronger and that she had resisted temptation. If she had … Ash had plainly come to her intending to take her to bed. Against all logic her body reacted to that knowledge with a surge of fierce longing. Longing for a man who’d had sex with her once and then hadn’t come near her for three weeks? Sex with a man who had shown her body what sensual pleasure could be, the only man—thanks to the vows she had made—who would ever have sex with her. She was a normal, modern healthily functioning woman, so wasn’t it only natural that her body should want to know again that sensual pleasure? Without love? Without respect? Without Ash wanting anything from her other than an heir?
Where was her pride? This was not the right time for them to come together as prospective parents-to-be. She must remember that she was a Santina. She must remember the role to which she was now committed. She wanted Ash to leave so that she could rid herself of Nasreen’s clothes and her shame in private. She made to walk past him. She was trembling from head to foot, desperate now to remove the silk garments.
Thinking that Sophia was ignoring him, half maddened by his own unbearable feelings, Ash reached for Sophia again, dragging her towards him as though the very sight of her in Nasreen’s clothes maddened him beyond all sanity, tearing the scarf from her, and then, to Sophia’s shock, reaching for the neck of the tunic and starting to rip it apart.
‘No, Ash,’ Sophia pleaded with him. He would hate himself later for the destruction of Nasreen’s beautiful outfit, she knew, and he would hate her even more for being the cause of that destruction. He wasn’t listening to her, though, wasn’t paying her any attention at all, as she struggled in his hold. He refused to let
