Zarif's Convenient Queen

by Lynne Graham

  ‘No. I wanted a woman, not a child, which is why I waited. I didn’t want to take advantage of your inexperience. I didn’t want hero worship. I didn’t want to turn your head with my money. I just wanted you,’ Zarif breathed emotively. ‘But what I didn’t appreciate then, because I had never felt that way before, was that I was not simply attracted you, I was in love with you.’

  ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me that now three years too late!’ Ella suddenly framed in anguished reproach. ‘If you loved me when you proposed and I turned you down it will break my heart because I loved you too.’

  ‘But it was my fault. I screwed up back then. And even after demanding this second chance with you I screwed up again so badly that I honestly didn’t know how to convince you of the duration and strength of my feelings for you without showing you that embarrassing album of stolen photos,’ Zarif told her in a hoarse undertone. ‘I felt such guilt that I was unable to love Azel. How could I admit that within two years of her death I took one look at a seventeen-year-old girl and fell in love with her?’

  ‘You loved me and you lied about it, you idiot!’ the woman of Zarif’s dreams hurled at him in a tone of tragedy.

  ‘Yes, habibti...when it comes to the love stuff, I’m pretty useless,’ Zarif was willing to admit because it gave him the chance to sweep her up into his arms and hold her so close that she could barely breathe. ‘But I do love you. I love you so much that I don’t think I could live without you now.’

  ‘But you said—’ Ella began.

  ‘No, don’t remind me. We both said lots of things that day—like you telling me that women in Vashir are treated like second-class citizens.’

  Ella reddened. ‘It was the driving-ban thing. I didn’t know what it was really like until I lived here. I didn’t mean to insult you. I was just trying to think up excuses. I couldn’t tell you the truth and you seemed to feel nothing at all for me—you were so cold, so emotional.’

  ‘I was very upset. I was genuinely expecting you to say yes. That was arrogant of me. But then I didn’t know how I really felt about you until you told me about the baby and suddenly I realised that I was glad of any excuse to keep you.’

  ‘An excuse?’ she gasped.

  ‘And then I asked myself why I needed an excuse to do what I wanted to do, which was keep you for ever,’ Zarif extended abstractedly, studying her lovely face with warm dark golden eyes of appreciation. ‘And that’s what I intend to do if you’ll let me...keep you for ever.’

  ‘I can’t believe that you’ve loved me all this time,’ Ella admitted apologetically.

  ‘I will teach you to believe it, habibti,’ Zarif swore as he carried her up the narrow staircase and across a wide landing into a shaded bedroom. ‘But first, since there should be no more secrets between us, there are some other things I must talk about.’

  He loved her? Could she believe that? She could certainly understand his guilt over his inability to love the first wife who had patently loved him. She could understand why he had been unable to admit that and why it would have been much easier for him to credit that his reaction to Ella was simple lust. ‘Am I the only person you’ve ever been in love with?’

  ‘Yes, habibti.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ she pronounced, trying to take a sensible attitude as he set her down on a bed made up with snowy white linen. ‘Although you’re the only person I’ve ever been in love with as well.’

  ‘As my grandmother would have said were she here now, we’re a match made in heaven, habibti,’ Zarif declared with tender amusement. ‘You came back into my life to save me from a lifetime of regret, and loneliness.’

  ‘No,’ Ella corrected. ‘I came back into your life to ask you for a favour—’

  ‘And I was a total bastard,’ Zarif said softly, carrying her hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to her palm in mute apology for that meeting at the hotel. ‘I was very bitter when you turned me down three years ago. I thought you had deliberately lured me into proposing just for the ego boost of blowing me off.’

  Ella was shaken. ‘But I wouldn’t have done that to anyone!’

  ‘I was bitter,’ Zarif repeated doggedly. ‘Angry, desperately unhappy. I wanted you so much, believed you were about to become my wife and then, suddenly, I couldn’t have you.’

  ‘You’d have got me with bells on if you’d told me you loved me then. Of course you didn’t appreciate that what you were feeling was love or you wouldn’t have wittered on about Azel,’ she worked out for herself, her lovely face reflective. ‘But maybe on some level after your first marriage you just weren’t ready to make such a major commitment to me and maybe I was still too immature.’

  ‘I’m trying to make excuses for the way I behaved after you turned me down,’ Zarif confessed grittily. ‘I went off the rails for a while...sex, alcohol.’

  Ella quirked a fair brow. ‘Loose women?’

  As she studied Zarif he flinched and reddened with embarrassment. ‘All blonde, all blue-eyed. I tried to fantasise every one of them into being you,’ he groaned. ‘My brothers thought it was good for me to live like that for a while and that it would have been foolish of me to get married again so soon and tie myself down.’

  ‘But what did you think?’ Ella pressed, pained by what he was telling her, although it really wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected when she had seen photos of him in clubs and at parties with glamorous women.

  ‘I would have exchanged all of the partying for one day married to you. It was sleazy and I’m ashamed of it but for a long time afterwards I blamed you for having set me off on that path by...hurting me.’ He found it so difficult to get that confession of vulnerability past his lips that he almost choked on that word.

  Ella hated to think that she had hurt him but then he had hurt her as well and that was what happened when two people didn’t understand each other or their feelings. Slowly she laced her small fingers with his long tense ones, recognising what it had cost his pride to speak as freely as he had done about both the duration of his love and his mistakes, and loving him all the more for that sacrifice. ‘We’re all good at blaming others for our mistakes, and at least I know you’ve satisfied any curiosity you had about that kind of lifestyle. As for the apartment in Dubai—’

  Zarif tensed. ‘I’ll sell it. I could never take you there.’

  ‘So, we draw a line under it and put it all behind us, no more recriminations, no more shame or regrets. Stop beating yourself up about your blunders. It’s the past,’ she emphasised with quiet assurance. ‘We’ll make a wonderful future together for our child.’

  ‘A future in which you occasionally throw yourself at me again?’ Zarif whispered wickedly.

  Ella pushed him flat on the bed. ‘For the last time, I did not throw myself at you!’

  ‘I loved every second of it,’ her husband admitted shamelessly, shooting her an irreverent grin that lit up his lean, darkly devastating features and made her heart leap inside her chest.

  ‘When’s your birthday?’ she asked him.

  ‘That’s months away!’ Zarif groaned as he drew her down and extracted a very long and passionate kiss from her lush mouth.

  Supporting herself on one hand, Ella traced teasing fingers along the line of a long, powerful thigh and watched him jerk taut. ‘I’m not sure I could wait that long either. I love you so much, Zarif, but from now on you have to tell me that you love me at least once every day.’

  He sat up and peeled off his robe and the shirt beneath in one potent and impatient movement, revealing his golden muscular torso. ‘I love you, habibti.’

  Ella felt incredibly powerful when he looked at her with his heart in his beautiful eyes. ‘I love you too.’

  * * *

  Ella twisted and turned to get a good view of her outfit. Brought as a gift from her mother-in-law, Mariyah, the s
leek sapphire-blue evening gown oozed Italian chic.

  ‘It looks amazing,’ Cathy told her cheerfully.

  Ella turned to smile at her childhood friend. ‘Fine feathers make fine birds.’

  ‘No, it’s the jaw-dropping sapphire jewels, not the dress, that knocks the eyes out first,’ Soraya teased. ‘But even when you’re in jeans, you look great, Ella. You’ve kept your figure so well.’

  But the baby weight had been an uphill challenge to shed, Ella reflected wryly. She had managed it twice, however, and now, and quite unexpectedly, she was going to have to do it again, but that was still a secret. ‘There’s still lumps and bumps in places there didn’t used to be,’ she lamented.

  Five years of marriage and two children, Ella mused in wonder, because the time had flown and seemed to speed up with every passing month. Halim had only passed away eighteen months ago and Zarif still missed the older man a great deal. His mother, Mariyah, had gradually become a more frequent visitor, who took great pleasure in her grandchildren.

  Given the opportunity, she had talked frankly to Zarif about why she had handed him over so completely to his grandparents. Mariyah had known that she had no father figure to offer her son and had deemed her own father preferable to the risks of Gaetano Ravelli’s potential influence. She had called herself selfish for wanting to pursue a career, which she could never have had in those days had she returned to Vashir, but she had believed it would be even more selfish to deprive Zarif of his heritage and very probably the chance to become King. Mother and son had made their peace and, although they might never be especially close, they were becoming friends and Zarif valued the connection.

  Ella’s parents were frequent visitors in common with Zarif’s brothers. Ella and Zarif had seen Jason occasionally when they visited her home but contact had been minimal. Jason had narrowly escaped a jail sentence two years earlier and had been put on probation when he became marginally involved with a pyramid selling scheme that broke the law. Since then Jason had been working in a sales role for a national company and Ella suspected that Zarif had somehow fixed that job for her brother behind the scenes, either because he felt sorry for him or because he felt sorry for the worry and distress Jason caused their parents. In recent times, however, her brother had not been a cause for concern and Ella was starting to dare to hope that he had learned his lesson and was prepared to turn his life around.

  As for Ella, she was still head over heels happy in her marriage. When she and Zarif wanted alone time, they flew out to the Old Fort for a few days. Now it was their fifth anniversary and they were having a giant weekend party at the old palace attended by all their family and friends.

  Cathy was now a mother as well with a toddler and she ran the thriving bookshop with her husband, since Ella had surrendered her share of the business. Soraya had had twin girls the previous year and had barely paused in her hectic career schedule. Ella and Soraya had become close friends while working together on the opening of the royal museum. Although the exhibits closely followed the rise of the al-Rastani dynasty, the central focus had become the history and civilisation of Vashir, which Ella had come to love almost as much as she loved her husband. But then she didn’t think she could ever love anything or anybody as much as she loved Zarif and their children.

  Her ears pricked up as she heard a distant roar from the courtyard.

  ‘Your husband is home,’ Soraya remarked with a grin.

  Through the doors open onto the stone balcony beyond the window, Ella could hear Zarif laying down the law to their sons, Hatim and Murad. Hatim was a boisterous and daring little boy and his little brother, a scant eighteen months his junior, tended to follow him slavishly into mischief. ‘A little military-style discipline keeps the boys in order,’ she confided.

  She heard Zarif’s steps on the stairs and her face lit up as she instinctively looked towards the doorway.

  ‘It’s like Romeo and Juliet round here every day,’ Cathy muttered appreciatively as she caught that look.

  Zarif strode in and lowered the two little boys clinging to him like monkeys to the floor. Evidently the military discipline had not been too tough this time around. ‘They were teasing the guards again, playing hide and seek round them, which is very dangerous,’ their father said sternly. ‘But they have apologised and now they are going to their rooms.’

  ‘Oh, but...right, OK.’ Ella bit back what she had been going to say about how overexcited the boys were waiting for their band of cousins to arrive. She had learned the hard way that two very lively boys were a handful and a staff who adored the little princes and could not do enough to please them didn’t help.

  ‘Mum?’ Hatim said pleadingly, a miniature Zarif with flashing tawny eyes and a killer smile.

  ‘Do as your father says,’ Ella told him coolly, hardening herself, knowing that Hatim had to learn about self-control and safety, young though he was. If he wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps he had to learn about consequences.

  Murad simply burst into floods of inconsolable tears and she could see even Zarif tense against the urge to offer comfort because Murad, cheerful and loving, was that kind of child. But it was Hatim who bent down and took his little brother’s hand and patted his back and led him off and Ella was proud of that.

  ‘We’ll go downstairs and see how the dinner arrangements are progressing,’ Soraya suggested tactfully to Cathy and, with a polite curtsy to Zarif, the two women left the royal couple alone.

  ‘Thanks for not caving in. I could see Murad pushed you close to the edge,’ Zarif told his wife with a gleam of appreciation in his beautiful dark golden eyes as he closed the bedroom door. ‘They need half an hour to think about what they did and cool off and then they can come out. My brothers and their families have just landed. By the way, is it too late to tell you that you look amazing?’

  Ella smiled widely at him. ‘No.’

  ‘You look amazing but the dress has to come off,’ Zarif told her, hauling her close without the smallest warning and kissing her with passionate hunger.

  ‘Be careful with the zip. It’s a tight fit,’ Ella told him helpfully without a single word of protest. Yes, she would have to redo her make-up and get dressed again but one of the aspects she most loved about Zarif was the strength of his passion for her, his need for her.

  ‘I won’t have you to myself again until the early hours of the morning...if even then,’ Zarif lamented. ‘You and Belle and Betsy get talking and sit up half the night.’

  ‘You know you do the same with your brothers...that last holiday we had with Nik and Betsy, you came to bed the first night at dawn.’ Skimming off her lingerie with careless hands, Ella lay back naked on the bed but for the famous sapphires and watched her husband strip at even greater speed, enjoying every lithe bronzed and muscular inch of him that emerged from beneath his clothing. Five years hadn’t made him any less hot, she thought gratefully.

  ‘And you were in a temper and you got straight back out of bed and now I know what not to do,’ Zarif husked, his stunning eyes locked to her lush pale curves with hungry appreciation. ‘You’re so beautiful, habibti.’

  ‘But I’m going to get fat again,’ she countered, deciding that it was as good a time as any to break her news.

  ‘Fat?’ Zarif repeated blankly.

  ‘Cast your mind back to the shower at the Old Fort...no condoms,’ Ella reminded him ruefully. ‘We thought we’d take the risk—’

  ‘We’re pregnant again?’ Zarif exclaimed with a huge grin of satisfaction. ‘I love it when you’re pregnant! That’s not fat, that’s lush, curvy, sexy,’ he asserted with rich vocal approval.

  Zarif came down on the bed with an even greater hunger for the woman who had transformed his life. He studied her with immense pride and tenderness. ‘Maybe this super fertility is a Ravelli thing and we have my father to thank for that one gift.’


  ‘And the “absolutely insatiable for sex” gift? Do we thank him for that too?’ Ella asked with a comic roll of her eyes, because she loved the fact that he still couldn’t keep his hands off her.

  ‘No, only you do that to me,’ Zarif told her, lowering his lithe, aroused length down over her prone body and lowering his head to lick at a perky rosy nipple. ‘I could eat you alive at any time of day or night—’

  ‘And frequently do.’

  ‘Can’t help it...I love you so much, habibti,’ he murmured with raw sincerity.

  And she ran her hands through his luxuriant black hair, framed his spectacular movie-star cheekbones and told him that she loved him too. They were both fully dressed and respectable by the time their guests arrived. Hatim and Murad were released from captivity to mingle with their equally excited cousins and the noise of their games and the rising tide of chatter from their parents rang round the ancient palace walls, giving it more life than it had enjoyed in centuries.

  * * * * *

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