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‘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 think 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.
Jaul was frozen in the doorway, only marginally conscious of his large staff now grouped in the hall to study him in consternation, desperate to know what had caused such a fracas in his deeply traditional household.
And what Jaul did next would very much have stunned Chrissie.
‘Miss Whitaker is my wife...my Queen,’ he announced with quiet dignity in his own language, ignoring entirely the utter shock spreading across every face turned towards him.
* * *
Chrissie went back to her sister’s home and cried again, tears dripping down her face as Tarif looked up at her with his father’s eyes and smiled.
Lizzie hovered, understandably unsure of what to say. ‘It can’t have gone that badly,’ she insisted. ‘Did he insist there would have to be DNA tests and stuff like that to prove the twins are his?’
‘No, nothing like that. I shouted at him and threw things at him while he stood there like a stone statue,’ Chrissie recounted bitterly. ‘There was no satisfaction to be had out of it at all. I wanted to kill him.’
