‘I cannot lie and say that people are going to be delighted,’ Raschid sombrely acknowledged. ‘But given time they will become used to the idea. We all will,’ he added carefully.
Meaning her, Evie supposed.
The teapot was special, more a tiny silver urn that Asim had given her as a gift last year when she had got him to show her how to prepare the mint tea the way Raschid liked it.
It had been a nice thought—a caring thought. But even Asim, whom she was perhaps closer to than anyone else attached to Raschid, would stare in horror at his master actually marrying her.
‘I won’t marry you, Raschid,’ she said, spooning the pale green coarse-cut leaves into the urn. ‘It would be wrong for me and disastrous for you.’
‘Define disastrous,’ he requested.
One of those weary sighs whispered from her. ‘Your country’s stability depends upon its Muslim roots,’ she explained. ‘Marrying a Christian would weaken those roots. Which is why the cousin of a cousin has always hovered in the shadows throughout the time we’ve been together.’
He didn’t bother to argue the point, which made her want to weep. ‘Now explain why it would be wrong for you?’ he prompted instead.
Another sigh—one that was caught back before it was uttered this time, but her heart lay heavy in her breast as she stood there watching the kettle come slowly to the boil. ‘You would stifle me. The situation would stifle me. As our relationship stands at the moment I have the freedom to do more or less as I please. The restrictions placed on a Muslim wife are stifling enough, but for one who would be as disapproved of as I would be…I would suffocate,’ she predicted.
‘And the child you carry?’ he continued levelly. ‘What is supposed to happen to him while you protect yourself from a stifling marriage and save my country from instability?’
He was mocking her but angrily. He didn’t like the picture she was painting but couldn’t come up with a better one to paint over it.
‘The he may be a she,’ she smiled. ‘Which would not be so big a problem, would it?’
‘We are not barbarians, Evie,’ he said tightly. ‘We do not drown our female offspring at birth, I promise you.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ she said, pouring boiling water into the urn. ‘Tell me…what would your people think of a half English boy child who would in effect be his father’s heir if we married?’
‘He will be my heir whether or not we marry,’ Raschid informed her with a grimness that had Evie spinning round to stare at him in horror.
‘No, Raschid!’ she cried out in protest. ‘You—’ ‘Watch out!’ he rasped at her.
But it was already too late. ‘Oh, damn!’ Evie gasped as pain like nothing she had ever felt in her life before forced the air to rush from her lungs.
She hadn’t even realised she still had hold of the hot urn! The jerky way she had spun around had sent the hot tea shooting out of the spout and over her arm.
‘Here!’ Raschid was suddenly in front of her and grabbing hold of her hand to yank her over to the sink. Ice-cold water gushed over burning hot skin, sending heart-stopping shock waves shooting through her system.
Her eyes were closed, and she was shaking so badly that even her teeth chattered. If Raschid hadn’t been holding her up with his arm clamped around her waist, she would have fallen in a trembling heap to the tiled floor.
‘Did it splash you anywhere else?’ he asked harshly.
It was all she could do to shake her head. She felt sick, she felt dizzy, the shock and the pain driving her to breathe in choked whimpers.
Raschid hissed out something nasty from between violently clenched teeth. ‘You fool,’ he muttered, ruthless in his determination to keep her arm beneath the agonising coldness of the water. ‘Did I ask for tea—did I? If you’ve damaged this beautiful skin I will throttle you!’
‘Sh-shut up,’ she breathed, in too much pain to want to listen to him taking his own distress out on her.
‘I should have seen it coming!’ he railed on regardless. ‘When you play the super-controlled ice-maiden, it usually means you’re struggling to keep yourself together for one reason or another!’
Well, she wasn’t together now, Evie thought painfully. She was literally coming apart at the seams. Her arm hurt, her body hurt and her heart hurt. ‘I w-won’t marry you,’ she choked out, his remark reminding her why she had ended up scalding herself like this.
The hand clamped around her slender wrist tightened its grip, then grimly lowered the arm into a sink now full of icy water before he let go of her. The tap was switched off, Evie wilted weakly against the unit, her body sliding away from his until she was hunched over the sink with her arm immersed up to the armpit.
Leaving her standing there weak and shaking, fighting to keep the sickness, the dizziness and now the onset of wretched tears at bay, Raschid strode angrily away. A moment later she heard him running up the stairs, and a minute after that and he was back with the first-aid box from her bathroom and a snowy white towel, both of which he angrily tossed down on the unit beside her.
Then he was gently lifting her arm out of the water and laying it on the towel. He didn’t speak as he bent over to inspect the damage, but his face was cast in stone, his eyes glittering from between lushly curling lashes, his mouth nothing but a thin tight line.
She watched his brown fingers move gently over the reddened area of her arm, watched him carefully cover it with the towel then turn to open the first-aid box.
Most of the heat had been neutralised by the water by then, although Evie still could not stop shaking. Producing a tube of antiseptic, he deftly unscrewed the cap then began lightly smearing the ointment on her arm.
‘Does that hurt?’
She shook her head in answer.
‘If it blisters we will have to call in a burns specialist. But at the moment you seem to have been lucky.’
Lucky, Evie thought. There had to be an irony in that somewhere though she didn’t feel like looking for it.
‘Raschid—please listen to me,’ she pleaded. ‘You can’t—’
He glanced up, those golden eyes so hard they silenced her utterly. ‘Don’t force me to get tough with you,’ he warned. ‘For you will not like the tactics I will employ.’
‘Was that a threat?’ she gasped.
He didn’t answer, didn’t need to while he continued to look at her like that. Raschid had a ruthless streak running through him that could, when invited, become quite cruel—though until now Evie had never been a party to that side of him.
‘The child is mine.’ He reinforced the main points of conflict here. ‘You are mine. I have not the slightest intention of giving either of you up. Which means I must make your place in my life official.’
‘And damn the consequences?’
He grimaced but nodded. ‘And damn the consequences,’ he flatly confirmed.
The phone began to ring, slicing through the tension like a knife.
‘Do you want me to answer it?’ Raschid asked quietly.
Evie shook her head, her eyes lowered while she waited for the answer machine to take over.
It was her mother again. ‘Have you seen this morning’s paper?’ Her shrill voice slashed across the room. ‘I have never been so embarrassed in all my life! If it isn’t bad enough that you disappear without a word of thanks to anyone, that wretched man only goes and does the same thing—then I have to contend with the pair of you staring out at me from the front page of the newspaper!’