perhaps now that you’ve eaten you could dismiss the staff?’ she added in a disturbing indication that she was likely to become loudly vocal once again.
Rashad signalled the two hovering servants to dismiss them before springing upright with fluid agility and sitting back down on the low wall bounding the castle ramparts.
Polly immediately froze in her seat. ‘No, don’t do that,’ she said anxiously, blue eyes fixed to him in dismay.
‘Don’t do...what?’
‘Don’t sit there with your back turned to a dangerous drop,’ Polly urged.
Rashad studied her in disbelief and then glanced round in a sudden movement that made her gasp to scrutinise the dangerous drop she had complained about. A couple of hundred feet of scrub and rocks sloped gently down towards the beach and he had climbed it many times with a blindfold as a little boy on a dare.
‘Please get up and move away from it,’ Polly whispered unsteadily.
Rashad studied her again, noticing how pale and stiff she had become. ‘It’s not a dangerous drop—’
‘Well, it is to me because I’m terrified of heights and just looking at you sitting there is making me feel sick!’ Polly launched at him at vastly raised volume with only a hint of a frightened squeak, her annoyance at his obstinacy having risen higher still.
Rashad raised calming hands as though he were dealing with a fractious child and rose with exaggerated care to move to the castle wall. OK...point taken.’
Polly flushed to the roots of her hair and slowly breathed again. ‘I just don’t like heights—’
‘I think I’ve got that,’ Rashad confided straight-faced.
‘So, you’re planning to listen now to me?’ Polly enquired stiffly.
Impatience flashed through Rashad and no small amount of frustration at her persistence. Water dripping on stone had a lot in common with his new wife. But he was clever enough to know that listening was an important skill in negotiation and experienced enough to know that marriage encompassed an endless string of compromises and negotiations. ‘I’ll listen but not here. I’ll show you round the castle and you can talk...quietly,’ he added softly, but the dark-eyed imperious appraisal that accompanied it was a visual demand for that audible level. ‘No shouting, no crying, no dramatic gestures.’
‘I don’t do crying and dramatic gestures,’ Polly told him in exasperation.
By nature, Rashad recognised the ironic fact that, of the two of them, he was more volatile and more likely to be dramatic and his handsome mouth quirked at that sardonic acknowledgement. The night before, Polly had been very understated but a rejection was a rejection, no matter how it was delivered, and not a pattern Rashad wanted to find in his wife. He looked at her; in truth he never tired of looking at her and the plea in her shadowed blue eyes would have softened the heart of a killer.
‘OK,’ he agreed grudgingly. ‘But if you embark on another argument—’
‘You’ll lock me up and throw away the key,’ Polly joked.
‘Considering that that is exactly what my ancestors did with their wives, you could be walking a dangerous line with that invitation,’ Rashad murmured, teasing on the surface but fleetingly appalled by how much that concept attracted him when it came to the woman smiling back at him.
‘EVERYTHING HERE IS unfamiliar to me. Your lifestyle, the customs, the language,’ Polly murmured quietly as they walked along the battlements past stationed guards to take advantage of the aerial views. ‘When you add you and a new marriage into that, it can occasionally be overwhelming.’
That made remarkably good sense to Rashad, who had been braced to receive a quiet emotional outpouring of regrets and accusations. Relief rising uppermost, he squared his broad shoulders and breathed in deep. ‘I can understand that.’
‘And I’ve barely seen you since the day I agreed to marry you. I realise that with your schedule you had no choice but it made me feel insecure.’
Rashad was downright impressed by what he was hearing, it never having occurred to him that a woman in a relationship with him could speak her mind so plainly and unemotionally. In silence he jerked his chin in acknowledgement of the second point.
‘Yesterday was a very challenging day for both of us.’ Polly’s voice shook a little when Rashad settled an arm to her back to steady her on the uneven stones beneath their feet, long fingers spreading against her spine to send a ridiculous little frisson of physical awareness travelling through her all too susceptible body.
‘It was...’
‘I’ve never been in a serious relationship before...’
Rashad stopped dead. ‘Never?’ he questioned in disbelief. ‘But you are twenty-five years old.’
Polly explained about her grandmother’s long, slow decline into full-blown dementia and the heavy cost that had extracted from her freedom while her sister was away at university. ‘So, if I’m a little inexperienced in relationships, you’ll have to make allowances on that score,’ she told him tautly.
A frown line was slowly building between Rashad’s ebony brows. His fingers smoothed lightly up and down her spine as if to encourage her to keep on talking as he stared down at the top of her pale blonde head, far more engaged in what she was telling him than she would have believed.
Polly could feel the heat of embarrassment rising into her cheeks in a wave. Gooseflesh was forming on her arms, the hairs at the back of her neck prickling while the warm hand at her spine had tensed and stilled. ‘And I think that may be why I sort of freaked out last night because I was a bit nervous...of course I was...and you hadn’t made me feel safe or special or anything really!’ Conscious her voice was rising in spite of her efforts to control it, Polly looked up at Rashad in dismay and discomfiture.
And for the very first time, Rashad understood his bride without words and he felt like the biggest idiot ever born because he had been guilty of making sweeping assumptions without any grounds on which to do so. It had not once crossed his mind that Polly might be less experienced than he was. Indeed he had even worried just a little that he might not be adventurous enough or sophisticated enough to please her. With a sidewise glance at the guards studiously staring out at the desert and the beach, Rashad bent down, scooped his surprised bride up into his arms and carried her indoors. Doors were helpfully wrenched open ahead of him by the staff as he strode back to their bedroom.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Polly exclaimed when he had finally tumbled her down in a heap on the giant bed in which she had slept alone the night before.
‘Giving us privacy,’ Rashad advanced with a sudden smile of amusement that sent her heart racing. ‘I don’t wish to offend you but I had made the assumption that you would have enjoyed at least a few lovers before me—’
‘And why the heck would you assume that?’ Polly demanded with spirit.
‘Your values are more liberal. Here, although young adults now tend to choose their own partners, it is still the norm for women to be virgins when they marry. That would be more unusual in your society.’
‘I suppose so,’ Polly conceded reluctantly because she knew her sister fell into the same ‘unusual’ category, Ellie having admitted that she had yet to meet a man who could tempt her into wanting to cross that sexual boundary. ‘But my sister and I were both brought up in a very strict home. My grandmother believed that both I and Ellie were illegitimate and until she fell ill she policed our every move because she was afraid that we would repeat what she saw as our mother’s mistakes and come home pregnant and unmarried.’
‘I know very little about your background.’ Rashad settled fluidly down on