The Price of Royal Duty by Penny Jordan

Author:Penny Jordan [Jordan, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-03-04T18:42:12+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THEY had been married almost three weeks, and not once since that first night had Ash even touched her, never mind taken her to bed again. Did she want him to? Sophia closed her eyes. It made her feel so humiliated to have to admit how badly her body ached for more of the pleasure he had given it. All those years when she had been able to turn down attempts to seduce her without feeling she was missing out on anything had not prepared her for feeling like this: of lying awake and raw with need in the emptiness of her bed; of feeling her body surge with fierce tight longing just at the sight of Ash’s bare throat or arm; of wanting what he had already given her so badly that she had to fight against her need for him. Of course, she had expected to feel like that about the man she loved, but she did not love Ash, he did not love her, and it left a sour and bitter taste in her mouth to know how shamefully she wanted him.

Ash had told her himself that he felt they should wait to see if she had conceived before they had sex again. His uncompromising words had stunned her. He had made it sound as though he didn’t want to have sex with her. His words had been a stinging reminder that for him sex with her was merely a duty. That had hurt. In fact, it had hurt so much that even now when her body’s evidence said she was not pregnant, she had not said anything about it to Ash. Because she was afraid that now he was married to her, and despite everything he had said to her about duty, he had discovered that the comparison between her and Nasreen was such that he simply could not bear to touch her.

Nasreen. She didn’t want to allow the other woman to take up residence in her thoughts and undermine her but somehow she couldn’t help it. If Ash could make her feel like that without loving her then how must Nasreen have felt? How much had she delighted in the pleasure they must have shared. As a new husband, Ash would not have stayed away from her bed. The hot surge of jealousy burned her pride. She couldn’t allow herself to be jealous of Nasreen. She must focus instead on her own life. So why was she constantly breaking the rules she had made for herself by questioning Parveen about Ash’s first wife?

When she had broken the protocol with which she had been brought up and questioned Parveen, the maid had been reluctant to satisfy her curiosity at first, but gradually Sophia had coaxed her into confiding in her. Nasreen had not been well liked by those who staffed the palace, which she rarely visited, preferring to be in Mumbai with her own family, she had been told.

‘When a woman marries, her husband’s family becomes her family, but the maharani was very close to her family,’ Parveen had said.

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