‘It is not that simple for me. In an effort to secure our children’s status and acceptance by my people, I’m prepared to pretend I’m part of a happy couple. That’s part of my duty of loyalty and care towards them and their needs,’ Jaul framed in a raw undertone. ‘They will take their place in the royal family as the prince and princess they are and that is my responsibility and yours.’
Yanking open the guest-room door, Chrissie was reckoning that she could have done without the parental slap on the wrist. He scarcely needed to remind her of the maternal obligations that had consumed her youthful freedom throughout the time they had lived apart. It was so unfair, she thought bitterly, that Jaul could have walked out on her, abandoning his responsibilities and then walk back into her life only when it suited him to demand that she observe a duty of care that he had royally ignored.
‘Will you agree to it?’ Jaul asked, striding after her impetuous exit to follow her down the corridors that led to the giant upper landing.
Adrenaline on a high, her steps faltered while common sense and survival instincts took over. The twins had become a weapon and if she wanted to keep her children she had no other option but to take up residence in Marwan.
On one level she recognised the position he was in, on another she hated him for making it her responsibility as well. It was one thing to own up to a two-year-old marriage and two young children and shock the Marwani population but it would be another thing entirely to stage that shock along with a headline-grabbing divorce in the UK while they fought a bitter custody battle over their children. Because, no matter how damning that agreement she had signed would prove to be when aired in a courtroom, Chrissie knew she would still fight for her children regardless. But such a fight would undoubtedly damage everyone involved.
Did she really want to land the stress of a custody battle on Cesare and Lizzie as well? Hadn’t she already caused them as much grief as a wayward teenager with her exam agonies, touchy pride, carefully kept secrets and unplanned pregnancy? Did they really deserve to have to deal with more on her behalf? Shouldn’t she be handling her own problems and standing on her own feet? Wasn’t that really what adulthood was all about?
‘Chrissie...?’ Jaul prompted, falling still. ‘I need an answer.’
‘I’ll do it because I don’t appear to have the choice of doing what I want,’ Chrissie shot back at him tightly. ‘But I won’t forgive you for it.’
Brilliant dark eyes veiled, his beautiful mouth compressing. ‘You’ve never forgiven me for anything I did wrong.’
Chrissie refused to believe that was true. She must have forgiven him at some stage for something. She was not a hard, unforgiving person, was she? Her first impressions of Jaul returned to haunt her and, along with it, her long-held refusal to consider the fact that she might have misjudged him. Very faint colour warmed her cheeks.
She recalled that she had never forgiven her mother for what the older woman had put her through and frowned. Francesca had died before her younger daughter reached the age of confrontation and the older woman had taken her guilty secrets to the grave with her. Chrissie swallowed hard, struggling to shake off the dirty, shamed feeling that always engulfed her when she thought of Francesca. She was older now, wiser and less judgemental, she reasoned tautly. Her mother had not been a strong person and she had been very much abused in some of her relationships with men. Her second husband, the very last man in her life, had been the worst of all, taking advantage of Francesca’s weakness and dependency on him to propel her into an unsavoury lifestyle. Some day she might tell Lizzie the truth about their mother, but certainly she could never ever imagine sharing that sordid story with Jaul.
‘I think this is an incredibly weird and ugly house,’ Chrissie remarked curtly on the way down the massive staircase, which reminded her of something out of an ancient Hammer Horror movie. It only lacked zombies sidling out of the mummy cases in the hall to totally freak her out.
‘Blame my grandmother. She furnished this place.’
‘The Englishwoman who walked out on your grandfather?’ That was the bare bones of what Chrissie knew about her British predecessor in the Marwani royal family. ‘Tell me about her.’
‘Why?’
‘Fellow feeling...aren’t I sort of following in her footsteps?’ Chrissie quipped, eager to talk about something, anything other than the agreement she had just given and what had occurred in the tumbled sheets upstairs. That extraordinary passion had left her aching in intimate places and even walking wasn’t quite comfortable. Jaul had been so...wild and forceful...and she had revelled in that display of primal passion, but now she was being forced to pay the piper and put her whole life back in Jaul’s hands. She should never have let herself down like that, she thought painfully. He was running rings round her now.
‘I hope not. She deserted her son,’ Jaul proffered censoriously. ‘She met my grandfather Tarif on a safari in Africa. She was a socialite from an eccentric but aristocratic English family...Lady Sophie Gregory. Tarif fell deeply in love with her but he was simply a walk on the wild side for her...a novelty. A couple of months of life in backward Marwan where there were no ex-pats for company was too much for my grandmother. She stayed only long enough to give birth to my father and walked out only weeks afterwards.’
Chrissie knew when she was listening to a biased story. ‘This is what your father told you?’
‘Yes. I met her once though when I was a teenager. I was in Paris on an officer training course and she was at a party I was invited to,’ Jaul told her grudgingly. ‘She came right up to me and said, “I understand you’re my grandson. Are you as stiff-necked and stubborn as your father?”’
‘So, your grandmother did try to see her child again,’ Chrissie worked out wryly from that greeting. ‘In other words she wasn’t quite as indifferent a mother as she was painted to you. Most probably your grandfather wouldn’t allow your grandmother to see her son again because she walked out on their marriage. Have you ever thought of that angle?’
Jaul hadn’t and his jawline clenched like granite because that particular family story had long been an incontestable legend set in stone and he couldn’t credit that Chrissie had already come up with a likelihood that had never once occurred to him. ‘There were grounds for his bitterness.’
‘Such as?’ Chrissie was receiving a twist of satisfaction from needling Jaul even if it was only about old family history. Why? He was wrecking her life again. He owned her, just as he owned their son and daughter. There was no leeway for misunderstanding in that clause in the contract, no wriggle room for a screamingly naive girl who had been so in love she hadn’t foreseen a future where she might have children and end up alone and abandoned. She knew she would never forgive herself for being that stupid and that short-sighted about so very important an issue as the right to keep and raise her own babies and live where she chose.
‘Lady Sophie’s desertion made Tarif a laughing stock. In those days saving face was everything for a ruler but there was nothing he could do to hide the fact that she had left him.’
‘And no doubt he never forgave her for that and kept her from her son as punishment while brainwashing that same child into a hatred and distrust of Western women,’ Chrissie filled in with spirit, her disgust palpable. ‘Don’t forget I met your father and I was left in no doubt that he saw a woman like me as a curse on his family name. Knowing how he felt, why on earth did you marry me? No, scratch that, don’t answer me. I know why you married me.’
Fine
