The heavy oak door swung smoothly inwards on well-oiled hinges, and her brother Julian stepped into the room.
He looked gorgeous, already dressed in his formal grey morning suit with its dashing silver silk waistcoat and cravat.
‘Hi,’ he greeted. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘It should be me asking you that question,’ Evie smiled.
His answering shrug showed that Julian was not in the least bit nervous about what was to come. He loved Christina to distraction and Christina openly adored him. This was no carefully arranged union between two noble dynasties.
‘Mother’s having a panic attack over the state of her hat or some such thing,’ he drawled. ‘So I thought I would come and hide in here.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Evie murmured, following him with wryly understanding eyes as he went to stand by her window.
Their mother could be an absolute tyrant when she was stressed out or angry. Today she would be feeling stressed out, worrying that she didn’t let the family down, that her choice of outfit was absolutely perfect, that she looked exactly what she was—the upper-class super-elegant mother of the handsome baronet groom.
‘I can’t believe they’ve stuck you right out here on the edge of the world,’ Julian complained, checking out the view she had of the stable block that had been temporarily turned into a car park.
The vast fifty-bedroom castle had been split into two pieces for the wedding, the east wing housing guests of the groom while the guests of the bride occupied the west wing. The further east you went, the smaller the rooms became until—this one, where the old tester bed almost filled it and the plumbing was antiquated—a message in itself to the dreaded black sheep.
Smiling to herself, Evie turned back to the mirror. ‘I have been put here because this is so obviously a single room,’ she explained, using the exact same words Christina’s stiffly smiling mother had used when she’d shown her in here earlier that morning. ‘And I am so obviously a single woman,’ she tagged on in mockery of herself.
‘They’re all such damned hypocrites,’ Julian grunted in disgust. ‘They might disapprove of you and what you do in your private life, but they don’t have to be so obvious about it. I wouldn’t mind,’ he added, ‘but they had the damned barefaced cheek to invite him!’
‘Not for my benefit.’
‘No,’ her brother acknowledged grimly. ‘They invited him because they can’t afford to offend him—despite what he is to you.’
‘And he had the damned bad taste to accept,’ Evie said.
‘Your doing?’ Julian asked.
‘No,’ she denied, her voice cooling considerably because she’d wondered if Julian had been suspecting her of trying to manipulate the situation. ‘Actually, I asked him not to come.’
And he told me to go to hell, she recalled with a weary grimace. Not that she had expected anything less from him. Raschid was arrogant by birth. It was built into his genes to ignore what it did not suit him to see.
And refusing to see his presence here today as an embarrassment to her stupid mother was, perhaps, one of his more understandable bouts of blindness. After all who, in this day and age, condemned a man and woman for wanting to be together so long as they were both free and single?
Free and single, she repeated wryly to herself. What a worn-out cliché. For there was nothing free in the way she and Raschid conducted their relationship. It had cost them both dearly in family respect and personal privacy. And she hadn’t felt single since the day she met him, which explained why she had put off telling him what she knew she had to tell him one day.
But not today, she told herself as she glanced around at her brother. For today belonged to Christina and this precious brother of hers—who was standing there with his back to her, his hands thrust into his trouser pockets in what she considered his disgruntled pose.
Which meant he was cross, and she didn’t want him looking cross. She didn’t want him looking anything but happy today—for they would only blame her if he did.
‘Hey,’ she said, getting up to go and link her arm through one of his. ‘Stop grouching,’ she scolded. ‘It spoils your handsome features.’
He turned a rakish grin on her. Her heart swelled to bursting because she so loved this big brother of hers who she knew loved her unreservedly in return.
‘You look stunning,’ Julian murmured softly. ‘I love the dress.’
‘Thank you,’ she smiled. ‘I bought it specially for the occasion.’
And to make a statement—a rather obvious statement that announced to everyone that, although she was not playing a major role at this wedding, neither was she about to fade into the background as she was sure most of them would prefer her to do.
The dress was short and it was clingy, made of a fine silk jersey material that moulded every slender line of her body from shoulder to well above the knee and so left more than enough of her wonderful legs on show. It was also red. A dramatically unapologetic letterbox-red, with a scooped neck, and a thin gold belt that hugged her narrow waistline. On her feet she was wearing very high-heeled strappy gold sandals, and waiting for her on the bed was a tiny bolero jacket in the same red as the dress.
Plus her hat—a wide and floppy-brimmed gold gauzy affair, bought to use as a prop to hide her thoughts and feelings beneath while she got herself through what promised to be one hell of an ordeal of a day.
‘They certainly won’t miss the fact that you’re here,’ Julian observed. Her brother was no fool; he knew what she was trying to do here.
‘The wicked lady in red,’ she grinned. ‘I can’t fight them so I have no choice but to join them in condemning myself.’
‘Will he mind you taking them on in public like this?’ he asked curiously.
Evie’s slender shoulders lifted and fell in a gesture of indifference. ‘He may be my lover but he is not my keeper.’
‘Ah. I scent trouble in the air,’ Julian sighed. ‘Is this his punishment for refusing to stay away?’
She didn’t answer, her hand sliding away from his arm so she could go back to the dressing table and finish getting ready. There was a moment’s silence, the kind taut with words she didn’t want him to utter.
‘Evie—’
‘No,’ she cut in. ‘Don’t start, Julian. Not today of all days; I’m just not up to it.’
‘But—’
‘But nothing,’ she inserted firmly. ‘What goes on between Raschid and myself is our business. Keep out of it.’
‘Well, that’s telling me,’ he drawled after a moment. ‘Makes me wonder what you told our dear mother…’
‘Is that why you’re here, Julian?’ she sighed. ‘To find out if it was me who put her in a temper?’
‘Was it?’ he asked.
‘I
