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“If you don’t want to do it, then don’t. You are Sheikh of Ras el Kida. With or without a wife; with or without a child.”
Raffa stared at his oldest friend with a rueful shake of his head. “You’re trying to make me feel better about taking a woman who hates me to my bed – about seducing an innocent woman, almost ten years my junior – just so she can carry a baby I don’t even know she wants.”
Kalim’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “You mean to say, a baby you don’t know if you want.”
Raffa was uncharacteristically awkward. “I have always known my duty here, Kal. If I don’t have a child, an irrefutable heir to inherit the throne, Goran will act, and you know he has the power to tear at the fabric of this kingdom. For all my father has done, for all I’ve done, it is always banging on our doorstep. Don’t you hear that? The factions who wish to return to our old ways? To plunge Ras El Kida into what it once was? A disparate, fractured group of councils and tribes, with no single authority? Goran wants to drag us there; he is always stirring up dissent. And my father’s death, my lack of heir, these things will appeal to those who would foolishly follow him. I will not let that happen.”
Kalim lifted his broad shoulders. “Then you have no choice but to go through with this.”
Raffa compressed his lips and in the crowd, far below the mezzanine level on which they stood, sequestered from the goings on of the celebrations, he found her easily in the crowd. A single blonde head in the midst of so much colour. She was still, unmoving, like an ice sculpture in the centre of all the festivity.
A thick thud of guilt hefted in his gut.
“I know that.” He lifted his attention back to his friend’s kind eyes. “I just don’t know how I’ll live with myself afterwards.”
Chloe ruminated on her plan of attack throughout the function, so that she was barely cognizant of proceedings. It was an effort to make conversation with other dignitaries and guests, when all of her mind was absorbed by Malik’s worsening condition and Raffa’s demands for an heir, so by the time she walked from the Gold room, she was already weary.
The problem was, she loved Malik. While her own father had ignored her, Malik had been there – bringing her to Ras el Kida, even as a small child, so she could spend exotic, wonderful vacations in this beautiful palace. She had fallen in love with this place then: perhaps it was because it was the first time in her life she’d known kindness and affection. She’d run through the corridors, picked the wild, heavily scented flowers from the gardens, and become addicted to the sun on her skin.
She loved Malik, and she loved this country. But her husband?
She sighed, focusing her mind on the moments ahead.
Her maids surrounded her instantly – six of them, anyway. Perhaps she could beg off with a headache? Tell them there was an emergency in the city and she had to leave at once?
But just as she opened her mouth to speak, her husband’s principal bodyguard appeared. Male servants weren’t allowed to look directly at Chloe – a fact that had always amused her, and made her feel like some kind of human solar eclipse. She had become used to it now, though, used to the way they dipped their heads forward as a mark of deference and addressed her through her primary maid, Aysha.
“The princess is to attend His Highness,” Fahir said in his own tongue.
Chloe cursed inwardly but didn’t reveal a hint of how the pronouncement affected her. She’d become excellent at hiding her inner-most thoughts behind a well-practiced mask of indifference. First with her father, then with her brother, and now with her husband. Life had been a series of dictatorial men for Chloe and Raffa was no different.
“Fine,” she said to Aysha. “But you need not accompany me. I know the way.”
Aysha looked confused but knew her place wasn’t to question the princess’s dictates.
“As you wish,” she said with a bow, that set off a Mexican-wave reaction amongst the other servants.
Chloe turned her back on them and stalked through the enormous corridor of the Qasr Alnujum palace. She was not tall, only five and a half feet, and yet she walked fast, so it only took her five minutes to reach the carved timber doors inlaid with gemstones that announced the Sheikh’s apartments.
She hovered on the threshold, barely seeing the four guards that stood sentry, dressed in traditional military attire. They were the highest rank, she knew, men who had served in war and fought for their country, now prepared to willingly die for their ruler.
“Open the doors,” she said, taking only a moment
to quell the blood that was raging inside of her veins.
They did so without a word.
Chloe had only been in his apartments once before, on their wedding night. As was the expectation, they’d spent the night together – better to acquiesce to traditions rather than incur the gossip and scandal of the palace staff. No one needed to know that she’d slept in the bed while he’d slept on a rolled mattress on the floor. She’d protested then but he’d made her feel utterly foolish, pointing out that he’d slept in far less savory environments during his four years in the country’s military.
The Warrior King – that was what the American press loved to call him. It conjured images of a half-man, half-beast, and unfortunately, those images were very close to the truth. Raffa was some kind of primal, feral creature, caged by his palace, but no less vitally strong for the veneer of civilization he adopted as required.
His own suite of rooms was unlike anything she could have imagined before arriving at the palace. Through the thick, carved timber doors there was an atrium with a waterfall that Raffa had explained, on their wedding night, was naturally occurring. The palace had been built against a mountain range and this room had historically been the Sheikh’s.
The waterfall dropped into a pool – ‘my predecessors liked to watch their concubines swim,’ he’d said, with something in his eyes that had made it hard for Chloe to tell if he was joking. Teasing her, mocking her innocence. Trying to shock her?
It had worked.
She’d jerked her attention away from the waterfall sharply then, and she did so now. Bougainvillea had been trained to grow over the ceiling, and night-flowering jasmine intertwined with it, creating a heady fragrance and a stunning tangle of purple and white flowers.
