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‘Nor can I,’ she whispered, beginning to understand why he had brought her to the harem. He had found out the truth and immediately acted with the open-minded candour she had always loved him for. When Jaul was in the wrong he never tried to cover it up or excuse himself.
‘I’ve phoned Sophie’s daughter, Rose, and apologised through her for taking so long to make an approach to my grandmother.’
‘You phoned Rose...already?’ Chrissie exclaimed.
‘There were concubines here well into the last century. My grandmother wasn’t lying,’ Jaul confirmed with a sardonic twist of his lips. ‘But I only learned the truth this afternoon from Yusuf. He knows all the family secrets and learning about how cruelly my grandmother was treated was only the first of several shocks I received after I questioned him.’
A frown dividing her brows, Chrissie made an instinctive move forward and rested her hand soothingly on his forearm, feeling the muscles that were pulled whipcord tight with fierce tension. ‘I’m sorry, Jaul.’
As if he found her touch unbearable, Jaul shifted back a defensive step. ‘For what are you sorry? That I was too much of a fool to appreciate that my father would say or do anything to wreck my marriage?’ he framed with unleashed bitterness. ‘Chrissie, I would’ve trusted him with my life! He was a difficult man and very controlling but in many of the ways that mattered he was a good father.’
Discomfited by his rejection of her sympathy, Chrissie stiffened. ‘And you loved him, of course you did. I loved my mother when I was a child even though I had a pretty miserable childhood. Parents don’t have to be perfect to be loved. But I still don’t understand why your father stayed so dead set against his own mother and me when he knew your grandfather was the one at fault.’
‘My father chose the easy way out. He was never going to admit the embarrassing truth. If he laid the blame of cultural differences at his mother’s door, he could continue to idolise his father and believe that he was right to protect me from all Western influences.’ Jaul’s brilliant dark eyes veiled. ‘Apparently he was afraid that I may have inherited Tarif’s fatal weakness for women. I was finally able to understand why I had to rebel against him to gain the right to study in the UK.’
Chrissie was listening closely. ‘You had to...rebel? You never told me that before.’
‘I was ashamed of it. I was raised to believe that a decent son always respects a parent’s greater maturity and wisdom,’ Jaul admitted grudgingly. ‘After the experience of a military boarding school followed by army life, I longed for the freedom to make my own choices.’
‘Of course you did,’ she whispered feelingly, newly aware of what a domineering old tyrant his late father had been. ‘And I respect you more for having taken a stand and it’s hardly surprising that you went a little wild when you first started university. I never appreciated how restricted your life had been before you came to the UK.’
Jaul studied her lovely face fixedly, the turquoise eyes soft with compassion. He was shaken that she was still trying to comfort him when he didn’t deserve comfort because he had let her down worst of all. ‘But that period of going wild almost cost me you,’ he pointed out. ‘It gave you the wrong impression.’
Tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back in desperation as she sat down on the flat tiled edge of a fountain. ‘There was no way I was going to resist you for ever...the attraction was too strong.’
‘I have never wanted any woman as much as I wanted you,’ Jaul admitted in a raw undertone and he bent over the tray stationed on a table by a pillar to fill a glass and extend it to her. ‘I have never loved any woman but you...’
At that statement, her hand shook a little as she accepted the glass, hastily sipping the cool sweetness of fruit juice. He had never loved anyone else, she was thinking, that surely had to be a point in her favour.
His lean, darkly handsome features were grim and taut with tension. In a restive, uncertain gesture he raked long, elegant fingers through his luxuriant hair, tousling it. ‘I loved you yet I let you down. You were alone and pregnant and I wasn’t with you. I accepted my father’s lies.’
