She walked under the arch, her nerves leaping exponentially with every hurdle she crossed, for each one brought her closer to Kiral.
“You have identification?”
She nodded and reached for her handbag. “May I?”
He nodded. She slipped her passport from the bag and handed it to him. He studied it and then put it into another tray.
“Oh.” Abi’s eyes were enormous as she looked at his face. “May I have it back?”
“Not now. After.”
“After?” She licked her lower lip. “What are you going to do with it?”
His smile was reassuring. “Have it checked and keep it safe. You need not worry, madam. You are in the royal palace of Delani. We have little interest in identity fraud, eh?”
She felt small and silly. How could she explain to him that it was not identity fraud she feared so much as a loss of her liberty? She couldn’t. Not when so much was still at stake. Not when she still had no idea if Kiral would even see her. If he would help her.
“All visitors surrender their passport, madam. It is a necessary security measure.”
“Right,” she felt slightly mollified by his assurances. She nodded jerkily and, when he extended the tray to her, slipped her bag back over her shoulder and her shoes onto her feet. They were hot. So hot. This guard was kind-seeming and so she felt emboldened to say, “Would it be possible to get some water, please?”
He nodded and said a few words over her shoulder. A woman appeared with a bottle.
“This is Anushka. She will perform a pat-down, madam. Then you may have your water.”
“Fine,” Abigail nodded. Weariness sapped her like a spell. What time was it? She scanned the room, looking for a clock. Anushka’s watch was the closest she came. As the woman deftly moved her hands over Abigail’s body, she saw it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon. She’d arrived at the palace at ten that morning, and prior to that it had been a long flight out from New York. No wonder she was tired and hungry.
Anushka said something to the guard Abi had originally followed into the room and he nodded efficiently towards Abigail. “This way.”
She fell into step beside him, focusing on the details of the building to keep her mind off the meeting that was, surely, coming closer and closer to fruition.
Did the guard intentionally take her past the statue? Or was there no other way to enter the inner sanctum of the palace? It towered over her; it was at least five times as tall as her, and built of marble. It was Kiral, though. She knew his body intimately, and she knew that this statue had been perfectly carved to resemble his form. She stared at it with a sinking feeling of desperation. How had she ever felt she loved him? How had she ever believed she knew him? He was a man that sculptures had been made for! He was a King!
The guard had continued walking and Abi had to hasten her step to catch up. She left the statue behind and tried her hardest to harden her heart; to find some strength and bravery in her being. The corridors continued as endless sleeves of glowing white, and the guard took so many twists and turns that Abi knew she’d never be able to find her way out again.
The wall to her left gave way eventually to glass. From the floor to the ceiling, the view of the glistening ocean to the west was perfectly framed. It was far enough away to form a perfect vista; she could take in the spiked palm trees on the shore, and the desert sand that changed from a burnt orange to a crisp white as it neared the ocean. The ocean itself was one of the most beautiful colours she’d ever seen. Turquoise and blue, so crisp and clear that she was almost irrepressibly drawn to it. How inviting it looked! How pleasant it would be, on a day such as this, to submit to its cool depths.
“Here.” The man paused outside a large room. The ceiling was high above her and the chairs looked both expensive and uncomfortable. “Here you wait.”
She nodded. “Thank you. Excuse me but does he, does His Highness, know I’m here?”
“Not yet,” the man said with a shake of his head. “He will be finished soon.”
“And then he’ll come to me?”
“He will come when he is able. If he chooses to do so.” The guard’s smile was apologetic. “I cannot promise he will meet with you at all, madam.”
The thought that, after all this, he might turn her away, filled Abi with a cold sense of dread. “Please be sure to tell him it’s urgent. Please tell him … please tell him I wouldn’t have come if it weren’t a matter of life and death.”
* * *
“Life and death?” Kiral studied the passport with a pounding sense of emotion. “She used those exact words?”
The guard nodded. “It is what she said.”
He held the passport closer. It was new. The photo was recent then, but it could have easily been taken three years earlier, for all she’d changed. Her hair was the same. Her eyes. Her skin. She looked just as he remembered. And he hated her for that.
Why had she come?
His marriage was only a week away. The last person on Earth he should be seeing was Abigail McClean. She belonged in his past. He’d spent a long time making sure she stayed there. Even when his dreams of her had been so vivid he’d felt that he could reach out and hold her to him, he’d pushed her out of his mind. He’d become an expert at ignoring the small part of his mind that was almost permanently on Abi-duty. Remembering her. Thinking of her and wondering. What was her life like now? Had she graduated? Married? The very thought filled him with an acidic burn.
“Where is she?”
“In the Eflianan room.” Only a few doors from his office.
Kiral tightened a fist beneath the marble top of his desk. She was so close. If he wished to, he could be with her in moments. He stood abruptly. “I have a full schedule of meetings. You must tell her I cannot see her today.”
The words surprised him. He wanted nothing more than to see her, and yet he was stalling. He was sending her a message. She was no longer important to him.
Why?
Because you have to, he reminded himself. His marriage was important. He could not jeopardize it for some American woman he’d once slept with.
“At all today, sir?” The guard felt emboldened to ask. He couldn’t get the woman’s desperate expression from his mind.
Kiral heard the question and he understood it. Abi’s power, then, was not diminished by time either. She had a manner about her that made her impossible to resist. As he’d learned first-hand. “I’ll see. Leave her to wait. She is not your concern. Understood?” He had spoken more harshly than he’d intended but that was a measure of how Abigail made him feel.
“Of course, your highness.” The guard left swiftly and Kiral was alone.
Only he wasn’t alone. Abigail was there with him. She stood before him as clearly as she had done three years earlier, when he’d told her he must leave. When he’d told her that he was a powerful ruler with a fiancé and a life earmarked for him in which Abigail McClean could have no part.
They’d fallen in love. It had been a disaster. He’d had no business loving a woman like her. He could offer her nothing. Even without his official betrothal to a princess of an important neighbouring country Abi would not have been a woman he could ever have contemplated marriage to.
He had made that abundantly clear to her, but only when it was too late. He had, if anything, laboured his point more harshly than was necessary. But he’d wanted her to hate him. He had erred in allowing her to care for him. He had exposed her to pain. He had also sought to avoid any ambiguity. For a short time, weeks perhaps, they had experienced impossible joy and pleasure. They had made love physically and emotionally; they’d experienced the most perfect balance that two people could share. If he’d been any less brutal when he’d ended it she might have wanted more from him. She might have let him cloud her future. So he’d ended it with cold determination.
Why had she appeared now? Three years later, she was in his palace. Had she come to beg him not to marry? Did she want another chan
ce? Surely she knew how impossible that was?
Questions gnawed at his gut, but Kiral was nothing if not stubborn. He held to his schedule as though nothing untoward was happening. But his mind was stubbornly focused on the mystery of her appearance.
By ten o’clock that night, when his final interview was concluded and the sun had set over the city in the distance, he allowed his curiosity space to breathe.
He walked with a fatalistic assuredness towards the Eflianan room. It was used for visiting dignitaries and he imagined she would have been comfortable waiting for him there.
He stepped in with ingrained confidence, certain he could not convey to her the emotional storm she’d sparked inside of him.
But he was not prepared for the sight that would greet him.
Abi was asleep. Her shoes were lined up neatly on the floor, and beside them was an old leather handbag. Her petite frame was curled into an arm chair. A book had fallen down the side.
And just like that, a tonne of bricks crushed down on him.
He almost groaned, so great was the desire to wake her with a gentle kiss. But that was something he’d done in the past, and he could no longer give in to such cravings. Though her lips looked just as soft as always; they were shaped like perfect rose petals. He ached to trace them with his tongue; but he did not.
He could look, though, and look he did. Like a man who had been deprived of food led to a table of offerings.
She was wearing a cotton dress and the scarf she’d wrapped around her head had fallen loose, revealing her mane of chestnut hair.
When he had first met her in New York, he’d been a man. At least, so far as she knew, he’d been a man, and not this. A King. A ruler. But here in his palace, he was royal, filled with the powerful blood that had long-since guided his people to peace and prosperity.
He cleared his throat and she startled, her eyes latching to his immediately. He saw the anguish and the shock, the rich emotion that troubled her too. She banked down on it quickly but it had been there. Whatever had brought her to him, the journey for her had been difficult.
“Ki,” she croaked, her voice dry. She blinked again and then looked around them. The room was empty. She pushed her feet into her shoes and stood. The disadvantage of height was as pronounced as ever. Years had passed, yet he stood the same, like a figment of her memory. She almost wanted to touch him to make sure he wasn’t a creation of her subconscious. Only she’d never seen him like this. In New York, he’d worn beautiful clothes but clothes that were somewhat familiar to her. Now, in what she could only guess was a traditional robe — slate grey with pale cream embroidery at the cuffs and collar — he looked regal and imposing. His dark hair was a little shorter than he’d worn it in New York, but still thick with a slight wave. Her fingers tingled with the force of memory; how she’d run them through it whenever she could.
Her gut squeezed and she made an involuntary gasping sound. It was too much. Seeing him like this again had made her entire body vibrate with a deluge of long-forgotten emotions.
“Abigail,” he said, injecting coldness into his tone with effort. She looked at him as though she wanted to strip him naked and make love to him right there amongst the grand and ancient furnishings. She looked at him as though it was three years ago. He spoke coldly to remind them both: they were simply a fragment of a long-ago past; nothing more.
She swallowed convulsively, just as she had the first time they’d met. She’d been nervous then, too. Shy. But she’d glowed with an inner-strength he’d found compelling. That was missing now.
“Thank you for seeing me.” Shock was receding and now the purpose of her visit was uppermost in her mind. Her voice was business-like. Her manner switching from emotionally-charged to focused and detached.
He hadn’t expected that. She’d been furious when they’d parted. It had come out of nowhere for her. She had not expected him to end their relationship. Not when they’d become so dependent, and so quickly.
“Why are you here?”
Another visible effort to bring herself under control. She opened her mouth to say something and then squeezed her eyes shut.
He couldn’t have known then but she was trying her hardest to get the words out. Only even she, who’d lived with the reality of their son’s illness for so long, found it hard to frame the sentence; to admit the truth of his damaged heart. If Kiral had had any sense of the news she was attempting to broach he might have been patient. To have silently encouraged her. But he didn’t, and patience had never been Kiral’s strong suit.
His words rung with assumed boredom. Assumed because Kiral knew that if he didn’t conclude this conversation swiftly he would do something he would truly regret. “It is late, Abigail, and I am tired. My day has been long. Say what you’ve come to say.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did you come here because of my wedding?”
“What?” She shook her head distractedly. “No. I didn’t even know that was this week until … until I arrived.” She couldn’t meet his eyes but he didn’t doubt her honesty. The admission hurt him. He didn’t want to analyse why her lack of interest in his life bothered him; the emotion was not to his credit
“Then what is it?”
She heaved out an enormous sigh. “I need money.” Her fingers lifted and wrapped around the slender column of her neck. “I need money, Ki.” At his look of disinterest, she put a hand on his forearm. “Please help me.”
* * *
Two years earlier
“You need to tell him, sweetheart.”
Abi stared up at her mom’s face with guilt. Little lines of worry were bunched around her eyes and Abi knew she’d put them there. The last six months had been hard on both of them. Absentmindedly, she reached a hand out and stroked Michael’s hand through the hole in his humidicrib.
“I can’t.”
“Abi.” Annette sat down in the vinyl seat beside her daughter. She crossed her slim legs and stared at the small figure curled in the plastic cot. His little body was beautiful, despite the trails of cords that ran in and out of his nose and mouth and were tangled and webbed around his torso.
“Mom,” Abi interrupted. “He wouldn’t want to know.”
“That’s crap,” Annette shook her head firmly. “You told me this guy’s fantastic. That he’s smart, and kind and intelligent. You said you love him.”
Abi compressed her lips. “He is. I do. I thought he was all those things. But he can’t … he’s not … it’s not possible for him to hear about this.”
“Why not?” Annette pushed, putting a hand on her daughter’s knee to draw her gaze.
Abi’s eyes were enormous. “Because. He would take him away, mom.”
“Nonsense. He couldn’t. You’re an American citizen and so is Michael. This man couldn’t simply steal your child.”
Abi’s laugh was muted. She shook her head wearily. Kiral could do whatever the heck he wanted, and Abi was certainly not in a position to stop him. “I’m going to do this on my own, mom.”
Annette recognized the stubborn assurance that ran through her daughter. She saw the petulant determination and sighed. “Not on your own, darling. I’m here too. I’ll always be here for you both.”
2
Please help me.
Seeing her again had poured ice into his brain and through his body. He was frozen to the spot, and every fibre of his being was sluggish and confused. She was wreaking havoc on his senses, pulling him back towards a time when he’d felt young and free and happy.
He should never have been with her.
It had been playing with fire then.
And she sure as hell shouldn’t be here now.
“You need money?” He repeated, not even certain he’d heard her correctly.
Her pink tongue darted out and moistened equally pink lips. Lips that had once known his body intimately. He felt himself tighten at the involuntary recollection.
Her hands were shaking. She lifted one and pressed it against her forehead. Wa
s she in pain? Was she ill? He scanned her face, waiting for her to elaborate.
Only Abi had no idea how to begin. She had planned this for weeks. Since the operation had first been mentioned to her and she’d got an idea for how life-saving it could be – and how much it would cost.
“I have not seen you in three years, and that is what you come and say to me?”
She nodded again. Her face was pale beneath her tan. Her eyes enormous. She looked exhausted; ill, almost. He should not have kept her waiting as long as he had. What a childish indulgence, to imagine her waiting for him. Another emotion that was beneath him.
“You told me we could never see one another again,” she said, her voice soft.
“And yet you are here,” he retorted, to stop himself from remembering how hollow it had felt to say those words.
“Not by choice, believe me.” She wrapped her arms around her slender waist and turned away from him. She padded, bare-foot, across the room, towards the windows that glimpsed the ocean.
He had been wrong in his initial assessment. She had changed. She had grown slimmer in the intervening years. Through the dress he could make out the frailty of her figure and it angered him. Had she given in to that ridiculous idea that a woman needed to be skin and bones to look attractive?
“I have tried everything and everyone I could think of. Banks won’t lend me a third of what I need. Believe me, Ki, I wouldn’t be here if I had a viable alternative.”
He would not have thought she could hurt him so easily, and yet her words were sharp blades scoring marks in his chest.
“What amount of money do you require that a bank would not loan to you?” He pushed, curiosity barbing.
She couldn’t turn around to face him. She stared at the water, now black and bathed in silver moonlight. “Two hundred thousand dollars.” Her voice shook with disbelief as she uttered the amount.
Clare Connelly Pairs II Page 16
