as if he had just discovered she was infected with some contagious disease. Tamara spun round to see his aide on horseback, squinting through the sliver of sunlight from a distance.
‘Forgive me, Your Highness,’ he called, stilling at the point they must have come into view, ‘I missed you leaving and then…when I saw Amir I thought perhaps you were in trouble.’
‘No trouble, Jalaal, thank you.’ His voice was husky but level.
Jalaal nodded and turned without question.
Tamara frowned as Kaliq moved towards Amir. So he had not instructed his aide to leave them alone on purpose, and he certainly hadn’t dismissed him on her account now. No, he fully intended to leave. Tamara drew in a ragged breath. Was Jalaal discovering that the crown prince had human desires like anyone else so terrible? Was desiring her so regrettable full stop?
‘Don’t tell me, Kaliq, it is right that we should be getting back.’ Her voice was sarcastic. ‘After all, tomorrow I’ll be gone.’
Kaliq looked at her blankly. Down at the sand beneath his feet. Then out at the round sun shimmering on the horizon.
Like a gem.
Then suddenly a look came over his face unlike any she had ever seen before. As if he had just been handed a key to a door without a keyhole, and he wasn’t entirely sure whether to leave it be or barge the door right down.
‘Well?’ she asked, her hands on her hips, looking at him and then at Amir.
And then he turned back to her quickly, as though her impatience had made up his mind.
‘Tamara, will you marry me?’
Tamara stared in disbelief at the doubtful expression on his face and half-laughed, wondering if she had missed the joke.
‘Marry you? Why? Because your aide just caught us alone together?’
Kaliq’s mouth hardened. ‘No.’
‘Then why?’ she asked softly, her voice barely more than a whisper.
‘You wish me to list the reasons why? Is it not obvious?’ He flexed his hand, then closed it again. ‘Because you are exceptionally beautiful, and a virgin. Because you are the daughter of the ambassador, and you have shown great respect for my country in your own right. And because—as you know—I must marry in order to inherit the kingdom.’ He paused as if to be sure there was no reason he had omitted and, to her consternation, she realised it was the first time in the last ten minutes she had seen him look utterly certain—there was not. ‘Is that clear enough?’
‘Perfectly.’ Tamara felt as if her heart were a hologram and with the rising of the sun the light had made it cease to exist completely. For in one succinct sentence he had just listed all the reasons why she might be a suitable future queen, but none of the reasons why he might want her to become his wife.
Suddenly she knew that they had been worlds apart all along.
The truth was that this week had been a test of her suitability. It had nothing to do with encouraging her to pursue her dreams or to defy expectations—it had been a double bluff. He had cared about nothing but his precious duty all along.
And though she had fallen for him, though to say no would be to lose the one thing that had ever made her feel truly alive, to say yes would be to sacrifice the life she had only just begun to live. For how could she spend the rest of it trapped in a marriage to a man who didn’t love her? That could only ever end the way her parents’ marriage had—with a painful and bitter divorce splashed across the newspapers.
‘Well?’ he said, mocking her earlier impatience. ‘What do you say to wearing the sapphires, Tamara?’
Tamara took a deep breath. ‘I can’t marry you Kaliq.’
Kaliq straightened indignantly as the sun rose high above their heads, the mystical glow of half light beginning to fade away.
‘May I ask why?’
Is it not obvious? She wanted to retort in kind, but her pride forbade her. For how could she reply that it was because he did not love her, when to admit she loved him—when she had only known him for one week—was crazy. As ridiculous as saying yes to a man who had only proposed because she was the virgin daughter of an ambassador, and because he needed a wife in order to inherit his kingdom. And how better to escape the real reason than to answer as if she had simply been offered the job of queen, rather than asked the one question in the world that ought to have been motivated by love but which held none at all?
‘Because I wish to be free,’ she whispered brokenly, ‘to live my life out of the spotlight yours attracts.’
Kaliq looked up from the final paragraph of the international trading treaty as the plane began its descent to his homeland, and his heart settled. It had consumed almost all his waking hours for the past few weeks and, finally, it was finished. He felt all the pleasure of a plan just as he had calculated—well reasoned and considered after days of deliberation—the way his plans always were.
Always, except once. His eyes roamed to Tamara, willing himself to feel the same sense of satisfaction as she sat there compliantly in exactly the way he had intended, but his mind only filled with scorn for his younger self. That idea then had come impetuously, irrationally, awkwardly. Had presented itself as an ill-timed but doable solution to satiate both his lust and fulfil his duty.
But then there had been nothing rational about his thoughts from that very first day he had met her, when he had known, unequivocally and inconveniently, that she was both innocent and the most desirable woman he had ever encountered. Less rational still had been that night when it had occurred to him that not only was she leaving, but that it was inevitable that on her travels she would meet some other man who would have no qualms about robbing her of her virtue. He’d wanted her, with an ache unlike any he had ever known. Yet to have taken her would have made him no better than some other man himself and, as a proud descendent of the A’zam tribe who had first civilised Qwasir, that had been out of the question.
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