father is allowing Alex to choose his own bride, so why should I have to submit to having my husband chosen for me?’ Her brother’s engagement had come as a complete surprise to her, and to Carlotta, the sibling to whom she was the closest. ‘You loved Nasreen. Why shouldn’t I be loved and love in return within my own marriage?’
The passion with which she spoke confirmed what he had already told himself about the emotional intensity she would bring to her sexual relationships. Such emotions had no place in his life any more, and he was determined that they never would. And if he could have her without those emotions? If they could enjoy each other now as the sexually experienced adults they both were? The rush of fierce male urgency that surged though his body gave him its own answer. But then there had never been any doubt about his awareness of her as a woman from the minute he had turned round tonight and seen her coming towards him.
In fact, if he was honest, Ash couldn’t remember ever before having such an immediate and insistent ache of hunger for a woman to the extent that it came between him and the cool logic of the business affairs to which he gave priority these days.
He had to distance himself from her.
‘My marriage is my business,’ he told her curtly, as he fought against his reaction to the thought of taking her to bed.
She had done it again, Sophia recognised. She had trespassed into a private place where she was not welcome. Because he still loved Nasreen?
That pain she could feel in the region of her heart was simply caused by the fact that if her father succeeded in marrying her off to this prince, she would never know what it felt like to be loved in that way. It wasn’t for any other reason—such as her wishing that it was Ash who loved her. Certainly not. She wasn’t sixteen any more. And neither was she going to let the subject drop. To her family she was the rebellious ‘difficult’ one, the one who was always challenging the status quo and pushing their father, the one who bit harder than anyone else. That was her reputation and she wasn’t going to abandon it now just because Ash was looking at her in that forbidding, icily cold way.
Nasreen. Ash wished that Sophia hadn’t mentioned her name, but she had.
He had vowed that he would love the bride who had been chosen for him, and that their marriage would be one of mutual, total faithfulness to each other. Loving the woman who had been promised to him in marriage from childhood had been a matter of great pride and honour to him, and a duty that he had taken seriously.
Orphaned as a young boy, he’d been brought up by an elderly nurse, whose stories about the great love affair between his great-grandfather and his English bride had built a responsibility within him to love and cherish the young maharani who would one day be his bride. Love mattered more than anything else, his nurse had told him. He must love his bride and she would love him back, with that love making up for the loneliness he had known as an orphan. After listening to his nurse he had believed when he married he would love his bride as completely and faithfully as his famous warrior ancestor had loved his.
Had that belief sprung from arrogance or naivety? He didn’t know. His mouth twisted in a grim expression of bitter self-contempt.
He only knew that the harsh reality of his marriage and the death of his wife—a death for which he believed that, in part at least, he had to carry a burden of blame—meant that he would never, ever again allow emotion into any intimate relationship he had with a woman. Never again would he mix sex and love. Never. Sex was a pleasure and a need, but it was just sex. He could allow himself to want a woman but he could not allow himself to love her.
CHAPTER THREE
ASH must still love Nasreen very much indeed to react to the mere mention of her as he had just done, Sophia decided.
How she hungered to be loved like that, wholly and completely, as herself and not for her royal blood. One day, one day she would find that love, Sophia assured herself fiercely, just so long as she remained free to look for it, and wasn’t forced into a marriage she didn’t want. Her passionate nature, like molten lava compressed for too long beneath unforgiving stone, pushed against the unspoken rules of never betraying any real feelings in the Santina family. Before she could stop herself she had burst out, in self-betrayal, ‘My parents don’t believe that love matters. Duty to our family name is all that counts. Especially to my father.’
The pain in her voice caught Ash’s attention. He knew her history so well that he could easily recognise the real reason for the way her voice had trembled over those telling words … my father.
What was happening to him? He had a thousand more important things on which he ought to be focusing. The negotiations he had been involved in to turn the empty, decaying palaces which had once belonged to minor, now long-dead members of his extended family into elegant hotel and spa facilities were at a vitally important stage, as was the exhibition of royal artifacts being mounted by his charity to raise money to help educate the poor of India. These should be at the forefront of his mind, not this wayward passionate and far too desirable young woman standing in front of him.
He needed to bring their conversation to an end.
‘I’m sure that your father only wants what’s best for you,’ he told her as he had done before. He knew that his words were bland and meaningless but why should he try to comfort and reassure her? Why should he care what happened to her? He didn’t, Ash assured himself.
Best for her? Wasn’t that what he had said to her all those years ago before he had walked away from her? That refusing the plea she had made to him was ‘best for her’ when what he had meant was that it was best for him.
‘The best for me?’
Ash could see the bitterness and the despair in her eyes as she shook her head in rejection of his words.
‘No!’ The second vigorous shake of her head that accompanied her denial had the dark cloud of her soft curls and waves sliding sensuously over her bare shoulders, reminding him … Reminding him of what? Of how much his body was still aching for her?
‘What my father wants is what he thinks is the best for him and for the Santina family. And as far as he’s concerned I’ve always been an unwanted and unexpected addition to the family.’ The softness of her mouth twisted painfully as she challenged him. ‘You know that’s true, Ash. You know the gossip about … about my birth as well as I do.’
It was true. He had been a boy, invited back for the school holidays with Alex after Alex’s mother had realised that he was an orphan with no family with which to spend the long holidays from their British boarding school; Sophia herself had barely started school when he had first heard the rumours that the king might not be her father.
‘You have the Santina looks,’ was all he felt able to say to her now.
‘That is what my mother said when I asked her if it was true that the English architect everyone gossiped about might be my father, but doesn’t it tell you something that never once whilst I was growing up did anyone ever suggest I should have a DNA test?’
‘What it tells me is that both your parents were so sure that you are their child that a DNA test wasn’t necessary.’
‘That’s what Carlotta says,’ Sophia admitted, ‘but then with an illegitimate child of her own and her refusal to say who the father is, she would say that, wouldn’t she?’ Normally Sophia wouldn’t have been so outspoken about Carlotta’s situation. The birth of Carlotta’s son, Luca, had meant that she, too, was out of favour
