Page 47 of Exotic Affairs: The Mistress Bride\The Spanish Husband\The Bellini Bride

side out, so she also knew what that tone of voice really meant.

Raschid was struggling to keep his real feelings about his father under tight wraps.

‘He sends you his most sincere apologies—’

‘He’s already done that,’ she clipped, her face going white when she remembered the last person who had said those words to her.

‘And begs your forgiveness,’ Raschid doggedly continued as if she hadn’t spoken.

Evie clamped her lips together and forbore to repeat that his father had also done that before.

‘He will, of course, tell you these things personally as soon as he is fit enough to leave hospital.’

That brought her eyes up and around to stare at him. ‘What hospital?’ she gasped.

‘The one I put him in,’ he replied, the words hard with a mockery that had no hint of humour. ‘When he refused to accept that I intended to marry you and not Aisha,’ he went on to explain, ‘I abdicated my right to succession. The shock almost killed him.’

‘Oh, Raschid, no,’ Evie groaned, and wondered wretchedly how many people this whole horror story was going to hurt before it was done.

‘Still,’ he went on coolly, ‘all’s well that ends well, as you British like to say. My father now has a heart which beats as healthily as my own does, and he is also reconciled to the fact that I will marry where I choose to marry.’

‘Not if that marriage includes me, you will not,’ Evie said stiffly.

His dark head turned, and it was only as it did so that Evie realised that he too had been avoiding all eye contact between them.

But not now. Those liquid gold eyes now pierced her with a deep, dark, grim intent. ‘You will marry me,’ he proclaimed. ‘I have not spent millions of pounds and too many precious days scouring the Middle East searching for a suitable substitute to take my place as Aisha’s husband, nor did I almost put my own father in his grave and place at risk both you and the child you carry simply to hear you now tell me it was all for nothing!’

‘Did I ask you to do all that?’ Evie countered tersely.

‘Yes!’ he declared. ‘Every time you told me you loved me, you asked me to do those things!’ he rasped. ‘Every time we simply look at each other, we are demanding from the other that we go to any lengths necessary to be together!’

He got up, the passion sounding in his voice reflected in the angry movement of his body as he walked across the room to stand glaring out of the window.

While Evie sat, stunned into utter silence by his vehemence.

And the worst of it was that he was right! The kind of love they had shared during the last two years had demanded that they go to any lengths to hold on to it!

But not any more, Evie thought on a shudder. Recent events had gone too far and turned too nasty to hang on to romantic ideals that had no place in reality.

‘I can learn to live without your love,’ she told him huskily. ‘I can even live without people’s respect!’ Hadn’t she been doing that very successfully for two whole years now? ‘But I’ve discovered that I cannot live with hatred.’

‘My father doesn’t hate you,’ he sighed. ‘He simply saw you as a pawn he could use in the battle he was waging with me.’

‘That makes it all right, does it?’ Evie flashed back bitterly.

‘No,’ he heavily conceded.

‘And I wasn’t the real pawn,’ Evie added. ‘My baby was.’

‘Our baby,’ Raschid grimly corrected.

But Evie shook her head. ‘No matter how you want to cover it up, Raschid, your father wanted this baby dead. I can’t forgive that. I refuse to forgive that! So as far as I am concerned for him this baby is dead,’ she announced. ‘I will not acknowledge you as his father, and he will not bear your name. I will not place his life at risk like that from anyone again.’

‘And I have no say in this? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I am saying,’ Evie wearily asserted, ‘that if you care for this child then you will do the right thing by him and forget you ever conceived him.’

He didn’t say anything for a long time after that. And the silence pealed like the toll of a funeral bell while Evie waited to find out what he was going to do.

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