that was why he was staying? For Sophia’s sake? For the sake of their marriage, for the sake of the duty they had both agreed they would share. For them he would stay, but he would not allow himself the emotional pleasure of drawing her back into his arms to hold her there whilst her heartbeat stilled and he breathed in the warm Sophia-scent of her skin. No, he would not allow himself that, because he did not deserve it.
It was over, and despite the—to her, at least—intense intimacy and closeness of what they had just shared, Ash was already withdrawing from her, still sharing her bed but not touching her, not showing her any tenderness, not saying a word about what to her had been an experience of true unimaginable wonder and delight. And he had wanted what had happened between them; he had wanted it badly. She might not be experienced but no woman could misunderstand the messages his body had given to hers.
To hers?
The sharp sound of Sophia’s indrawn breath with its raw note of pain had Ash frowning, his voice harsh as he demanded, ‘What’s wrong?’ Their lovemaking had been intense and passionate and she had given herself fiercely over to it; if he had accidentally caused her discomfort, that was the last thing he had wanted to happen.
‘Do you really need to ask?’ Sophia challenged him. ‘It wasn’t me you took to bed tonight, was it, Ash? It was Nasreen. That’s my fault for wearing her clothes. I don’t know why I did that. It was wrong. I know you still love her.’
Sophia thought he would do something like that? She thought that he could have the kind of powerful, all-consuming sex they had just had and want anyone but her in his arms? Something—a force, a need, a tidal wave of something he could not suppress—rose up inside him.
‘No,’ he told her. ‘I do not still love Nasreen.’
He paused as though his words had somehow caused a seismic movement within himself over which he had no control, and which had now set in motion an unstoppable force within him—a shift in the weight of his burden and its pressure on the dam behind which he had sealed it away. Like an unstoppable landslide it plunged down on that dam, smashing it apart, tearing at its foundations, words he had never expected to hear himself utter in the privacy of his own thoughts, never mind to anyone else, bursting past its barriers in an unchecked torrent, dragged from the depths by the sheer force of the reaction Sophia’s accusation had aroused within him.
‘The truth is that I never loved Nasreen.’
Shock, disbelief, confusion—Sophia felt them all, but on some deeper level and with the new maturity the short weeks of their marriage had brought her, she could hear the starkness of the truth in Ash’s voice. Those words were dragged from him against his wish or control, the first time she had ever seen any break in that control when it came to his silence on the subject of his first wife. The first time he had allowed her to see what lay behind that silence, and what she could see was a man in torment.
Now that he had started to speak, to his own shock Ash discovered that he couldn’t stop, the words tumbling from him one after the other, as though desperate to finally be heard.
‘I should have loved her. It was my duty to love her.’ His voice was raw with the burden of past pain. ‘It was my duty to make our marriage as filled with love for each other as my great-grandparents’ marriage was. As a boy growing up, orphaned, with only my nurse’s stories of that love to show me what adult love could be, I believed that it was enough for me merely to want to love my chosen bride. I was both naive and arrogant. I made promises to myself for our marriage that I was unable to keep. Over the course of our wedding celebrations when I looked at my bride, despite her undoubted beauty, despite the fact that our marriage was one arranged for us with our best interests at heart, when I listened to her, when I saw how different our goals in life were, when I dismissed her as shallow and empty-headed, selfish and greedy, unkind to those who served her, and not worthy of the great love I had promised myself I would have for her, I showed that I was the one who was not worthy, not worthy of my duty, not worthy of the gift of love shared by my great-grandparents.’
The words were pouring from him with an uncontrollable force now, increasingly desperate to escape and be heard, desperate to escape his desire to have them silenced, as though a part of him had yearned for this escape, this stripping down of himself to the bare bones at the root of his angry contempt for himself, so that his failings could finally be seen in the clear light of day. As though somehow he had been waiting for this moment and this one woman to lay bare his dreadful weakness and shame, because only she would understand, because only she …
‘I should never have married her.’
‘You had no choice,’ Sophia felt bound to point out.
‘I had the choice of choosing another path once I realised that my original goals for our marriage were not achievable. I could and should have chosen then to forge our marriage along different lines, practical royal lines.’
Like their marriage, he meant, Sophia thought. That pain inside her meant nothing. She was as resolved to make their practical marriage work as he was. In fact, she preferred not loving him because not loving him meant that she could not suffer the pain of not being loved back.
‘I didn’t do that, though. I allowed myself to be directed by my own emotions, by my anger at myself for all that our marriage could never be instead of focusing on what it could be.
‘Nasreen was far more practical in that regard. She told me on our wedding night that for her our marriage was merely a diplomatic dynastic union and that her heart along with her body had been given forever to another man.’
Ash heard the shocked indrawn gasp of Sophia’s breath.
‘She told you that she loved someone else?’
‘You pity me? There is no need. The truth is that I was relieved to discover that I would not have to bear the burden of a love from her that I already knew I could not return. However, since I was not prepared to countenance a continuation of their relationship and Nasreen was equally determined that it would continue despite the fact that he was married, there were frequent quarrels and much ill feeling between us. Nasreen’s plan for her married life was that she would live the life of a wealthy titled young woman in Mumbai, socialising with her friends. I, on the other hand, wanted her to spend more time here in Nailpur as my maharani, helping me to improve the quality of the lives of my people.
‘The night she died we had quarrelled even more than usual. I had gone to Mumbai and brought her back with me against her will to attend a formal court event. I had even insisted that she wear a sari that had been embroidered for her by some of the tribeswomen as a wedding gift.
‘Nasreen had objected to all of this. She had further told me that she had no intention of conceiving a child any time soon because being pregnant would stop her from living the life she wanted to live, and that I would have to wait until she was ready.
‘I was furious with her, and told her that I would not allow her to return to Mumbai. Whilst I was engaged in a business meeting she left the palace in the sports car she insisted on keeping here because she said that driving it was the only freedom she could have outside of the city. By the time I was alerted to the fact that she had gone, intending to return to Mumbai, it was too late to stop her. And too late to save her.’
Instinctively Sophia reached out towards him in a gesture of sympathy and compassion. How could the touch of such a cool, healing hand on his own burn him with such intense pain? It was his guilt that was responsible for that pain, Ash told himself, that and the knowledge that he did not deserve Sophia’s compassion, because he did not deserve anything
