It Started With A Lie: A forbidden fake-boyfriend Cinderella romance (The Montebellos Book 5)

by Clare Connelly

  There was a hollow ring to the words that had the Sheikh wondering at what kind of messed up lack of independence had led her to believe that a royal lifestyle, under the microscope of a fascinated press and adoring public, would be preferable to being single?

  “So despite your parents, you still have faith in the institution of marriage?”

  “Our marriage is nothing like theirs,” she said with a grim smile.

  “How did it differ?”

  “Our marriage is barely a marriage,” she pointed out, distracting herself by reaching for a small wedge of peach and sliding it between her lips. His focused attention on the action almost threw her train of thought. “Up until a few nights ago, we hadn’t seen one another in six months.”

  “Whose fault is that?” He prompted.

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, no, you don’t! You don’t get to rewrite history, Rafiq Al-Khalil. You wanted me here about as much as I wanted to be here – which is to say, barely at all. I think it suited us both to have a degree of separation in our marriage.”

  He nodded slowly, but there was something like regret in his face. “And yet how quickly you’ve become an addiction in my blood. How did that happen?”

  She was startled – startled, shocked, pleased, surprised. She swallowed, and looked upwards, towards the stars overhead.

  “I like to know what’s expected of me,” she said, returning to their earlier, safer conversation.

  “You like safety,” he said with a nod that was rich with approval.

  “Yes.”

  “I understand that.” He pushed up a little straighter. “In this way, we are the same. For me, surprises are to be abhorred. Even the good ones.”

  She shifted her shoulders. “I don’t think there’s any such thing.”

  “True.”

  “It was hard on me, though. The divorce. Then again, what six year old wouldn’t have been devastated?”

  “Did you want to stay with your father?”

  “No.” Her shiver was involuntary. “I hardly knew him. Besides, my mother was adamant.”

  “He was saddened by the breakup.”

  “Don’t.” Her look was unspeakably intense. “Don’t make excuses for him. I know your father adored him, and you probably did too. But my father was a serial womanizer. A philanderer. He broke every heart that ever gave itself to him…”

  “Yours included.”

  She wanted to deny it, but there was something about the space they were in, the clarity of the night sky, the connection they’d forged in bed and now, over dinner, that had her nodding. She couldn’t meet his eyes though. “Mine too, yes.”

  “Your mother didn’t remarry?”

  “No.”

  “She never met anyone else?”

  “Oh, she met many someone elses,” Chloe whispered gravely. “A different man every week. Sometimes two.” Chloe sighed. “My mother was very beautiful, Raffa.” She bit down on her full, lower lip, but Raffa didn’t notice. His eyes were trained on her face, her anguished, haunted face. “She had no shortage of men who caught her eye, and vice versa. But none of them lasted long. She told me once, after she’d had a bottle of champagne, that there was no one on earth like Diego. My father, she told me, was the only man alive who’d ever made her heart sing.” Chloe rolled her eyes. “And so she drank herself into an early grave, sleeping with whomever took her fancy, never caring for what a sad spectacle she’d made of herself.”

  To her surprise, tears had pricked Chloe’s eyes without her notice. It wasn’t until one rolled down her cheek and Raffa reached across the table to pad his thumb over it, catching the moistness on his tip and dragging it sideways, that she recognized her emotional state.

  “Sorry,” she murmured. “I make it a rule never to talk about my messed-up family.”

  “Why?”

  She pulled away from his touch, shaking her head and lifting her own palms to dash at her cheeks. “Because apparently it brings me to tears and I despise crying.”

  He laughed again. “Crying is nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Oh, really? When was the last time you cried, your highness?”

  He frowned. “It’s different. I’m ...”

  “Oh, let me guess? A big, brave, macho man?”

  “I was going to say,” he corrected with a grimace, “a man who was raised knowing he would be Sheikh. Tears weren’t tolerated – ever – in my upbringing.”

  It was enough of a revelation to have Chloe’s mind changing courses, uncovering the stones of this. Her own upbringing had been lonely, cold, devoid of the kind of family interactions most people took for granted. But what had it been like for Raffa?

  “I have a problem with that,” she said, reaching for some cheese and grapes and placing them on her plate.

  “Oh?”

  “Firstly, I don’t think you would ever have been prone to crying. It’s just not… you. And secondly, you are definitely not the kind of man who, even as a boy, would have been dictated to. In fact, I dare say that had someone urged you to stop crying, you would have carried on for days, just to spite them.”

  He dipped his head forward but Chloe was certain she saw the hint of a smile on his face. “I cried,” he said after a moment, “when my mother died. And when your father died.”

  “I was angry when he died,” she said with a twist of her lips. “I was angry about the article, angry that it must been the last thing he saw. You know they found him with it in bed? He’d read it, and then he had a heart attack.”

  Raffa nodded. “I had heard that. Your brother was similarly furious. Devastated, too. So many revelations that should have stayed private…”

  “It was just conjecture,” she brushed it aside. “How could a journalist know the details she claimed to?”

  Apollo remained silent, unable to disclose what he knew of the situation – unable to tell his young wife that the article was, indeed, accurate. That the journalist’s source had been correctly quoted: that the source of the article was Apollo himself. He could tell her none of these things, because his friend had sworn him to secrecy, and even now, even with Chloe as his wife in every sense of the word, he couldn’t break the bonds of trust that he and Apollo had forged years earlier.

  “I didn’t.” Chloe continued speaking, unaware of the direction of her husband’s thoughts. “Cry when my father died, I mean.” She cleared her throat. “I don’t know why. I just don’t cry often. I was sad, I think – but because of an imagined future I had lost, rather than any special bond we’d shared. Death is sad – always. An old man who’s lived well and fast and long? It’s hard to see grief in that.”

  “Will you feel that way when my own father goes?”

  Chloe paled, her face instantly rejecting his words.

  “So it is not so natural after all?” he prompted, his point well-made.

  “Malik is so dynamic. It’s hard to imagine his body turning to dust and memory.”

  “Your father was just as much so.”

  “Not to me.” She speared a piece of octopus and ate it without tasting its salty sweetness.

  “What was he like to you?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Indulge me.”

  And for a flash of a second, just an instant wedged in time, she remembered the way they’d indulged one another only an hour earlier. The way he’d stormed into her room and taken her because it had seemed as though he couldn’t live and breathe for a moment longer in a world that didn’t have their bodies intimately intertwined. She wanted more of that; not this. And yet, hadn’t it been Chloe’s insistence that they get to know one another?

  She licked her lower lip, and exhaled slowly. “I told you already. He was busy.”

  “When he was married. Then he divorced and your mother spent every spare minute with random men. You saw your father when?”

  “Once a year, if that. I didn’t see him at all from my eighth birthday to my eleventh.”

  Raf
fa did the math. “The Veronica years?”

  She grimaced. “Yes. Of course, I never met that stepmother.”

  “I did. You haven’t missed anything special.”

  Chloe shrugged. “Diego didn’t want me.” She took a sip of her wine and then met Raffa’s eyes. “It took me a long time to come to terms with that; to accept that he wished I hadn’t been born. It’s somewhat freeing to be able to say that now, without fear, without grief. As a statement of fact, as it is. He didn’t want me.”

  Raffa was as still as stone, and just as silent.

  “Apollo he wanted. Apollo he loved. Apollo he was proud of. And how I wished he’d felt that for me! I spent years wishing, wanting, trying so hard. Do you know the happiest I’d ever seen him?”

  “No?” Raffa asked, though he feared, in fact, he did.

  “When I said I’d marry you. For just a moment – barely even a moment, actually, his eyes glowed with something like the indulgence he afforded my brother at all times.” She swallowed. “I’ll never regret this marriage.”

  Raffa, across the table, felt his gut shift as though it were being tumbled through stone. “He wanted this marriage for us.”

  “I know.”

  It didn’t assuage the sense of darkness that was beginning to spin inside of him; a growing feeling of being somehow out of control. “And what did you want?”

  She frowned, her beautiful face pulled taut by a need to be strong and smart and right all the time. He understood those compulsions, for he shared them. “I wanted to be happy.”

  “And are you?”

  She had a habit of pulling her lower lip between her teeth when she was thinking. It was a small gesture, but one that he’d come to recognize as her way of prevaricating.

  “Don’t think. Answer.”

  “Is that a command?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought the interrogation was to come after?”

  “I’m King. I get to choose.”

  “Oh, I see.” She lifted her glass and sipped again. A breeze lifted off the desert, bringing with it the fragrance of heat and the sound of a night bird, flying in the distance.

  “Answer me, or pay the consequences.”

  Chloe wasn’t sure she could even remember what he’d asked, she knew only that her breath was burning inside her lungs and all she could think about was the way his body felt when it moved within her. Heat spread from cell to cell, a contagion of desire making thought and speech difficult.

  After several seconds of silence, he released a growl. “You choose consequences?”

  She nodded slowly, a smile playing around her lips, so that he pushed up to standing and rounded the table. He extended his hands to her and she put hers in them without hesitation. When he pulled her to standing, her body cleaved to his.

  “Dance with me.”

  “That’s my consequence?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no music.”

  “Isn’t there?”

  She frowned.

  “Listen.” He lifted a finger to her lips, to encourage silence, and then smiled as he wrapped his hand around her waist, holding her flush to his body.

  He moved slowly, his hips nudging hers, and she did as he said: listening.

  And she heard it.

  The whispering of the wind, fast and insistent, melodious as it passed through the windows of this carved building; the desert animals – tigers sprinting and calling to one another, birds flying overhead, their songs filled with the magic of this ancient land.

  She pressed her cheek to his chest and danced with him, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  His body moved and hers responded; a silent call they answered together, in perfect unison.

  “Why haven’t you ever asked me any of this before?” She murmured, the words adding to the sense of music surrounding them.

  “When would I have had time?”

  She exhaled once more, pressed her cheek to his chest, and shifted as the rhythm of his body dictated.

  “You make it sound as though you were burning up with curiosity. Until a week ago, you didn’t even recognize I existed.”

  “That’s definitely not true.”

  “You didn’t recognize me as a woman.”

  “No. You were my wife.”

  She rolled her eyes, leaning back a little so she could see his face more clearly. “An odd distinction.” The moon shifted from behind a cloud, highlighting his face in silver light, making shadows and planes of his features. “Did you want to marry her?”

  “Who?”

  “Elena.” His grip around her waist loosened for a moment but when her eyes flew to his face, there was nothing there to suggest he was emotionally disturbed by her question. “Amit’s mother,” she explained. As though he could have forgotten who she was referring to.

  “No.”

  Chloe frowned. “You loved her?”

  Raffa stopped moving his hips, standing still, holding Chloe to him. “I thought we just discussed this.”

  Chloe frowned, her lack of comprehension obvious.

  “I do not believe in love, Sheikha. It’s a drug, an addiction that drives people crazy.”

  Chloe thought of the rumours about Elena and winced. Was it possible the other woman had lost her mind? That Raffa’s harsh refusal to accept love, even after Elena had borne him a child; his refusal to admit to feeling love, had taken her sanity?

  Chloe could almost understand how that might feel.

  Were it not for an inner-strength forged by the irons of rejection, she too might have found her husband’s ability to ignore her too painful to bear.

  “She loved you,” Chloe said softly.

  He stepped away from her, returning to the table. When he reached for his wine, she saw his fingers weren’t quite steady and his jaw was clenched as though he was grinding his teeth together. “Yes,” he said finally, the word spoken as though it were a hoarse expletive. His eyes latched to hers and there was anger and blame in them. “She loved me.”

  “You’re angry.”

  With an effort, he schooled his face into a mask of disinterest. “I am not interested in having this discussion,” he corrected. “It serves no purpose to rehash the past.”

  “But the past is still in the present,” she said with impeccable logic. “She bore you a son and he lives within the palace walls. He is a young man now, and he needs a father to be a part of his life. How is Amit going to feel when we have a baby? When he is usurped by a child you will acknowledge?”

  A muscle jerked in Raffa’s cheek and he spun away, striding to the edge of the parapet, propping his elbows against the wall there, and staring out at the crisp night sky. The moon was splitting the clouds like a beam, and it caused the sand to shimmer like diamonds beneath them.

  “Amit is my son,” he said after several beats. “But he will never be Sheikh. He knows this. He understands my need for a legitimate heir.”

  Chloe let the words sink in, her mind trying to digest the ramifications of this. “You’ve told him about me, about us?”

  “He was at our wedding.”

  She shook her head, moving to stand behind him. “I mean that we’re trying to conceive a baby.”

  Raffa spun around to face her, his strong, sharp face staring down at her. “As you say, he is growing into a young man. He will no doubt have guessed at the reason for your installation at the palace.”

  “God, he must be seriously messed up.”

  “On the contrary. He takes after his mother,” he said with a smile that made Chloe’s heart thump painfully in her chest. For there was love in that smile. Love and affection and sweet reminiscences that were utterly distinct from anything her husband had ever shown her.

  She had lived her whole life in the shadows of others. Her mother, her father, her brother. And now, her husband’s child’s mother! She couldn’t have said where Elena was, but suddenly, the idea that she might be in the palace, that her hus
band might still be involved with her, filled Chloe with an icy numbness.

  “Eat something, Chloe. If you’re to carry the royal heir, you need to look after yourself.”

  And that was what this all boiled down to. Raffa needed an heir, and she was his wife. She was the only one who could provide him with the legitimate child he required. Whatever passion hummed between them, whatever power she had to drive him wild, was contained to a very limited set of circumstances.

  She returned the table and did as he said, but the food had lost its flavor and the stars their shimmer.

  7

  IT WASN’T EVEN TWO weeks later that Chloe awoke to discover she wasn’t pregnant. Despite having shared her husband’s bed every night for three weeks, no baby had found its way into her belly.

  Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how desperate she was to conceive. How much she’d wanted that baby. How despite the fact it had only been weeks, she’d begun to hope beyond hope that there was a child growing inside of her. That she’d begun to think of it as real and tangible and true.

  She’d been wrong.

  “Aysha,” she murmured, after her shower. “I’d like to go to the city.”

  “Yes, your highness,” Aysha had bowed low, but when she’d lifted her head, there was empathy in her gaze.

  Chloe didn’t hold it for long.

  She took a piece of paper from the bureau and scrawled a note to Raffa:

  I’m going away for a week or so. Chloe.

  It seemed appropriately business-like. Since their night under the stars, they had barely spoken beyond the perfunctory civilities. In bed, he had set fire to her body, burning her blood with passion and needs that controlled her utterly, and she knew that raging desire was mutual. She knew he felt it too. Only he controlled it so much better than she ever could. No matter how tempestuous their coming together, he never stayed the night. He never held her afterwards.

  It was lovemaking with a purpose, and the purpose had failed.

  Yes, that was what was itching her skin. It wasn’t just disappointment – it was an overwhelming sense of failure. Why hadn’t her body done what it was meant to? Why?