other woman. Of bedding his prospective bride’s maid.
Clearing his thoughts with a brutal shake of his head, he brought his mind back into focus.
‘No. No, she’s not.’
How could he ever marry Jamalia when as his Queen she would surely bring her maid with her? And yet how could he now refuse to take Jamalia as his wife and risk insulting her father by rejecting his beautiful daughter?
He could see why Jamalia had been selected. She was stunning; there was no doubt about that. She would look magnificent as Queen. But he wanted more than a queen, someone who would give him an heir to his throne. He also wanted someone who would be a mother to his children. He hadn’t acknowledged how much that mattered to him until now. Until he had seen Jamalia preening in the mirror, her total sense of entitlement reminding him of nothing so much as his own mother.
Having been the child of a woman who loved her role as Queen so much that she had never had time for her son, he never wanted any child of his to go through that. He had seen his parents for perhaps an hour or less each week. Times when he had been brought from the nursery, spruced up and groomed, ready for the formal occasion that spending time with his mother had always been. Brought into her private sitting room, he’d had to bow the requisite three times before he could even approach her. And he had always known that the delicate touch of her hand on his head as she commented on how he had grown was one of the two gestures of ‘affection’ she would allow him.
The other was when his brief time was up and his nurse had prepared to escort him from the room. Then his mother would bend her head towards him, wreathing him in the overpowering scent of her perfume, and offer him her powdered cheek for his kiss, allowing him only the lightest, briefest, moment of contact for fear that the contact might smudge her immaculate make-up.
And then he was dismissed.
Small wonder then that the death of both his mother and father in the helicopter crash had barely touched him. How could he miss people who had created him but yet had been barely present in his life? The death of his old nurse, two years later when he was sixteen, had had a far more dramatic effect on his life.
That was not how he wanted the future to be for his children. Having seen how Clemmie was with her son and daughter, he wanted that sort of mothering for any child of his. And something about Jamalia’s self-absorption scraped over his skin like sandpaper.
‘No?’
Clearly Omar thought he had lost his mind—or at least come close to it. But the truth was that he felt more clearer-headed than he had in a long time.
‘But, sire—the treaty...’
He didn’t need reminding about the importance of the treaty, but now, remembering the time he had spent in Farouk’s home when he’d been twelve, he also knew why, unconsciously, he had been avoiding all contact with the man’s older daughter. Told that he was spending some time with an important family, his mind had caught on the word family, hoping that there might be someone who might become a friend. Or that the El Afarims could at least show him something of what a family life might mean.
Instead, it had been plain that the visit was more one of diplomacy and state. Even then, there’d been obviously plenty of scheming going on in the background, as the way that Jamalia had been pushed forward from the start had made plain. He had never taken to the elder El Afarim daughter but...
‘There is a younger sister, isn’t there?’
He had no idea where the memory had come from but suddenly it was clear in his mind. The image of a small, shy child who had peered out at him from behind her mother’s skirts, a soft giggle escaping her curved lips. A little girl so much shorter and more rounded than her older sister with the smile of an angel that had made him feel welcome in a moment. A girl who had cared for a bundle of orphaned kittens as if they were precious to her, feeding them from a dropper with infinite patience, and who, young as she had been, had had a magic touch with a crying baby cousin, soothing him to sleep in just moments. If he had to make an arranged marriage to provide heirs for the sake of his country’s future then the least he could do was to give those heirs a mother who would give them more than he had ever had.
‘If the treaty is to go ahead, then all it needs is that I marry one of the El Afarim girls?’
‘Indeed, but...’
‘But nothing.’ Nabil’s hand came up to cut off any further conversation with a slicing gesture. ‘Enough. If the treaty still stands, then that’s the way it will be. If I have to have an arranged wife, then I’ll take the younger sister. Let it be done.’
HOW COULD YOUR life turn inside out in the space of just a few days, not even a month? Aziza wondered to herself as she stood, waiting for the door of the banqueting hall to open, and for her walk—surely the longest walk on earth—to begin. She had barely been aware of each day that had passed, all of them filled with frantic organisation, fittings, meetings, all the arrangements that were needed to turn her into the Sheikh’s chosen bride.
The Sheikh’s chosen bride.
There they were, the four words that had taken her life as she’d known it and shattered it into a million tiny fragments that could never be made whole again. The words were so shocking, so unbelievable, that they made her grab hold of her father’s arm, holding on tightly for fear that her legs might give way beneath her.
The rich golden silk of her ceremonial robes, heavy with embroidery, weighed down on her, making her feel as if she was carrying a burden on her shoulders, and the layers of the veil she wore clung around her face until it was almost impossible to breathe, obscuring her sight so that she had to rely on her father’s support to move forward and walk straight to the right place.
‘Steady...’ her father urged as she swayed slightly, hesitating nervously.
If anything brought home the change in her situation, it was that. The fact that her father had spoken to soothe her, instead of the sharp reproach she would have expected in the past. She was someone new now, and Farouk’s attitude had had to change along with her life.
‘Remember, he chose you.’
He chose you. She still couldn’t believe that those words were true. That they had actually been said in the moment that her father had come to find her and Jamalia in the room where they had been waiting, all day it seemed, for some sort of announcement on Sheikh Nabil’s selection of a bride. They had known that something had happened when Farouk had arrived, his mouth seemingly clamped tight on the news he had to deliver and his dark eyes burning with a suppressed excitement until he’d been free to speak openly.
‘Sheikh Nabil has made his decision,’ he had said and immediately Aziza’s eyes had gone to her sister who had pushed herself out of her chair, hectic colour flooding her cheeks. The ‘diadem’ she had created out of her necklace still glittered on her forehead like an omen.
But it was towards his younger daughter that Farouk had turned, his own smile slightly uneven. He had not been able to suppress his delight that one of his daughters was to become the Sheikh’s bride, but was bemused that it was Aziza and not his ‘jewel’, her elder sister.
‘He chose you.’
Aziza
