“Not as good as it was before I had Michael,” she said truthfully.
“Then you had better lean on me.”
She rested her hands on his broad, strong shoulders and one by one he slipped the dangerous shoes from her feet. He unfolded himself to a standing position and studied the pale cream construction.
“You are mistaken, Abi. These would make formidable weapons.”
Her feet were relaxing with instant relief. “Thank you,” she said simply. She would never have felt comfortable to remove her shoes in the palace without his invitation. Would she ever feel comfortable in the palace to do anything?
“You did well tonight,” he said, his eyes scanning her face. Something like concern was hinted at by his handsome features.
Immediately Abi’s stomach clenched with worry. It was an instinct that had been finely honed over the past two years. “What is it? Has something happened? Is it Michael?”
His frown deepened. “Michael is fine.”
“Don’t … don’t say that if he isn’t. I’d rather know …”
He shook his head to show how little he understood of his wife as he pulled his mobile phone from his pocket. He passed it to Abi, a small smile on his lips. “Your mother sent this photo not ten minutes ago.”
Abi looked at the image with a swollen, aching heart. Their child. They had made him. He was a mixture of their genes and their souls. His face was almost completely Kiral, but his dimples were Abi.
“I miss him,” she said softly, wishing she could reach through the screen and stroke those downy little cheeks.
The effect of his wife admiring their son did something strange to his own heart. “It is too late to go to him now. But tomorrow, we will visit.”
She passed the phone back abruptly, not wanting to risk giving into the emotions that were jumbling through her. “Yes,” she said, but her voice cracked.
“Your mother said he is completely himself. Doctor Edrich reports his medical recovery could not be improved upon. He is strong.”
She nodded. Abigail wouldn’t have let herself dream Michael would make such a miraculous improvement after the operation.
He began to walk once more, leading them further down the marbled corridor.
Michael was strong. His condition could have killed him at any point, but he had survived. Abi had remained hyper-vigilant. She’d hardly slept more than two hours in a row since he’d been born. The fear that he might have a heart attack overnight had kept her ever-alert.
“I guess I’m just used to worrying.”
Kiral nodded. “That is natural.” He reached down and took hold of her hand. He stroked the sensitive flesh inside her wrist. “You aren’t alone anymore. I wish … If things had been different, I would have helped. I would have done everything in my power to relieve you of that stress.”
Regret, remorse and frustration over the unchangeability of the past swamped her. What could she say? He knew why she’d kept Mikey secret. She’d been so terrified of losing him; the fear seemed a little ludicrous now, given how quickly he’d shaken his life up to effect this marriage.
“Kiral?” She said his name so softly that Kiral wasn’t even sure she’d spoken. “How did Melania take it when you ended the engagement?”
Outside of the doors to his apartment, two guards stood in ceremonial uniforms. Their eyes were staring directly ahead, and yet as Kiral and Abi approached, the man to the left pushed the door inward and clipped to attention. Kiral walked through as though there were no guards; Abi flashed them both a nervous smile and then followed behind her new husband.
She stepped into his apartment with a growing sense of anticipation.
They both knew what they’d agreed to. They were married, and the marriage would be a real one. She wasn’t afraid of that. In truth, Abi knew herself well enough to acknowledge that she wouldn’t be able to keep her hands off him. No matter how angry she was, nor how hurt she felt, she was too selfish to resist the pleasure she knew he could offer, nor the closeness she was craving.
“She accepted it as I knew she would,” he said simply, pausing while the guard shut the door behind them.
Abi swallowed her anxiety. “What does that mean?” She asked, but her voice was shaking with nerves.
“Melania and I have both known, for a long time, that our marriage made sense. We both accepted the necessity of it. But she was equally able to accept my decision not to marry her.”
“She wasn’t upset?” Abi asked, though it was with a sense of disbelief. After all, who wouldn't be devastated to lose Kiral?
“Not at all,” he assured his wife. “In fact, she wished us well.”
“And you?” Abi pushed. “Do you regret the necessity of cancelling the wedding?” She had to know.
“No,” he responded shortly. “I regret the necessity of forcing you to travel to Delani and marry me.”
“Oh.” She turned away from him, her heart pounding. His words were confusing in so many ways and yet she was too proud to seek clarification. Did he mean that he wished they hadn’t married? Or that he wished he hadn’t found it necessary to force her into it?
“And you?” He prompted, his voice rich with curiosity. “Do you wish you were still in New York, living your own life?”
She bit down on her lip and slowly shook her head. “We married for Michael,” she said with a shrug. “His life is going to be so much better now. The opportunities he’ll have … How can I possibly regret that?”
Even then, after all that he’d put her through, she was brave and strong; worse, she was fair. He deserved her anger, hatred and criticism and yet she spoke levelly and with true understanding.
Abi let out a sigh. She lifted a hand to the column of her neck and ran her fingers down its fair sides. “Well?” She said thickly. “What next?”
An excellent question; one Kiral didn’t have an answer to.
Ten
His arm was across her naked chest. They’d fallen asleep some time in the early hours of the morning, after their bodies were sated — for the interim, at least. Kiral had not found it difficult to crash. He was exhausted. Worry over Michael and a fear that Abigail might pull out of the wedding at the last minute had given him more than the odd sleepless night.
But as he slept peacefully now, content that his son was well and Abigail was his wife, familiar worries were turning the wheels of Abigail’s nocturnal brain. In her mind and her dreams, she saw him.
Michael: his face pale, his lips blue, his body lifeless. In her dream, she was shaking him, but he wasn’t responding. In her dream, he died in her arms; she felt his body lose its life and there was nothing she could do.
She sobbed in her sleep and then pushed up out of the bed. Her heart was racing and the fear and worry had disorientated her. It took her a second to remember the wedding, her husband, the palace.
And the fact Michael was so far away.
Particularly the fact that he was healthy, when in her mind’s eye she could so clearly see his body and face, devoid of life and animation.
“Abi?” Kiral had burst into wakefulness as soon as she’d stirred. “What is it?”
She sucked in a deep breath, but it was useless. She was on the brink of a panic attack. She sat down on the edge of the bed and dipped her head forward. “I’m okay,” she lied, bracing her hands on her knees and concentrating on the steady rhythm of in-out-in-out breaths.
“Abi?” He ran his hand down her back, and watched as goosebumps chased his touch. Beyond them, one of the desert birds began to sing. “Your skin is like fire.”
She nodded. That always happened when she had the nightmares. Adrenalin pumped through her body and gave her a kind of fear-fever.
“I know.” She swallowed.
“This happens often?” He pushed.
She shook her head. “Sometimes.”
“How often is ‘sometimes’?”
She didn’t answer. Her heart was squeezing and her body was shaking. She cou
ldn’t get the image of Michael’s lifeless body out of her mind.
“It is a bad dream?” He prompted, coming to kneel in front of her. Her cheeks were flushed and her skin was still warm to touch.
She nodded. “A memory.” She shuddered. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
He studied her carefully. Sweat was beaded on her forehead and upper lip. He wiped it away and then put his hand on her knee. “I will make a deal with you,” he said.
“Another deal?” She couldn’t help responding with shuddering cynicism
He nodded slowly. “There is a beautiful pool through those doors. More beautiful than you can possibly imagine. The water will be cool on your flushed skin. Tell me your dream and I will take you to it.”
Her heart turned over. The idea of swimming was instantly appealing. But sharing her innermost worries?
“It’s just a recurring nightmare,” she said with a wave of her hand, hoping he’d buy her blasé attitude and stop asking questions.
“About?”
She swallowed. “What do you think?”
He pushed to his knees and ran a thumb over her cheek. “I think it is about Michael,” he said simply. “And I think you will one day forget this burden you have carried for so long. One day, you will realise that your life now is without trouble or difficulty.”
“Do you think?” She muttered, standing up and moving away from him.
Something lodged in his chest, something sharp and uncomfortable. “Yes. Michael is getting better every day.”
“Yes, he is. But that doesn’t mean my life will be without difficulty. I wouldn’t undo the decisions I’ve made, but it occurs to me that I’ve jumped straight from the fat and into the fire.”
“From the … I am not familiar with this idiom.”
She nodded. She was still burning with the heat of her emotions but her heart was coming back to its usual tempo. “It means I’ve swapped one worry for another.”
Comprehension dawned and with it a sense of remorse. He had been acting on a mix of adrenalin and instinct since Abigail had reappeared in his life. Now that he had her where he needed her to be, bound to him as his wife and forever guaranteed to be a part of his palace, he could afford to stop and examine what he’d done.
And it left him cold.
He barely recognised the man he’d become. “Tell me about the dream.”
“Show me the pool.”
He swallowed. She should be demanding. She should be demanding so much more from him than a bloody swimming pool. He cut through the room, his powerful legs making short work of the distance. His mind was firing with self-directed accusations.
He paused only to remove two monogrammed robes from the back of the door; he handed one to her and then shrugged his own on.
“Thank you,” she murmured as she cinched it around her narrow waist. His eyes dropped to the gesture. He had held her waist as they’d made love; she’d straddled him and he’d gripped her, and somewhere in the back of his mind he had wondered at how slender she’d become and he had hoped she would soon flesh out. With happiness, but also, one day soon, with another baby. One wasn’t enough. Not with Abi.
The doors on the far side of this apartment opened onto an outdoor sitting area. Beyond it was another set of doors, these ones made of a sort of wrought iron. They opened easily when he pushed them. He watched her walk through them, but his mind was split in two.
She had been nineteen years old when they’d met. She had been a virgin. Completely innocent. He had known from that first afternoon in the restaurant that she was his. And he’d played with her. He’d loved her, too, but he’d allowed her to fall in love with him and he’d always rationalised it easily.
She would get over him.
She would meet someone else.
She would suffer temporarily - as he had - but she would recover.
Only she’d become pregnant. At nineteen. Alone. He physically winced with the shame of his choices.
Abi was wholly engrossed in the grotto. She was still sweating. Despite the cool desert breeze that blew through the city and over the sand, her skin was shimmering with perspiration. But her eyes chased down the details of the area.
It had been built as a gift for his wife by Kiral’s great grandfather. She had grown up in Switzerland and found the desert heat unbearable. The construction was typical for designs of the time; a sort of cave had been constructed out of local stones, and it loomed large over more than half of the pool. Vines dangled from the top of it, creating a private cove within. The moonlight shimmered and bounced off the water, making it seem that it glowed with magic, but even in full sunlight this was one of Kiral’s favourite places in the palace.
“It’s perfect,” she said seriously.
“Abi,” his word was thick with emotion. “What happened when you had Michael?”
She spun around. Her face was so pale. He couldn’t help it; he lifted his hands and cupped her cheeks so that he could stare down at her. She was still so young; and yet she was wise well beyond her years.
“What do you mean? In what way?”
“I need you to fill in the gaps for me.” His fingers stroked her flesh gently. “You were in college when we met, and working at the restaurant.”
She nodded slowly but her eyes were closing off from his. She was shifting a part of herself into a box, compartmentalising out the parts of her life she didn’t want him to know about. “I had a baby.” Her words were stiff. “What do you think happened?”
His stomach squeezed. “Did you finish your degree?”
“Did I …” She pushed the words deep down inside of her. The acerbic, ‘With what time?’ died on her lips. There was no point in playing the victim. She had chosen to have Michael. And she had chosen to keep him. She never imagined herself as a single mother, especially not having been raised by one herself, but she’d been happy to sacrifice anything she needed simply to keep her beautiful boy. “No, in the end, I didn’t.” The words were clipped. She turned to the water and shrugged out of her robe. Her nakedness almost bowled him over.
Would he ever get used to that? To having his beautiful Abigail back in his life? So available and so willing?
He ground his teeth together and turned away.
She was available because he’d forced her to be.
She was willing because she had no idea how to control her body and the libido that was rampant within her.
And as he’d done then, he’d miscalculated the effect their relationship would have on her. He’d pushed instead of given. He hadn’t listened and he hadn’t seen.
But it was Abi who wasn’t listening now. She was easing herself into the water, tilting her head back to drown all of her hair in its cool serenade. She moved her arms in gentle circles, reminding him of a butterfly.
No.
It was not a butterfly she reminded him of, but a mermaid.
He stared at her, completely struck. Damn it, his uncle would know exactly how to interpret a thought such as that, but all Kiral knew was that she was as mythical now as one of the original sea-people.
And this from a man who firmly disbelieved those stupid stories.
He crouched down on the edge of the pool and dipped his fingers in. The slight motion alerted Abigail and she stood up. Though she was short and the bottom of her chin appeared to float on the surface.
“What was your dream about?”
She looked away, focusing on the vines that floated overhead. But here, she was apparently willing to be open. She sighed. “I was going to get all of Mikey’s records for you, anyway.”
He could only see her face but he knew her well enough to know that her fingers were fidgeting beneath the water. “A week after turning one, Mikey had his first really bad episode.” She couldn’t meet his eyes. “I woke up and went to check on him. I can’t even say why. I don’t think he made a noise. I just … something made me stir. And he wasn’t breathing. His face was white; his lips were blue
— his fingers too. He just wasn’t breathing. He felt dead in my arms; that’s the only way I can describe it.” Still she kept her eyes averted. “It happened twice more. I got one of those mats that alerts you when babies stop breathing in their sleep. Thank God.” She swallowed. “But this dream… It comes back to me often.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ll never forget what it was like to hold him in my arms and not be able to wake him. He felt dead, Kiral.”
“You saved him though. He is alive because of how well you handled these trials.”
She nodded. He couldn’t tell if she was crying silently, or if her face was wet from the pool. But it was no longer sufficient to speak to her from the edge. He stepped out of his robe and glided, naked, across the water’s surface. She watched him come towards her and was powerless to move.
He was far taller than she, and stood a head above her. He wrapped an arm around her waist to hold her higher in the water and she didn’t bother to pretend his contact wasn’t comforting.
“This was another dream of mine,” she said softly, but her words were saturated in sadness.
“Yes?” He prompted, her body soft against his hard planes.
She swallowed, her eyes wide. “I dreamed we were married. That you never left. That Michael was healthy and we were in love; I dreamed that we were a fairy tale. I dreamed that you weren’t a prince; a powerful leader of a foreign country. In my dreams you were always just ‘Ki’. The man I thought I loved.”
Every single one of her words wounded him like a poisoned arrow; he knew she didn’t mean it to have affected him so. In fact, he was certain she had no concept of the power she wielded over him.
“And now that we’re here, and we’re married, I can’t quite believe it’s like this.”
“Like what?”
Her laugh was without humour. “Like this.” She didn’t elaborate further. And Kiral didn’t need her to. She’d dreamed of the fairytale and instead he’d piled onto her nightmares.
I’m sorry.
Those were the words he should have said. But he had them bottled inside his chest. In his defense, Kiral Mazroui had not grown up with the expectation that he ought to apologise for his wrongdoings. He had never learned to be humble nor apologetic, and so he had no real mechanism for processing the sensations that were arrowing through him.
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