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‘The dream wedding?’ he prompted blankly.
‘Because you didn’t want us to attract too much attention I wore a plain black dress at the embassy do,’ she reminded him. ‘This time around I’d like a proper wedding gown...and, oh, yes, I want my sister to come over for it.’
‘That could all be arranged. Western wedding gowns are very popular here.’
‘Seriously?’ Chrissie looked up at him with surprised turquoise eyes.
The sudden charismatic grin Chrissie had almost forgotten flashed across his lean dark features. ‘Seriously...but it will have to be a rush job. My advisers are hoping we can stage this the day after tomorrow—’
‘The day after tomorrow?’ she yelped in disbelief, pulling free of him to scramble out of bed naked. ‘I need to phone Lizzie and warn her!’
Pleasantly surprised at the ease with which she had given her agreement, Jaul rose at a more leisurely pace. He laughed as he listened to Chrissie chattering to her sister on the phone line in the next room and even paused for thirty seconds to appreciate the picture his wife made standing there stark naked, her slender, graceful figure gleaming porcelain pale and pink in the sunlit room. Concerned that one of the staff might enter without offering sufficient warning, he fetched a towelling robe from the bathroom and held it out while Chrissie dug her arms into it with a lingering smile in her eyes that held his attention like a magnet. He strode back into the bedroom and dug his mobile phone out of his jacket to call Yusuf.
But his father’s former aide was unavailable. Yusuf’s manservant informed Jaul that his employer was in the USA visiting his daughter and that it would be two weeks before he was home again. Jaul grimaced, knowing it would be inappropriate to try and tackle such a controversial subject with Yusuf over the phone. He had no choice but to await the older man’s return. And while he waited, more and more questions and inconsistencies would pile up in the back of his mind. Even worse, he acknowledged with sudden grim awareness, if Chrissie proved to be telling the truth without exaggeration on all counts, he would suddenly be the guilty party, who had virtually destroyed her life, and how could he ever live with that conclusion?
* * *
Chrissie put the phone down and breathed in deep, astonished to recognise that she had been gabbling to her sister like an overexcited teenager. As she asked herself what had come over her, she lodged by the window, which was bounded by a stone balcony and a glorious view of the trees flourishing in the garden below. Was she a total idiot? she was suddenly demanding of herself. She was still in love with Jaul and she wanted to give their marriage the best possible chance to thrive that she could...but.
And it was a very large ‘but’; she had to be realistic and stop behaving like a dizzy adolescent. She needed to view their situation as it was and not wrap it up in fancy trappings, for the surest way to a failed marriage would be setting out with too high expectations only to be rewarded with a slow, steady process of disenchantment.
Jaul wasn’t in love with her. Sexual chemistry wasn’t love even though the powerful attraction that had first drawn them together was still red hot. Other facts spoke too loud to be ignored, however, she reflected unhappily. Jaul had come to London to see her in the first place because he’d wanted a divorce and he had only changed his mind about that after he’d realised that he was a father.
He only wanted to stay married to Chrissie now because she was the mother of his children and Tarif was the heir to his throne. Love and affection had nothing to do with that decision. Jaul was prepared to behave as a husband and father, not only to meet the conservative expectations of his people, but also to provide the twins with a stable and respectable home background. It was a praiseworthy motivation but it did not mean that Jaul was happy about embracing Chrissie as his wife and queen or that he would willingly have selected her for that role now.
After all, what choice had Jaul had? His passionate temperament was uniquely misleading. He was a wildly passionate male but, at heart, he was ruled by cool intellect and practicality. The marriage he had chosen to put behind him and dismiss had come back to haunt him in the worst way and now he was trapped with a wife he couldn’t divorce without shocking and disappointing his people. Fate could well be forcing him to make the best of a bad situation. Her skin turned clammy while she pondered that humiliating theory but she knew that it would be stupid to ignore that wounding analysis of their marriage and even stupider to assume that sharing Jaul’s bed meant anything more to him than the casual and convenient slaking of sexual need. Sobered by those reflections, Chrissie tightened the sash on the oversized robe and went back into the bedroom, relieved to appreciate that there were two en suites attached to it. Just at that moment she needed her own space and peace in which to rebuild her poise. Home truths, she thought reluctantly, were necessary to keep her feet on the ground but, my goodness, they could hurt...
