Sweet Revenge

by Nora Roberts

  “Doesn’t it? You’re in this as much because you loved your mother as because you hate your father. Maybe more. I’m here because everything you are and feel is important to me.”

  “Philip.” She put a hand lightly to his wrist. “I never know what to say to you.”

  “It’ll come to you.” Always one to take advantage of the moment, he drew her closer. “Are you going to invite me back to your room?”

  “I’d like to.” She closed her eyes and enjoyed the kiss. “But I can’t. How about a raincheck?”

  “As long as it’s soon.”

  She turned away to fit the key into the lock again. Her ears were tuned to hear the slight grate of metal on metal where it didn’t slide true. “I can’t risk unlocking it now. The more detailed filing has to wait until the alarms are off. But I think …” She slipped the key in, then out again. “It’s going to be close.” She stopped, and with the key still warm in her hand stared at the door. “It’s just beyond there, only a few feet away. I’m surprised we can’t feel the heat.”

  “Have you ever considered keeping it?”

  “When I was young. I’d imagine it—imagine putting it around my mother’s neck and watching the life come back into her face. I imagined putting it around my own and feeling …”

  “Feeling what?”

  She smiled a little. “Like a princess.” She dropped the key back into its pouch. “No, it’s not for me, but for all the tragedy that’s followed it over the years, this time there’ll be some good.” She shrugged, feeling foolish. “I suppose that sounds idealistic and stupid.”

  “Yes.” He brought her hand to his lips. “But you see I only lusted after you before I knew you were idealistic and stupid.” He kept her hand in his as they walked to the door. “Addy, be careful. I mean with your father.”

  “I rarely make the same mistake twice, Philip.” She put the listening device against the door and waited until she was greeted with only silence. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve been playing princess for years.”

  He caught her before she could slip out of the door. “Adrianne, you don’t have to play at what you are.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  She wasn’t convinced he was right. Over the next few days Adrianne had to call on all her poise, all her control. Part of the ability may have been a matter of her royal blood. As far as Adrianne was concerned, the bulk of the talent had been inherited from a Nebraska girl who had once taken Hollywood by storm.

  She attended parties—countless luncheons and buffets hosted by various female relatives, where the talk was invariably the same. She listened to advice and answered questions any bride-to-be might expect. She saw Philip in snatches, and never alone. Hours were spent in fittings, more still shopping with aunts and cousins.

  Gifts were already pouring in from all over the world. That was one aspect of the deception she hadn’t anticipated, but which she’d turned to her own advantage. Gold plates, silver urns, Sung vases from heads of state and royal allies. Revenge that had once been intensely personal had spread to encompass friends as well as strangers. Though they were unaware, princes and presidents had become part of the game.

  As was expected, she acknowledged the gifts herself. Time was eaten up writing letters and receiving guests who were flown in for the ceremony.

  But there was one, one very important gift that had been sent from New York. It had been Philip’s job to call Celeste and request it. Now it sat among the others, a beautifully lacquered Chinese box. A puzzle box with a delightfully complex pattern of sliding doors and springs. In a matter of days, Adrianne would nest The Sun and the Moon in the secret drawer and ship it, as she would ship the vases and platters, home.

  The brazen and potentially dangerous plan of smuggling the necklace out on her person could be rejected. Abdu, through his own pride, had given her the perfect route to revenge.

  She saw him only once more before her wedding day, and then it was she who was obliged to approach him. Written permission from a male relation was still necessary for a woman’s outing, princess or not.

  Adrianne stood, hands folded at the ends of her long sleeves. She wore only the diamond Philip had given her, and the earrings which had been a gift from Celeste. The amethyst was already put away. It would be liquidated for the plumbing in the clinic.

  “Thank you for seeing me.”

  Her father’s offices were a symphony of royal red and blue. A sword with a jeweled hilt hung on the wall at his back. He sat behind an ebony desk with his ringed fingers drumming impatiently on the surface.

  “I have only a short time to give you. You should be preparing for tomorrow.”

  The pride she’d inherited from him flared. The skill she’d inherited from her mother banked it so that her voice was quiet. “Everything’s ready.”

  “Then your time should be spent contemplating marriage and your duties.”

  Before she spoke, she forced her hands to relax. “I’ve thought of little else. I must thank you for arranging everything.” They both knew that the cost of a daughter’s wedding was another way a man was judged.

  “Is that all?”

  “I’ve also come to ask your permission to take Yasmin and my other sisters to the beach for a few hours today. I’ve had very little time to get to know them.”

  “The time was there; you chose to live it elsewhere.”

  “They are still my sisters.”

  “They are women of Jaquir, daughters of Allah; you are not and have never been.”

  Keeping her head lowered and her voice quiet was one of the most difficult things she’d ever done. “Neither you nor I can deny blood, however much we might wish to.”

  “I can deny my daughters the corruption of your influence.” He spread his hands on the desk. “Tomorrow you will be married in a ceremony as is fitting your rank. Then you will leave Jaquir and I will no longer think of you. Inshallah. To me you have been dead since you left Jaquir. There is no need to deny what doesn’t exist.”

  She stepped forward not caring whether she was struck for it, or worse. “There will come a time,” she said softly, “when you will think of me. I swear it.”

  That night, alone in her room, she didn’t dream. But she wept.

  The prayer call woke her on her wedding day. Adrianne pushed the windows open, welcoming the heat and the light. This day would be the longest and perhaps the most difficult of her life. She had only a little time before women and servants would invade her privacy and begin the ordeal of dressing her.

  Letting her mind go blank, she filled the huge sunken tub with hot water and laced it with bath oil.

  If the wedding were real, real in her heart, would there be excitement, joy, anxiety? All she felt now was the dull throb of grief for what couldn’t be. The ceremony would be a lie, as the promises made in such ceremonies from one end of the world to another were so often lies.

  What was marriage but bondage for a woman? She took a man’s name and forfeited her own, and with it her rights to be other than a wife. His will, his desires, his honor, never hers.

  In Jaquir it was called sharaf, the personal honor of men. Laws were built around it, traditions grew from it. If it was lost, it could never be recovered. So women of the family were guarded fanatically—or their chastity was, for a man was responsible for his daughter’s behavior as long as she lived. In place of freedom they were given servants, an absence of physical labor, and empty lives. This gilt-edged slavery went on and on as women allowed themselves to be sold into marriage, just as she, for the price of revenge, was allowing herself to be.

  But what her father had said had been true. She wasn’t a woman of Jaquir, and Philip had no bedouin blood. It was all pretense, all masquerade. On this, the most important day of her life, the day she had waited for since childhood, she had to remember that. She might have had the blood of Abdu in her veins, but she was not his daughter.

  When it was over, when the long fanfare of celebration had ended,
she would do what she had come to do. What she had sworn to do. Revenge, still hot after so many years, would be both wild and sweet.

  When it was done, all ties to family would be irrevocably severed. She would suffer for that, ache for that. Adrianne knew it already. There was a price for everything.

  The women of the house joined her while she was still damp from her bath. They came to scent her skin, to scent her hair, to darken her eyes with kohl, and redden her lips. It became like a dream, the incessant music of the drums, the feel of fingertips on her skin, the sound of women’s voices murmuring. Her grandmother sat in a gilded chair instructing, approving, dabbing her eyes.

  “Do you remember your wedding day, Grandmother?”

  The sigh came, as thin and fragile as her bones. “A woman does not forget the day she truly became a woman.”

  They slipped silk over Adrianne’s body, sheer, embroidered white on white. “How did you feel?”

  Jiddah smiled, remembering. She was old for a woman of her culture, but she remembered being a girl. “He was handsome and straight, and so young. You have the look of him, as does your father. We were cousins, but he was much older, as is fitting. I was honored to be chosen for him, afraid I would not please him.” Then she laughed, and her sexuality, undimmed, flashed in her eyes. “But that night I was no longer afraid.”

  Jokes were made about the wedding night to come, some with amusement, some with envy. Hands were in Adrianne’s hair, braiding, crimping, curling while smoke from incense was fanned into it. Adrianne couldn’t find it in her heart to object.

  Most of the women were shooed out when the couturiere arrived with the wedding gown. With tongue clicking and muttered instructions, Dagmar helped Adrianne into the dress. She had had enough of paradise and wanted Paris, where the worst a woman could expect on an afternoon stroll were a few whistles and propositions. There were oohs and aahs as she fastened an array of two dozen covered buttons.

  “You make a magnificent bride, Your Highness. Wait.” Dagmar gestured impatiently for the headdress. “I want you to see the full effect when you look.”

  Filmy tulle was draped in front of her eyes. A veil, even now. Only more of a dream, Adrianne thought as she looked out in the misty light. The mirror was turned and she saw herself draped in icy white satin and stiff lace with a luxurious train that gleamed in the light as it poured to the far end of the room. Seamstresses had worked more than a hundred combined hours sewing on the pearls that adorned it. The headdress glittered, a small crown of pearls and diamonds circling before it fell into yards of thin tulle.

  “You look stunning. The dress is everything I promised.”

  “Yes, and more. Thank you.”

  “It’s been a pleasure.” And a relief to be done with it. “I’d like to wish you happiness, Your Highness. May today be everything you want.”

  She thought of The Sun and the Moon. “It will be.”

  She accepted the bouquet of orchids and white roses.

  She was a bride, but there would be no wedding march, no shoes tied to a bumper, no rice thrown. It made it easier somehow to pretend it was only a show, one more part of the game.

  With her hands cool and steady, her heartbeat easy, she followed her attendants into the room where she would be presented to her husband and the men of her family.

  She took his breath away. There was no other way for him to describe it. One moment he was breathing, thinking like any man, and the next, the moment he saw her, everything stopped. Even his fingers went numb. The nerves he thought he didn’t have reached up and grabbed him by the throat.

  She was kissed by each male relative in turn, sometimes solemnly, sometimes joyfully. Then stiffly by her father. Abdu took her hand and placed it in Philip’s. And he was finished with her.

  They were blessed. Words from the Koran were read, but in Arabic, so Philip understood nothing except her hand was cold in his and just beginning to tremble.

  She hadn’t known he would wear the white throbe and headdress of Islam. It should have made it only more unreal, but somehow it struck her that no matter how much she pretended or denied, the marriage was fact. It would be temporary and easily dissolved, but today it was real.

  It was more than an hour before the procession began. It was heralded by a shout, then the traditional clicking of tongues of the bedouin women waiting in the wedding hall. He could hear the drums and the music as they began the long walk.

  Tonight they would walk through these halls again, in secret.

  “Is that it?”

  She nearly jolted at Philip’s whisper, then told herself it was time to see the humor of it. “Not by a long chalk. The wedding guests need to be entertained. Musicians and dancers go down first. You aren’t allowed to see them.” She gave him a quick smile. “It shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes.”

  “And then?”

  “The bridal party. We’ll walk down between the chairs. There’ll be a podium of some kind set up. Lots of flowers. We’ll sit up there for the ceremony, then to receive congratulations for the next two hours.”

  “Two—lovely,” he muttered. “Do they feed us?”

  She wanted to kiss him for that, if only that. Instead, she laughed. “After, at the wedding feast. Why are you dressed like that?”

  Because her father had requested it, but he thought it best not to say so. “When in Rome,” he said easily. Then there was no more time for talk.

  She hadn’t exaggerated about the flowers. There were walls of them reaching from floor to ceiling. The only thing more stunning were the jewels draped over the women privileged to have been invited. Nor had she exaggerated about the time. They sat under a bower and shook hands and exchanged kisses and good wishes for more than two hours while the scent of roses and heavy perfume had a headache pounding behind his eyes.

  But there was still more to come. They were ushered, herded, Philip thought, into a huge room with one narrow doorway. In it were table after table loaded with food, sugared fruits, glossy desserts, spiced meats. In the center was a cake that towered twenty layers high.

  Someone had smuggled in a Polaroid camera, and women were gleefully posing then secreting away the pictures. Philip begged one of himself and Adrianne, then tucked it away.

  Eight hours after she had put on her wedding gown, she and Philip were ushered to the rooms where they would spend their first night as husband and wife.

  “Well,” she managed when the door was closed and the last giggle had died away. “That was quite a show.”

  “It was missing only one thing.”

  “Mud wrestlers?”

  “Such a cynic.” He took her hands before she could remove her headdress. “I haven’t kissed the bride.”

  She relaxed enough to smile. “There’s still time.”

  She leaned to him, leaned on him. Just this once. That’s what she told herself. Just this once she’d let herself believe in happily ever after. The scent of flowers still lingered. Her dress rustled as he wrapped his arms around her. His kiss was warm, solid, and more than anything what she needed.

  “You’re so beautiful, Addy. I almost swallowed my tongue when you walked into that room.”

  “I wasn’t nervous until I saw you.” She rested her head against his shoulder. “I’ll never be able to pay you back for what you’re doing for me.”

  “When things are done for selfish purposes, there’s no reason to pay back. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve already told your father.” After unpinning her headdress, he set it aside. His fingers were already itching to work their way into her hair. “He has no problem with me wanting to take my wife on a honeymoon right away. I made sure he understood we would be in Paris for two weeks, then in New York.”

  “You’re right, it’s best. The less I see of my brothers and sisters, the easier it will be not to see them again.”

  “You can’t be sure that will happen.”

  “He won’t pe
rmit them to contact me after this. I know that, and I accept it. I just didn’t know it would be difficult to give up something I’ve had for such a short time.” She reached her hands to the back of her neck to begin undoing buttons. “We should rest, Philip. It’s going to be a long night.”

  He replaced her hands with his. “Some things come before rest.” He brushed kisses over her face as he worked his way down the buttons. “I’ve missed you, Addy. I’ve missed the taste of you.”

  She pushed the robe from his shoulders. “Just this once, you can taste all you want.”

  The dedicated French seamstresses would have winced when the satin slid to a heap on the floor.

  He awoke in the dark and lay still, feeling the weight of Adrianne’s body pressed against his. She was sleeping, but lightly, so that he knew if he moved, or spoke her name in a whisper, she would come alert. There was time for that yet.