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.
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