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.
‘Damn it to hell, Aziza, but I hate this blasted veil.’
His fingers tangled in it, tugging at the delicate material roughly in a way that pulled painfully at the many tiny pins that held it in place. ‘How do we get rid of it?’
‘Let me...’
The hand she put up to her head, hunting out the first of the pins in her hair, shook almost as much as her voice. But at least she knew what she was doing with this. When her mother, aided by her personal maid, had put the veil on her, working her way around her head to fasten it to the twists and braids of the ornate hair style into which her black hair was piled up underneath, she had made sure that her daughter knew just where each fastening would be placed, and how many pins there were so that Aziza would know how to remove the concealing covering for herself.
‘It’s designed so that it won’t move or come loose—until...’
Just for a second the flying fingers slowed, stilled, came to a complete stop with the last couple of pins in their reach as Aziza struggled with the reality of just what was happening. Apprehension fought with anticipation, a wild, fizzing excitement at the thought that this man—her husband—really had wanted her, not her sister.
‘Done!’ she managed on a long exhalation of breath, taking the veil in one hand, lifting it, flinging it in the opposite direction to the pins so that it rose wildly into the air, hovered for a moment then drifted slowly and elegantly down to the floor like some giant gauzy cloud.
Then she turned to see Nabil, to meet his eyes, for once free and unrestricted by the concealing curtains.
And saw his whole face change. Saw every muscle draw tight over his harsh, etched bone structure, pulling the skin white around the nose and mouth. Saw the light fade from his eyes to be replaced by a heavy shadow that spoke of the exact opposite of what she had hoped to see in his reaction.
He even took a single step backwards, away and so much more distant from her than the paces between them. His obvious mental withdrawal was far, far worse than any physical response he had made.
‘Nabil...’
It was just a whisper, dragged from a mouth that was suddenly too dry to speak properly. Even as she said it, she was forced to wonder whether in fact that was the biggest mistake of all.
Had he given her permission to use his name? She’d thought he had, but as she met the polished jet darkness of those deep-set eyes she saw no lessening of the frozen coldness, no warming to soften them.
‘Sire...’ she tried again, anxious to repair the mistake—if a mistake it had been. Desperate to appease him she sank into a deep curtsey too, giving him the respect and deference he was owed as the Sheikh.
Her husband but still the Sheikh.
‘Sire...’ he muttered, echoing her shaken response with dark cynicism.
With a movement like the pounce of a hunting cat, he moved forward, reached for her left hand, grabbing it and lifting it from where it was partially hidden by the sweeping skirt of her wedding gown.
‘Sire,’ he said again and the danger in that dark tone drained all the power from Aziza’s legs so that she could only stay crouched halfway to the floor, staring with unfocused eyes as she watched him lift the hand he’d captured, turn it so that he could see it more clearly. His black frowning gaze fixed on the slightly damaged shape of her littlest finger and too late she realised that he had stared at it in something of the same way before. On the night on the balcony.
The night when she had told him...
‘Zia...’ Nabil said again, his tone turning the sound of her nickname into a fiendish curse. ‘Not Aziza—but Zia.’
He spat the word at her, not troubling to hide the fury he was feeling.
‘Hellfire and damnation—I have married the maid!’
HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION—I’ve married the maid!
Or have I?
Nabil tried to make his mind focus but nothing registered except the appalling truth of those seven impossible words. Was that his pulse thundering inside his head, beating at his temples, or had a storm really broken on the horizon, threatening to drown any attempt to think straight?
‘Who the hell are you?’
No—stupid question. He knew exactly who she was—or did he? Aziza, his arranged bride—or Zia, ‘just a maid’? Shaking his head violently as his scrambled brain refused to put any words together in a logical sequence, Nabil tried to enforce some control on the thinking processes that had been shattered by shock and savage rage. The fact that his body was still rock hard with desire only made matters even worse.
Just moments before he had been burning up with sexual hunger; turned on as he had never been before in his life. Now it felt as if someone had punched him right in the gut and the throbbing ache of frustration only soured his temper even more than the mental bruising.
‘Who?’
He
