‘That’s not like you,’ Ruby remarked helplessly, for she always got the feeling that Raja worked everything out to the nth degree and rarely got taken by surprise. ‘At the beginning I even suspected that conceiving a child might have been part of the seduction plan. After all, once you got me pregnant it would be harder for me to walk away from our marriage.’
‘But not impossible and I wouldn’t wish an unwilling mother on any child of mine.’ Raja scored impatient fingers through his cropped black hair, his clear, dark golden gaze melding to hers in reproach. ‘I am not a Machiavelli. My desire for you was very strong and I acted on it for the most natural of reasons.’
It disturbed Ruby that she could not work out how he felt about her revelation that she was pregnant. She had originally assumed that he would be pleased, which was why she had announced it in that quirky fashion, striving to be cool. But now she was no longer so certain of his reaction because his innate reserve concealed his true reaction from her. ‘I bet you that Wajid turns wheelies when he finds out—it’s another piece of good PR, isn’t it? Three weeks of marriage and I’m pregnant?’
‘And you feel even more trapped than you did already,’ Raja assumed, his stubborn jaw line clenching, a muscle pulling taut at the edge of his handsome mouth. ‘I know you had already decided that you wanted to offer a home to Leyla, but you are very young to take on the responsibility of parenthood—’
‘Raja…girls of fourteen were falling pregnant when I was at secondary school. At twenty-one I’m mature enough or I wouldn’t have been talking about trying to adopt Leyla,’ Ruby argued, feeling insulted and wondering if he considered her immature.
Raja strolled over to the window and looked out at the lush tranquil garden in the courtyard. His lean classic profile was taut. ‘I do understand how you must feel. Such massive changes in your life are a challenge to cope with. Be honest with yourself and with me—’
Tension made Ruby sit up a little straighter in the bed. ‘Honest about what? And how do you feel?’
‘I felt incredibly trapped when I knew I had to get married as part of the peace accord,’ he admitted without warning, the words escaping him in a low-pitched driven surge. ‘I didn’t want a wife I didn’t choose for myself. My father reminded me that he didn’t even meet my mother before he married her but, as I pointed out to him, he was raised in a different world with exactly that expectation. I never dreamt that I would be asked to make an arranged marriage. I had to man up.’
With that confession, which Ruby was quite unprepared to receive at that moment, she felt as though he had driven a knife into her. It shook her that she had been happy to feel like a victim while ignoring the reality that he might have felt equally powerless on his own behalf. I didn’t want a wife I didn’t choose for myself. That one sentence really said all she needed to know. At heart they had always had much more in common than she was prepared to accept. No doubt he had not shared his feelings on the score of their marriage when they first met for fear of influencing her into a negative response. She could understand that. Yet even so, regardless of how she had felt at the beginning, she had adapted, a little voice pointed out in her head—adapted, without even appreciating the fact, to her new position and responsibilities to live a life that was a great deal more demanding but also more interesting than the life she had left behind her in England.
Paradoxically it had wounded Ruby to hear her husband admit that he too had felt trapped when he had learned that he had to marry her. It was a case of very bad timing to learn that truth at the same time as she told him she had already conceived his child. But perhaps once again she was being unfair to him, Ruby reasoned uncertainly, reluctant to come over all dramatic like his first love. After all, how much enthusiasm could she reasonably expect from him? A baby with a woman he didn’t love could only feel like another chain to bind him even though he had already agreed to take on Leyla.
Raja sank down on the side of the bed and reached for her hand. ‘We will have two children. We will be a family before we have learned how to be a couple.’
‘Not how you would have planned it?’ Ruby prompted.
‘When it comes to us nothing seems to go as planned and who is to say that what we have now is not all the better for that?’ Expression reflective, he sounded more as if he was trying to convince her of that possibility than himself. ‘I’m accustomed to change and I will handle this, but you have already had so many challenges to overcome in so short a space of time. This is a tough time for you to fall pregnant.’
Ruby was bewildered. ‘I—’
‘Naturally I feel guilty. I should have been more careful with you,’ Raja breathed curtly. ‘You have enough to deal with right now without this added responsibility.’
‘You still haven’t told me how you feel about the baby. Don’t you want it?’ Ruby queried anxiously.
Raja dealt her an astonished appraisal. ‘Of course I want my own child, but not at the cost of your health and emotional well-being.’
‘I’ll be fine.’ Ruby was disappointed that he had said nothing more personal. ‘But most of those fancy clothes you bought me aren’t likely to fit in a few months.’
‘Not a problem. I like buying you things,’ Raja volunteered, his thumb rubbing gently over the pulse in her narrow wrist. ‘I want you to spend the next couple of days just acclimatising and catching up on your rest.’
Ruby gave him an impish grin. ‘No more all-night sex sessions, then?’
Dark colour highlighted his superb bone structure and his eloquent mouth quirked in reluctant appreciation of that sally. ‘Oh, Ruby…’ he breathed, his hands gathering her slight body up so that he could kiss her with all the devastating expertise that sent her defensive barriers crashing flat like a domino run.
Feeling daring, Ruby pushed the sheet back. ‘You could rest with me,’ she muttered in an intuitive invitation.
‘I have only fifteen minutes to make a meeting on the far side of the city,’ Raja groaned, pausing to extract a second driving kiss, his breathing fracturing as he stared down at her with unalloyed hunger before finally springing up again, adjusting the fit of his trousers to accommodate his response to her. ‘You’re a constant temptation. I’ll see you mid-afternoon and we’ll go over the adoption papers we need to lodge to apply for Leyla.’
He found her very attractive, Ruby told herself consolingly. It wasn’t love, it was lust, but marriages had survived on less. He was taking the advent of an unplanned baby very much in his stride, but then Raja was the sort of guy who typically rose to every challenge. The very worst thing she could do was brood about what they didn’t have as opposed to what they did. In time he might almost come to love her out of habit. What was wrong with that? Did she need the poetry and the hand-holding? It would have been much worse had she fallen in love with a man she couldn’t have. A man, for example, who belonged to another woman. Here she was safely married to a very handsome, sexy and exciting man and she was still feeling sorry for herself. Why was that? Was she one of those perennially dissatisfied personalities who always wanted more than she could have?
Ruby was dozing when she heard a mobile phone going off somewhere very close to her ear. With a sound of exasperation she lifted her head and focused in surprise on the slim cell phone flashing lights and lying semi-concealed in a fold of the bedding. It was Raja’s phone. It must have fallen out of his pocket while he was kissing her. She closed a hand round it and immediately noticed the photo of the gorgeous blonde.
And that was that. Ruby suffered not one moral pang rifling through Raja’s phone and discovering that someone called Chloe had sent him a series of suggestive texts in English. Obviously a woman who was a lover, a woman who had shared a bed with him, enjoying all the intimacies and no doubt many more than Ruby had ever had with him. In shock Ruby read the texts again. The skank, she thought furiously, appalled by the sexy little comments calculated to titillate the average male. Raja’s healthy libido did not require stimulation yet he had been receiving those texts ever since they got married. She went through his phone. If he had sent any texts back to Chloe he had clearly had the wit to delete them.
So, who was Chloe and what was Ruby going to do about her? Was she his most recent girlfriend? Why hadn’t he told Chloe to leave him alone? Why hadn’t he told her that his relationship with her was over? He had promised Ruby that he would be faithful and that there would be no other woman in his life while he was with her. Suddenly the cocoon of shock that had kept Ruby unnaturally calm was cracking right down the middle…
CHAPTER TEN
DISTRESS flooded Ruby and for a horrible timeless period she was too upset even to think straight. Men had cheated on Ruby before but invariably because she refused to sleep with them and it had never hurt so much that she wanted to scream and sob and rage all at the same time.
Yet she had instinctively trusted Raja—why was that? She peered down at the photo. Chloe was a very beautiful woman. Few men would feel obligated to ditch a woman with Chloe’s looks and penchant for provocative texts just because they had made an arranged marriage. Why would Raja award Ruby that amount of loyalty when he didn’t love her?