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Wasn’t it?
At least the Sheikh’s attentions towards their son remained constant and Caitlin was able to derive comfort from that. Each morning she joined them in the stables and watched as their son grew more confident on his new pony—now called Bunni, which apparently meant brown and had nothing to do with rabbits.
With her new camera, she took hundreds of photos of Cameron with his father but she captured plenty of other images, too. Arty pictures of gilded arches, the misty blur of a fountain glimpsed through a curtain of flowers—and the snow-capped peaks of the Zeitian mountains. One shot she was particularly proud of—taken of Kadir as he walked through the wide palace corridors, his shoulders appearing to carry the weight of his destiny.
But these creative endeavours only went so far in providing her with a feeling of satisfaction, before her thoughts inevitably ran into the brick wall of fear. With each day that passed, it became harder to deny the sense of being the outsider in this gilded new home of hers. She became more and more certain that Kadir was pushing her away from him and one morning, her worst fears were confirmed.
Imagining her husband to still be occupied with the visiting Maraban Ambassador, Caitlin had been in her husband’s office, a room to which, as Queen, she now had unfettered access. The light in there was particularly good and she wanted a shot of the rose garden before the sun was too high.
She wasn’t snooping. Most definitely she wasn’t snooping. She just happened to be walking past his desk. And what would anyone else do in the circumstances if they saw their own name on a sheet of paper, which was lying right next to a golden-framed photo of Cameron?
Without touching it, she quickly scanned the handwritten note, which had the name of a London legal firm embellished on the top. She remembered Kadir once telling her that all legal matte
rs were conducted in English, because that meant they could be enshrined in international law and also because not many people spoke Xulhabian. It had made perfect sense at the time and Caitlin supposed she should be glad of it now because it meant she could understand what she was reading, but she almost wished she didn’t understand. Her disbelieving mind skated past the formal greeting of ‘Majesty’ as she tried to absorb some of the letter’s contents, because it was about her. Or, more specifically, it was about Cameron. Her throat felt raw and her eyes burned as one sentence branded itself on her brain and, despite its stuffy legal phraseology, it was easy to understand.
The marriage obviously confers legitimacy and inheritance rights on the young Prince, but also the mother will now be unable legally to remove the child from Xulhabi without your consent.
Suddenly it all made sense. The softening of Kadir’s attitude towards her and the clever wooing. The way he’d made her feel stuff she’d never been expecting to feel. The sense that something tangible and wonderful had been within her reach, only to have it snatched away at the last moment. Caitlin’s fingers tightened around her new camera. She wanted to hurl the expensive piece of kit to the ground and smash her foot down on it, but that would be the behaviour of a hysteric and she needed to be calm. Because everything she held dear depended on staying in control. She sank down on the window seat as she forced herself to focus on one single, comforting fact.
She wasn’t going mad.
She wasn’t imagining things which weren’t really happening. She was being excluded! She had served her purpose by marrying the powerful Sheikh and, in so doing, had relinquished all her maternal authority, without her knowledge. How sneaky and cruel was that? Was that why he was pushing her further away from him—so that she could quietly be siphoned out of royal life? Perhaps that was the reason he’d been so keen to make their family bigger—also without her permission—so she could become some little breeding machine in the corner of the palace, quietly giving birth to heirs and spares.
And all the time she had been falling in love with him. Deeper and deeper and deeper. Did that make her as foolish as her poor mother had been? A deluded woman who had clung to the futile hope her married lover would one day leave his wife—and who had wasted so much time in pursuit of her own desires she had made her and Caitlin’s lives a misery.
But she had been guilty of something similar. She had craved love from a man who had told her right from the beginning that he was unable to provide it. She had allowed her own romantic fantasies to blind her to a truth she had refused to recognise, which was that she was simply a means to an end. She’d been so grateful to him for providing her with security and for legitimising their son that she hadn’t stopped to realise that she was never intended to be anywhere except on the sidelines.
As the sun rose higher in the sky behind her, she sat on the window seat and waited, her heart pounding a fast and steady beat as a feeling of doom threatened to envelop her.
She shook her head when a servant entered and enquired whether she required refreshments and she was equally negative when Makim appeared at the door to ask whether she was okay.
‘I’m waiting for...’ she nearly said my husband, until a small voice in her head suggested she might want to start recalibrating her mindset ‘...the Sheikh,’ she finished, unable to keep a note of venom from her voice as she looked up defiantly at Kadir’s aide.
‘But have you not consulted with his diary, My Queen?’ He seemed perplexed. ‘His Serene Majesty has meetings until early this afternoon.’
‘I don’t mind. I’ll wait.’
Had Kadir been alerted to this display of his wife’s stubborn tenure? Was that why he appeared within minutes with an expression of irritation he didn’t bother to hide.
‘I’m assuming this is important?’ he questioned.
For a moment Caitlin felt almost awestruck by his arrogance until she remembered that he was a master of battle—and didn’t people say the best form of defence was attack? Well, maybe she would take their advice.
She got up from the seat and walked over to his desk, plucking up the lawyer’s letter which was lying there.
‘I’ve just read this!’
‘Oh?’ His features remained implacable. ‘Have you been spying on me, Caitlin?’
‘Don’t you dare try to turn this round!’ She sucked in a furious breath, waving the letter in front of him. ‘Instead, why don’t you try explaining this?’
It occurred to Kadir that never had anyone addressed him quite so insolently just as it occurred to him that maybe, in some mysterious way, he was relieved this had happened. At least now matters could be brought to a head and there could be no misunderstanding. ‘What you read is nothing but the truth, Caitlin. There is really no need to distress yourself,’ he said. ‘You must have known deep down that such a clause would exist. Are there not laws in place in most countries, to prevent one parent fleeing with a child without permission? And when that child is a prince, it becomes even more important.’
‘You think that’s what I might do?’
Kadir met her eyes and suddenly the atmosphere between them changed. He felt the first fraught dark charge of something he didn’t recognise and realised too late that, by bringing matters to a head, he was going to have to face the very truth he had been seeking to avoid. ‘I don’t know what you might do, Caitlin,’ he answered quietly. ‘I’ve always found women extremely unpredictable.’
She nodded as she stared into his eyes and then she began to speak.
