She frowned at a thought. “When Lamis and I registered Sam’s birth…she must have known that it was possible that one day people would find out and believe he was Prince Kamil’s son.”
“She knew, but thought it remote. But she felt—and she is right, Rosalind!—that there was no reason her son should not inherit his great-grandfather’s throne. It is a stupid prejudice we have about the male line. She said to me, Nobody wants to remember that Mohammad had no sons! All the line of descent from the Prophet originally came through his daughter. Why is descent through the mother now meaningless? At least we know for certain who a child’s mother is!”
“Oh, she has changed!” Rosalind said on a breathless laugh. “She would never have said that five years ago!”
“And she is right. Even if, in this particular case, her argument is somewhat disproved by our own experience.”
They laughed a little at that.
“You see, we were going to give Sam up for adoption,” Rosalind said. “And she wanted him to have a lead to his rightful family if, when he grew up, he ever searched his background. If he found me, I promised I’d tell him the truth. But what if he didn’t find me? What if I died before he found me? That was why we registered the birth as we did.”
He stopped and turned to face her. “You did a brave thing, Rosalind, taking a child to raise on your own. This is not a thing many women would do.”
“You don’t know how heartbroken I was,” she said. “Sam was such a comfort. I’ve never regretted what I did.
“And Lamis certainly made sure I had a financially easy time of it,” she continued, before he could speak. “She bought the apartment—did she tell you that was why she pretended to have gambling losses?—and she bought bonds to pay his school fees. We both wanted me to be able to be a stay-at-home mother.”
He shook his head. “But the burden of being both father and mother to a child, Rosalind, nothing lifted this from you.”
His eyes were searching, and her heart began to beat in slow, heavy thuds. “No,” she whispered.
“Rosalind, we are to be married in the morning. When we agreed to this, it was not meant to be real. But I love you the way a man hopes to love the woman he makes his wife.”
She sighed a sigh of completion and homecoming. “Do you, Najib?”
“I loved you from the moment I saw you—no, before that! When I looked at your photograph, I knew then that you were the woman for me. I was jealous—do you believe it? I looked at your picture and I was jealous of my cousin because five years ago you had smiled at him like that.”
She could say nothing, only listen.
“Tomorrow when I take my vows I will mean it. I want to marry you, and be a father to your son. I want it to be real for you, too, Rosalind. I want to hear you say you can love me!”
Her heart stopped beating so that she could listen in perfect stillness.
“Will you marry me, my Rose?” said Najib.
They were married in the morning, when the mountain air was crisp and delicious, in the palace’s Rose Garden. It had been planted over fifty years ago, as the magazine afterwards explained to its readers, by Prince Rafi’s late stepmother, Queen Azizah.
Now it boasted every variety of rose, the sweet-scented and the merely beautiful, climbers, shrubs, trees. There were banks and walls and arched trellises of roses—purple, red, pink, white and yellow.
To add to the magic, Rosalind’s lovely, trailing bouquet was composed of red and white roses from the garden, picked only last night. It matched the beautiful diamond-and-ruby “something borrowed” pin in her hair, a loan from Princess Zara, who afterwards made the bride a gift of the fabulous star.
The bride was accompanied to the altar by the wedding couple’s own son, Samir. The boy dressed in the Eastern pyjama outfit called shalwar kamees, in richly coloured silk brocade that matched the bride’s embroidery.
Sheikh Najib, the Cup Companion to Prince Rafi well-known in the West for his attempts to repatriate the famous so-called Cup of Cyrus, now in the Louvre, and several statues and a plate residing in the British Museum, was magnificently regal in gold and ruby.
The guest list was small but significant, with Prince Rafi and Princess Zara heading up a glittering elite that included Prince Omar and Princess Jana from Central Barakat, Prince Karim and Princess Caroline from West Barakat, Crown Prince Kavian and Princess Alinor from Parvan, and Sheikh Arash al Khosravi and his new wife, Sheikha Lana, the daughter of American computer mogul Jonathan Holding, as well as the groom’s sister, now revealed as the granddaughter of Sultan Hafzuddin, Sheikha Lamis al Makhtoum, and her husband….
A delicious rumour ran through the crowd that the heirs of the old Sultan of Bagestan were also in the congregation to see their cousin married, but if so, no one was sure who they might be. Although Najib al Makhtoum had gallantly revealed himself in order to re-marry, under his own name, the woman he had first married five years ago, it was safe only because he was not considered to be in the direct line to the throne. The actual heirs of Hafzuddin al Jawadi could not risk being unveiled, the magazine explained. Many in the ancient, noble family had paid for their ancestry with their lives since the bloody 1969 coup that had put the man the tabloids were calling Ghastly Ghasib in power in Bagestan….
Rosalind scarcely noticed the photographers, so nervous was she as she walked down the flower-strewn carpet of grass towards the white canopy where Najib awaited her. He was breathtakingly handsome in the gold and red robes, the rich, jewelled turban. He looked like something out of a picture book.
But best of all was the expression in his eyes. Najib was looking at her with such a mixture of love, pride, hunger and happiness in his face that her heart soared.
Accompanied by her son, Rosalind moved to stand beside her proud sheikh, knowing that they had come home at last.
Epilogue
The door was opened, when he rang, by a white-haired woman.
“You are Helen Mitchell?”
“I am.”
“Good afternoon. My name is Haroun al Muntazir. I believe my cousin Rosalind telephoned you earlier.”
The woman stared at him, her mouth open. “Oh, my goodness!” she exclaimed. “Oh, yes, she did, but—”
His eyebrows went up. “Did she not ask you to let me pick up a certain ornament?”
“Yes, she—I mean, she said, ‘He’ll take the rose crystal ornament,’ but—who was that who came earlier, then?”
He stiffened. “Came earlier?”
“Yes, I thought it was…oh dear! He said, I am here to take the rose….”
Haroun went still. “And you—” He swallowed. “You gave it to him?”
“Well, he came in—well, yes. I mean, I thought it was the right thing to do. He seemed to know exactly what he wanted. I thought he was the man Rosalind had sent. Was it terribly important? I’m awfully sorry, but it was almost an hour ago. I don’t know if you could catch him.”
“Oh, I will catch him, Mrs. Mitchell, be sure of that.” Haroun bent his head in a bow. “It will perhaps take time, but I will catch him.”
ISBN: 978-1-4592-0434-8
THE SULTAN’S HEIR
Copyright © 2001 by Alexandra Sellers
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
Visit Silhouette at www.eHarlequin.com
*Sons of the Desert
The Sultan's Heir Page 15