she could to keep the father of the child she was carrying as close to her as she could. After all, in prehistoric times the survival of both her and her child would have depended on the willingness and the ability of the father to keep them safe and fed. It made her feel better to be able to give herself this rational explanation for feelings that had made her feel so vulnerable. And it stopped her wanting that physical and emotional closeness to Ash that had so caught her off guard, didn’t it?
She had her babies to think about now, not just herself. She was still learning what it meant to be Ash’s wife and to live by the rules he had imposed on their marriage, and the truth was that living by those rules didn’t come naturally or easily to someone who had always wanted to marry for love. Motherhood, on the other hand, and her feelings of maternal love and protection for the babies she was carrying, was as instinctive and as natural to her as breathing. Just like wanting to reach for Ash’s hand when she had had her scan. But that was forbidden.
How many other things would be forbidden under the complex barriers Ash had erected against love? Would those barriers come between him and his sons? Would they, too, be denied emotional intimacy with their father? Sophia gave a small shiver despite the sunny warmth of the airy room. She must not look for problems. She must be positive and she must be strong—for the sake of their babies.
‘There is no doubt that your people will welcome the arrival of your sons, Highness,’ the royal physician was saying.
Sons. Another unexpected pang gouged Sophia’s sensitive emotions. Had she been carrying daughters, how much of a solace might they have been to her as they grew up, members of her own sex with whom she might have had a special closeness that helped to alleviate the loneliness of being an unloved wife. Sons would be raised as future leaders of their people; sons would align themselves to their father. Sons would pattern themselves on that father. Another chill of dread shivered over her body. That wasn’t what she wanted for her sons. She wanted them to grow up knowing what love was and valuing it.
‘It is a gift indeed that there should be two children, for us and for them,’ said Ash to Dr Kumar.
Sophia was so delicately built despite her lush curves. The thought of her carrying two babies was causing Ash anxieties for which he hadn’t been prepared. Of course, it was only natural that he should be concerned for her well-being. He knew all about the loneliness suffered by a child who lost a parent, and it was equally natural therefore that there should be that core of anxiety within him for Sophia’s health and safe delivery.
Suddenly, as pleased as he was about the conception of his sons, Ash was also aware of a need to withdraw into himself so that he could put a safe distance between himself and the dangerous intensity of the emotions that were threatening to take control of him.
‘I have to go,’ Ash told Sophia abruptly, still not looking directly at her. ‘I have a meeting I have to attend. Dr Kumar will arrange for you to be driven back to the palace and I shall have a word with him about having a nurse on hand there—’
‘No. That’s ridiculous and unnecessary.’ Sophia stopped him, whilst the medical staff discreetly disappeared, leaving them alone in the room.
‘I’m not sick, Ash, I’m pregnant—and healthily pregnant, too.’
‘You are—’
‘—carrying your heirs, yes, I know, and I hope that you don’t think that I would do anything that would prejudice me carrying them safely to full term.’
Sophia’s feisty reaction warned Ash that she wasn’t going to allow him to wrap her in cotton wool.
‘I simply want to make sure that all three of you receive the best care possible,’ Ash defended himself.
All three of them, when he hadn’t even cared enough about her to understand how much she had needed some small show of physical affection from him earlier on whilst she had waited to see her scan?
She must not allow herself to become downhearted, Sophia warned herself later as she was driven back to the palace. It had been a shock for both of them to discover that she was carrying twins. Surely the knowledge that they were to become parents was bound to bring them closer? After all, it was what they both wanted.
IT WAS almost exactly a month since her scan, but far from bringing them closer together those four weeks had, if anything, led to Ash putting an even greater distance between them, Sophia thought as she sat alone in her private courtyard garden in the welcome cool of the evening.
Where the twins were concerned, Ash was scrupulous about keeping a check on their health and her own, but whenever she tried to talk to him on any kind of personal level he retreated from her and changed the subject.
And most humiliating of all for her, as her own need and indeed craving for a loving gentle intimacy with him grew, along with her feelings of emotional insecurity, Ash had rejected her by no longer coming to her bed.
Whilst part of her—the old feisty Sophia—longed to demand to know what had happened to the sexual chemistry he had told her existed between them, the new mother-in-waiting Sophia was far too protective of the future emotional security of the babies she was carrying to want to risk a confrontation that could destroy the increasingly fragile bonds that held them together.
Besides, she seriously thought that Ash’s distance from her was the way things were going to be and that nothing she could say or do could change that, and that really scared her. Not for her own sake but for the sake of their sons. It was one thing for Ash to refuse to let her get close to him, but increasingly she was worrying that he might behave in exactly the same way with the twins, locking them out emotionally. Not necessarily deliberately—she knew how pleased he was about them—but because he simply couldn’t help himself?
She had grown up with a distant father whom she had felt had rejected every attempt she had made to get close to him. She couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to her precious babies. But they would have her, and Ash would be a good and protective father in many other ways. Right now, because her pregnancy was making her feel so emotionally vulnerable, she was achingly conscious of all that she was missing as a woman by not having a husband who loved her, but it was the twins who mattered most, not her. There was no sacrifice of her own personal happiness she was not prepared to make to give them the security of growing up with their parents living together. That didn’t mean that she wasn’t right to feel concerned that Ash might not be able to stop his attitude towards her from spilling over into his behaviour towards his sons.
In the privacy of his own suite, Ash paced the floor of his office. He had taken to working late into the evening, telling himself that he needed to ensure that all his projects were up to date ahead of the birth of the twins, but he knew that the reality was he worked late because that was the only way he had of blotting out the demons that were stalking him.
It was illogical and … and unnecessary, unwanted and unacceptable to him, this almost constant need he had to be with Sophia. And not just to be with her. He wanted … Ash stopped pacing, a dark frown slashing his forehead. He had told himself that it would be no hardship for a man of his level of self-discipline to deny himself Sophia’s bed as a precautionary measure to ensure the safety of her pregnancy—after all, as good and passionate as the sex between them had been it was only sex—but the truth was that with every night without her, his desire for her found a thousand different new ways in which to torture him. Just the memory of the scent of her skin,
