The Heartbreaker Prince

He had bought women presents before, typically expensive baubles, and he took their appreciation for granted. The bauble he had bought Hannah had been in a different class. News of the record-breaking price it had fetched at auction had made the news headlines.

It had been a fortnight ago, the same night that Kamel, who normally worked in his office after dinner, had found himself wondering what Hannah did while he worked. He spent each and every night with her, he saw her in the morning and her personal secretary told him what her schedule was for the day. Sometimes they ate together in the evening but after that...? It had not previously occurred to him to wonder what she did with herself in the evenings.

So he asked.

‘The princess takes a walk and usually spends some time in the small salon. She enjoys watching television.’

‘Television?’

Rafiq nodded. ‘I believe she follows a cookery programme. Sometimes she reads...’ Without any change of expression, he had somehow managed to sound reproachful as he added, ‘I think she might be lonely.’

‘That will be all.’ Only a long relationship and a respect for the older man stopped him saying more, but Kamel was incensed that his employee should think it came within his remit to tell him he was neglecting his wife!

If she was lonely, all she had to do was tell him. The trouble was that she had no sense, and could not accept advice. She had taken on an excessive workload, despite his giving her secretary explicit instructions to keep her duties light. She had ignored him, she had... His anger left him without warning, leaving him exposed to the inescapable fact that he had been guilty of neglect. Outside the bedroom he actively avoided her. But then logically if they were to be parents there would, for the child’s sake, need to be some sort of mutual understanding outside the bedroom.

Lonely. A long way from home and anyone she knew, living in a totally foreign environment by a set of rules that were alien to her. And Kamel had needed someone to tell him that?

She hadn’t complained and he had been happy and even relieved to take her seeming contentment at face value. Determined to make up for his neglect, he had gone to see for himself, but any expectation of discovering a forlorn figure had vanished when he’d walked into the small salon and found Hannah sitting cross-legged on a sofa giggling helplessly at the screen. She seemed surprised to see him but not interested enough to give him all her attention. Most of that remained on the television. Of course, it was a relief to discover she didn’t need him to entertain her.

‘A comedy?’ He sat on the sofa arm and looked around. The room was one that he rarely entered but he recognised there had been some changes. Not just the television and bright cushions, but where a large oil painting had stood there was now a row of moody monochrome framed photographs of rugged mountain landscapes.

On the desk there was a piece of driftwood and some shells beside an untidy stack of well-thumbed paperback novels.

Hannah caught him looking. ‘The painting made me depressed and the other stuff is in a cupboard somewhere.’

‘What a relief. I thought you might have pawned it.’

She looked at him as though she couldn’t decide if he was joking or not. ‘Do not let me interrupt your comedy.’

‘It’s a cookery competition. His sponge sank.’

‘And that is good?’

She slung him a pitying look and shook her head. ‘If he doesn’t pull it out of the bag with his choux buns he’s out.’

Kamel had stayed, not because he found the competitive side of baking entertaining, but because he found Hannah’s enjoyment contagious. She was riveting viewing. It fascinated him to watch her face while she willed on her favourite, the sound of her throaty chuckle was entrancing, and her scolding of a contestant who, as she put it, bottled it, made him laugh.

When the programme finished he was sitting beside her, sharing the sofa, and it was too late to go back to work. So he accepted her suggestion of a second glass of wine and watched a documentary with her. It was then he discovered that Hannah, renowned for her icy control, cried easily and laughed even more easily. Her aloof mask concealed someone who was warm, spontaneous and frighteningly emotional.

She had been pretending to be someone she wasn’t for so long that he wondered if she remembered why she had developed the mask. But then his research into the subject had said that dyslexics developed coping mechanisms.

After that first evening it had become a habit for him to break from work a little earlier and join her. On the night he had taken receipt of her birthday gift he had cut his evening work completely and when he’d entered the salon had been feeling quite pleased with himself as he’d contemplated her reaction when she opened her gift the following week.