by Lynne Graham
Chrissie would not have put it past Jaul to have deliberately set out to get her horizontal. He was no slowcoach with women, no fool when it came to what mattered. His passion was irresistible but he would know perfectly well that she would feel tormented by what had just happened between them and he probably felt quite self-satisfied because he had proved his point: she did still want him and crave him in the most basic of ways.
That meant more to Jaul than it meant to her though. When she had first met Jaul he had been a sexual predator, programmed to take advantage of willing women even though he had not behaved that way with her. In fact, although they had hit astonishing highs in the lesser intimacy stakes, Jaul had married her before he actually had full sex with her, making her appreciate even back then that in some ways Jaul was much more anchored in his own culture than she had ever properly appreciated. It had also made her wonder in low moments after he had disappeared if she had won Jaul purely by saying no for so long and thereby acquiring all the glorious lustre of a challenge and a worthwhile trophy. Was that the simple explanation of why the heir to a Gulf throne had chosen to deem an ordinary Yorkshire girl special enough to marry? But then had he ever planned on it being a permanent marriage?
But that past was long gone and she was over it, Chrissie reminded herself as she got dressed again. Just not as over him as she had thought she was, a little inner voice reminded her deflatingly. Jaul would think he had won now, would assume she would become his wife again. It probably was just that basic for him, his belief that if she had sex with him again it meant he had her back.
And whose fault was it that he would now be thinking that? Chrissie boiled with regret inside herself. Pure naked lust had overwhelmed her. It was a fallacy to believe that only men could react like that, she ruminated unhappily, a nonsense to assume that a woman couldn’t feel the same way. She had never been with anyone other than Jaul but she had learned a lot about that side of her nature even in the short time they had actually lived together and knew that she was a passionate woman. And the only reason she hadn’t slept with anyone else since Jaul was that she had yet to meet any male who had the same highly charged sexual effect on her that he did.
* * *
Jaul towelled himself dry after a shower with a reflective look on his lean, strong face while he tried to work out whether he had made the right or wrong move with Chrissie. She was so stubborn, so unforgiving. Did she have genuine cause to feel that way?
He refused to believe that his late father had lied to him, so what point was there in making enquiries at the embassy? Such an investigation into King Lut’s behaviour would be downright disloyal and it would be sure to spawn unpleasant rumours and damaging gossip. His features sombre at that prospect, Jaul cursed below his breath. He had a wife. He had two children. He might have spent two years in ignorance of those facts but the reality was that now he had to live with his wife and his children in the present and not in the past, harking back to old disruptive issues that only roused bitterness and aggression in both of them.
She had taken the money and run. Did he continue to hate her for that even when he now knew that she had been pregnant and in dire need of financial help? She was younger than he was, less mature and all of a sudden he hadn’t been there for her. A woman of greater selfishness might have had a termination rather than raise two children she had not planned to conceive. Whether he liked it or not, fate had ensured that he had let her down by not being there for her when he had been needed.
And on a much lighter note, he ruminated abstractedly, shapely mouth sultry with recollection, the sex was amazing. But where once it had been the icing on the cake, now it was the only glue likely to give them a future as a couple. Wasn’t that why he had swept her off to bed? That laced with unashamed desire, of course.
Why was he even thinking like this? In the past, Chrissie had often made him think about stuff that generally struck him as not quite masculine and when they were first married he had resented that truth. He was not a knight on a white charger like some character out of the medieval romances she had once adored. He had never pretended to be perfect but he had always known that she wanted him to be that knight. Chrissie the realist was deeply intertwined with Chrissie the romantic.
And now he was about to be the bad guy again, he acknowledged grimly. He had no choice. He had not had a choice from the moment he’d learned of his son’s existence.
* * *
Chrissie was brushing her hair when she heard the guest-room door open and she stiffened, leaving down the brush and walking to the bathroom door. Jaul was in jeans and a bright turquoise tee that clung to his impressive chest and if she felt lacerated by what had occurred, he looked infuriatingly energised, she reflected wretchedly.
‘I thought we should talk in here,’ Jaul confided.
Less risk of being overheard by his staff, she translated. So, what was he about to tell her that she might want to shout and scream about?
‘I still want the divorce,’ she repeated doggedly. ‘What happened just happened but it doesn’t change my mind about anything.’
Burnished golden eyes shaded by luxuriant black lashes surveyed her without perceptible surprise. ‘We have a link we could still build on—’
‘I don’t think so,’ she argued, waving a pale, slender hand in a dismissive gesture. ‘Been there, done that. I could never trust you again and let’s face it...you wanted a divorce as well until you found out about Tarif. I appreciate that Tarif’s birth changes things for you but it doesn’t change them for me.’
‘And that’s your final word on this subject?’ Jaul pressed with sudden severity.
Chrissie lifted her chin, refusing to let mortification take over. She had made a mistake but that didn’t mean she had to live with it and build her entire future around it. ‘Yes, I’m sorry, but it is...’
‘Then perhaps you should look at this...’ Jaul slid a folded document out of his back pocket and held it out to her. ‘I didn’t want to be forced to make use of it. I had hoped to avoid it because coercing you is something I would’ve preferred not to do. But this particular document would have been produced by my lawyers had any divorce meeting taken place,’ he explained flatly. ‘However, I have cancelled that meeting.’
‘What on earth is it?’ Chrissie whispered anxiously.
‘It’s the pre-nuptial contract you signed before we got married,’ Jaul informed her levelly. ‘I don’t think you read it properly.’
The vaguest of memories stirring, Chrissie wrenched open the sheet of paper and saw the clause marked with a helpful red asterisk in the margin. Her heart in her mouth, she read the clause relating to the custody of any children born of their marriage in which she had agreed that any child they had would live in Marwan with Jaul.
Her mouth ran dry because she vaguely remembered reading that more than two years previously and cheerfully dismissing the concept from her mind because it had not seemed remotely relevant to her at the time. After all, they had not been planning to start a family immediately and the prospect of babies and the problems of custody should their marriage run aground had seemed as remote as the Andes to her back then. They had been madly in love, at least she had been in love and, trusting and naive soul that she was, it had not occurred to her that some day in the not too distant future her blithe acceptance of that clause might come back to haunt her...
CHAPTER SIX
HE HAD TRIED to play nice, Jaul reflected grimly, but nice hadn’t panned out too well with Chrissie, who was suspicious of his every move and had ensured that they were now down to the brutal bare bones of legal agreements and custody. Possibly he wasn’t very good at playing nice, he acknowledged in exasperation, having much more experience of playing nasty. The King’s word was the last word to be heard in serious disputes in Marwan and there was always an aggrieved party, convinced of unjust treatment and favouritism. He had learned that, regardless of negotiation and compromise, someone would always be dissatisfied w
ith his decision.
Like a drowning woman forced to review the most important moments of her life, Chrissie was pale as death as she stared down at that clause in the pre-nuptial contract. Her heart was sinking down to the very soles of her feet. She could not see how she could possibly combat an agreement that she had voluntarily signed.
Jaul breathed in slow and deep, muscles rippling below the T-shirt, wide shoulders taut. ‘At some future date, should you remain convinced that you want a divorce—’
Her turquoise eyes flared back to life like the unholy blue hot streak flickering inside a flame. ‘You’d better believe that I won’t change my mind!’ she traded furiously.
‘Then you will be entitled to your own household in Marwan in which to raise the twins. I’m afraid that is the best I can offer you should you want your freedom back,’ Jaul imparted grittily, white teeth flashing bright against golden skin.
‘But...for the moment, a separate household for the three of us is out of the question?’ Chrissie prompted dangerously.
‘I’m afraid so. At least this way, however, you retain shared custody of our children,’ Jaul pointed out.
‘They’ve never been our children, they’ve always been mine!’ Chrissie vented painfully, biting back a flood of recrimination.
‘Only because I didn’t know I was a father,’ Jaul parried.
‘And what you refer to as “this way” means that you expect me to pretend that we still have a real marriage?’ she interpreted jaggedly as she stalked to the door and spun back again. ‘How could you do this to me after deserting me for two whole years? Don’t you have any moral decency?’
‘It is not that simple for me. In an effort to secure our children’s status and acceptance by my people, I’m prepared to pretend I’m part of a happy couple. That’s part of my duty of loyalty and care towards them and their needs,’ Jaul framed in a raw undertone. ‘They will take their place in the royal family as the prince and princess they are and that is my responsibility and yours.’
Yanking open the guest-room door, Chrissie was reckoning that she could have done without the parental slap on the wrist. He scarcely needed to remind her of the maternal obligations that had consumed her youthful freedom throughout the time they had lived apart. It was so unfair, she thought bitterly, that Jaul could have walked out on her, abandoning his responsibilities and then walk back into her life only when it suited him to demand that she observe a duty of care that he had royally ignored.
‘Will you agree to it?’ Jaul asked, striding after her impetuous exit to follow her down the corridors that led to the giant upper landing.
Adrenaline on a high, her steps faltered while common sense and survival instincts took over. The twins had become a weapon and if she wanted to keep her children she had no other option but to take up residence in Marwan.
On one level she recognised the position he was in, on another she hated him for making it her responsibility as well. It was one thing to own up to a two-year-old marriage and two young children and shock the Marwani population but it would be another thing entirely to stage that shock along with a headline-grabbing divorce in the UK while they fought a bitter custody battle over their children. Because, no matter how damning that agreement she had signed would prove to be when aired in a courtroom, Chrissie knew she would still fight for her children regardless. But such a fight would undoubtedly damage everyone involved.
Did she really want to land the stress of a custody battle on Cesare and Lizzie as well? Hadn’t she already caused them as much grief as a wayward teenager with her exam agonies, touchy pride, carefully kept secrets and unplanned pregnancy? Did they really deserve to have to deal with more on her behalf? Shouldn’t she be handling her own problems and standing on her own feet? Wasn’t that really what adulthood was all about?
‘Chrissie...?’ Jaul prompted, falling still. ‘I need an answer.’
‘I’ll do it because I don’t appear to have the choice of doing what I want,’ Chrissie shot back at him tightly. ‘But I won’t forgive you for it.’
Brilliant dark eyes veiled, his beautiful mouth compressing. ‘You’ve never forgiven me for anything I did wrong.’
Chrissie refused to believe that was true. She must have forgiven him at some stage for something. She was not a hard, unforgiving person, was she? Her first impressions of Jaul returned to haunt her and, along with it, her long-held refusal to consider the fact that she might have misjudged him. Very faint colour warmed her cheeks.
She recalled that she had never forgiven her mother for what the older woman had put her through and frowned. Francesca had died before her younger daughter reached the age of confrontation and the older woman had taken her guilty secrets to the grave with her. Chrissie swallowed hard, struggling to shake off the dirty, shamed feeling that always engulfed her when she thought of Francesca. She was older now, wiser and less judgemental, she reasoned tautly. Her mother had not been a strong person and she had been very much abused in some of her relationships with men. Her second husband, the very last man in her life, had been the worst of all, taking advantage of Francesca’s weakness and dependency on him to propel her into an unsavoury lifestyle. Some day she might tell Lizzie the truth about their mother, but certainly she could never ever imagine sharing that sordid story with Jaul.
‘I think this is an incredibly weird and ugly house,’ Chrissie remarked curtly on the way down the massive staircase, which reminded her of something out of an ancient Hammer Horror movie. It only lacked zombies sidling out of the mummy cases in the hall to totally freak her out.
‘Blame my grandmother. She furnished this place.’
‘The Englishwoman who walked out on your grandfather?’ That was the bare bones of what Chrissie knew about her British predecessor in the Marwani royal family. ‘Tell me about her.’
‘Why?’
‘Fellow feeling...aren’t I sort of following in her footsteps?’ Chrissie quipped, eager to talk about something, anything other than the agreement she had just given and what had occurred in the tumbled sheets upstairs. That extraordinary passion had left her aching in intimate places and even walking wasn’t quite comfortable. Jaul had been so...wild and forceful...and she had revelled in that display of primal passion, but now she was being forced to pay the piper and put her whole life back in Jaul’s hands. She should never have let herself down like that, she thought painfully. He was running rings round her now.
‘I hope not. She deserted her son,’ Jaul proffered censoriously. ‘She met my grandfather Tarif on a safari in Africa. She was a socialite from an eccentric but aristocratic English family...Lady Sophie Gregory. Tarif fell deeply in love with her but he was simply a walk on the wild side for her...a novelty. A couple of months of life in backward Marwan where there were no ex-pats for company was too much for my grandmother. She stayed only long enough to give birth to my father and walked out only weeks afterwards.’
Chrissie knew when she was listening to a biased story. ‘This is what your father told you?’
‘Yes. I met her once though when I was a teenager. I was in Paris on an officer training course and she was at a party I was invited to,’ Jaul told her grudgingly. ‘She came right up to me and said, “I understand you’re my grandson. Are you as stiff-necked and stubborn as your father?”’
‘So, your grandmother did try to see her child again,’ Chrissie worked out wryly from that greeting. ‘In other words she wasn’t quite as indifferent a mother as she was painted to you. Most probably your grandfather wouldn’t allow your grandmother to see her son again because she walked out on their marriage. Have you ever thought of that angle?’
Jaul hadn’t and his jawline clenched like granite because that particular family story had long been an incontestable legend set in stone and he couldn’t credit that Chrissie had already come up with a likelihood that had never once occurred to him. ‘There were grounds for his bitterness.’
‘Such as?’ Chrissie was receiving a twist
of satisfaction from needling Jaul even if it was only about old family history. Why? He was wrecking her life again. He owned her, just as he owned their son and daughter. There was no leeway for misunderstanding in that clause in the contract, no wriggle room for a screamingly naive girl who had been so in love she hadn’t foreseen a future where she might have children and end up alone and abandoned. She knew she would never forgive herself for being that stupid and that short-sighted about so very important an issue as the right to keep and raise her own babies and live where she chose.
‘Lady Sophie’s desertion made Tarif a laughing stock. In those days saving face was everything for a ruler but there was nothing he could do to hide the fact that she had left him.’
‘And no doubt he never forgave her for that and kept her from her son as punishment while brainwashing that same child into a hatred and distrust of Western women,’ Chrissie filled in with spirit, her disgust palpable. ‘Don’t forget I met your father and I was left in no doubt that he saw a woman like me as a curse on his family name. Knowing how he felt, why on earth did you marry me? No, scratch that, don’t answer me. I know why you married me.’
Fine ebony brows pleating, Jaul was recalling their final argument in Oxford. She had wanted him to take her out to Marwan with him, had protested the secrecy he had insisted on and had implied that his attitude bore a closer resemblance to shame than secrecy. But that was untrue. He had known that without preparation and forewarning his father would react badly and he had flown home intending to break the news of his marriage in person. Sadly, he now knew that he should have made the announcement much sooner and had he done so he was convinced that everything that followed would have happened very differently.
‘You don’t know why I married you because you never have known what I was thinking,’ Jaul boxed back cool as ice water. ‘In reality, I was trying to protect you but, unhappily for both of us, I went about it the wrong way.’