dignitaries who had flown in from all over the world to be here—out of respect for Christina’s father, whose diplomatic skills had earned him lifelong friends in far-flung places.
The weather was glorious, the location a picture-perfect English castle complete with ramparts and moat set in its very own ten-thousand-acre estate right in the heart of Royal Berkshire.
You really couldn’t get any more romantic than that. It was no wonder some people were willing to sell their souls to acquire an invitation.
Which made Evie very much the odd one out here today, because she would have sold her soul to be anywhere but here.
She should, in fact, have been heading up an entourage of six lovely bridesmaids. You could even say that it had been expected of her. But she’d turned the invitation down, upsetting several and annoying many, but…
A sigh broke from her—the pair of lavender-blue eyes staring back at her via the dressing-table mirror she was sitting in front of mocking to say the least.
She just couldn’t have done it to the happy couple. After all, how much bad luck did you invite on yourself by having the family black sheep play a major role at your marriage? It just wouldn’t do and they all knew it wouldn’t do—which was why Christina’s mother had found it difficult to hide her relief when Evie had turned the request down.
But neither did it mean she could escape her duty altogether. As sister to the groom she had an obligation to be here—if only for Julian’s sake. And, black sheep of the family or not, she was not about to disappoint her brother. She loved and respected him too much.
So here she was, quietly preparing herself for the event ahead, in the room allotted to her by the Beverley family in the east wing of their beautiful home—very much aware that her mother was doing the same in another room not that far away, because she could feel the waves of resentment reaching out to her through several layers of solid stone.
And why was her mother so resentful? Evie asked that pair of eyes in the mirror. Because Lady Lucinda Delahaye had once been thwarted of the chance to put on a day like this for her own daughter when Evie had turned her back on the chance to marry a marquis so she could be with her lover.
‘He won’t marry you!’ her mother had angrily predicted two years ago. ‘He’s an Arab prince for goodness’ sake! And unlike you he will know his duty! When the time comes he will turn his back on you and marry one of his own. You mark my words, Evie. You mark my words.’
Well, she’d marked them all right—and to this very day she was still marking them. Though the moment of their parting now loomed so very large on the horizon that it actually blocked out her view of anything else.
Two weeks you’ve had—two long wretched weeks to find enough courage to tell Raschid what he needs to be told, she castigated those mocking eyes in the mirror. And what do you do? You avoid him. You let him fly home to Behran for a week without saying a single thing, then spend the next week not even daring to let yourself see him.
Excuses—excuses. Her life recently had become one long round of lying excuses.
Another sigh whispered from her, one of those heavy sighs she had caught herself releasing a lot recently. She looked bruised around the eyes, she noticed, even with the very professional job she had done on her make-up. But then, a worry and lack of sleep had a habit of doing that.
Coward, she derided those eyes in the mirror.
A knock sounding at the door to her room forced her to put her thoughts aside as she turned on her dressing stool to invite whoever was there to come in. 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