Coming home, he’d imagined what it would be like to show Megan the narrow streets of his city, the ancient bazaars, the hidden places he’d discovered as a boy.
He’d pictured her delight at the little shop that sold silks from China, the half-moon bay just up the coast where dolphins played in the shallows. He’d thought of what it would be like to spend their days exploring his world, their nights making love in the enormous bed that had belonged to five centuries of Suliyam’s kings.
Caz bent down, scooped up a shell and tossed it into the sea.
Instead his wife
and he were strangers. They were polite to each other. Pleasant. They conferred before the meetings and sometimes after them, but once the day was over, he went his way. She went hers.
And at night…
At night, he lay on the sofa in his sitting room, stared up at the ceiling and tried not to think about Megan lying alone in his bed.
She was only in that bed because he’d commanded it.
“I’ll stay in the women’s quarters,” she’d said the day of their return to the palace.
“The king’s wife does not sleep in the women’s quarters,” he’d said, silently cursing himself for sounding like a stiff-necked martinet. “It would generate talk, and it would not be—”
“Tradition,” she’d said, with a taut smile.
Let her think that. The truth was, until his father’s marriage to his mother, generations of wives had slept in the women’s quarters. It had been the only workable system, back when a king had three, four, a dozen wives, but he’d be damned if he’d tell her that.
It was better than telling her he wanted to know she was in his bed, to be able to dream of her there, with her hair spread over his pillows, even if the image was torture.
How many times had he risen from the sofa, gone to the bedroom door, stood outside it with the blood roaring in his ears as he imagined opening that door, going to her, taking her in his arms and telling her…and telling her…
“Sire?”
Caz swung around. Hakim hurried toward him, huffing and puffing with the effort of walking through the white sand.
“What is it, Hakim? I’m not in the mood to be—”
“It is important, my lord. Your cousin wishes to see you.”
“My cousin?”
“Alayna. She has been waiting to meet with you for days.”
Hakim spoke the name with all the importance Caz knew it deserved, knew, too, that he had to deal with Alayna eventually. He owed her that…but not now.
“Later, Hakim.”
“But Lord Qasim…”
‘‘Later, I said. Tell my cousin that I will see her, but not today.”
Hakim nodded stiffly. “Very well, sir. In that case, there is something else. A minor matter…”
“Get to it, man! I told you, I’m not in the mood to be bothered.”
“It concerns the woman’s departure.”
“What woman? What departure?” Caz glowered at his aide. “What are you babbling about?”
“Sir, your pilot will not agree to the flight without your direct permission. I told him there was no need to trouble you, but he insists that—”
“What flight?”