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‘Unhappily that is not the case.’ Bandar sighed. ‘To be free of the marriage you require a divorce under UK law and Marwani law.’
Jaul stalked over to the window beyond which Zaliha could still be seen entertaining her niece and nephew, but he was no longer remotely conscious of that view. ‘I had no suspicion of this. I should have been informed of this situation months ago—’
‘As I mentioned, Yusuf was my superior and he refused to allow me to raise the subject—’
‘It is three months since my father passed away,’ Jaul reminded him stiffly.
‘I had to ensure my facts were correct before I could raise this matter with you. I have now discovered that in spite of your separation your wife has not sought a divorce either—’
Jaul froze, his lean, darkly handsome features clenching hard. ‘Please do not refer to her as my wife,’ he murmured flatly.
‘Should I refer to the lady concerned as your queen?’ Bandar pressed with even less tact. ‘Because that is what Chrissie Whitaker is, whether she knows it or not. The wife of the King of Marwan is always granted the status of Queen.’
Jaul snatched in a ragged breath of restraint, lean brown hands closing slowly into fists of innate aggression. He had made one serious mistake in his life and it had come back to haunt him in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. He had married a gold-digger who had deserted him the first chance she got in return for cold, hard cash.
‘Naturally I respect the fact that your father did not approve of the young woman but perhaps now—’
‘No, my father was correct in his assessment of her character. She was unsuitable to be either my wife or my queen,’ Jaul acknowledged grittily, a faint flare of colour accentuating the line of his spectacular high cheekbones as he forced out the lowering admission that stung his pride. ‘I was a rebellious son, Bandar...but I learnt my lesson.’
‘The lessons of youth are often hard,’ Bandar commented quietly, relieved that the current king was unlike his late parent, who had raged and taken umbrage at anyone who told him anything he did not want to hear.
Jaul was barely listening. In fact he was being bombarded by unwelcome memories that had escaped from the burial ground at the back of his mind where he kept such unsettling reminders firmly repressed. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Chrissie walk away from him, her glorious silver-blonde hair blowing back in the breeze, her long, shapely legs fluid and graceful as a gazelle’s.
But she had always been walking away from him, he recalled with cool cynicism. Right from the start, Chrissie had played a cool, clever, long-term game of seduction. Hot-blooded as he was and never before refused by a woman as he had been, she had challenged his ego with her much-vaunted indifference. It had taken a two-year-plus campaign for him to win her and she had only truly become his when he had surrendered and given her a wedding ring. Unsurprisingly during that long period of celibacy and frustration, Chrissie Whitaker had become a sexual obsession whose allure Jaul had not been able to withstand.
The payback for his weakness had not been long in coming. They had had a flaming row when he’d left Oxford to fly back to Marwan without her and, extraordinarily, he had never seen her again after that day. At that point and perhaps most fortunately for him, fate had intervened to cut him free of his fixation with her. Following a serious accident, Jaul had surfaced in a hospital bed to find his father seated like a sentry beside him, his aged features heavy with grief and apprehension.
Before he had broken the bad news, King Lut had reached for his son’s hand in a clumsy gesture of comfort for the first time in his life. Chrissie, Lut had then confided heavily, would not be coming to visit Jaul during his recovery. His marriage, Lut had declared, was illegal and Chrissie had accepted a financial pay-off as the price of forgetting that Jaul had ever figured in her life. King Lut had purchased her silence and discretion with a large sum of money that had evidently compensated her for her supposed loss of a husband while providing her with support for the future.
For a split second, Jaul recalled one of the most insane fantasies that had gripped him while he lay helpless in that hospital bed. Aware of his diplomatic immunity within the UK, he had actually dreamt about kidnapping Chrissie. Now in the present he shook his proud dark head slowly, utterly astonished at the tricks his mind had played on him while he had struggled to come to terms with the daunting fact that, not only was his wife not his wife, but also that given generous enough financial compensation she had no longer wanted to be his wife. Chrissie had been quite happy to ditch her Arab prince once she’d had the means to be rich without him. Only angry, bitter and vengeful thoughts had driven Jaul while he’d fought his injuries to get back on his feet.
