‘A man in my position is always expected to marry,’ he said. ‘But I saw no urgency to do so. For someone who doesn’t believe in love, it was always going to be an academic exercise of settling down to produce a family at the optimum time.’
‘And what would you consider to be the optimum time?’ she echoed cautiously.
‘Never?’ he questioned sarcastically.
‘Kulal, I’m serious.’
He shrugged. ‘In perhaps a decade and a half, when I had reached fifty years and sown every last wild oat.’
‘So this early and unwanted marriage has prevented you from having hundreds of different relationships? All those wild oats which will remain unsown.’
‘I am not totally indiscriminate, Hannah,’ he said gravely.
‘But all that...all that unexplored opportunity,’ she breathed. ‘Won’t it make you resentful?’
Kulal frowned, feeling momentarily wrong-footed. Surely she was the one who was supposed to be feeling resentful—not turning it around so that she was coolly interrogating him. ‘I have no intention of straying, if that’s what you’re getting at. Infidelity is something I am vehemently opposed to—despite many of my royal peers feeling it their right to keep a mistress.’
He saw the surprise on her face as she brushed a heavy swathe of hair away from her forehead and blinked at him.
‘I have the feeling I shouldn’t be grateful just because you’ve told me you won’t break our wedding vows, but the fact is that I am,’ she said. ‘And a little curious, too.’
Her instinctive intelligence was enough to make him prolong the conversation, even though he sensed he was venturing onto precarious territory. ‘About what in particular?’ he questioned.
‘Well, you’ve told me you don’t want love.’
‘I don’t.’
The rumpled white sheet barely covered the creamy swell of her breasts and her eyes suddenly seemed very bright. ‘So why would you care about breaking your wedding vows, if another woman should suddenly take your fancy?’
He was on the verge of telling her that she looked so entrancing at that moment, that he couldn’t imagine another woman holding a flame to her.
Until he remembered.
He tried not to remember, but sometimes it came out of nowhere and hit you like a vicious blow. He felt the pain course through him like a black tide and his body tensed. ‘If you had grown up with parents like mine,’ he said, a trace of savage bitterness creeping into his voice, ‘you would understand.’
There was a pause before she spoke. ‘But how can I understand if you won’t tell me, Kulal?’ she whispered. ‘And if I understood, then maybe I could help you. Maybe you’ve forgotten that I grew up in a dysfunctional foster home which wasn’t in any way loving, so I don’t think anything you can tell me would shock me.’
He could see the eagerness on her face—a desire to help, which tugged at something deep inside him, but successfully he pushed the feeling away. Did she think it was that simple? That telling her would free him from the demons which had lived in his heart for so long? From his secret torture and sense of powerlessness? He felt a new resolve creep through his veins, for he would not give her that power. He would not give it to anyone. Hadn’t he promised his brother that?
‘And besides—’ her voice had softened hopefully as she fixed him with that same wide-eyed stare ‘—we’re married now. Aren’t we supposed to share those kinds of things?’
There was a split-second pause before Kulal was galvanised into action. ‘No, we’re not,’ he grated as he pushed the sheets from his naked body. ‘I don’t want that kind of marriage. I told you that from the start. Weren’t you listening, Hannah? Or did you think you could change my mind just as soon as my ring was on your finger? Did you believe, as so many women mistakenly do, that it was just a matter of time and proximity before you could get me to backtrack on my words? In which case, I fear you may be a little premature, as well as misguided.’ His voice hardened even more. ‘In my culture, we don’t spill out our innermost thoughts and feelings, as if life was just one long therapy session!’
‘I didn’t mean to pry,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘I was just trying to...help.’
‘Well, don’t because it’s a waste of time—yours and mine. The past is none of your business, Hannah. You’d better accept that now or this isn’t going to work. I will give you my fidelity and my support for our child. And I am prepared to make this marriage work within the framework we’ve laid out.’
‘You’ve laid out, you mean.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m the King. Sorry, but that’s the way it works around here. I am not an unreasonable man and anything you require will be yours, within reason. But please don’t ever ask me that again.’
There was a silence as she studied him, like someone hoping for a sudden miraculous change of heart, and Kulal saw the exact moment when resignation entered her eyes. When she realised that he meant every word he said.
‘And that’s the end of the discussion, is it?’ she questioned flatly.
He nodded as he slid from the bed. ‘Yes. And now I think it’s time you got some sleep.’
‘But...’ She sat up and the white sheet fell to her waist, showing the luscious thrust of her breasts. ‘Where are you going?’
He saw the alarm in her eyes, but years of practice meant he was able to steel his heart against it, even though he wasn’t managing to remain quite so indifferent to the sight of her rose-pink nipples. Did she really think he was going to lie there night after night, while she fired her questions at him, shattering those sleepy moments of post-coital intimacy and ruining them? Should he tell her the reasons why he didn’t want love and why he never would?
No.
Not on their wedding night. His mouth hardened. Perhaps not ever.
‘I’m going to sleep next door. It’s better that way.’
‘Better?’
‘Once again, I will draw your attention to royal protocol,’ he said softly. ‘It is quite normal for the Sheikh and his Sheikha to sleep separately—a pattern which was set many centuries ago. We can still be intimate.’ He reached for his discarded robe. ‘But you need your rest, Hannah. And I’m going to make sure you get it.’
CHAPTER TEN
THERE WERE TWO different ways of dealing with a problem. Hannah knew that better than anyone. Stepping from her bath, she bent forwards a little as the servant wrapped a fluffy towel around her damp shoulders. You could either accept the problem and learn to live with it, or you could try to solve it. And hadn’t she spent her life trying to do the latter?
She watched rose petals swirling round and round as water drained away from the golden bathtub. When she and Tamsyn had been hungry as children, she’d found food, hadn’t she? And when her schooling had suffered as a result of her having to keep house, she’d tried to teach herself. Even when her lack of formal qualifications had led to what some people might have considered the non-aspirational job of chambermaid, she had worked hard and earned herself promotions. Necessity had made her one of life’s fixers and that was the way she operated.
So couldn’t she apply the same criteria to her marriage—to find a way to elevate it from its current state of stalemate? To make it into something more meaningful, despite Kulal’s determination that it should exist only on the most superficial of levels? She swallowed. Because she was finding that what she had was not enough.
Not nearly enough.
She had a husband who was physically present but emotionally distant. A man who occupied himself by day—and sometimes evenings, too—with the many demands placed on him. Oh, occasionally he made a space for her in his diary, when for a brief time she felt as if she was actually sharing his life rather than living on the periphery of it. Times when she would accompany him to a state banquet, or the opening of some new medical centre, or perhaps they wo
uld eat dinner together—but that was the exception, rather than the rule. The only time she really had Kulal to herself was in bed at night.
Patting her skin dry, she sighed, because that wasn’t quite true. Even being in bed with him was time-limited. Once they had satisfied their mutual desire several times over, he would slip away to sleep in his own room, rising at five to saddle his horse and pound the desert sands until his hard body was sheened with sweat and little tendrils of black hair clung to his face. She knew this because once, long after he’d left her bed, she’d heard a noise and, on getting up to investigate, had found him stripping off in one of the anterooms of their vast suite. He had pulled the damp shirt from his body and had been in the process of unzipping his jodhpurs when Hannah had walked in and he had frozen.
So had she. Because the sight of Kulal undressing was overwhelming enough to make her heart race erratically. Oh, she got to see his naked body at night—every night, as it happened—but at times that felt almost stage-managed and this totally unexpected half-clothed version of him was unbelievably erotic. She hadn’t meant to be provocative when her tongue had slid out to slowly moisten her lips, but the increased tension in Kulal’s muscular torso had suggested that he’d found it so.
As she stood in her long, diaphanous nightgown, her rounded shape must have been very apparent with the lamplight shining through the folds of silk-chiffon, and she’d seen her husband’s black eyes roving greedily over her body before he deliberately lifted his gaze to hers.
‘You are not ill?’ he demanded.
She’d shaken her head. ‘I heard a noise, that’s all. It woke me up.’
He’d lifted his broad shoulders in apology, pointing to the discarded riding crop which had lain beside one leather-booted foot, which had been tapping at the marble floor with impatience. ‘I must have thrown that down with more force than I intended.’
She’d wanted to ask him why. Just as she’d wanted to ask him whether he might break his cast-iron rule and take her into his arms and kiss her. Now. Here. No matter how damp and sweaty he was. She had held her breath for one long moment when such a scenario had seemed possible—if the darkening of his eyes and the hungry hardening of his lips had been anything to go by—before he’d given her a dismissive smile.
‘Forgive me for waking you.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘You should. A pregnant woman needs her sleep.’ There had been a pause. ‘Go back to bed, Hannah.’
The memory retreated as Hannah bent down to dry her toes, then pulled a silky robe over her head. Was that what happened in relationships? Were you always seeking something more, no matter how much you had? And wasn’t the danger that she could jeopardise what they did have, if she allowed these restless longings to take over?
So she tried to count her blessings and to pray that some of Kulal’s icy reserve might melt a little. One morning, he had flown her to the north-eastern side of Zahristan, to his royal beach house, where they had sat beneath a shaded canopy and watched the glitter of the sun on the Murjaan Sea as they’d sipped fire-berry cordial. Their small contingent of protection officers had been entirely female, giving Hannah the opportunity to swim in the enormous pool which was surrounded by palm trees. The silken waters had rippled deliciously over her skin and she’d seen Kulal smile when she’d given a little squeal of delight.
‘Come and join me?’ she had questioned shyly.
Uncharacteristically, he had hesitated before telling her he needed to make a conference call to New York, and that brief pause had been enough to make a flicker of hope enter her body. Because in that moment, hadn’t he been tempted by an intimacy which wasn’t just about sex?
And the trouble with hope was that it was like a weed—it grew wildly with the slightest bit of encouragement. Hannah wondered if it was all in her imagination, or whether Kulal’s nocturnal visits were getting longer. Last night, it had been almost dawn before he had left the rumpled sheets to retreat to his own bedroom. Her eyelids had fluttered briefly open as she had watched him dressing in the dim light, longing for the time when he might spend an entire night with her. But she didn’t dare ask him outright. Not after the humiliation of their wedding night. Not when she suspected such an appeal would prompt the proud desert King into doing the very opposite.
In the meantime, her pregnancy was progressing with textbook perfection. Each day her bump grew bigger, ticking off every developmental milestone along the way. The palace doctor declared herself delighted with Hannah’s progress during their regular consultations, though the Sheikh had been absent from all of these.
‘It would be inappropriate for the King to be present during such an intimate examination,’ Kulal had said in reply to her tentative query about whether he might one day accompany her.
It was an old-fashioned point of view, but in many ways he was an old-fashioned man despite his western business dealings and cosmopolitan lifestyle prior to his marriage. He didn’t seem to mind that royal law decreed that the sex of their unborn child should be known only to the attending doctor, even though Hannah was longing to find out if she was having a boy or a girl. Sometimes she reflected on how different Zahristan was from the world she had grown up in.
But somehow, despite all the odds, she liked it and found a peace there she’d never known before. She liked the quiet and beauty of walking in the palace gardens, or drinking her tea in the vast courtyard, with its cobalt-blue mosaic floor and the mingled scent of orange blossom and gardenia filling the air. She liked it when she was appointed a female aide and two female protection officers so that she was able to explore the ancient museums and artefacts in the nearby city of Ashkhazar, though she preferred to make these visits unannounced, so that there wouldn’t be too much fuss. And she loved the huge library in the palace itself because, for the first time in her life, she actually had the time and the opportunity to read.
It felt magical to have endless rows of beautifully bound leather books at her fingertips and she began to read up more about Zahristan history, partly because she wanted to take her role as Sheikha seriously and partly because she wanted to understand Kulal’s land and, by definition, him. She read that he was from a long line of Zahristan kings from his father’s side and that his mother had been a princess from the neighbouring land of Tardistan. But there seemed to be gaps in the various accounts of his family history, even in the more modern publications—and it was only on a neglected shelf in a hidden alcove that she discovered a short biography about Kulal himself.
Her eyes scanned the pages eagerly, her eyes drinking in the portraits of his hawk-like features and flashing black eyes. There were descriptions of his exemplary school record and his daring exploits when he’d run away as a teenager to fight in the fierce border battle with Quzabar. There was an account of his father’s lying-in-state and the political turmoil before Kulal’s subsequent accession to the throne, but practically nothing about his mother’s early death, other than the fact it was ‘tragic’. And if Kulal was the younger of twin brothers, as was stated, it didn’t explain why he had taken the throne instead of his older brother, Haydar. Hannah wanted to know, but instinct told her not to pry. That the answers she sought would only come about if she and Kulal grew closer as a couple—and wasn’t she attempting to help that process along, by increasing the amount of time they spent together?
She’d quickly realised that Kulal working late into the evening before he came to bed was an evasive tactic. She realised that he preferred her to be waiting and ready for sex—she guessed because that ruled out the need for conversation other than the ‘do you like it when I do that?’ variety. She remembered those far-away days when she’d cleaned his suite in Sardinia when they used to chat about stuff. When once in a while he’d even teased her. Couldn’t they get back to easy conversations like that—and the sort of intimacy which didn’t involve her gasping out her pleasure as he drove into her eager b
ody?
She told herself that the only reason she’d decided to start waiting until Kulal returned to their suite before retiring for the night was so they could chat. But deep down she knew that wasn’t the whole truth. Deep down she realised she had started to care for her husband in a way he had emphatically warned her against. A way which felt frighteningly close to love, even though she told herself that wasn’t possible.
But something had changed.
She wasn’t sure how or when it had happened, because it wasn’t the obvious things which had made her feel so differently about him. Not the muscular body which transported her to heaven and back every night. Or the ruler in all his finery with people bowing before him. It was the man with the occasional flicker of vulnerability in his eyes before the shutters came crashing down—that was the Kulal who had captured Hannah’s imagination and then her heart. Was it so wrong to wonder if she could ever forge a tiny place for herself in his heart?
Her silken robes whispered as she walked over to the desk where she’d left her book open and the dull thud of the outer doors of their suite told her that Kulal had returned. Instantly, she felt her heart begin to thunder.
‘Hannah?’
The sound of his voice was enough to send desire rippling down her spine and Hannah struggled to keep the hungry tremble from her voice. ‘I’m in here!’
He walked into the bedroom, appearing startled to see her sitting at the desk, a halo of golden lamplight surrounding her. ‘You’re not in bed?’ he questioned.
‘As you see,’ she said, with a smile. ‘I thought I’d wait for you and do a spot of reading.’ She put a bookmark in her book and closed it. ‘How did your meeting with the Sultan of Marazad go?’
Kulal felt momentarily disorientated because he hadn’t been expecting to see her waiting up for him. He swallowed. The sight of her alluring body was making him want to ravish her with a hunger which never seemed to wane, no matter how many times he took his fill of her. And it had never happened to him before—not like this. Every night since their wedding had been spent in her arms and not once had he grown bored. Unusually, he’d found himself cancelling trips to Europe and the States—feeling it wasn’t really fair to abandon his pregnant wife in a strange new country, even though no such complaint had come from her. Despite the huge leap of being catapulted from chambermaid to queen, she hadn’t been in the least bit clingy or dependent. She had been...
Crowned for the Sheikh's Baby Page 12
