by Penny Jordan
CHAPTER THREE
KADIR looked grimly round the now-empty bedroom. She had gone. Good. The music she had left playing was still on and the dimmed lights were far too evocative a reminder of what had happened, but nowhere near as compelling as the scent of her, which seemed to cling to his own flesh despite his shower. It was an unusual blend of sensual warmth spiced with something he couldn’t name, and it had insinuated itself into his awareness in a way that infuriated him.
What was he doing wasting time thinking about her? She was nothing to him. Nothing, just a woman who was a sexual opportunist. He wouldn’t have gone near her if it hadn’t been for the fact that a near deathbed promise wrung from him by his dying mother that he end his relationship with his mistress had resulted in a period of celibacy far longer than he was used to. That was the only reason for what had happened, the only explanation there could be.
After all, it hardly suited the new roles he was about to take on, of both King-in-waiting and newly married man, for him to be having sex with a stranger; a masseuse, for heaven’s sake. What had happened to his self-control? He normally found it easy to control his sexual appetite. She hadn’t even been his type—he liked petite women, not sensual Amazons with lush curves and demanding sexual appetites. Yet he had allowed his loins to rule his head.
Well, it certainly must not happen again—not with any woman.
Kadir had no intention of being one of those rulers who pretended to have a certain moral stance in public whilst freely indulging in the most salacious of habits in private. There had never been a time in his life when sensual promiscuity had appealed to him. There had been women, yes, especially during his years on the professional polo circuit, but those were long behind him now and the only women to share his bed these last years had been a modest succession of discreet mistresses, of which Zahra had been the latest.
He had known her for many years, but they had only become lovers after her husband’s death. From his point of view it had been a very convenient and practical arrangement. Kadir liked such arrangements; emotions weren’t something he wanted to bring into his relationships, and an over-emotional mistress was the last thing he wanted. Or had been. Surely now the last thing he wanted was an emotional new wife.
It had been some financial business connected with his late mother’s estate that had brought him to Venice, and he was glad now that he had without thinking booked into the hotel using his alias from his polo-playing days.
From what he had learned about King Giorgio his father might have enjoyed a pretty varied sex life himself, but he had very strict views on the conduct of current members of the Nirolian royal family, especially his own heir.
Kadir’s frown deepened. Should she discover who he was and try to make use of that information, he might be forced to defend his behaviour to his father and the thought of that was totally unpalatable. How could he have put himself in such a situation? And with such a woman; the very antithesis of everything he personally wanted to see in a woman—especially one who shared his bed.
It was lucky that he had had the means of protection to hand, otherwise…Otherwise he would have stopped; there was no question of that. How could there be? He had a responsibility, after all, not just to himself, but to the woman he was committed to marrying. Was he really so sure that he could have stopped? Kadir swore inwardly as he ground the taunting inner voice into silence.
It was too late now to wish that he hadn’t come to Venice. His mother had loved the city. ‘It is like a miracle to those of us born of the desert to live in a city of water,’ she had once told him.
Kadir’s mouth hardened with bitterness. He had thought he had known his mother; had believed he shared a special closeness with her, but he had been deceiving himself just as she had deceived him. The last thing he had expected in those final days before she had finally succumbed to the fatal illness that had stalked her all summer was to hear her tell him that the man he had always thought of as his father had been no such thing and that, instead, he was the result of a youthful affair she had had with a European. And not just any European, but King Giorgio of Niroli, the head of what was reputed to be Europe’s richest royal family. Not that money was of any primary concern to him. Kadir had turned the million-plus inheritance he had received from his maternal grandfather into a billion-figure empire before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, thanks to his own financial and entrepreneurial skills. No, he had no need of King Giorgio’s wealth, and no real need either of the title he would inherit from him, but what he did need was to find out if this new persona his mother’s revelations had given him fitted him more comfortably than the one he had always previously worn. And if didn’t? If he felt as alien and apart from those he lived amongst as King Giorgio’s son and heir as he had done as Hadiya’s sheikh, then what? Then he would just have to live with it. He was forty now, after all, not an untried boy who knew nothing of himself. Niroli would give him the chance to stretch himself, to prove himself in many ways that ruling Hadiya could not. Besides, it was too late now for him to change his mind. He had given his commitment to his brother, Ahmed, to support his claim to become Hadiya’s new sheikh and he had also given his commitment to his as yet unmet father to become Niroli’s next King.
But whilst the outcome of his mother’s revelations might ultimately be to his benefit, Kadir could not overcome his sense of betrayal that his mother could have kept something so important to him a secret.
She had begged him to understand and to forgive her, telling him that she had already been promised in marriage to her husband when she had met King Giorgio. She’d stopped off on the island of Niroli on her way home to Hadiya. According to her, theirs had been an intensely passionate and equally intensely brief affair, and her marriage to her husband had taken place before she had realised she was carrying King Giorgio’s child.
‘So why tell me now,’ he had demanded angrily, ‘since you have not seen fit to do so before?’
‘Before I was afraid for you,’ she had told him. ‘Everyone assumed that you were the legitimate heir to the sheikdom and I could not bear to be responsible for taking that from you. But now…I am close to death, my son, and I have watched you these last weeks since your uncle died. For all that you are ready to assume your responsibilities to Hadiya I can see that you do not have the heart to do so. You have always yearned to be free of the restrictions our small kingdom has imposed on you. Where your brother is content to go and count the revenues from Hadiya’s oil wells and listen to the state advisers, you could never exist beneath the yoke of another’s rule.
‘There is something I want you to do for me, Kadir.’
That was when she had produced the small gold amulet, worn and thin and decorated with ancient writing.
‘King Giorgio gave me this. I want you to return it to him for me—and in person. I have kept an interest in his world over the years and I understand that King Giorgio is in despair because he does not have a direct male heir to inherit the throne from him. You are his son, Kadir. Your rightful place is on the throne of Niroli, not here in Hadiya where I have always known you have never quite felt at home. Oh, you have tried, but I have seen your impatience with our ways, and your desire to live a different kind of life. You have learned the subtleties of the way we in the East do business, but I have seen in your eyes that you are impatient of it and that you yearn for the directness of your European heritage.’
‘If by that you mean that I resent the paying of large bribes to already wealthy men when the poorest of our world go without, then, yes, I do grow impatient,’ he had agreed tersely.
She had died three days after making her confession to him, and Kadir knew that his gentle brother had been shocked by his inability to shed any tears for her.
Women! What sane man would ever trust one? He had learned young about their duplicity. He had been just eighteen when he had discovered that the bride chosen for him by his family was far from being the innocent sweet virgin sh
e was supposed to be and had in fact been having an affair with a married cousin for over a year. It wouldn’t be true to say that the discovery of her deceit had broken his heart. He had broken off the betrothal—it had been an arranged marriage, after all—but it had certainly taught him to mistrust the female sex. They lied when it suited them to do so, with their kisses and their protestations of love, and far more importantly they lied about their fidelity. He had learned that much the hard way. What infuriated him now, though, was that, knowing what he did, he had still given way too easily to his own physical desire for the woman who had just left him. Why? Why? Because his need to possess her had been stronger than anything he had ever experienced. That was rubbish, he denied his inner voice angrily. Total rubbish. She had been the one who had come on to him, after all. And he had been the one who had taken her, so filled with need for her that he couldn’t stop himself. A moment’s aberration, that was all…a nothing…to be obliterated as though it had never been, like an empty Bedouin camp covered by the desert sands.
He looked down at the amulet he was holding. It had still been warm from her own flesh when his mother had handed it to him and sometimes when he held it in his hand and closed his eyes he could almost convince himself that he could still feel the echo of an imprint of that warmth on it. As a boy he had thought his mother the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the whole world, and she in turn had adored him. Adored him but kept from him the truth about his parentage.
When she had given him the amulet she might have had some romantic idea of him turning up on Niroli barefoot and ragged from some solitary and arduous odyssey spent journeying to claim his birthright and being welcomed by his father with tears of joy. But modern life wasn’t like that.
Far from travelling like some would be Ulysses he had initially simply and discreetly let it be known through the right diplomatic channels that he and the King of Niroli needed to make personal contact with one another.
The result had been a flurry of letters and telephone calls interspersed with terse emails from the king’s more IT-savvy advisers, and a DNA test to establish the truth of his mother’s claim, all without he and King Giorgio ever speaking personally to one another, never mind setting eyes on one another.
Cynically he was inclined to suspect that it was the result of the DNA test that had ultimately led to King Giorgio’s formal offer to him of the throne of Niroli.
Further negotiations had followed once he had been able to establish that his brother was willing to step in and rule Hadiya in his place. Negotiations during which he had raised his own concerns about the willingness of the people of Niroli to accept him as their absolute ruler. King Giorgio’s response to his concern had been to suggest that a diplomatic marriage should be arranged for him with a Nirolian woman who would be welcomed as their queen by the people.
Historically in Arab society there was no right of primogeniture—a man made his way within his extended family by his own skills and strengths and he married where he could achieve the best bargain for himself in terms of the benefits the marriage would bring. And therefore Kadir had no issues with the fact that his wife-to-be was the granddaughter of the island’s most senior vintner. What she was bringing to the marriage bargain would be of far more value to him that any supposed blue blood.
With everything organised for him to fly direct from Hadiya to Niroli at the end of the week, this matter of his mother’s still-outstanding Venetian bank account and business interests had needed resolving, and so he had flown here en route, reawakening an old polo injury ache in doing so, hence his decision to book into the spa, which he knew was one favoured by top sportsmen and women.
In the morning he was leaving by private jet for Niroli. The king had been quite specific that he did not want his people to know of their relationship until he himself presented him to them as his son and their new King-to-be, followed by an immediate announcement of his marriage to Natalia Carini, and, being the man he was, Kadir had thought that it made good sense to arrive ahead of schedule just to see how his father would react. From what he had heard of him King Giorgio was an autocratic ruler who refused to delegate, or allow his country to change.
Kadir intended to make it plain to him that if he was to rule then he fully intended to rule alone and on his own terms.
He looked at the door again. Where had she gone? To another man’s bed? His fist closed round the amulet, and then he made a sound of angry self-disgust as he turned on his heel and picked up his laptop. He had more important things to do than think about a promiscuous pleasure-giver whom he would never see again—nor would ever want to see again.
As she walked across the square Natalia was oblivious to the admiring looks she was attracting from passers-by. Yesterday’s mist had turned into a soft drizzly rain that lay like diamond drops on the darkness of her hair, causing its soft waves to turn into rebellious curls. She wasn’t doing this in the hope of seeing Leon Perez and she certainly hadn’t humiliated herself by checking the register to see if he had actually checked out this morning. No, she was crossing the square because she needed some fresh air, some space inside her head in which to come to terms with her own horror at what she had done. The only saving grace of the whole incident, if it could be called such, was the fact that he Leon Perez thankfully—mercifully—had used protection, so she need have no concerns about there being any repercussions of any kind from their intimacy. It made her feel physically sick to think of the potential consequences if he hadn’t done. How could she have been so lost to everything to have taken such a risk—to her own health, to the trust King Giorgio had placed in her, to her husband-to-be’s right to expect her to come to him free of any kind of taint from another relationship?
She could see a coffee shop up ahead of her and she ducked into its crowded warmth. Her mobile started to ring. She put down her cappuccino so that she could answer the call.
‘The king wishes you to return to Niroli immediately,’ she heard the voice of the king’s most senior minister informing her tersely.
‘Immediately? But why?’
‘I cannot tell you any more.’
‘But my flight back is booked for the day after tomorrow, and I don’t know if I can—’
‘A private flight has been arranged for you. All you need to do is present yourself at the special check-in desk at the airport.’
‘But why? What is going on?’ Natalia started to demand but it was too late; the King’s Chief Minister had already ended the call.
‘Have you finished with the table?’
‘What? Oh, yes,’ she confirmed, getting up to let the two young women take over the table.
Outside it was still drizzling. Niroli had a warm and sunny climate all year round, rather like that of the Canaries, albeit with seasonal fluctuations, and the drizzle and its accompanying grey skies made her shiver.
What was behind the urgent summons of her to return ahead of schedule?
Had the new heir changed his mind about their marriage and, if so, how did she feel about that? Natalia wondered just over a couple of hours later when she had been escorted on board her private flight to Niroli.
‘What would you like to drink?’ the smiling steward was asking her. ‘We have champagne?’
Natalia could feel the movement of the sleek modern jet as it started to roll down the runway. A feeling of panic gripped her but she swiftly controlled it. This was it, she was on her way—not just home, but to her future and her future husband. ‘No…no champagne, thank you,’ she told the steward hollowly. ‘Just water, please.’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘BUT this is ridiculous,’ Natalia objected to the driver of the imposing chauffeur-driven car that had been waiting for her right on the runway the moment her plane touched down. ‘I don’t want to go to the palace; I want you to take me home.’
‘I’m sorry, but my orders are to take you to the palace,’ the driver told her woodenly.
Natalia stared out of the blac
ked-out windows in frustrated silence. This was crazy. What on earth was going on? Why on earth hadn’t an official from the palace been waiting in the car for her to explain everything?
The sky had turned clear blue-green, and was now shading into midnight-blue velvet as darkness fell and the car sped along the modern ceremonial highway linking the palace and the main town to the airport.
Up ahead of them Natalia could see the lights of the town itself, crowned by the familiar sight of the royal palace.
The driver took an unexpected detour, skirting the town, and taking her off guard as he drove down a very narrow road that led to the back of the castle.
So, Natalia decided wryly, whilst her presence was commanded and so important apparently that she had been flown home in a private jet, her person was still unimportant enough to have to enter the palace via what looked very like much a tradesman’s entrance to judge from its gateway—so narrow that she sucked in her breath fearing that the car was too wide to fit through it. Beyond the gateway lay a dank, unlit courtyard, the windows overlooking it were shuttered and the whole atmosphere was inhospitable and unwelcoming.
The chauffer had brought the car to a halt and was getting out to open the door for her. Despite her irritation, Natalia still managed to find a warm smile for him. He was after all merely following instructions.
This cloak-and-dagger type of thing was in many ways typical of the way King Giorgio ran his court, she thought ruefully. It wasn’t unknown for those who knew him best to exclaim in irritated exasperation that Machiavelli ought to have been King Giorgio’s middle name. The old king loved playing people off against one another, and always had done, Natalia acknowledged, but she admitted that she had come to feel a certain amount of sympathy for him as one after the other the candidates for his heir had had to be rejected. He might be arrogant and proud, but he was also old, and she suspected he had begun to feel real fear about what would happen to Niroli if he died without appointing his own successor. For all his faults, and she wasn’t going to deny that they were many, no one could ever doubt his fierce love for his country. A love that she of course shared, as he well knew. He had surprised her once by telling her that she reminded him a little of his first wife, Queen Sophia, and that she had the same elegance and spirit. Natalia had been touched and flattered by his words, knowing how well thought of his first queen had been by the people of Niroli and those who knew her more closely. She suspected that it was in part because of this likeness to Queen Sophia that King Giorgio had initially conceived the idea of her marrying his newfound son.