involved even a fleeting thought.
Her love for him demanded more.
His lack of love for her demanded freedom.
CHAPTER ONE
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, unlike her mother, Angele would never tolerate it. Her surprising streak of stubbornness gave him hope for the years ahead. He did not want to tie his life to a doormat.
Regardless of how intriguing Zahir found this new side of Angele, his patience grew thinner by the minute as the wedding festivities marched forward. She took her stubbornness to a new, inexplicable level. She repeatedly declined to be in any of the formal wedding photos.
“Come, my little princess, I believe your point has been made.” King Malik of Jawhar patted Angele’s shoulder, his words showing he had put the same interpretation on her actions as Zahir had done. “Do not be the camel that tries to drink with its tail.”
Angele smiled at her honorary uncle, though the expression did not reach her too serious eyes, and shook her head. “The formal shots are for family, not friends.”
Stunned, and a little impressed, Zahir frowned. He had never heard her deny the king before.
“You are nearly family.” And would be soon enough, Zahir implied, knowing she was intelligent enough to get his meaning.
She simply shook her head again and turned as if to go.
He reached out to grab her arm and then yanked his hand back, realizing what he’d almost done. They were not formally betrothed and to touch her so familiarly in this setting would be highly improper. As future king of Zohra, Zahir never acted without propriety.
At least in a public setting.
His behind-the-scenes impropriety was over as well, and he still felt a fool for pining after what he could not have.
A life of love and happiness, as his brothers were building for themselves, was not to be for him.
King Malik laughed. “You begin to see the child as a woman with her own will, do you not?”
Zahir could not deny it. He had never seen Angele dressed with such an evident intent to entice, either. It had worked. He found her quite alluring. Used to barely noticing her at all, he’d been shocked by the low burn of arousal he’d felt when she had arrived. With new highlights shining in her dark brown hair, she wore it swept up to show off the slender column of her neck and the creamy, delicate slope of her shoulders.
The soft peach color of her couture dress was the only thing demure about it. Clinging to her slight curves, it fell inches short of her knees. While she did not share her mother’s supermodel stature, in the dress and matching heels that added at least four inches to her height, Angele’s legs looked every bit as long as the Brazilian beauty’s today. And twice as sexy.
Add to that the fact that her stubborn refusal to participate in the wedding as a member-to-be of the family had intrigued him from her first refusal three months ago, and it was a lethal combination to his recently restrained libido.
Reminding him that his future wife had not been raised in the secluded environment inhabited by the women in the royal palace of Jawhar, she had continued to stand by her first denial. He’d been more than a little stunned to realize he liked it.
While his marriage would not be the love-match his brother had made, it would not be as much of a dry connection of two overly similar lives as he had always anticipated, either.
Frankly love could go hang, as far as he was concerned. This newfound passion and interest was all that he required, or wanted.
“Wasn’t the wedding beautiful?”
A bittersweet smile curving her lips, Angela looked up at her mother. “It was, but the love between Amir and Grace made it even more so.”
“It reminds me of your father and my wedding.” Lou-Belia sighed with a fond reminiscence that Angele found difficult to understand. “We were so much in love.”
“I do not think Amir is like my father.”
Lou-Belia frowned. “You know Cemal has settled down.”
Angele did know. She still floundered in her feelings for a man who spent the better part of two decades flaunting
