my virginity?’ she responded in as cool a voice as she could manage. She must not allow herself, never mind Ash, to feel that their coming together had touched her emotions, because it hadn’t. As she had just analysed, for herself that reaction had simply been a long-ago echo of something that no longer existed.
‘Yes, of course for your virginity.’
She still looked slightly dazed, her eyes huge and dark, her mouth flushed a deep rose pink, but for all the signs of her pleasured sensuality, there was also a vulnerability about her, as though she was in need of … Comfort? Tenderness? These were things he could not give her. White teeth snapping together, he pulled on his robe and went across to the table where the maid had left her a bottle of water in a bucket of ice. He removed and opened it, pouring two glasses, one of which he brought over to her. Water, most precious gift of all to those born into a desert race, because it was the gift of life.
Sophia willed her hand not to tremble as she took the glass Ash held out to her. The water slid coolly down her throat, both reviving her and giving her new strength. Ash watched as a drop of condensation on the glass fell onto her chest and ran down the valley between her breasts. He wanted to look away but somehow he couldn’t. He wanted, he discovered, to reach out and stop its descent with his finger and then lick it from her skin with his tongue. He wanted … He wanted nothing other than a marriage of duty and mutual respect through which he could dedicate himself to his people and his responsibility to them.
Sophia pulled the sheet up around her naked body. Ash turned away, an unfamiliar feeling slicing into his gut. She was rejecting him? Why should that bring him such an immediate and intense desire to go to her and hold her, to feel her responding to him again as she had done earlier instead of retreating from him? He didn’t know. But he felt as though he didn’t know anything any more, and for a man who liked being in control of his life that was intolerable.
He turned back to Sophia. The evidence of the intensity of what had happened between them was plain to see. It was there in the tousle of her dark hair, the flush on her cheeks and the sensual exhaustion in her eyes. She looked like a woman who had been made love to and whose body had shared enthusiastically in that experience. Or did he just see that because it was what he wanted to see?
‘It’s a bit too late for that now,’ he told her brusquely, gesturing to the sheet with which she had so modestly covered herself, ‘and I still want an explanation.’
‘It isn’t a crime to be a virgin, is it?’ Sophia shrugged as casually as she could. Despite everything, she recognised that a part of her, that part that still belonged to her sixteen-year-old self, wanted desperately to celebrate the ability of her body to give and receive pleasure, and to know that the wonderment and joy it had given her was shared by the man who had partnered her in it. But of course, to Ash what had happened between them was nothing special. How could it be? She knew that. The euphoria she had felt had gone and all that was left was the chilly reality of what she had lost—not her virginity, but her dreams and her hopes of being truly loved.
‘No,’ Ash agreed, ‘but you have to admit that when a woman goes to as much trouble as you have done to give the world the impression that you are sexually experienced and available, it is bound to raise the question of just why you did so.’ Sophia could hear the anger and the bitterness in Ash’s voice. ‘And I want an answer, Sophia.’
‘You already have that answer,’ she told him proudly. ‘I gave it to you when I told you that I wanted to marry for love. When you rejected me, Ash, I promised myself that I would only give myself to a man who loved me as much as I loved him. That is why I didn’t want my father forcing me into an arranged marriage. I wanted to find a man who would love me for myself, and as myself, not as the daughter of the King of Santina.’ Sophia paused. Just speaking like this was activating so many feelings she desperately wanted to deny. The temptation not to say any more was great, but something deeper and more demanding was driving her on as though seeking a form of catharsis for her.
‘When you reminded me of my responsibility for my actions, for boarding your plane, I realised that I would never reach that goal. But I still have no regrets that I made such a goal my priority. When you rejected me, Ash, when you told me that you didn’t want me because you loved your bride-to-be, I was so very envious of her that I promised myself one day I would meet someone who would love me like that and who I could love like that in return. I promised myself then that I would wait for that person. I promised myself that he would be my first and my only lover.’
Why was he allowing her words to cut so deeply into his conscience? The reality was that he had done the honourable thing in doing what she referred to as ‘rejecting’ her. To have taken her innocence would have been a gross abuse of her and of his own values, even if he had not already been committed to marriage to Nasreen. He had done the right thing, the only thing it had been possible for him to do. He had, in his arrogance, his blind belief that he could order his own emotions and those of Nasreen, given a naive sixteen-year-old the belief that if one waited long enough and believed hard enough that love must appear.
Wasn’t he already carrying a heavy enough burden of guilt? Did he have to force himself to carry even more? Was there never to be any peace for him, or any salvation? All he had done was try to emulate the happiness of his great-grandparents’ marriage.
A surge of something so intense that it physically hurt him to breathe seared through him—a sense of great loss and regret, sharpened with guilt.
Deliberately not looking into his face in case she gave away more than she wanted to, Sophia continued. ‘I knew, though, that if men knew I was a virgin they’d try to get me into bed, as some kind of challenge, so I decided that the best way to hold them at bay was to pretend that I had had loads of lovers. That was why I didn’t want my father to force me into a marriage without love.’
Ash had drained his own glass and had gone back to the table to pour himself a second one. Wrenched by guilt, he tried to defend himself to himself with a caustic, ‘And do you intend to continue looking for this once-in-a-lifetime love despite the fact that you are now married to me?’
Why was he doing this? Why did the thought of her turning to another man fill him with such a savagery of emotion that it ran like fire through his veins? Because of the disaster that had been his first marriage. Not because of any other reason.
‘No,’ Sophia denied.
Her voice was filled with so much calm conviction that Ash knew she meant what she was saying. She might claim that she wanted to reject her royal status and upbringing, but right now, no matter how much she herself might deny it should he tax her with it, she was every inch the royal princess bound by her own awareness of the demands placed on her to fulfil her birth role. It was impossible for him not to admit to the respect he felt for her.
Unaware of his thoughts Sophia confirmed her right to that respect when she told him firmly, ‘I’m not a child, Ash. When I agreed to marry you I knew what I was committing myself to. It’s called growing up. The reality is that I was wrong to think I could persuade my father not to force me into a marriage of which he approved. I recognised that when I heard what he said to you when you telephoned him, just as I also recognised that if I had to have a marriage that would please my father then I would rather it was to you than someone I don’t know. Those of us with royal blood aren’t always free to follow our own dreams. We have a duty to fulfil the role for which we ourselves were created by our own parents.
‘If my virginity disappointed you then I’m sorry, but I am as committed to this marriage and to my own fidelity to you within it as I would have been had our marriage been a love match.’ That was certainly true. ‘I never want any of my children to have to wonder if my husband is their father. Never.’
Ash closed his eyes. Just for a moment, listening to her, he had thought … felt … wanted … What? Nothing, he assured himself grimly. Nothing at all. Unable to trust himself to look at Sophia he picked up his robe and put it on before turning and walking away from her.
Ash had gone. She was on her own. And she wished that he was here with her. Wasn’t that natural after the intimacy they