His Queen by Desert Decree Read online

  My goodness, he’s trying—he’s trying so hard to make this special and you are an ungrateful cow, Molly scolded herself furiously. But to be fair, he had wrong-footed her because she had been planning to tell Azrael that she thought it would be wisest if they stopped having sex until they had both decided where their marriage was heading. Why? Because sex with Azrael killed her brain cells, she thought wildly, knowing there was no way she could drop the sex ban on him when he’d gone to the extreme lengths of taking her to a cave for the night. I mean, how lucky am I to be the woman who gets to spend another night in the cave?

  A clutch of robed men moved away from the front of the cave, bowing to them both and addressing Azrael in their language. ‘They are honoured to guard us tonight,’ Azrael translated.

  Molly contrived a brilliant smile and passed on into the cave...and found it transformed. There was a bed, a proper bed and lit lanterns everywhere. A seating area with rugs was arranged around a small fire as well as a table with covered dishes. Towels were heaped helpfully by the pool edge. Her contrived smile blossomed into a genuine smile and she spun back to Azrael to say spontaneously, ‘You’re not crazy. It was a wonderful idea.’

  Smiling brilliantly, Azrael lifted her off her feet and set her down on the side of the bed.

  ‘How on earth did you get a bed out here?’ she whispered wonderingly.

  ‘With the help of the same tribe who once brought supplies here for my mother and I,’ he told her, watching as she tugged off her headdress and set it aside, shaking her head so her copper tresses spilled in bright spirals across her pale skin. She toed off her shoes and settled back against the heaped pillows, emerald earrings gleaming in the flickering candle light and acting as a reminder of something he had forgotten.

  Azrael dug into his pocket to retrieve the ring box and handed it to her. ‘I had it made to go with the necklace. I intended to give it to you before we signed the marriage contract but we were never left alone.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ Molly quipped, flipping open the box with inquisitive eyes, which widened at first sight of the huge oval emerald surrounded by diamonds. ‘My word, this is gorgeous.’

  Long brown fingers eased the ring out of its velvet bed and installed it on her wedding finger.

  ‘Thank you,’ Molly said warmly, understanding that the ring, given in private in contrast to the royal emeralds, was a personal gift.

  No, she acknowledged, it very definitely wasn’t the right moment for a serious discussion about whether or not their marriage had a future. He had made such an effort to please her that she was touched and surely a lasting future was more than implied by such an approach? I want to keep you. And she very much wanted to keep him, she conceded helplessly, watching him ditch his cloak and his head cloth and visibly shed the tension of the day.

  ‘Would you mind if I took a dip in the pool?’ Azrael enquired very politely. ‘It’s warm in here and it has been a long day.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, her body starting up a guilty hum at the very idea of him stripping. That very first glimpse of him in the same cave had turned her into a committed voyeur.

  It was their wedding night but he was probably exhausted because he rarely enjoyed more than five hours of rest. Determined to get more comfortable, Molly stood up and began to remove the heavy emerald brocade robe.

  ‘Allow me,’ Azrael murmured, lifting it from her taut shoulders. ‘Keep the emeralds on. It is a joy to see you wear them as I imagined.’

  The hands she had been lifting to remove the weighty necklace dropped again and she settled back on the bed, striving not to look as though she was watching him undress when that was exactly what she was doing. He shed his tunic and stepped out of the loose linen pants he wore below, shedding his boxers at the same time, and the light fell on that long, elegant back she had so appreciated when she was half-unconscious and her breath betrayed her with a sudden indrawn hiss that made him whirl around, an ebony brow lifting in query.

  ‘Your back...’ she muttered hot-faced, sliding off the bed to approach him and step behind him, fingers lifting to trace the paler slashes of old scarring that marred his perfection. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘Firuz had me whipped when I was seventeen,’ he admitted tightly. ‘Are the scars still so obvious?’

  ‘No...no, they’re very much faded,’ she mumbled awkwardly, looking up at him with appalled eyes. ‘Whipped? Literally whipped?’

  Azrael jerked his chin in confirmation, clearly not a fan of pursuing the demeaning topic. Naked as a bronze god, he stalked over to the pool and stepped in, evidently expecting the dialogue to end there.

  Molly hovered barefoot in the sand, wringing her hands. ‘But...why would he do such a thing?’ She tried but she could not hold the question in.

  ‘When Firuz married my mother, he made an agreement with Hashem that neither my mother nor I would be allowed to become the focus of any rebel activity in Djalia against Hashem’s rule. You must understand that my stepfather was afraid to anger Hashem because Quarein is a poor country with very little military capacity.’

  ‘Yes...?’ Molly breathed encouragingly.

  But it didn’t work. Azrael stretched out in the pool on the rocks in brooding silence, long black hair tousled around his big stiff shoulders. With a stifled sigh, Molly stripped off and, fighting her self-consciousness about her own body, she padded across the sand and stepped into the pool beside him, sinking down on the nearest flat rock. ‘Yes?’ she said again, refusing to surrender to that silence.

  ‘From the moment Hashem executed my father, my mother became his most implacable enemy. She was a very brave woman. She raised funds for the rebels and was, until I became old enough, their de facto leader. She used Quarein as a safe house for both of us but, make no mistake, being married to Firuz was tough for my mother. He is a hard, judgemental man, who makes daily life difficult for those around him. When phone messages between his home and the rebels were intercepted by Hashem and brought to my stepfather’s attention, it put my mother in grave danger.’

  Molly grimaced. ‘Of course it did.’

  ‘To protect her I said that I had sent the messages and Firuz had me whipped. I believe he knew the truth and he let it go because in his own limited way he did care for my mother. As long as someone was punished Hashem was satisfied.’

  ‘That’s one of the secrets you thought I wouldn’t want to know,’ Molly guessed, smoothing a soothing hand down a bulging bicep. He was so modest, so reluctant to acknowledge his own courage for what it was. His sheer strength appealed to her on the most basic level because she knew that no matter what happened she could depend on Azrael. He was very strong and his innate need to protect those weaker than he was ran through him like a vein of solid gold.

  ‘Why would you want to know such a thing?’ Azrael demanded in honest bewilderment, twisting to study her with glittering dark golden eyes.

  ‘I don’t know, but I do,’ Molly fielded dry-mouthed, somewhat belatedly noticing that, despite the icy temperature of the rock pool, he was fully aroused.

  ‘Sometimes you are a very strange woman,’ Azrael breathed thickly.

  ‘But the differences between us are kind of fascinating,’ Molly told him shakily, wanting so badly to touch him but afraid of doing it wrong.

  Could she have but known it, there was no wrong in that line as far as Azrael was concerned. As he bent his head to claim her lush, inviting mouth, he carried her hand down his body, his breath tripping in his throat simply at the brush of her tiny fingers. Molly touched, stroked, in too awkward a position to really explore and he took care of that problem too by springing upright with a noisy splash and scooping her dripping body up to plaster it against his hot, wet body with an enthusiasm that suggested he was not as tired as she had assumed earlier.

  ‘We’ll get everything wet!’ she gasped as he brought them both down on the bed.

  And Azrael laughed with hearty amusement, spreading her out lik
e a feast to be savoured, gazing down at her with wondering satisfaction. She didn’t want his child, he reminded himself darkly before he sent that reality back into the burial ground at the back of his mind where he kept things that couldn’t be changed. For the first time ever, he would live in the moment, savour its sweet pleasures and look neither forward nor back. On his wedding night, he was not the Djalian King, he was only a man, a man with a voracious appetite for the warmth and relaxation and pleasure that Molly represented.

  Molly pushed him back against the pillows before he could kiss her again. ‘My turn,’ she told him with a hectically flushed face.

  She knelt over him, wondering just where to start and spoilt for choice, her hands finding those wide brown shoulders and smoothing down over the hard buds of his male nipples to the corrugated lean muscle of his stomach and then lower, finding him, tracing him, rejoicing in the silky, tensile strength of him and the rise of his hips in response. With those stunning heavily lashed golden eyes welded to her every move she felt as though she had him at her mercy and she liked that feeling of power.

  ‘I might be a little clumsy at this,’ she warned him.

  But Azrael was a willing sacrifice for any form of experimentation as he watched her lower her mouth to him. It was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. She licked, swiped and stroked and then she stretched her ripe lips around him and her head bobbed, copper ringlets trailing across his thighs like teasing ribbons. He had to fight to withstand the intensity of the pleasure, and when he couldn’t tolerate it any longer he reached up and dragged her down to him to find her mouth again for his tongue, darting and exploring while his hands hungrily moulded the swollen bounty of her tightly beaded breasts and slid slower to trace the gloriously wet opening between her thighs.

  ‘I want you now... I can’t wait,’ he groaned hoarsely, pushing her away and startling her as he sprang lithely off the bed to stalk over to the chest by the wall and rummage within it.

  He tore open the packet and put on the condom while she watched with wide, equally impatient eyes for him to return to her. Her arms opened automatically for him, the throb between her thighs like a pulsing hum of eager welcome, a deep-seated ache that only he could satisfy. He drove into her hard and fast and she wanted to cry out but she was recalling those tribesmen outside the cave and the lack of doors and his controlled silence while she pleasured him. A tiny little whimper was wrenched from her and then there was nothing in her world but a nameless fear that for some reason he might stop, which she couldn’t have borne.

  Her heart thumped like an express train inside her body as Azrael reached a hard, insistent rhythm that made her buck and gasp with helpless excitement, her hips writhing, her entire skin surface burning up with the inexpressible wildness of the experience. The wicked delights of his possession went on and on and on until finally her body was thrust over the edge into climax. Delicious internal convulsions gripped her as the surge of pleasure washed over her in an unstoppable tide.

  Still floating, she lay there cradled in Azrael’s arms and feeling positively sunny in mood. It was slowly dawning on her that a baby with him, assuming she wanted to keep him, might even be a development she could welcome. Why? Because he was great in bed? Hardworking, honest, noble, gorgeous? Naturally there was also the beautiful ring and the cave setting, chosen for her benefit. But most of all her heart was his because he was a hero, who had suffered horrors she couldn’t imagine, horrors he didn’t even want to talk about for fear of upsetting her! Listening had almost broken her heart as she’d pictured Azrael, young and proud and vulnerable, accepting pain and humiliation to shield his mother. Now she was also picturing a little Azrael or a little girl and her heart began to go all floaty too.

  ‘I was thinking...about a baby...’ she murmured, stumbling over the words, having spoken before she even knew what she planned to say.

  ‘We don’t need to concern ourselves with that issue,’ Azrael cut in, smooth and cutting as polished steel. ‘Forget about that idea. I wasn’t thinking rationally.’

  Molly was disconcerted by that response; her lips framed a silent oh of perplexity and then hurt flared inside her where it didn’t show because she felt rejected. He had thought the concept over just as she had done but he had reached a different conclusion. She had decided that it could be a very good idea to have a family with him but evidently, after further consideration, Azrael had decided against the same idea. He had changed his mind. He was entitled to do that. Did that mean that he no longer wanted to keep her? And if he had decided that, what was she supposed to be doing about it?

  He hadn’t asked her to fall in love with him, had he? It was her own fault that she had fallen head over heels in a process that had started the day she first saw that gorgeous portrait of him in the Djalian Embassy. But they had originally signed up for only a few months of being married and perhaps Azrael had realised that that option would still suit him best. Was there even a possibility that he was already planning that his next wife would be Princess Nasira? In fact, was Molly merely a kind of hiccup and an aberration in Azrael’s planned marital journey?

  That sneaking, humiliating suspicion kept Molly quiet when she would normally have spoken up and asked him why he had changed his mind. How could she ever be good enough or loveable enough for someone like Azrael? she questioned painfully. Compressing her lips, she shut out the mad tumult of her rushing thoughts and stamped on them hard when they tried to emerge and torment her again. Agonising over what could not be would not change anything. It would not change what Azrael felt and thought, but if she was sensible, and she so badly wanted to be sensible, she would begin trying to detach herself from unrealistic hopes and step back from her emotions.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘BUT THERE’S SOMETHING you’re not thinking about,’ Molly said as Azrael encouraged her to peruse the display of blueprints on the housing project. ‘If you want to attract foreign experts to work on large developments that will run for years, you should consider setting up an international school—’

  ‘An international school?’ Azrael cut in with a frown. ‘When our own education system is still so basic?’

  ‘You have to prioritise,’ Molly pointed out. ‘You need the experts and they will be unwilling to sign up for long contracts without their families. They will want schooling for their children that will enable them to return to their home countries fully equipped to continue their education.’

  Azrael’s lean dark face took on a thoughtful aspect. Molly, he had learned, might tackle problems from a different angle but often came up with solutions that would not have occurred to him. She was clever and progressive. He studied her preoccupied face as she examined the blueprints he had recently had drawn up to house workers from abroad. She was correct. His country badly needed those professionals and their skills to drag Djalia into the twenty-first century, and to appeal to the right calibre of personnel they had to make the employment contracts attractive.

  ‘Zahra is a teacher,’ Azrael reminded her. ‘Work with her to consider the setting up of an international school as soon as possible.’

  Molly went pink with pleasure. ‘Zahra will know far more than me.’

  ‘But it was your idea. Run with it,’ Azrael advised with a sudden charismatic grin. ‘That is your punishment.’

  Only it was anything but a punishment to be trusted with responsibility and to be with a man who invited and respected her opinions, Molly conceded inwardly. A mere two busy months into being Azrael’s wife, Molly was failing dismally at the challenge of stepping back from her emotions and suppressing forlorn hopes. She loved Azrael and every moment she spent with him only made her love him more. When had anyone but Maurice ever listened to her with respect? When had any man ever wanted her to the extent that Azrael seemed to want her? But her childhood insecurity, her secret fear that she was not loveable or even truly wanted, still haunted her and filled her with the terror that she was living in a dream world and that soon
er or later Azrael would take a good clear look at her and wonder what he was doing with her.

  For that reason, every time she was tempted to ask Azrael how long he believed their marriage would last, fear strangled her voice and kept her silent. It was better to enjoy what she had while she still had it, she reasoned unhappily, rather than stress about how she would feel when it came to an inevitable end.

  They had spent the first weeks of their marriage touring Djalia by helicopter and Molly had seen everything from the unspoilt desert that was still home to nomadic tribes to the oil fields and the greener, more mountainous region to the north of the country. Zahra had become her right-hand woman, acting as interpreter for both culture and language while also becoming a good friend. Molly, however, kept her secret fears to herself and simply tried not to dwell on them.

  She had dived into her agreement with Azrael to stay married to him and he had dived in with an equal lack of forethought. In mysterious addition, since their official wedding the reality that their marriage was not supposed to be real seemed to have become a taboo subject. In the same way as Azrael had backtracked from the concept of her having a child with him he retreated at speed from any discussion of the future, with the result that Molly sometimes felt as though she were living in a soap-bubble fantasy.

  That was why it was such a boost to her confidence to be asked to work on the building of an international school, because that would not be a short-term project. In the same way, she now asked herself, how could she truly feel that their marriage was only temporary when Azrael had taken the time and trouble to accompany her to London to meet her grandfather in his care home? Indisputably, Azrael treated Maurice like a family member. On their most recent visit, when Azrael had seen her happy tears because Maurice had enjoyed a little window of recognition and had connected again with Molly as his granddaughter for the first time in months, Azrael had been so supportive and compassionate in his understanding of how much that acknowledgement had meant to his wife.