Sheikh Malik raised his eyebrows. ‘You were planning to be a lawyer? You should have drawn up the contract today. Is that what you always wanted to do?’
‘Not for a long time. Originally I assumed I would head into PR or something. I did a lot of temping for law firms, mainly big city firms, and it was fascinating. I would take minutes, or type up letters and think, well, I could do this.’
‘I see, you wanted to work for one of the big city firms. That shows a lot of ambition.’
‘They certainly pay well.’ Idris leaned back in his chair, his eyes full of scorn. ‘Money’s a great motivator, isn’t it, Saskia?’
‘No. Not corporate law, although obviously that has its place, it isn’t completely full of big business types thinking about a big wage packet.’ Her fingers tightened on her glass as she met Idris’s gaze as evenly as she possibly could. She knew full well that he had rebuilt his family fortunes back in France, restored the vineyards to produce wine that sold for more than her weekly rent. He didn’t live on some kind of moral high ground—every shirt he possessed was handmade. ‘I wanted to do family law. Advocate for those who can’t speak for themselves. I’d still like to do that in some capacity. One day.’ She raised her water glass to Idris, allowing the defiance to gleam in her eyes. She would achieve her dreams, Queen or not. She would just have to redefine what those dreams were and not let anyone, no matter how igniting his touch, stand in her way.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘SASKIA? A MOMENT, PLEASE.’ It was couched as a request but Idris knew that she was fully aware of what he really meant.
It was a command.
Saskia stilled, half turned away, her full body angling towards the door leading back into the villa, poised for flight. ‘It’s late and I am very tired. It’s been a long day.’ His uncle and aunt had only just left after what had been a curiously lighthearted evening in the end.
‘This won’t take more than a few minutes.’
She hesitated for another long moment and he tensed, relaxing as she let out a small, indignant huff. ‘If it really can’t wait.’
Idris nodded at the servants, still clearing the table, and at his signal they melted away, leaving the two of them alone. ‘Please sit.’
‘I’d rather stand.’
He gave her stomach a pointed look, but he didn’t press the matter. If she chose to be uncomfortable who was he to stop her? ‘Bien. Stand.’ He picked up his brandy glass and studied the liquid just covering the bottom before setting it down and transferring the same keen study to his new wife. ‘Is it true what you said just now? You’re studying law?’
‘Yes.’ Her eyes flashed as she tilted her chin defiantly. ‘I’m not in the habit of lying, Idris. I just completed the first year online—and passed with honours, with the intention of transferring to a bricks and mortar university for the next two years and for my qualifying year. But plans change.’
‘Yes.’ He knew that all too well. It was common ground between them; enough of a common ground to build a marriage on? It was a start. ‘That’s why you agreed to become Maya’s surrogate? To pay for your degree?’
Her face reddened. ‘And to buy a house. Jack needed a proper home. We needed a proper home.’
It still made no sense. ‘But what about your father’s money?’
Saskia stared at him, incredulity sharpening her gaze. ‘Come on, Idris, you know what happened to my father. Don’t tell me there’s not a nice little dossier on your desk right now.’
He nodded his head in acknowledgement. Of course the Dalmayan Secret Service had torn her life inside out the second the marriage had been agreed and he had spent last night reading the slender file, disbelief increasing with every word. Where was the trust fund? The parties, the boyfriends, the socialite existence? Instead all they could find on Saskia was a tiny rented flat in Wood Green, temping jobs, menial at first, better paid once she had taken some courses to improve her administrative skills. The only scandal was seven years old and lay at her father’s door.
He hadn’t been able to sleep last night, trying to reconcile the entitled girl he had known, the girl he had tried not to fall in love with, with this backstreet Cinderella, toiling her twenties away. ‘I’m sorry to hear about your father. I know how much you loved him.’
‘Sorry? Because he was a thief? Because he committed suicide? Because in the end I adored a liar and a sham. Save it. I don’t need your pity, Idris.’ The words and tone were dismissive but she leaned against the chair as if for support, her knuckles whitening as she clutched the chair back.
Idris’s lips tightened. The coward had shot himself the second he was discovered, leaving Saskia to deal with the mess. ‘He was a clever man. He must have left you something. I understand you have to be careful not to flaunt it but surely there’s enough money for you to live...’ He couldn’t believe a man like Ted Harper hadn’t hidden money away in offshore accounts ready for this kind of eventuality. That he would have abandoned his beloved only daughter to poverty.
But Saskia shook her head vehemently. ‘He left me nothing. Nothing except shame and debts.’
‘Your mother couldn’t help you?’
‘She was never really part of my life. They divorced when I was small. Idris, why are you dredging this up? You knew about my mother back then. Why would anything have changed?’
‘I know you weren’t close but surely she didn’t just abandon you?’
Saskia put her hand in the small of her back and straightened, her face contorted with effort. Idris glared pointedly at her unused chair but she ignored him, leaning against the table instead. He almost admired her stubbornness. Almost. ‘She didn’t want any publicity that might connect her with my father. She had remarried and her celebrity yoga business relies on good press and good karma, which I apparently was very short of.’ She blew a frustrated breath. ‘I mean, I don’t know if I had turned up that she would actually have sent me from her gates but there was Jack...’
Yes. There was Jack. For some reason the boy was Saskia’s responsibility—which now made him Idris’s. Three days ago he’d had no responsibilities beyond the vineyard and his business apart from his mother’s occasional dramas and bailing out his father on occasion. Now he had a kingdom, a wife, a dependent child and another on the way. It was as if he had pressed fast forward on the game of life and been catapulted five years on with no real idea how he got there.
‘Where is his mother?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care. That woman. God, Idris, she didn’t want to be a mother at all. She was my father’s mistress, I didn’t even know of her existence—or of Jack’s—until a week after my father...a week after he died. I was still at the house then, gradually realising just what a mess he had bequeathed me, and she turned up at the door demanding her maintenance. Apparently she had only agreed to keep Jack in return for a lavish allowance. No allowance, no Jack. She just walked away and left this tiny boy behind in the hallway, as if he was an unwanted cat...’
Idris pictured the bright-faced boy running into the villa, disgust twisting his stomach at the thought of someone just abandoning their child. ‘There was no one else who could help?’
‘No. It was all down to me,’ she snapped. ‘I was—I am—the only person I can rely on. I found that out the night my father died...’
Idris stilled, an unwelcome realisation creeping over him as he added two and two together and came up with a sickeningly certain four. Her father had died seven years ago. She’d dropped out of Oxford seven years ago. He had ended their relationship seven years ago...
Ended it because she was a distraction, because he knew all too well where following your heart not your head led. The final straw had been the evening she’d shown up drunk and hysterical. He’d turned her away—and that was the last he had seen of Saskia Harper until three days ago.
Saskia whirled around, her aches evidently forgotten as she faced him, tall and defiant. ‘It’s such a cliché, isn’t it? The worst day of your life? And you know, until that day, every day had been pretty damn good. Since then?’ She shrugged, an angry, brittle movement. ‘There was the day I was fired when I didn’t let my boss feel me up in the photocopier room, the day I literally couldn’t afford baked beans. The day I realised Jack had been going to school with holes in his shoes. The day I dragged myself to work with flu because there’s no sick pay if you’re a temp. The day Maya died. Yeah, there’s been some competition for the worst day of my life but the day my father died still holds the crown.’
Every word dropped heavily straight into his heart. How had he not known? Not known that her gilded life had tarnished, not known that she had willingly accepted a burden far too heavy for her? Guilt flooded through him, guilt edged with anger. Anger at every person who had let her down, himself possibly included in that tally. Idris curled his hands into fists as he vowed to hunt down that particular boss and make him regret he had ever set foot in the photocopier room.
‘That day,’ she continued, her eyes harder than the emeralds they resembled, ‘the police turned up at college to take me home. They told me that the man I idolised had shot himself. That they suspected fraud. That there was a possibility that everything I had, everything he’d lavished on me, had been bought with stolen money. I identified the body, answered questions until I couldn’t speak, saw enough papers to realise that their accusations had merit and all I wanted was you to help me make sense of it all. Somehow I got myself back to Oxford, I don’t remember how. But you weren’t there, not at your flat, at your college, nowhere. You weren’t answering your phone or texts. I bumped into Tatiana and, although her all-day party-girl shtick usually bored me, that day her offer of a drink seemed like a good one, and so did the next and the next and the one after that because I needed to somehow be numb. I got to numb, stupidly I kept drinking past numb, and somewhere along the way I hit hysterical. That’s when it seemed like a good idea to try and find you again. To find comfort.’ She held his gaze, proud and true like the Queen she would so shortly become. ‘And you sent me away.’
There it was. Two and two did make four, after all. He held a degree in maths and business—how could he doubt it? He’d ended their relationship on the day she had lost her father, lost her entire life. Ignorance did not seem much of an excuse. If he had known why she had turned up so late, so drunk, so incoherent, then of course he would have acted differently. Been gentler. But he hadn’t asked, hadn’t given her the chance to tell him. She had just had her world destroyed and he had put in the final boot, stomping down on what was left of her. Shame twisted in his gut, hot and fierce.
But the truth was he would still probably have finished their relationship, not that night but soon after. She had been the ultimate distraction and his work had started to pay the price. Idris had known his path—it was straight and clear and sensible and there had been no room on it for a red-headed siren no matter how seductive her song.
He knew all too well what happened when people threw duty away for love: it tore families apart. Duty came first, always.
For once the certainty didn’t feel quite as comforting as it usually did. It didn’t matter; the undeniable truth was that Idris had made a success of his life thanks to his one hundred per cent dedication and commitment. He’d restored the vineyards, restored the chateau, built up a business. The Delacour name was no longer a fading star, relegated to gossip pages, but a force to be reckoned with. He had inherited the crown as a worthy heir. As a man who achieved. A man who built and restored. It was enough. It had to be enough. It was what he had.
‘Why did you?’ She no longer sounded angry, she sounded exhausted, and Idris glanced over at her, concerned. The baby wasn’t due for six weeks and so far he’d done a terrible job of helping her to keep her stress levels down. ‘I thought you loved me. You never said it, but I could have sworn I used to see it in your eyes, in your smile. Feel it in the way you touched me.’
The air around them grew thick with memories, the scent of the night-blooming jasmine permeating the terrace. Idris’s grip tightened on his glass as her words sank in, as he remembered the softness of her skin, the feel of her hand in his, the way she’d shivered when he’d traced a finger along her cheek, along the curve of her waist, the swell of her breast. ‘Maybe I did,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Maybe I was close, at least as much as I was—as I am—capable of loving anyone.’
Her eyelids fluttered at his words. ‘I’m glad it wasn’t all in my head.’
‘Sit down, Saskia. Please,’ he added and, after a quick glance at him, she slid carefully into the chair, accepting the glass of iced water he pushed over to her with a wan smile. ‘You know that Fayaz was my cousin?’
If she was surprised at the change in topic she didn’t show it, nodding slowly. ‘Of course, your mother was his aunt.’ She looked up. ‘Shouldn’t your mother be Queen then, instead? Or is that not allowed here?’
‘It’s not been done, nor has any King inherited through his mother as I am doing, but my grandfather, the Great Reformer, didn’t allow little things like thousands of years of tradition to stop him.’ He stopped, visions of the proud, straight-backed man flooding his thoughts. Would he be proud of the man Idris had become? Of the sacrifices he had made? ‘If things had been different maybe my mother would be in Dalmaya preparing to take the throne right now, but she hasn’t set foot in the country since she was nineteen. She’s not welcome here.’
‘She’s been exiled? In this day and age?’
‘Not officially, but as good as.’
‘What on earth did she do?’
What hadn’t she done? His mouth twisted. ‘She ran away with her ski instructor when she was nineteen.’
‘Okay. That doesn’t sound too awful.’
She didn’t understand; how could she? ‘Saskia, in this country arranged marriages are still common, and education for girls over eleven still relatively new. My mother was a royal princess, a role model, and she not only lived with a man she wasn’t married to but she was pictured—extensively—smoking, drinking, flirting. She modelled, did some acting. There were nude shots. She left the ski instructor for a racing driver and then, after some public scenes, she left him for my father. My father is a well-known provocateur, an artist, and there’s no controversy he hasn’t courted...their parties, their affairs, their arguments have been photographed and written about for the entirety of their marriage.’ Neither cared. His father thought even noticing such things beneath him; his mother just laughed.
‘Compared to an embezzling fraud they don’t sound too bad to me, but I’m the first to admit my standards are pretty low. An actual parent would be nice to have.’
He barely heard her, trying to find the right words to explain. ‘That night. That night you came to me, my mother had called me. My job, Saskia, my role, was to be the sensible one, to be the grown-up. It still is. There was no room for three juveniles in my family and neither of my parents had any intention of growing up.’
‘What did your mother want, that night?’
He cast his mind back to that day. His mother hadn’t been able to speak at first; it had taken hours to calm her down. ‘There was some transgression of my father’s. It wasn’t uncommon, for her to call and cry at me, but this was worse than usual. It took three hours to calm her—she was hysterical, threatening to leave him, to kill herself. To do something crazy. She is quite capable of anything when she is in that mood. I couldn’t i
gnore her, no matter how much I wanted to.’
He poured himself a little more brandy, trying to remember the emotions of that night. It was all so long ago; he had been a different person then, still a boy in so many ways. ‘For the first time, academically, things were slipping. I wasn’t in control and that scared me. My essay was late, my tutor concerned, my final proposal flawed, work in general not up to scratch and I knew it was because I was spending too much time with you. Non,’ he said as she looked ready to retort. ‘The fault was all mine, but I knew I had to remedy it. My future, the family expectations demanded it.
‘And then you turned up and it was like watching my parents’ marriage mirrored in our still fledgling relationship, seeing our possible future in their present. My mother crying, my father frustrated because he couldn’t work, I could smell the alcohol on you, you made no sense...’
‘I see.’
‘I couldn’t allow myself to be dragged into any more drama. I couldn’t allow my feelings for you to develop any further, to distract me any more. I didn’t know how serious things were for you, and I am truly sorry I didn’t find out and help...’
‘I didn’t need your help. I just wanted your support.’
He couldn’t, didn’t answer. What was there to say? He couldn’t lie and tell her that of course he would have supported her, shouldered her troubles, carried her needs and expectations along with all the others that had been thrust upon him. They’d only been dating for a few months. His mother might throw caution to the wind for the very idea of love but Idris had spent his life living with the consequences.
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