by Lynne Graham
‘Perhaps we should exchange phone numbers now,’ she suggested and he dug out his phone and took a note of hers while passing her a sleek business card. ‘This feels so weird, Jaul...all of it.’
‘Of course it does. Naturally we have both changed a great deal,’ he fielded with a level of smooth assurance that made her want to slap him.
It was a welcome interruption when a knock sounded on the door and someone entered with a tray, followed by another person, who surged forward with a deep bow in Jaul’s direction to yank out a small table and spread it with a cloth. A china stand loaded with miniature French fancies and tiny scones was put on display and the English tea was poured.
The sight shot Chrissie back in time to what she supposed had effectively been her first date with Jaul although she had not seen it as such at the time. He had taken her to an exclusive hotel for afternoon tea, a quintessentially English tradition he had naively assumed everyone followed. Feeling like a lady of the manor, she had very much enjoyed the experience.
‘You remembered,’ she told him without thinking about what she was saying.
But Jaul hadn’t remembered. Afternoon tea had been his grandmother’s routine and it was still served all these years on because the house had never benefitted from another mistress. The faintest colour scored his high cheekbones as he was shot back in time to recall that long-ago afternoon after he had finally persuaded Chrissie to see him as a normal educated male rather than a womanising party animal. She had been wearing a blue dress then as well. The dress had had tiny little flowers all over it and she had sat there, tense and shy with her beautiful hair falling to her waist, and he had been so scared of saying or doing the wrong thing and frightening her off again. Scared of what a woman might think for the one and only time in his life! He wanted to laugh at that recollection of his younger, less cynical self but now he was looking at Chrissie again, noting the silvery hair that was shoulder length now, the fined-down line of her perfect features, and other reactions were overwhelming him.
Images that Jaul had resisted for two years were suddenly leaping out of the box he had locked them in. Colliding with the bright turquoise eyes that he knew could turn feverish with longing for him, he went rigid recalling that incredibly erotic eagerness, nostrils flaring, dark eyes shimmering gold beneath his lush black lashes.
The atmosphere had become suffocating, Chrissie registered in dismay, shifting off one restive foot to the other. She met his intense gaze and froze, her temperature running cold and then hot until melted honey pooled low in her pelvis, an almost forgotten sensation from the past. But it was too late by then for her to draw back because Jaul was unexpectedly in front of her, close enough to touch and literally just grabbing her with two strong arms to weld her into sudden highly provocative contact with his lean, powerfully hard body. Air exploded into her lungs as she snatched in a startled breath.
‘Chrissie...’ Jaul husked, lean hands sliding down her slender spine to tilt her hips into an even more intimate meeting.
And as she recognised and felt his erection below their clothes, the long, thick evidence of his need hard against her belly, an ache of near pain stirred between her own legs. Her head swam, clear thought forgotten, knees suddenly as weak as bendy twigs. He took her mouth with all the passion she had never forgotten, fiery and urgent and wildly demanding. She took fire from the kiss, which was like a flame hitting bone-dry hay, and the piercing arrow of bittersweet hunger travelled to the very core of her being. Her hands flew up to his broad shoulders and roved from the hard muscle there to the thick blue-black hair she had loved to bury her fingers in.
His tongue plunged between her parted lips and a shudder racked her in his arms, sudden wickedly strong need loosed inside her to run amok like bush fire. She wanted to rip his shirt off and run her hands down over his washboard abs. She wanted to drag him down to the rug below their feet and satisfy the hollow ache screaming at her feminine heart. It was powerful, it was seductive and she could no more have resisted that savagely strong hunger than she could have resisted his explosive passion. She wanted, she wanted...
CHAPTER FOUR
SOMEONE KNOCKED ON the door and Jaul froze, literally froze as if someone had hit an alarm bell. He pushed her back from him, dark eyes glittering tiger gold and a ferocious frown on his lean, darkly handsome face.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said flatly. ‘That was a mistake.’
Chrissie was unable to pull herself together quite so quickly and as he released her she pivoted away from him towards the windows. As she raised trembling hands to press to her suddenly clammy cheeks, she was sick with self-loathing and shock and only dimly aware that someone was speaking to Jaul in his own language at the door. Feeling shaky, she sat down on a horrendous carved wooden sofa without even a cushion to soften its hard, unyielding seat.
A mistake? How demeaning to be told that! Only a kiss, only a stupid kiss, she was reasoning with herself in a daze of shame and denial. But how could she have let that happen, particularly when she had visited him to discuss the infinitely more important reality of the twins’ very existence? It was as though something had momentarily stolen her wits, overpowering all memory and rationality in the same moment. Well, what was done was done and he had been equally guilty of inappropriate behaviour, she reminded herself in consolation. Of course, she had once been accustomed to Jaul’s distinctly carnal can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you nature, had indeed at one stage gloried in her apparent power to attract him, innocently assuming that it meant more than it did. It seemed in that line though he hadn’t changed a bit.
Jaul was receiving a lengthy message from his PA. He was taken aback to be invited to a legal meeting the following morning between the legal firm chosen by Bandar and the lawyers who would apparently be arriving to represent Chrissie’s interests. After her attitude to the divorce issue the night before he was disconcerted but less surprised by her unexpected visit. Had she already thought better of her behaviour? Evidently she could muster a crack divorce team virtually overnight. Perhaps she had also mulled over the financial advantages of giving him the divorce he wanted, he reasoned sardonically. When had money come to mean so much to her?
It was a question he had asked himself repeatedly two years earlier when she had accepted his father’s pay-off to turn her back on their relationship and walk away. How had he missed out on that devious, greedy streak in her make-up? At the time he would have described her as the least mercenary woman he had ever met. Had she cunningly concealed her avaricious side from him in an effort to impress him? When they had been together she had gone to great lengths to prove that his wealth meant little to her. And if he was honest, he had been impressed because by that stage he had become bored with women who valued him for what he was worth rather than for the man he was.
Yet the woman he had valued beyond all others had proved to be the greediest of all. That was a lowering truth he hated to recall for it exposed his poor judgement when he was at the mercy of his libido. A reminder he evidently needed, he conceded darkly, acknowledging without much surprise that one look at Chrissie’s beautiful face and slender but shapely proportions could still arouse him.
Chrissie was finally wondering how on earth she could broach the subject of Jaul being a father and increasingly it was sinking in for her that it would come as an enormous shock to him. Her fingers dug into the clutch bag Lizzie had pressed on her and in a sudden movement she bent her pale head and snapped it open to withdraw the birth certificates. Those documents were self-explanatory and there was really no need at all for her to start stumbling into an awkward announcement.
Chrissie extended the certificates. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I came here.’ Not to kiss you and dream about ripping off your clothes again, she completed inwardly while her face burned with mortification. ‘I had to see you because I thought you should see these first...’
Another frown drawing together his fine ebony brows, Jaul grasped the documents with an
unhidden air of incomprehension. She hadn’t mentioned the kiss and he was grateful for that, well aware of Chrissie’s ability to throw a three-act drama over what he viewed as trivia. Time had shot them both back briefly into the past and that was all. Nothing more need be said, he was thinking while he grasped the fact that for some peculiar reason his estranged wife had given him a pair of birth certificates.
‘What are these?’ Jaul scanned the name of the mother and went cold. ‘You have children?’
‘And so do you,’ Chrissie advised thinly. ‘You got me pregnant, Jaul.’
Jaul stilled and stopped breathing. Pregnant? The word screamed at him. It was not possible in his mind to credit it at that first moment, but now his quick and clever brain was checking dates, making calculations, recognising that whether he liked it or not it was a possibility. A possibility he didn’t want to think about though. He had children, a boy and a girl. The concept was so shattering that he literally could not think for several tense seconds. The woman he was planning to divorce was the mother of his children. Inwardly he reeled from that revelation, instantly grasping how that devastating truth would change everything. Everything!
But why was he only learning about something as incredibly important as the news that he was a father over a year after the event of their birth? Jaul was not accustomed to receiving the kind of shock that rocked his world on its axis. Momentarily he closed his eyes before opening them to stare at Chrissie...beautiful, deceptive Chrissie, who had hit him with an own goal of mammoth proportions.
‘If this is true...and I assume that it is,’ Jaul framed with the greatest difficulty he had ever had in controlling both his temper and his tone, ‘why am I only being told about the existence of my son and daughter now?’
Of all the reactions he might have had and she had envisaged while the taxi ferried her across London, that particular one had not featured. It was a Eureka moment for Chrissie and she didn’t need to leap out of a bath to be galvanised into instantaneous rage and jump to her feet. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say to me?’ she shouted at him full force.
Innumerable generations of royal ice stiffened Jaul’s spine, for no male had been more minutely trained from childhood than he had been to deal with a sudden crisis without any show of unseemly emotion or ill-judged vocal exclamations. ‘What were you expecting me to say?’ he enquired.
The door burst open and all four of his bodyguards rushed in to stare at Chrissie in disbelief. As collected as ever, indeed as if such interruptions were part of his normal life, Jaul sent them into retreat with the instruction that on no account was he to be disturbed again. He knew what had happened: his highly anxious protection squad had heard her shout when nobody shouted at him and had feared that some sort of a dangerous incident was developing. But they were nervous and on edge, having never been abroad before and London was a very scary place as far as they were concerned.
Turquoise eyes glittering with rage, Chrissie knotted her fingers into fists. ‘Well, maybe I expected something a little more human and you asked me a very, very stupid question!’
Jaul gritted his strong white teeth. ‘Stupid how?’
‘You asked me why you’re only finding out about Tarif and Soraya now and I want to ask you...is that a joke?’
‘No. It was not a joke,’ Jaul responded with perfect diction, studying her with assessing dark eyes. ‘Why would I joke about it? Try to calm down and think about what you’re saying. This is a very serious matter.’
And that was the moment when Chrissie lost even the slight hold she still retained on her temper. The father of her children was poised there like a granite pillar and acting as coolly and politely as though they were discussing the weather. It was too much, too great an insult after that offensive question to be borne in silence. How dared he ask her to calm down? How dared he talk down to her when he had just about wrecked her life and abandoned her to sink or swim?
‘You complete bastard,’ she breathed in a raw undertone, barely able to get the harsh syllables past her parted lips. ‘Why weren’t you told? You deserted me—’
‘I did not—’
‘You went back to Marwan and you never returned to me—that’s desertion. You didn’t answer your phone. You didn’t call, email, write, even text...I never heard another word from you!’ Chrissie slashed back at him shakily, bitter wounding memories surfacing inside her head to power her on. ‘You left me no way of contacting you. Of course I appreciate now that that was deliberate because you knew before you left that you weren’t coming back—’
‘That is untrue—’
‘Shut up!’ Chrissie practically screamed at him, her sense of injustice and furious hurt too great to be silenced now that she finally had Jaul in front of her. ‘Don’t lie to me! At least be honest...what could you possibly have to lose now?’
His lean, devastatingly handsome features clenched hard. ‘I have never lied to you—’
‘Well, the “love you for ever” bit was certainly a lie! Telling me that the Oxford apartment was our home when your father could throw me out of it at a moment’s notice was a lie! And according to him even our marriage was a lie!’ she reminded him, half an octave higher, and it did not help her mood when Jaul visibly winced. In punishment, she snatched up a sugar bowl and flung it at him, sugar cubes flying like tiny missiles as the china bowl shattered on the edge of a small table.
Jaul was right in the middle of the three-act drama he had hoped to avoid. Urging calm wasn’t working, listening quietly wasn’t working either. But then all that had ever worked with Chrissie when she was angry was dragging her off to bed until they were both thoroughly satisfied. That was a totally inappropriate thought, he admitted, struggling to concentrate on what mattered most: the children. But how could children he had never heard of until this day or even seen seem real to him?
‘Thanks to your father’s little “mistake”, Jaul, my children are listed as illegitimate and without a father!’ Chrissie ranted, almost running out of breath but quickly powering up for the next. ‘Now my family may not be from a culturally conservative place as sensitive as Marwan but my father didn’t speak to me for over six months once he realised that I was pregnant and unmarried because he was ashamed and embarrassed—’
If possible Jaul froze to an even greater extent.
Having been convinced by King Lut that she was not a married woman, Chrissie had not had the power to put Jaul’s name on the birth certificates as to do so he would have had to accompany her to the register of births to register their birth or have made a statutory declaration that he was the twins’ father. Chrissie had also been afraid to mention a marriage that she had already been told was illegal, fearful that in some way she might have accidentally broken the law by going through with such a ceremony. She had also been very much afraid of the risk of attracting embarrassing publicity should the royal status of her children’s father ever become public knowledge. Anonymity and silence all round had seemed the safest option after her fruitless visits to the Marwani Embassy.
‘In fact if it hadn’t been for my sister and her husband, I would’ve been in even more serious trouble than I already was. So don’t you dare ask me why you weren’t told that you were a father when you were such a very lousy husband or non-husband or whatever you were!’ Chrissie slung tempestuously.
‘Is that it?’ he enquired, dark eyes glittering bright as a starry night. ‘Are you finished hurling abuse?’
‘That was not abuse...that was what happened!’ Chrissie raved back at him, undaunted. ‘Do you know what your problem is?’
Jaul knew he was about to find out.
‘People don’t stand up to you, don’t expect you to account for the wrong you do because you’re this super rich, powerful guy who’s spoilt. I hate you. I absolutely hate you!’ Chrissie shouted at him, punctuating the assurance with the milk jug that had accompanied the sugar bowl. ‘You’re a horrible, seducing, selfish, womanising rat!’
‘I th
ink you should go home and lie down for a while. I’ll phone you later when you’ve calmed down a little,’ Jaul murmured without any expression at all and it just made her want to scream until she was carried off and locked away as the madwoman the Marwani Embassy staff had once treated her as.
Chrissie was rigid with fury: Jaul had no idea what hell she had gone through, probably even less interest, and she very much doubted that he had absorbed what she had told him.
Pregnant, Jaul was still thinking in a daze, trying and failing to imagine Chrissie’s slender figure swollen with his children, Chrissie going through the pregnancy alone while rejected in disgrace by her father as a single parent. For the very first time he was glad she had had the money his father had given her, even relieved by the idea because she would have needed financial support. Children, he thought again, unable to imagine them, a baby boy and a baby girl, the first twins in the royal family since his grandfather and great-uncle’s birth. Dimly, he realised that he was in such deep shock that he was in an abnormal state of disorientation and detachment, completely divorced from his usual cool, rational mind.
‘Just you try lying down for a while when you have two babies of only fourteen months old to look after!’ Chrissie hurled as a last-ditch put-down, stalking out of the door. She ignored the fact that his bunch of bodyguards were pacing the hall like worried parents having heard the noise of shouting and breaking crockery. They rushed past her to check that their precious charge, the King, was unharmed. King indeed, she thought incredulously, for that Jaul had become a king had just never seemed real to Chrissie.
A servant rushed to open the front door to her, visibly eager to see her off the premises. If they mentioned her name at the Marwani Embassy they would all be able to get together and talk about what a raving nut job she was, the crazy Englishwoman who wept and shouted and begged. Well, that wasn’t her any more because she had soon got over loving Jaul. When a man ditched you as cruelly as Jaul had ditched her, there was no coming back from such an experience. Nothing had ever hurt so much... She flung a disgusted glance back at all the shining windows of that weird mansion and if she had had a brick in her hand she would have thrown that as well.