tears of mortification.
He’d shaken his head and patted her arm. “Shh, ya habibti, our time is not yet.”
As he’d escorted her back to the party, she had consoled herself with the implied promise and the fact he had called her his darling. Twice.
A harsh laugh barked out of her as the photo of him kissing that other woman blurred before her eyes. Angele was twenty-three and still waiting for him to realize she was no longer a child.
Without this photographic evidence, would she have ever realized that day was never likely to come?
Blinking away the moisture in her eyes, she focused on the pictures again, sliding one to the side and to reveal another beneath it until they were spread across her desk in undeniable evidence. This was not the first time she’d gone through the photos, but now she refused to look away, or stack them again neatly in an attempt to hide from what they represented.
Zahir did not think this woman was a child. No, Elsa Bosch was everything a man was looking for in a lover. Extravagantly beautiful, voluptuous, experienced.
Angele winced at her own assessment, knowing she was none of those things.
She was not sure Zahir’s honor was besmirched by his liaison with the German actress. Not yet. After all, their betrothal had never been formally announced and he’d treated Angele like a distant cousin, not a lover. Despite her clumsy attempt at eighteen to rectify the matter.
She’d allowed her own love and the future she’d believed they were meant to share to become the foundation for fantasies that shared no touch with reality. She’d believed that, one day, he would realize she was not the young girl the marriage contract had been negotiated around.
She’d been waiting ten years. Ten years. A decade in which she’d never dated, not even attending her high-school prom because she’d considered herself taken. She’d had male friends in college, but none that she’d allowed to see her as anything but a study-buddy.
She’d just assumed that like her, Zahir had filled his life with family, responsibilities and friends … not a particular woman friend.
Unlike her own father, Zahir had been discreet in his relationship with Elsa Bosch. But the fact was: he’d had one.
These pictures could not be denied. So much like that time when she was at university, shouldn’t her pain be every bit as profound?
But she felt hollow now. Empty. Devoid of the emotions that she’d nurtured in her heart toward him for so long.
Unlike that last time, this sender was demanding money in exchange for silence. If Angele did not pay, the note accompanying the pictures promised every American and European tabloid would get the opportunity to buy a set of photos along with a very embarrassing tell-all story.
The fact Zahir was having an ongoing affair with an actress who had starred in a skin flick was scandalous enough to cause considerable upset in the royal families of both Jawhar and Zohra. Angele shuddered when she considered their response to a full-on exposé. The moment she’d gotten the pictures, she’d started researching the German actress.
While the woman spent less time in the spotlight than someone might expect, she was in no way a suitable companion for the heir to a kingdom.
However, Elsa was clearly his companion of choice.
These photos showed a great deal of skin, but even more passion. And happiness. Zahir’s happiness. Angele had never seen him smile like he did in some of these shots. Even when he wasn’t smiling, he had an air of relaxation he did not have around her.
Love might keep a woman married to a philanderer, but it might give another woman, a different type of woman, the courage to set the man she loved free.
Looking at those pictures, Angele knew deep in her heart that she could not allow Zahir to be held to a contract which had been brokered by men who had never given love between the two people involved even a fleeting thought.
Her love for him demanded more.
His lack of love for her demanded freedom.
HEART heavy with guilt at his envy, Zahir listened to his youngest brother speak his wedding vows.
Amir’s voice came close to breaking as he promised, not just simple fidelity, but also love to his bride. Grace’s eyes glistened, but her smile grew as she gazed at her groom with rapt fascination. Her own voice trembled as she returned the promise of love.
Love.
Both his brothers had found it with women not altogether suitable. But as neither were heir to the throne, their choices were hardly world-shattering. It was not the same for him.
His choice of bride had been set by an agreement between Zohra and Jawhar a decade past. His gaze skimmed the guests nearest the bridal party, gliding past his beaming father, king of their small Middle Eastern country, and his teary-eyed mother, to the woman he would one day wed. Though they shared no blood relation, Angele bin Cemal was treated as a favored niece by his uncle, the King of Jawhar.
Their eyes met, but she broke the gaze immediately, firmly fixing her gaze on the couple saying their vows.
He felt the dismissal, but was not surprised by it. Not after the past months preparing for the royal wedding.
Shocking everyone, the woman both royal families acknowledged would one day be his wife had refused to be a member of the bridal party or to participate in any meaningful way in the wedding. Citing her lack of close relationship to either the bride or the groom as her excuse, Angele had stood firm against every attempt by his mother and even Grace to include her.
Zahir had taken her uncustomary intransigence for what it was: a demand that he formalize an engagement between the two of them. Clearly she was done waiting patiently for her own nuptials. And, after the events of the past month, he realized the time had come to do his duty.
Besides, her father had kept his part of the bargain; he’d long since cleaned up his behavior so that he no longer courted tabloid attention.
After Zahir’s mother had told him how devastated Angele was by her father’s string of infidelities and the fact she had not spoken to the man in more than a year, Zahir had decided the time had come to do something about it. He wasn’t close to his future bride, but Cemal would one day be a member of his family and Zahir wasn’t about to stand by while the older man embarrassed them with his lack of discretion.
So, Zahir had laid down the law to Cemal. He’d told the older man that he would not marry a woman whose father’s tabloid fame rivaled that of a European rock star.
Cemal had believed him. He’d patched things up with his wife and had not been featured in a scandal rag for almost five years, proving he took his daughter’s future more seriously than his own marriage vows. Zahir kept the grimace such thoughts brought from his face.
He would never be that man—loveless marriage, or not.
He suspected that,
