by Penny Jordan
‘I still have certain duties I must perform in Hadiya, duties connected with the official handover of power to my younger brother, and which require my presence there.’
‘That is easily dealt with. As soon as you are married you and Natalia can travel to Hadiya on honeymoon.’
Their conversation was interrupted as the Chief Minister came hurrying into the room.
‘Your Highness,’ he addressed the king, ‘it is almost time. The people are already gathering, and Prince Kadir needs to change into the formal robes of state ready to be proclaimed your heir.’
‘You don’t really expect me to wear that!’ Natalia stared in revulsion at the satin corset with its heavy-jewelled beading. It looked more like an instrument of torture than an article of clothing.
‘The king specifically desires that you wear it. It is a copy of the gown worn by his first wife at her own betrothal,’ the countess told Natalia stiffly. ‘It is his belief that the sight of you in it will remind the people of their love for Queen Sophia and that they will transfer that love to you.’
And, of course King Giorgio, being the man he was, would never let slip an opportunity to trade on the loyalty of his people for his own ends, Natalia acknowledged disapprovingly, although in this instance she was obliged to admit that serving his own ends would also benefit his people.
The bodice of the gown had to be laced up so tightly that she could hardly breathe and then the straight, elegant column of its skirt attached to it. She had already endured an hour with a hairdresser summoned to put her hair up in a stiffly regal style and now as she looked at herself in the mirror the only familiar part of herself she felt she had to comfort her was the subtlety of her own specially blended scent.
There was a knock on the outer doors to her apartment and then they were opened to reveal the small phalanx of traditionally costumed palace guards.
It was time for her to go.
Once she walked through these doors she would be leaving Natalia Carini behind for ever.
When she walked back through them in her place would be the betrothed fiancée, soon-to-be wife, of Crown Prince Kadir of Niroli.
Kadir could hear the excited buzz of the crowd outside in the large courtyard below them. This room with its balcony onto the courtyard, according to his father, had been traditionally the place from which past kings had always addressed their people, giving them news both good and bad.
The doors to the balcony were hung with the Nirolian flag and the coat of arms of his father’s family and that too of his mother’s, and now those doors were flung open to a shrill fanfare of trumpets. As they stepped forward onto the balcony Kadir saw the rainbow-coloured ribbons of flowers and confetti being hurled into the air as the band in the square played the national anthem. The gaudy brilliance of the celebratory colours matched the excitement in the crowd as they yelled and cheered their joy.
He barely knew his father as a father; they were meeting now as two mature men both with their own agendas to promote. A fierce surge of unexpected emotion stabbed painfully through him, catching him off guard. He was forty years old, for heaven’s sake, far too old and too self-aware to start mourning some sentimentalised vision of a non-existent father-and-son relationship.
King Giorgio stepped forward holding up his hands for silence.
‘My people,’ he announced. ‘I give you my son.’
Natalia could hear the frenzied roar of the crowd as she stood in the shadows of the balcony room, waiting for her summons to join the king and her future husband. Down there amongst them would be her grandfather and other members of her extended family. No matter what other past quarrels might lie between them, her grandfather and King Giorgio were united in their love for Niroli.
Through the open doors she could hear the king’s voice, trembling slightly now. With age? With emotion? His stirring words had certainly elicited a roar of approval from the listening crowd.
‘We must always remember that there is a purpose in all things,’ the king was saying. ‘When one after another my heirs disqualified themselves from the right to follow me onto the throne, I was filled with despair, for you, my people, and for my country, not knowing then as I know now that fate had already chosen the one who will come after me; the son I did not know I had.
‘A chance meeting many years ago led to his conception, hidden from me and kept hidden until his mother relented and confessed to him on her deathbed that I had fathered him. Prince Kadir has given up his right to rule the Kingdom of Hadiya to take on the mantle of his duty to his blood, my blood, your blood, people of Niroli. He will need help if he is to rule you as you deserve to be ruled and to that end it is my pleasure to inform you that my son, and your future King, Prince Kadir, will in ten days be married to Natalia Carini, daughter of Niroli.’
As the roars of approval surged upwards from the crowd Natalia felt the countess give her a small push. Automatically she took a step forward, and then another, her heart thudding frantically inside her chest cavity.
The brilliant sunlight after the shadows of the salon momentarily blinded her as she stepped out onto the balcony, trying not to wince at the shrillness of the trumpeters.
The king was standing in the middle of the balcony. She dropped him a small stiff curtsey and felt her bodice corset digging into her flesh as she did so. Behind her the court dignitaries were filing onto the balcony; below her the crowd was cheering and calling out her name exuberantly, ‘Natalia. Natalia…You are a true Princess of Niroli.’ The air was filled with the scent of the bombs of flower petals being thrown by the revellers, some of whom were already dancing to the impromptu burst of music from a lone musician.
‘Daughter of Niroli,’ she could hear the king saying firmly, ‘give me your hand so that I in turn may symbolically unite it, and thus you, here in front of our people with the hand and the person of our chosen heir, my son Prince Kadir.’
The king was reaching for her hand, and for the first time Natalia was able to look past King Giorgio and at her future husband.
The world swung dizzily around her as though she had been scooped up and were being swung from a funfair wheel. Him! The man from Venice! Leon Perez! Surely there was some mistake, and she was just imagining…but, no…it was quite definitely him! Prince Kadir, her husband-to-be, was Leon Perez, and the man she had made love with in Venice. It couldn’t possibly be, but it was!
The shock struck right through to her heart, pinioning her with disbelief, sucking the air from her lungs and turning the bright sunshine dark. The sound of the crowd became a dull roar reaching her from a distant place. From that place she was only vaguely aware of the laughing excitement of the crowd being checked and then becoming a low-voiced sound of confused anxiety as they saw her sway and then semi stumble.
Natalia was oblivious to their concern. All she could see was the man who was to be her husband. He might be dressed in the historical dress uniform of the Commander-in-Chief of Niroli’s Armed Forces, a cloak of dark green velvet lined with ermine slung from one shoulder, and the Nirolian Seal of State ring very evident on his ring finger, but none of that could mask the reality of the fact that he was the same man she had had sex with in Venice.
A hard hand gripped her by the elbow keeping her upright as she swayed, a too well remembered male scent shocking her senses. The murderous look he was giving her was enough to have her stomach lurching without his for-her-ears-only, ‘Pull yourself together,’ mouthed against her ear as he made a pretence of showing concern for her.
Somehow she managed to force herself to turn to the crowd and smile as the king placed her now-icy-cold hand on that of his son and heir, Niroli’s future King and her future husband.
‘My people,’ King Giorgio announced emotionally. ‘I give you my son and his betrothed, your future King and Queen. May their lives together be spent in joyful service to our country and may they be blessed with the gift of children to carry on our traditions after them. I ask you to pledge to them your loyalty and love
, as they pledge theirs to you. My people, will you accept Prince Kadir as your future King and his wife-to-be Natalia Carini as your future Queen?’
‘We will…’ the crowd roared as though with one voice.
Their acceptance seemed to reverberate throughout the square as though sending its message to every part of the island, Natalia thought as she was overwhelmed by her own feeling of kinship with the people down below her in the crowd. She was a part of them and they of her in a way that the king and even less his son could ever be. She had been born amongst them and had grown up with them. She would, she promised silently, from now on dedicate herself to her service to them and to her country.
The crowd was now going wild with joy, some of the younger and bolder onlookers calling up to the balcony, ‘Kiss her, Your Highness. Kiss your bride-to-be.’ It was all Natalia could do to struggle to assimilate the true enormity of what was happening. How could this be? How could the man she had given herself to so ill advisedly in Venice be her future husband? She felt feverish and yet also cold, numb and yet acutely sensitive.
As though in obedience to the wishes of the crowd Kadir was leaning toward her. Instinctively she pulled back, as alarmed as though she were sixteen and a virgin and not twenty-nine and a mature woman. The hand clasping hers tightened its grip to an almost bone-crushingly punishing intensity, the green eyes sent her a message of warning and fury, and then the hard-cut male mouth was brushing hers to put a cold seal on the prison she herself had willingly walked into.
‘One more thing,’ King Giorgio was saying, as he had to raise his voice to make himself heard about the exultant roar of delight. ‘In recognition of how much pleasure it gives us that Natalia should become the wife of our son, we wish to publicly make this gift to her.’
Somehow both the countess and the Chief Minister had managed to make their way to the front of the balcony carrying the leather-covered jewellery case, which they were now opening for the king.
The glitter from the sunlight reflecting on the diamonds inside it was so brilliant that it made Natalia’s eyes hurt to look at them.
‘These diamonds were my gift to my beloved first wife, Queen Sophia,’ the king said emotionally. ‘Since her death I have kept them locked away, unable to countenance seeing anyone else wearing them. Until now. Now it is my belief that it is fitting and right that they should now be worn by my son’s betrothed, Natalia.’
Obediently she bent her head, shivering as she felt the cold, heavy weight of the diamond necklace lying against her skin.
‘Kadir.’ King Giorgio motioned to his son, indicating the enormous diamond ring that lay with the bracelets and tiara in the box.
As he picked up the ring Kadir looked at her again, his green eyes so hard with dislike and rejection that Natalia felt as if it were a physical blow.
‘Let him give you the ring,’ the countess snapped in her ear. ‘The people will want to see you wearing it.’
Wrenching her gaze from Kadir’s, Natalia held out her hand. Her fingers, long and slender, looked unfamiliarly delicate against the width of his palm and the length of his hand whilst the ring, held between his fingers, seemed to glitter malevolently at her. She was trembling so much that her hand brushed against him. Immediately he closed his fingers into a fist as though in rejection of the physical contact with her. Natalia’s face burned. She longed for the courage to simply turn and walk away. But it was already too late. He was sliding the ring onto her ring finger, and holding up her hand to show the crowd.
The noise of their roared approval was almost deafening. King Giorgio was looking triumphant but she dared not look at Kadir to see how he might be feeling. Her heart felt heavy with the weight of what she feared lay ahead of her. But it was too late for her to have regrets now, she told herself sickly, before rallying to remind herself that she hadn’t been alone in what she had done. But she had no explanation for what had happened; no rational means of making it seem more palatable. Unless she told him the truth. What truth? The truth that she had been so overwhelmed with desire for him that nothing else had mattered. Surely as her husband to be he would welcome that news.
CHAPTER SIX
WHEN was it going to end? Natalia wondered tiredly. She had not imagined, when the countess had told her that there was to be a formal reception after the announcements on the balcony, that she would have to stand at the side of her husband-to-be under such devastatingly untenable circumstances. Her head was throbbing and she could hardly move thanks to the constriction of her gown and the weight of the king’s gift to her. It would have been bad enough if they had simply been the strangers they should have been and not…not what they really were.
There was no need for Kadir to tell her what he thought of her, those hostile looks he had been giving her had made it mercilessly plain, and yet what right did he have to judge her? What after all had she done that he had not? There was no point in her even thinking about trying to wave the equal-rights flag in this situation, though. In a marriage such as theirs there was all the difference in the world between the moral laws applying to the woman and those applying to the man. Historically men of power and position married virgins on the assumption that way they would be guaranteed that the child born hopefully nine months after the consummation of the marriage would be theirs. The all-important first-born son. Despite the changes in the world over the last fifty years, the old beliefs were too deeply ingrained in some men to ever be erased or even softened. Kadir’s heritage from his mother’s people would mean that even more than most his pride would demand that the woman to whom he gave his name and his seed would be his alone. Natalia could sense that about him as clearly as though he had said the words to her himself. Her mistake was not so much what she had done, but that she had not thought more deeply about the expectations and mind-set of the man who would be Niroli’s next King before allowing herself to be carried away on a wave of emotional loyalty to her country.
Theirs would not, she realised now, be a prosaic marriage of convenience between two people who understand one another’s goals and beliefs. Even without Venice she would never have been the kind of woman Kadir would want as his wife. Her lip curled slightly in womanly contempt for a man she now saw as inwardly weak in all the ways that mattered the most to her, for all his raw masculinity and sexuality; a man who was so steeped in old-fashioned beliefs that he automatically considered it beneath him to take as his wife a woman who had been ‘used’ by another man.
She, on the other hand, was proud of everything that she was, of all that she had learned and all the ways in which she had grown from girlhood to womanhood by making her own choices and learning from them. Until Venice there had never been a relationship she had regretted or felt shamed by. She was a mature woman, morally the only judge she believed she needed, perfectly capable of policing her own sexual behaviour, instinctively knowing what was right for her and what was not. She had always believed that to deny her sexuality as she matured would have been as much of a sin as being promiscuous. And she wasn’t promiscuous. How could she be when she had been celibate for so many years? The only time she had broken her own self-imposed moral rules—the only time she had ever wanted to, in fact—had been that one night with Kadir, but how could she make him understand and believe that, as she must—for the sake of their marriage and Niroli?
Here they were standing side by side as they greeted the guests invited to meet them, joined together by the king’s own hand and by the heavy weight of the ring she was wearing, by the expectations of the Nirolian people, and yet in reality already divided by suspicion, deceit, mistrust and attitudes to life that were worlds apart.
Kadir could feel the stiff gold braid embossed collar of the uniform jacket he was wearing pressing against his flesh. It felt alien and constricting after the more familiar softness of the Arab robes he wore on formal court occasions in Hadiya, and more than that he felt almost as though he were dressed up to take part in a play, with a role imposed on him by th
e expectations of others, rather than living through a vitally important part of his own future life.
The research he had done on Niroli after his mother’s devastating revelations had shown him an island with the potential to play a vitally important role on the world stage. Geographically alone, its position was unique. The world was changing; old powers giving way to new; men with minds sharp enough, perceptive enough, forward-thinking enough to encompass what could be achieved were in a unique position to guide that world through its rebirth. He had learned so much from studying the history of his own country and the Middle East in general. He wanted his future sphere of influence and that of his sons to reach far beyond Niroli, and to that end he had decided that he needed a wife who understood this, a wife who would dutifully provide him with children he knew would be his, not a woman who would casually give herself to any man who happened to stir her to lust—a woman who could be stirred to that lust as easily as a bitch on heat.
Kadir could feel fresh fury raging through him as he relived the moment on the balcony when his wife-to-be had stepped out to show herself. His wife-to-be was a whore…worse than a whore: she gave herself for nothing other than her own pleasure; a whore at least put a price on her virtue or lack of it. Every time he thought of the casual contempt with which she had disregarded their marriage to throw herself at him he wanted to turn to her and rip the diamonds from her neck and the ring from her finger, the clothes from her body, to reveal her as she really was.
How many times had she slipped away from Niroli to pose as she had done with him in a role that allowed her access to men? Ten times? A hundred? A thousand? How long had she planned to wait after their marriage before doing so again? A year…a month?
It was of course unthinkable that his father knew the truth about her. He had seen in King Giorgio’s eyes the same arrogant pride he knew burned within himself. His father would never have considered her as a potential bride if he had known. The last thing he wanted to do was marry her, but the potential complications if he refused now were too great to be contemplated. He was the one who was the outsider here; the one who had to prove himself and win the acceptance of the island’s people. To reject one of their ‘daughters’ would be seen as an insult, here just as it would be in Hadiya, no matter how justified his reason. No, he was stuck with the marriage if he wanted Niroli. And Kadir knew that he did.