colour drained from her face in seconds but she remained strong and resolute before him, indignation sparking off her like fireworks. She watched him suspiciously as he moved towards her.
‘I told you, Kazim—nobody knew who I really was, not even Annie.’ Her voice, though just above a whisper, was strong.
Did she really think that such assurances were enough? He needed to know more and intended to get answers. He wasn’t going to be put off. He had to know. He’d been more than generous. Something wasn’t right. Why had she felt the need to work in such a place and live in the terrible excuse for a flat he’d seen?
‘But why there?’ He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, wondering again about that rumour from her time at the English boarding school. Her display on their wedding night had already proved that attending it had corrupted her far more than anyone else knew.
‘When you’re not prepared to use your own identity, it’s difficult to get a job, Kazim. I took whatever I could and am grateful to the women in the hostel for telling me about the job.’ She raised her brows in challenge, standing tall and resolute before him as she waited for her words to sink in.
Then, with a haughty flash of her smile, she walked away from him. He watched the sexy swaying of her hips as she made her way to the bedroom, mesmerised and knocked completely off course. It was almost as if she was taunting him with her body—again. Just as she had on their wedding night, drawing his focus away from what was important with the lure of her body.
One word leapt to life in his mind. Hostel. Shock mingled with hot need, making any kind of reply impossible. What did she mean—hostel? He shook his head, trying to free himself of the thumping desire that rushed through him just from watching her—desire that was distracting his usual rational thoughts.
‘What hostel, Amber?’ Quickly he refocused his attention, not prepared to let the moment slip by. She was hiding things from him, tormenting him, and he didn’t like it one bit. ‘I think you’d better tell me exactly what you’ve done since you left Barazbin—and with whom.’ The doubts he’d had about her on their wedding night surfaced again.
She sighed, but her rigid body told him she was resigned to having this discussion. ‘For a while I lived in a hostel in Paris. I didn’t have help from anyone and I had nowhere to live so, princess or not, it’s what I had to do.’ She’d walked back from the bedroom to stand in front of him once more, apparently abandoning the idea of closing the door on him. ‘Some of the girls there told me I’d easily get work at the club. I had no idea what sort of place it was.’
‘But you still took the job.’ He stated the obvious as he looked down into her face.
‘I needed the money. Besides, I met Annie there, who offered me a place to live.’ Her brown eyes looked beseechingly into his and he swallowed down hard on the guilt that threatened to drown him.
‘So, Annie offered you a place to live?’ He probed further, needing to know all of it. He couldn’t afford to read her story one morning, splashed all over the front of a newspaper. Not now they were about to return to Barazbin.
‘She was struggling, looking after Claude and working, we got on well, so it made sense. Neither of us had anyone; her parents had gone back to England, refusing to have any more to do with her.’ She looked up at him innocently, her explanation as plausible as the sunrise in the morning.
Guilt tore through him. He’d done this to her. If he hadn’t been so wrapped up in his problems he’d have realised sending her away wouldn’t help either of them. He’d been so damned determined not to be like his father. He raked his fingers through his hair, knowing he’d been worse—much worse—than that bully.
He took Amber’s hand in his and looked down at her. ‘I should never have sent you away. I had a duty to you as a husband and I failed.’
‘And now you are forcing me to go back, blackmailing me, using an innocent child.’ Accusation hung in her every word.
‘Not blackmailing, Amber, striking a deal. One which will see us both getting what we want. I thought we’d settled that argument.’
He watched as her teeth sank into her lower lip, indecision sweeping over her face. She looked the picture of innocence and he began to wonder if the rumours he’d heard of her just before they’d married really held any truth. Had they just been malicious palace gossip because of the English blood which flowed in her veins...?
‘Tell me about what happened when you were in England, when you were at the boarding school.’ He watched her face pale, but she lifted her chin and looked him in the eye.
It had been those rumours of her time at the English school which had clouded his judgement on their wedding day, made him doubt his bride’s innocence even before her little dance. Now he wondered if they had forced him to think things that might not have been true, despite the fact that he’d wanted to disregard them, but the way she’d acted had made him question his judgement.
‘There is nothing to tell; not when you have already condemned me.’ Her retort flew at him so fast that the pain of each word hit him hard in the chest.
‘So it is not true?’ He stepped closer, her stance and angry glare asserting that it wasn’t, and he regretted having listened to palace gossip.
‘No, for what it’s worth. I was in the hotel room, not to meet with a man but to save a friend’s reputation. She was the one meeting her lover, not me.’ She maintained her frosty expression.
‘That’s it?’ Her simple words didn’t come anywhere near the scandal that had whispered its way into his palace within hours of their wedding.
‘A friend had taken a lover, a married man, and she’d been meeting him regularly.’ Amber paused to look up at him and he kept his expression impassive, hoping his silence would encourage her to continue. ‘One day her lover asked her to bring a friend, saying we would all go out.’
‘You went, as the friend.’ It was slowly beginning to make sense. She’d been set up, sold to the highest bidder for her story.
She swallowed, lowered her eyes briefly then looked back up at him. ‘This other man was a reporter on the hunt for the scandalous story that would make his career. I didn’t know this and foolishly told him things I shouldn’t have. My friend and I returned to school, the same way we got out, through a back window. The next day I got the letter.’
‘How did you deal with that?’ Kazim couldn’t recall anything in the papers and surely his advisers would have mentioned the scandal during their marriage negotiations.
‘My mother can be very formidable when necessary.’ Amber smiled a light smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes and it touched him that she’d shared it with him. If only he hadn’t heard the rumour on their wedding night. His pulse leapt at the thought.
‘Then I believe you.’ He stepped closer, not sure if he really believed she was completely innocent, but right now he wanted to and he needed her to trust him. He needed the world to see a couple reunited and happy about it.
* * *
Amber looked into the increasingly dark depths of Kazim’s eyes and her stomach tightened. ‘What exactly do you want, Kazim?’ she whispered so softly she wondered if she’d actually spoken.
‘What I want? Right at this minute?’
