‘Discussed?’ Bethany repeated strickenly.
‘Our family may not suffer from the embarrassing intrusion of television crews and tabloid reporters in Datar but then our people have no need of such devices to know what we do. This is a small country and Datari society rejoices in a most effective form of the bush telegraph. The chemist will have been on the phone to his wife as soon as the door shut behind you, and she will have phoned all her friends while he was phoning his friends to share this exciting titbit, and within days everybody who is anybody hears of your interesting purchase. Had you wanted to maintain secrecy, you should have called me.’
Bethany’s legs wouldn’t hold her up any more. Wordlessly, clumsily, she sank down on the chair behind her.
‘I gather the test proved positive.’ Laila sighed. ‘Razul must be told.’
‘No!’ she gasped in horror.
‘Well, if you do not tell him I will,’ Laila informed her with flat impatience. ‘It is none of my business that you have driven my brother from you. I do not like you for it but the fact that you may be carrying the next heir to the throne of our country overrides all other considerations, and if you do not accept that fact you are indeed a very foolish woman!’
Bethany was paper-pale and furious. ‘I did not drive your brother anywhere! He left me!’
Laila looked angrily contemptuous. ‘I am aware that you want to leave him. He told me that—’
‘He was lying!’
‘My brother does not tell lies—’
‘But then you don’t know the promise he made to your father, do you?’ Bethany slung back with abrasive bitterness as she rose to her feet again.
‘I do know that he promised that if the marriage didn’t work out he would remarry without argument or fuss.’
‘But you don’t know that our marriage wasn’t a real marriage, do you?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Laila enquired impatiently. ‘Did not my brother wait two years to win my father’s permission to marry you?’
‘But only temporarily, because that’s all your father would agree to...and what does that matter anyway now?’ Bethany demanded unsteadily. ‘Razul has walked out on me—’
‘Temporarily? What nonsense are you talking? Razul loves you. Everyone in Datar knows how much Razul loves you!’ Laila asserted with complete exasperation. ‘In the end everyone also supported his right to choose his own bride, and you were a very popular choice because you are from the West. Many find this glamorous and also encouraging proof of Datar’s new liberal image.
‘It is true that my deeply pessimistic father was stubbornly set against such a marriage, but only because he was afraid Razul would be hurt as he was hurt...that you would find our culture impossible to adapt to and that the marriage would end in divorce as his did.’
Bethany licked her wobbling lower lip, frozen to the carpet by shock. ‘Razul doesn’t love me—’
‘Of course he blasted well loves you, you stupid woman!’ Laila shot at her with raw impatience. ‘And now he’s undergoing the tortures of the damned listening to my father miserably bemoan the fact that he ever agreed to him marrying you! What the hell do you think it is like for Razul right now? His romantic, fairytale marriage has gone down the tubes so fast he feels a complete failure, and he feels he’s let the whole family down by marrying you, and he’s got my father muttering “I told you so” at every available opportunity... so don’t you dare talk about—leaving him!’
A strangled sob punctuated Laila’s last words. She turned away, visibly fighting to conceal her distress. Bethany was reeling with shock. Was it possible that she had somehow misunderstood Razul about the temporary nature of their marriage? She so badly wanted to believe what she was hearing that she was dizzy.
‘I am sorry to have called you stupid...’ Laila said stiltedly, having firmly reinstated her usual self-command. ‘But I love my brother very much and I cannot bear to see him in such pain.’
‘I love him too,’ Bethany managed in a wobbly voice. What had he said? Something about being unable to live with this rope hanging over his head? But he had always behaved as though he didn’t expect her to stay...hadn’t he? But then that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t want her to stay, did it? It might only suggest that he was very insecure about her feelings for him...
‘Then what the heck is going on between the two of you?’ Laila demanded blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’
Ten minutes later Bethany was rigidly seated in Laila’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes. ‘If your brother shoots me down in flames,’ she warned shakily, ‘you do understand that it will be my turn to call you a very stupid, foolish woman?’
Laila laughed with amusement. ‘That is an opportunity you will be denied.’
Bethany wished she had that confidence. Could Razul have left her because he believed she was planning to leave him? That pride—that incredible pride of his, she recalled painfully as her fingers knotted tightly together on her lap.
‘Ah, my father’s secretary,’ Laila announced, waving an imperious hand in the echoing foyer of the old palace. as Mustapha trod towards them looking most reluctant to respond to that gesture. He avoided looking at Bethany altogether.
‘Mustapha will take you to my brother,’ Laila informed her.
Mustapha turned pale, his jaw-line stiffening. ‘I regret to say—’
Laila murmured something low-pitched and brief in Arabic. Whatever it was, it had an extraordinary effect on Mustapha. His compressed mouth fell wide, and he flushed and shifted from one foot to the other in clear perturbation.
‘Yes, indeed,’ Laila sighed. ‘If I were you, I would endeavour to circumvent such instructions. I would practise true diplomacy.’
It suddenly sank in on Bethany that Razul had already given instructions that if his wife should show up she was to be shown the door again. She began turning on her heel, white with furious humiliation, but Laila caught her arm and hissed in a fierce undertone, ‘Do not be foolish, Bethany. My father is furious with you. This is his command. As far as he is concerned you have ditched his beloved son and a whipping three times a day would be too good for you!’
With a smile of reluctant amusement Mustapha inclined his head to Bethany and politely asked her to follow him. But what possible point was there in even approaching Razul if King Azmir was still so bitterly hostile to her? Her heart had sunk like a stone.
In silence Mustapha escorted her deep into the bowels of the palace. He halted outside a courtyard, ducked his head as if to check that it was unoccupied, and murmured, ‘Please wait here, my lady. I believe Prince Razul is with his father.’
The courtyard contained a very elaborate and large conservatory. Unable to stay still, Bethany wandered into it and was astonished to feel the temperature-controlled cool of the interior, and even more astonished to lay eyes on the glorious collection of bonsai trees displayed on a series of ornamental plinths within. She focused first on a miniature forest of pine trees, and then, reached out a reverent hand towards an ancient-looking and gnarled Acer barely thirty inches tall, quite dumbstruck with admiration.
‘Do not touch!’ a harsh voice rapped out at her.
Bethany very nearly leapt out of her skin. She spun around and only then noticed the elderly man seated in a chair by a bench in the far corner. Clad in an old apron, with a pair of scissors clenched in one hand, he almost stared her out of countenance, so visibly infuriated was he by the interruption.
‘I’m sorry. I should have known better but it looked so beautiful...you see, I have some at home. They’re my bobby.’
The fierce dark eyes narrowed fulminatingly. ‘Bonsai trees?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry I interrupted you. Please excuse me.’ A rather ghastly suspicion was beginning to cross Bethany’s mind. Those dark, deep-set eyes, those level brows...
‘I do not excuse you.’
The rather ghastly suspicion was decidedly confirmed by that tone of hauteur. Bethany sti
lled, the colour draining from her cheeks.
‘You are the wife of my son,’ he pronounced through compressed lips. ‘Why do you come here?’
Bethany tried and failed to swallow the constriction in her throat. ‘I...I wanted to see Razul—’
‘Why should you want this?’ King Azmir demanded harshly.
Her eyes burned, her tongue cleaving to the roof of her dry mouth.
‘Why?’ He repeated the question with grim emphasis.
Bethany hovered, tears of stark pain suddenly welling up in her eyes. ‘Because I love him!’ she finally bit out, thrusting her chin in the air.
He frowned at her, clearly taken aback by the announcement.
‘And I believe I could make him happy...that is if he wants me to,’ she adjusted unevenly.
‘Then why are you not making him happy?’
‘I would rather discuss that with him,’ Bethany said stiffly.
Her father-in-law shook his head in exasperation. ‘I do not like my son to be upset.’
‘If you will excuse me for saying so, your son is very well able to look after himself,’ Bethany murmured.
‘Not when he marries a woman he cannot persuade to stay with him,’ he retorted brusquely.
‘I will stay.’
‘Then why is he here and not with you?’
‘I thought I couldn’t stay. I thought that you...wouldn’t accept me as his wife,’ Bethany stated tautly.
‘Do you not think that that is a most peculiar belief to hold when I agreed to the marriage?’ he pointed out rather more gently.