A Royal Bride at the Sheikh s Command

The comptroller was frowning. ‘There are such rooms, yes, but traditionally members of the royal family have preferred an outlook that gives them privacy.’

‘What is it you have in mind?’ she heard Kadir demanding, as though impatient of her input.

‘Our children will one day be the ones to take Niroli forward into the future,’ Natalia informed them both. ‘How can they do that if they grow up turning their faces away from our people? How will they understand and appreciate what it means to be of Niroli if they never see how our people live? As a child I roamed the city freely, exploring it, making it my own, binding it to me as it bound me to it. I could find my way through its streets blindfolded, I know now every nuance of its scents, all the places where the most precious flowers and herbs grow. Loving a country is something a child learns from its parents. Understanding it, knowing it and its people is something they can only learn by experience.’

She had said too much, been too outspoken, Natalia recognised, and in doing so would of course have antagonised Kadir and harmed her cause.

‘It is for His Highness to approve or disapprove our apartment,’ she told the comptroller tiredly. ‘I must be guided by what he says.’

‘My wife-to-be is right. I myself know now little as yet of my new country. A man who looks only inward learns much of himself but little of others. A king who would rule others must learn to study them as well as himself. If there are rooms available with windows that overlook the town…’

Natalia stared at the comptroller in disbelief. Kadir was agreeing with her, supporting her. A seed of something fragile but, oh, so precious was opening inside her heart beneath the warmth of her pleasure in his reaction, and putting out small quivering tendrils of hope. She turned to look at Kadir, but he was looking away from her.

‘It is also my wish that my wife and I share a bed instead of occupying separate rooms,’ Kadir was telling the comptroller in a businesslike voice. ‘After all, we have a duty to provide Niroli with the next generation of heirs.’

‘The state of marriage is so approved by God as to be the foundation of family life where children are born…’

Natalia tensed under the heavy weight of her ornate wedding gown and long veil. The Valenciennes lace overdress of her gown had originally been made for Queen Sophia’s wedding dress. Softly cream with age, it looked magnificent over the shimmering gold dress beneath it.

It had always been Natalia’s intention not to wear a white gown. She was a woman not a girl, a woman proud of all that she was. And if Kadir was not man enough to accept that, if he had felt it necessary to turn to her and give her a look of comprehensive cynicism when she had joined him at the altar, then that was his choice. Her conscience was clear.

Was it? If she should have conceived in Venice…If she should have, but how could she have done so when Kadir had used protection?

Kadir’s white uniform with its gold braid, instead of looking faintly ridiculous, actually brought home to her the reality of what it had meant in previous centuries for a king and his heirs to ride out into battle for their country at the head of their armies. All too easily she could see Kadir in such a role. Not that Hadiya or Niroli had been at war during Natalia’s lifetime, and nor would she want that. In fact she hoped that she and Kadir and then through him their children would play a strong role in promoting world peace. So why did she find it so stirring to visualise him in a combatory role? Women were drawn to the alpha men their instincts told them could protect them and, more importantly, their young, Natalia reminded herself as she forced herself to look forward instead of towards him.

‘I pronounce you man and wife…’

Natalia was shocked to discover that she was having to blink away emotional tears as the notes of ‘Ave Maria’ soared from the choir to fill the ancient cathedral and Kadir raised her fingertips to his lips.

It was done. She was his wife. Her commitment to her country and its future must now come before everything else.

Natalia was now his wife. This woman whom his intellect told him to despise and revile but whom his body ached for in the dark, empty hours of the night. Where had that admission come from? Kadir wondered grimly. So there might have been one night, possibly two when he had woken up like many another man with his body aching for a woman—that hardly meant that he desired Natalia Carini. Not Natalia Carini any more but Crown Princess Natalia, he reminded himself. His wife, his partner in this new venture he had committed himself to, a decision he’d probably made to avoid acknowledging his difficult relationship with his father.

How old had he been when he had first realised that the man he had believed to be his father did not love him, and that nothing he could do would ever draw the praise from him that he so willingly gave to Kadir’s younger brother? Eight? Six? Younger? Old enough to recognise he was being rejected certainly and at the same time still young enough for that to hurt, and for him not to have known how to put in place any defences against that pain. How could his father have turned away from him, his eyes cold and his manner aloof, whilst they had lit up with warmth the minute his gaze had rested on Kadir’s younger brother, his manner changing to become paternally indulgent?

He could still mentally see and sense his mother’s anxiety as she had stood watchfully in the shadows of the courtyard where he and his brother played. The minute his father had entered the courtyard a word from his mother had brought a maid to his own side, a firm hand on his shoulder as he had been led away, leaving his parents alone with his brother.

His protests had always been met by some rational explanation: he was the elder, and had his schoolwork to do; his brother was just a baby. And he had struggled harder to win his father’s attention and approval whilst his mother had in turn worked harder to keep them apart.

‘I did it for your sake,’ she had told him. ‘To protect you because I was afraid that he might look at you and see as I could see so clearly that you were not his child.’

All lies of course. She had not done it to protect him but to hide her shame and protect herself. But as he had come to learn, that was what women did. They lied to protect themselves and then added insult to injury by pretending that their motivation had been altruistic. A man did not allow women to undermine him. He certainly had no intention of allowing Natalia to undermine the position he intended to claim for himself here in Niroli. It was all too easy now for him to understand why his father had so often, and unfairly, he had believed at the time, questioned Kadir’s own allegiance to Hadiya and his ability to rule it well. His mother had sworn to him that her husband had never known he was not his son, but Kadir was not convinced. The sheikh might not have been able to prove he hadn’t fathered him, but Kadir felt sure that he had had his suspicions. He had seen by example what happened between man and child when that man did not accept his paternity of that child. That was not going to happen to him. No child growing up with his name would ever have cause to doubt his love or his complete belief that he had fathered him.

They were to spend the first night of their marriage in their palace

apartment before flying to Hadiya in the morning, and Natalia stood stiffly still and silent in the middle of her large dressing room whilst her maids removed her ornate gown. Whatever the circumstances she would have felt some natural apprehension about what lay ahead tonight. She might be old enough not to be sentimental about human sexual relationships, but she would be lying if she tried to pretend to herself that there wasn’t still a tiny part of her that foolishly longed to experience the close intimacy of a loving sexual relationship in which the two parties concerned were totally committed to one another, and that it hurt knowing that she would never have that.

Despite that she had determinedly refused to think of herself as a daydreamer or an idealist, but now she knew that her biggest mistake had been in believing that she and Kadir would bond over what she had believed would be their shared commitment to Niroli. Taking due care to make their relationship work would surely mirror the care they would take to work for the higher good of the island. That mind-set seemed risible now in view of what had happened. She thanked her maids as she stepped out of her gown and then scooped it up, acknowledging how bitterly disappointed she was and how bitterly angry with herself—and Kadir—she felt.

Beyond her dressing room lay her private bathroom just as on the other side of their shared bedroom lay Kadir’s dressing room and his private bathroom. She really didn’t want to think about the preparations he might be making for this, their first night together as the future King and Queen of Niroli. Was he still determined to wait a full month after Venice to consummate their marriage? Surely he would come to her on their wedding night?

She was under no illusions and knew that he had meant what he had said about having her watched night and day until she had conceived his child. How bitterly ironic it was considering her long years of celibacy. A celibacy broken only by her overwhelming desire for one man—Kadir himself.

She had already made it plain to her maids that she preferred to bathe alone, and her eyebrows rose when she walked into her bathroom and saw the champagne chilling in a bucket of ice. To calm her bridal nerves? Whose idea had that been? She would have preferred a glass of Niroli’s organic white wine, given the choice.

She showered quickly and efficiently instead of luxuriating in the huge round bath, drying herself and then pulling on a towelling robe to make her way to the bedroom.

Someone had been in to turn down the bed and switch on the beside lamps, and another ice bucket had been placed close to the bed.