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‘My father had broken the mould of his ancestors, who had always married for duty. Instead, he married my mother for love.’ He bit the word out like a curse. ‘And paid a heavy price for it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t want to go into details about my parents’ marriage, Caitlin. Suffice to say it wasn’t a happy one and certainly not one I ever wanted to emulate. I saw this thing called love as nothing but a trap—and one which I was determined never to fall into.’ He gave a bitter smile. ‘So when the time came for me to take a bride, I was perfectly willing to wed the princess who had been selected for me by the palace elders. To accept that we had much in common by virtue of our upbringing and royal blood, and to enter into the marriage wholeheartedly.’
‘And, was she beautiful?’ she asked suddenly.
Kadir narrowed his eyes, for it struck him as a highly irrelevant question. Until he remembered his last sighting of his mother and the way plastic surgery had transformed her into a monster he barely recognised. And wasn’t that what women were all about? he reminded himself bitterly. Shallowness and vanity, and a grotesque desire to stay young for ever?
‘Yes, she was beautiful,’ he said slowly, but felt no sympathy when Caitlin flinched.
You shouldn’t have asked me, he thought. You should never ask a question if you are unable to cope with an answer you don’t like.
‘But for me, the most important thing was that she wanted to be a royal queen and to be my wife. She was eager to embrace all the challenges which came with that role. Or so she told me.’
His words tailed off and he would have given any amount of gold from his vast vaults not to have continued with this conversation. But Caitlin was looking at him expectantly, those wide blue eyes stirring yet another forbidden memory, and he forced himself to plough on with his sorry tale instead of recalling how soft she had felt in his arms. ‘But the reality was that Adiya had no interest in ruling by my side. Nor in learning how to be a good wife and, in time, to produce children who could inherit my kingdom. She had but one interest...’
He couldn’t bring himself to continue and shook his head, afraid that the words might choke him.
‘Do you want to tell me what that is?’ questioned Caitlin, breaking the fraught silence. Only now her voice contained some of the gentleness which had lured him in so willingly the first time he’d met her—and didn’t that almost forgotten quality of sweetness tug painfully at his heart?
‘And that interest was drugs,’ he said baldly.
‘Drugs? Drugs?’ She stared at him at first with consternation and then with dismay. ‘You mean—’
‘I mean heroin, to be precise—although I understand she started off with cocaine,’ he supplied bluntly. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Caitlin. Did you think the west had some kind of monopoly on addictive substances? Apparently, one of her cousins gave it to her to try and she liked it. A lot.’
‘But didn’t you... I mean, didn’t you notice anything which might have made you suspicious, before you married her?’ she questioned, seeming to have forgotten her antipathy towards him, at least for the time being.
‘How could I?’ he demanded. ‘I had no experience of such things and our times together were limited because of propriety. Often she was veiled, her eyes downcast because of supposed modesty—at least that was my assumption, although afterwards I was to discover it was because the pupils of her eyes were like pinpoints and she wished to conceal that from me. Obviously, she was careful enough not to be really high during our chaperoned meetings before the marriage, but all such caution fled once the ceremony was over when I discovered I’d married a junkie.’
‘Oh, Kadir,’ she breathed. ‘What on earth did you do?’
‘What could I do? I wanted to help her, and for her to get better. I tried to ensure her supply was cut off, but somehow she always managed to get hold of more. I employed the finest addiction therapists in the world to treat her,’ he added bitterly. ‘But in order for someone to get better, they have to want to try. And Adiya didn’t. She liked it too much. She liked lying around in a chemically induced state of bliss.’ There was a pause and his words came out as a ragged whisper, as if the walls were listening. ‘Until one day she overdosed, then lay in a deep coma until she died.’
For a few seconds, Caitlin felt as if she had been robbed of the ability to move, but it wasn’t just that which made her feel as if her blood had turned to ice. Because Kadir’s face had grown so ravaged that she wanted to get up and go to him. To put her arms around him and comfort him. But she was so shocked she didn’t think she’d be able to get out of the chair and maybe that was a good thing, because it certainly wasn’t her place to offer him solace at a time like this. Her mind was spilling over with questions she wasn’t sure were wise to ask, but one was hovering like a dark spectre at the edge of a nightmare and refusing to be silenced.
‘So when you...when we...when we had sex together,’ she said haltingly, because she wasn’t going to try to make it sound like something it wasn’t, ‘was she—’
‘Adiya was already in a coma, yes, and had been for some time,’ he said harshly. ‘She had no idea that I was breaking our marriage vows, although I knew, of course. And I...’
His words tailed off and the bitterness and self-recrimination which had darkened his face were hard to witness. And despite Caitlin’s determination to remain impartial and not get sucked into some messy emotional quagmire, she couldn’t seem to let the subject go.
r /> ‘You should have told me,’ she said, but she didn’t tell him why. No need to explain that a lying and cheating man had provided the grim, grey backdrop to her own childhood—one twitch of its grimy fabric enough to send her mother into paroxysms of rage and regret. Because she and Kadir were not going to have the kind of relationship which invited unnecessary confidences of the type which revealed far too much of your vulnerability and inbuilt fears. ‘If you’d told me I might have understood—and if I hadn’t, then at least I might have felt as if my feelings had been taken into consideration, rather than you just ignoring them as if they were of no consequence. As it was, I felt second-best when I discovered the truth. As if I’d just been some vessel you had used to satisfy your lust.’
He didn’t correct her. Had she wanted him to? She bit her lip. Yes, of course she had.
‘Because only a very limited number of people knew about it,’ he told her heatedly. ‘Out of respect to Adiya’s family we kept the illness completely under wraps. Even her death and subsequent burial weren’t publicised, for the circumstances of her death would have carried with them too great a stigma for her family to bear, on top of her untimely death.’ He paused, and when he spoke his voice sounded raw. ‘And although I didn’t tell you the whole story, I never made you any promises I would be unable to keep, did I, Caitlin?’
‘You didn’t tell me you were a king.’
‘No, that’s true—but was that relevant? It wasn’t ever supposed to be anything other than a one-night stand—we agreed that at the time. It was supposed to be uncomplicated sex between two people. You even provided the condoms, if you remember.’
Caitlin’s cheeks flushed, because hadn’t that been another legacy from her own unhappy childhood? She had carried a pack of condoms in her purse since she was eighteen years old, because the thought of an unplanned pregnancy had been something she’d always feared and she was determined it would never happen to her. It had taken her another six years before she had opened that packet—maybe that was why they hadn’t worked, maybe they had been out of date. She shifted awkwardly as she took her mind back to that night. What had Kadir said as his hand had slid between her thighs and he’d flicked a provocative finger against her molten heat?
‘I can’t offer you anything.’
No, he hadn’t made any promises and now she understood why. But if he hadn’t been able to offer her anything back then, what was he doing here now?
