Cinderella's Royal Secret

by Lynne Graham

  ‘I’m on the pill,’ she told him quietly.

  Rafiq frowned in surprise. ‘But...why?’

  Hugging the sheet, Izzy sat up, copper corkscrew curls springing up like a halo around her flushed face. She wasn’t prepared to tell him the whole truth, not when it revolved around her mother. ‘My sister and I know someone who had an unplanned pregnancy and we never wanted it to happen to us that way, so we chose instead to be prepared for all eventualities.’

  ‘Are you staying?’ Rafiq enquired, ignoring the explanation that only emphasised to him that they lived in very different worlds, he in a world where pregnancy would have been an unashamed joy but she in one where it would have been an apparent punishment of some kind.

  Just being asked that question freaked Izzy out. In ten seconds, she was out of the bed and gathering up her clothes at the speed of a fleeing squirrel.

  ‘I was hoping you would stay,’ Rafiq rephrased, accepting that he had been clumsy. ‘But I have to leave very early in the morning and would likely be gone by the time you awake.’

  ‘Leaving the UK?’ Izzy queried tightly, without warning feeling as though he had buried an axe between her shoulder blades.

  ‘Yes...’

  Izzy slid past him into the bathroom and shut the door. He knocked on it and with reluctance she opened the door a crack.

  ‘I don’t want us to be so brief...but I don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Why? Why don’t you have a choice?’ Izzy pressed in desperation.

  His ridiculously long black lashes shielded his stunning gaze. ‘I can’t explain that.’

  ‘You know what? That’s fine. I’m going to have a shower and go home,’ Izzy told him with quiet dignity even though her stomach was already in the mood to heave.

  It was over. In fact, it had been virtually over even before it had got to begin, she reckoned, stricken. She had dimly assumed that she was on a date when in reality she had been succumbing to a one-night stand and that made her feel very, very stupid and naïve. She hadn’t realised that he was only in Oxford for one night and that tomorrow she would be receiving a text from the cleaning agency to do the changeover clean again. Best not to be in the apartment alone when that text came, she reasoned dully, as no doubt sleeping with the client was yet another fireable offence.

  Dear heaven, how had she contrived to be so dumb? How had she managed to decide to sleep with him and somehow idealise the decision into something it wasn’t and could never be? And she had believed that, of the two of them, Maya was the romantic dreamer?

  Showered and dressed, Izzy emerged from the bathroom in record time.

  Back in his jeans but barefoot, Rafiq extended the handbag she had left behind in the lounge, proving that he was surprisingly at home with a woman’s needs. The gesture only increased her suspicions. ‘Are you sure you’re not still married?’ she demanded thinly.

  ‘I am not married but—’ Rafiq breathed in deep, like a male mustering his strength ‘—I will be married again some time soon.’

  ‘You bastard...you’re engaged and you slept with me?’ Izzy exclaimed and she hit his shoulder with her handbag as she swung it like a weapon.

  Rafiq said nothing because there was nothing he could say without revealing his true identity. Being struck by someone for the first time ever shocked him, but not enough for him to rebuke her because the evening had turned into an irrefutable disaster and he didn’t blame her for the way she felt. He was rigid as he extended an envelope to her.

  ‘What’s this?’ she questioned.

  ‘The money I promised you,’ Rafiq advanced warily. ‘I pay my debts.’

  ‘I don’t want the money now!’ Izzy framed shakily, her face very white. ‘Not after what we’ve just done!’

  In a sudden movement, Rafiq snatched the bag out of her nerveless hand, opened it and dug the envelope into it before handing it back to her.

  ‘You do realise that this is the last straw...the biggest insult?’ Izzy shouted at him, stricken. ‘You’re paying me off like I’m a hooker or something!’

  ‘We both know that it was not like that between us,’ Rafiq framed in a raw undertone.

  ‘But that’s what it feels like now!’ Izzy slung back at him as she stalked out of the bedroom, out of the apartment and back to her own life with the knowledge that she should never have strayed from what she understood and what was familiar because, without those guidelines and boundaries, it was easy to get badly hurt.

  And she was hurt. On the way home she took her daily contraceptive pill from her handbag where she kept them, not wishing to trust in the convictions of the guy who had already let her down. But it had been her hopes he’d disappointed. He hadn’t promised anything, hadn’t broken her heart with lies either. He was engaged though, had been unfaithful to some other woman with her, which made her feel soiled, tainted by association. That wounded like another knife twisting inside her...how could it not? That took her right back to basics and she wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that, when she got back to the apartment, she was horribly sick on her empty stomach and never had she been more grateful that her sister was not around to see her at her lowest ebb.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MAYA RETURNED FROM her visit home and stayed in the bedroom most of the evening, clearly in no mood to chat, and Izzy was grateful, if not discomfited, by her twin’s preoccupation.

  ‘How’s stuff at home?’ she asked over breakfast the following morning.

  Maya grimaced. ‘The usual mess and Dad saying that everything’s going to be all right even though there’s no way it will be.’

  ‘Dad doesn’t change.’ Izzy sighed. ‘How’s Mum?’

  ‘Keeping faith in Dad as usual,’ her sister said wearily.

  ‘So, what do we do?’

  ‘Anything we can do,’ Maya breathed tautly. ‘And that’s not a lot at the moment.’

  Izzy hugged her own misery to herself in silence because Maya had quite enough to be contending with at present and Izzy had no plans to add to her burden. Undoubtedly her sister would share once life had lightened up a little, she thought tiredly, while still wondering how someone like Rafiq, whom she had only known for less than twenty-four stupid hours, could dent her usually cheerful nature to the extent that she felt as though an armoured tank had run over her. Even so, there was no point beating herself up continually over events she had no power to change, most especially when she was in the midst of her final exams, she reminded herself squarely.

  * * *

  Over the subsequent month, Izzy swotted hard and sat exam after exam, worrying every step of the way and then discovering a different and an entirely more frightening possibility dawning on her when her period was two weeks late. Could Rafiq have lied to her about being infertile? Well, he hadn’t been decent enough to mention that he was engaged, had he? By that stage, Izzy was willing to believe any evil of Rafiq. He had left her two thousand pounds in that envelope for cooking two meals for him and presumably, whether he was prepared to admit the offensive fact or not, for being a willing bed partner. He had treated her exactly like a hooker, thrusting cash at her as she departed, and her blood still boiled over that truth. But she didn’t understand either how she could possibly have conceived while she was taking the pill; she hadn’t missed one...had she?

  The ice queen of a doctor at the student health centre soon disabused her of that conviction with the reminder that she had been on a course of antibiotics for a mild infection only a couple of weeks earlier and that it was stated quite clearly on the leaflet that came with the pills that antibiotics could interfere with birth-control medication and that in that situation extra precautions should be taken.

  ‘Yes...but who reads those leaflets?’ Izzy had mumbled while the lady doctor looked at her as though she was an idiot when she already felt like one.

  It was too late but, devastated by the
confirmation that, yes, she was indeed pregnant, Izzy read that stupid leaflet on the bus on the way home and learned that even that episode of sickness she had had that night after leaving Rafiq would have lessened the effectiveness of her birth-control pills. It seemed to her that every piece of happenstance bad luck she could have had had all visited her on one day but she blamed Rafiq most of all for that lie about infertility, for parting from her without even giving her his surname or any means of contacting him. Of course, an engaged man wouldn’t want any comeback from his one-night stand, would he? she thought nastily. And why should he get to walk away from her pregnancy when she couldn’t?

  There was another side of the coin to Izzy’s feelings about her pregnancy. She adored babies, had always hoped that there would be children in her future but...?

  At that precise moment in her life, a pregnancy was nothing short of a disaster, she acknowledged unhappily. She needed to be able to complete her education with a teaching qualification to earn a decent living and how was a baby going to factor into that? And what about the costs involved in raising a child? Everyone knew that babies, sweet and wondrous as they were, cost a fortune to bring up!

  The more Izzy thought about what Rafiq had done to her, the angrier she became, because he had walked away afterwards, deliberately ensuring that she had no chance of identifying him or contacting him for support or anything else.

  She accepted that a sneakier approach to her dilemma was required. Determined to identify Rafiq, Izzy called in at the rental agency that managed the penthouse apartment she cleaned and got into a cosy chat with the receptionist. In tones of wonder, she described the absolutely gorgeous guy with his bodyguards whom she had supposedly seen when leaving the building.

  ‘That must’ve been the Prince...’ The receptionist sighed, hanging on her every word. ‘I never saw him, of course. People that important don’t make their own bookings but when his staff contacted us on his behalf, I looked him up on the website because I was curious...a prince, you know, and he is very, very good-looking, isn’t he? I wish I’d seen him in the flesh.’

  ‘The Prince?’ Izzy repeated chokily. ‘Like a real prince?’

  ‘Heir to the Zenarian throne. It’s all on their website,’ her companion told her abstractedly. ‘He’s something special.’

  Izzy was gobsmacked. A prince? A freakin’ prince? And now she understood the bodyguards, the air of imperious expectation, the cash, the reluctance to tell her anything about himself, which she had only registered afterwards, when it was far too late to see that attitude as suspicious. She raced home purely to look up the website that had been mentioned and, true enough, there Rafiq was in a photo along with his uncle, the Regent, the heir to the blasted throne of the whole country! Even worse, there was a very small reference to a rumour that the heir could be getting married again soon.

  Breathing heavily, Izzy paced the room, relieved that once again her twin was back in London with their parents, attending job interviews. Sooner or later she would have to come clean about her problems but, right now, Maya had more than enough on her plate and Izzy was determined not to lean on her sister as well. It was a wonder, she thought guiltily, that Maya hadn’t already drowned with the sheer weight of them all clinging to her, constantly looking to her for advice and support.

  No, on this occasion, Izzy would deal with her own issues and act like an adult. Not like the time she had been bullied at school. Not like the time Maya had rescued her from drowning in a winter river and almost drowned herself. Not like the time Izzy had broken her leg and Maya had sat up all night in hospital with her. No, just for once, Izzy would handle herself.

  She would fly to Zenara using the money Rafiq had given her to cover the cost of the flight. She had to tell him that she was pregnant before he got married. That was only fair to him and the woman he was planning to marry. It would be mean to withhold such information until a later date. In any case, the child she carried was his baby as well, and, while he had a responsibility towards his fiancée, he also had a responsibility towards Izzy and his child. Rafiq would have to man up and handle the situation and that was his problem, not hers!

  It cost a small fortune to book a flight to Zenara and, by the time she had booked and paid for a hotel for three nights as well, she didn’t have enough money left to book a return flight. But she was quite sure that bathroom guy with his private jet and his reputed billions would ensure that she swiftly got home again, she thought bitterly. He would want her smuggled out of the country again where she couldn’t cause His Royal Highness any further embarrassment!

  Rafiq had lied to her, she reminded herself, because it wasn’t like her to be bitter and angry but that was what the whole experience of Rafiq, his lies and evasions and an unexpected pregnancy had done to her. Instead of feeling able to rejoice in the baby she carried, she felt ashamed because love hadn’t featured in that conception, not as it had in her parents’ case. And Rafiq had hurt her pride and her heart, of course he had. She had been well on the way to tumbling into an infatuation with him. She hadn’t realised that she wasn’t on a level playing field. She hadn’t even suspected that she could be dealing with a real VIP, a foreign royal, no doubt accustomed to taking his sexual pleasure where he found it even if it meant wining and dining a humble student cleaner to seduce her into bed!

  * * *

  Izzy couldn’t understand what the problem was at the airport in Zenara. She had disembarked from the plane, shown her documentation and then somehow everything had gone wrong and, instead of being left free to go about her business, she had been ushered into a small office for an interview.

  The heat was killing her, the small fan on the desk in front of her making little impression on her condition. Her cotton top and linen trousers were sticking to her perspiring flesh and her brow was damp.

  An older man entered and gave her a small tight smile. ‘Miss Campbell. I am sorry for this inconvenience,’ he told her.

  Izzy went limp with relief at finally meeting someone who could speak her language. ‘I don’t understand why I’m not being allowed to leave the airport.’

  ‘We have certain entrance requirements for unaccompanied single women and I’m afraid you don’t meet the regulations,’ he told her.

  Izzy tilted her chin, not in the mood for some silly form of bureaucracy after sitting trapped in that claustrophobic room for more than an hour. ‘In what way?’

  ‘You have not stated your business in Zenara.’

  ‘I said I was a tourist,’ Izzy protested.

  ‘You have booked a hotel for only three nights and have not booked a return flight. Unfortunately, this sends up certain flags in our system. If you have any friends or connections in Zenara who could vouch for your character, please give me their details now and I will contact them.’

  Izzy blinked. ‘The only person I know in Zenara is Prince Rafiq...’

  The silence of shock that fell then pleased her because she was so tired, so hungry and so darned hot that she was utterly miserable and all she wanted was out of the blasted airport into the air-conditioned cool of a hotel.

  ‘And this...er...acquaintance?’ the older man began very awkwardly, clearly not sure how best to proceed when it came to questioning someone with a possible link to the royal family.

  Something in Izzy snapped then, something like the last link to her sanity, because she had just had enough and she breathed wearily, ‘He is the father of my child.’

  At that point the world around Izzy went crazy as cries of disbelief, shock and rapped-out exchanges in a foreign language broke out over her head. Overpowered by it all, she stood up because her back was aching and she was feeling queasy. An ocean of darkness instantly enfolded her, and she dropped without a sound into a dead faint. Pandemonium broke out while she was unconscious and rushed into an ambulance with a police escort.

  * * *

  Izzy surfac
ed back to consciousness in a bedroom so splendid that she was disorientated. Not a hospital, not a hotel either. Still fully clothed, only her shoes removed, she was lying on a grand four-poster bed with a trio of doctors standing at the foot of it, giving names that she instantly forgot while assuring her that she was in the safest of places because she was in the royal palace.

  Frozen back against the pillows by that startling information, she blinked rapidly, wishing that she could think clearly and less like a zombie. Without warning, the bedroom door opened and heads started dipping in a show of respect and Rafiq strode in, the proud lineaments of his bronzed and flawless features inhumanly calm and collected for a single man who’d had a woman announce at the airport that he was the father of her child. The airport, for goodness’ sake! Izzy could feel hot colour sweeping from her head to toes, her fury with Rafiq eclipsed entirely at that moment by the situation she was in. He had to think she was a madwoman but nothing that he might be thinking or feeling was showing on the surface.

  Involuntarily, her attention lingered on him. The high cheekbones and strong hollows, the blade-straight black brows, the stunning deep-set eyes fringed by those outrageous thick lashes. Get over it, he’s gorgeous, it’s not relevant right now, she scolded herself anxiously as he sank down with fluid grace for so large a man in the chair by the bed and reached for her hand in a startlingly supportive gesture.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Rafiq asked graciously, for all the world as though they had only parted as close friends in recent days, instead of the weeks that had passed since their last explosive meeting. Her fingers trembled in the light grasp of his.

  ‘Groggy,’ she muttered truthfully, gently removing her fingers from his hold while striving not to make a production out of the withdrawal. She was painfully aware that they were not alone, and she was keen to follow his example and behave as though everything between them were normal. ‘Think I’m just tired...’