Читать книгу Modern Romance May 2015 Books 1-8 - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 13

CHAPTER SIX

HE HAD TRIED to play nice, Jaul reflected grimly, but nice hadn’t panned out too well with Chrissie, who was suspicious of his every move and had ensured that they were now down to the brutal bare bones of legal agreements and custody. Possibly he wasn’t very good at playing nice, he acknowledged in exasperation, having much more experience of playing nasty. The King’s word was the last word to be heard in serious disputes in Marwan and there was always an aggrieved party, convinced of unjust treatment and favouritism. He had learned that, regardless of negotiation and compromise, someone would always be dissatisfied with his decision.

Like a drowning woman forced to review the most important moments of her life, Chrissie was pale as death as she stared down at that clause in the pre-nuptial contract. Her heart was sinking down to the very soles of her feet. She could not see how she could possibly combat an agreement that she had voluntarily signed.

Jaul breathed in slow and deep, muscles rippling below the T-shirt, wide shoulders taut. ‘At some future date, should you remain convinced that you want a divorce—’

Her turquoise eyes flared back to life like the unholy blue hot streak flickering inside a flame. ‘You’d better believe that I won’t change my mind!’ she traded furiously.

‘Then you will be entitled to your own household in Marwan in which to raise the twins. I’m afraid that is the best I can offer you should you want your freedom back,’ Jaul imparted grittily, white teeth flashing bright against golden skin.

‘But...for the moment, a separate household for the three of us is out of the question?’ Chrissie prompted dangerously.

‘I’m afraid so. At least this way, however, you retain shared custody of our children,’ Jaul pointed out.

‘They’ve never been our children, they’ve always been mine!’ Chrissie vented painfully, biting back a flood of recrimination.

‘Only because I didn’t know I was a father,’ Jaul parried.

‘And what you refer to as “this way” means that you expect me to pretend that we still have a real marriage?’ she interpreted jaggedly as she stalked to the door and spun back again. ‘How could you do this to me after deserting me for two whole years? Don’t you have any moral decency?’

‘It is not that simple for me. In an effort to secure our children’s status and acceptance by my people, I’m prepared to pretend I’m part of a happy couple. That’s part of my duty of loyalty and care towards them and their needs,’ Jaul framed in a raw undertone. ‘They will take their place in the royal family as the prince and princess they are and that is my responsibility and yours.’

Yanking open the guest-room door, Chrissie was reckoning that she could have done without the parental slap on the wrist. He scarcely needed to remind her of the maternal obligations that had consumed her youthful freedom throughout the time they had lived apart. It was so unfair, she thought bitterly, that Jaul could have walked out on her, abandoning his responsibilities and then walk back into her life only when it suited him to demand that she observe a duty of care that he had royally ignored.

‘Will you agree to it?’ Jaul asked, striding after her impetuous exit to follow her down the corridors that led to the giant upper landing.

Adrenaline on a high, her steps faltered while common sense and survival instincts took over. The twins had become a weapon and if she wanted to keep her children she had no other option but to take up residence in Marwan.

On one level she recognised the position he was in, on another she hated him for making it her responsibility as well. It was one thing to own up to a two-year-old marriage and two young children and shock the Marwani population but it would be another thing entirely to stage that shock along with a headline-grabbing divorce in the UK while they fought a bitter custody battle over their children. Because, no matter how damning that agreement she had signed would prove to be when aired in a courtroom, Chrissie knew she would still fight for her children regardless. But such a fight would undoubtedly damage everyone involved.

Did she really want to land the stress of a custody battle on Cesare and Lizzie as well? Hadn’t she already caused them as much grief as a wayward teenager with her exam agonies, touchy pride, carefully kept secrets and unplanned pregnancy? Did they really deserve to have to deal with more on her behalf? Shouldn’t she be handling her own problems and standing on her own feet? Wasn’t that really what adulthood was all about?

‘Chrissie...?’ Jaul prompted, falling still. ‘I need an answer.’

‘I’ll do it because I don’t appear to have the choice of doing what I want,’ Chrissie shot back at him tightly. ‘But I won’t forgive you for it.’

Brilliant dark eyes veiled, his beautiful mouth compressing. ‘You’ve never forgiven me for anything I did wrong.’

Chrissie refused to believe that was true. She must have forgiven him at some stage for something. She was not a hard, unforgiving person, was she? Her first impressions of Jaul returned to haunt her and, along with it, her long-held refusal to consider the fact that she might have misjudged him. Very faint colour warmed her cheeks.

She recalled that she had never forgiven her mother for what the older woman had put her through and frowned. Francesca had died before her younger daughter reached the age of confrontation and the older woman had taken her guilty secrets to the grave with her. Chrissie swallowed hard, struggling to shake off the dirty, shamed feeling that always engulfed her when she thought of Francesca. She was older now, wiser and less judgemental, she reasoned tautly. Her mother had not been a strong person and she had been very much abused in some of her relationships with men. Her second husband, the very last man in her life, had been the worst of all, taking advantage of Francesca’s weakness and dependency on him to propel her into an unsavoury lifestyle. Some day she might tell Lizzie the truth about their mother, but certainly she could never ever imagine sharing that sordid story with Jaul.

‘I think this is an incredibly weird and ugly house,’ Chrissie remarked curtly on the way down the massive staircase, which reminded her of something out of an ancient Hammer Horror movie. It only lacked zombies sidling out of the mummy cases in the hall to totally freak her out.

‘Blame my grandmother. She furnished this place.’

‘The Englishwoman who walked out on your grandfather?’ That was the bare bones of what Chrissie knew about her British predecessor in the Marwani royal family. ‘Tell me about her.’

‘Why?’

‘Fellow feeling...aren’t I sort of following in her footsteps?’ Chrissie quipped, eager to talk about something, anything other than the agreement she had just given and what had occurred in the tumbled sheets upstairs. That extraordinary passion had left her aching in intimate places and even walking wasn’t quite comfortable. Jaul had been so...wild and forceful...and she had revelled in that display of primal passion, but now she was being forced to pay the piper and put her whole life back in Jaul’s hands. She should never have let herself down like that, she thought painfully. He was running rings round her now.

‘I hope not. She deserted her son,’ Jaul proffered censoriously. ‘She met my grandfather Tarif on a safari in Africa. She was a socialite from an eccentric but aristocratic English family...Lady Sophie Gregory. Tarif fell deeply in love with her but he was simply a walk on the wild side for her...a novelty. A couple of months of life in backward Marwan where there were no ex-pats for company was too much for my grandmother. She stayed only long enough to give birth to my father and walked out only weeks afterwards.’

Chrissie knew when she was listening to a biased story. ‘This is what your father told you?’

‘Yes. I met her once though when I was a teenager. I was in Paris on an officer training course and she was at a party I was invited to,’ Jaul told her grudgingly. ‘She came right up to me and said, “I understand you’re my grandson. Are you as stiff-necked and stubborn as your father?”’

‘So, your grandmother did try to see her child again,’ Chrissie worked out wryly from that greeting. ‘In other words she wasn’t quite as indifferent a mother as she was painted to you. Most probably your grandfather wouldn’t allow your grandmother to see her son again because she walked out on their marriage. Have you ever thought of that angle?’

Jaul hadn’t and his jawline clenched like granite because that particular family story had long been an incontestable legend set in stone and he couldn’t credit that Chrissie had already come up with a likelihood that had never once occurred to him. ‘There were grounds for his bitterness.’

‘Such as?’ Chrissie was receiving a twist of satisfaction from needling Jaul even if it was only about old family history. Why? He was wrecking her life again. He owned her, just as he owned their son and daughter. There was no leeway for misunderstanding in that clause in the contract, no wriggle room for a screamingly naive girl who had been so in love she hadn’t foreseen a future where she might have children and end up alone and abandoned. She knew she would never forgive herself for being that stupid and that short-sighted about so very important an issue as the right to keep and raise her own babies and live where she chose.

‘Lady Sophie’s desertion made Tarif a laughing stock. In those days saving face was everything for a ruler but there was nothing he could do to hide the fact that she had left him.’

‘And no doubt he never forgave her for that and kept her from her son as punishment while brainwashing that same child into a hatred and distrust of Western women,’ Chrissie filled in with spirit, her disgust palpable. ‘Don’t forget I met your father and I was left in no doubt that he saw a woman like me as a curse on his family name. Knowing how he felt, why on earth did you marry me? No, scratch that, don’t answer me. I know why you married me.’

Fine ebony brows pleating, Jaul was recalling their final argument in Oxford. She had wanted him to take her out to Marwan with him, had protested the secrecy he had insisted on and had implied that his attitude bore a closer resemblance to shame than secrecy. But that was untrue. He had known that without preparation and forewarning his father would react badly and he had flown home intending to break the news of his marriage in person. Sadly, he now knew that he should have made the announcement much sooner and had he done so he was convinced that everything that followed would have happened very differently.

‘You don’t know why I married you because you never have known what I was thinking,’ Jaul boxed back cool as ice water. ‘In reality, I was trying to protect you but, unhappily for both of us, I went about it the wrong way.’

A lift door whirred back in the hall and the nanny, accompanied by a young woman in Marwani dress, appeared, each bearing a beaming drowsy twin back to their mother.

‘I’ll leave now.’

‘I want you to stay,’ Jaul decreed.

‘Listen.’ Chrissie rested a hand daringly on a muscular brown forearm as she stretched up to him to whisper, ‘For now, I’m staying with my family. I’ll do what I have to do only when you leave for Marwan. When is that happening?’

‘I have to return within twenty-four hours. I have already released the photos taken at our wedding at the embassy to the press at home.’

Chrissie lost colour. Only one wretched day of freedom left? Only one day more to be with her family and savour her independence and liberty to do as she liked. ‘So you expect me to...what?’

‘Close down your life here in the short term. Your family will naturally be welcome to visit and stay with us whenever they like.’

‘Then it’s about time you met my father,’ Chrissie pronounced abruptly, a rueful expression in her eyes for she doubted that Jaul would enjoy the experience. Her dad was chock-full of prejudices, against foreigners, rich people and royalty to name only a few, and Brian Whitaker was not diplomatic about hiding the fact. Jaul deserved that meeting as she had not deserved hers with his late father, Lut. ‘He’s coming down to London tonight to visit us.’

* * *

On the way back to her sister’s with the twins, Chrissie was recalling the day she had met King Lut, remembering the clammy break of sweat on her skin when she had finally grasped the alarming truth that the angry older man, dressed exactly as though he had stepped off a desert film set, was actually her father-in-law. He had not even spoken to her in English. Throughout another older man had stood anchored to his side translating his every furious gesture and bitten-out word and yet Jaul had once told her that his parent spoke fluent English. Possibly the King’s temper had prevented him from finding the right words in her language, the horrible, hateful words that had never left her once he had assured her that their very marriage had been completely unlawful...

‘It was not a proper marriage. It was never intended to be more than a casual affair and Jaul wants to be left in peace. It is over between you now that he’s back in Marwan. He does not want you living here in his English home, nor does he want to hear from you again. Please do not embarrass him further by visiting our embassy. My son plans to marry a decent woman from his own culture and who will marry him if you cause a scandal?’

There had been a lot more along the same lines, Chrissie recalled unhappily, every word aimed at ensuring that she accepted just how unimportant she was and how unfit she was to be Jaul’s wife. She had been a sexual fling, nothing more, an intruder in his apartment, an embarrassing visitor creating scenes at the embassy, in short a woman pitifully clinging to a man who no longer wanted her. Her pride had been crushed and her heart broken because she had loved Jaul with all her heart.

And now it seemed that her life had turned full circle, she reflected as the limo whisked her back to her sister’s home. She knew that Cesare and Lizzie would support her if she chose to fight Jaul for the children but she could not help recalling that even Cesare had urged her to be cautious in her dealings with Jaul, because Jaul had more power and influence than the average non-resident father. In other words even her powerful and extremely shrewd brother-in-law had been doubtful of her chances of winning such a custody battle.

And there were two menacing sides to her dilemma, she acknowledged wretchedly. If she fought Jaul it would turn bitter and nasty and then what would happen if she ultimately lost the custody battle? How much would Jaul allow her to see of her children in the hostile aftermath of such a conflict? She shivered, clammy and cold inside as she pondered that very realistic question. Hadn’t she already had the warning of learning what had happened to Jaul’s British grandmother, Lady Sophie? From what she could establish that poor woman had never got to see her child again, at least not until he was an adult and too locked into his prejudices and hostility to listen to the other side of the story. Chrissie reckoned that if she wasn’t careful she might fall victim to the same heartbreak and lose her children altogether.

Her other concern was the sheer selfishness of plunging Cesare and Lizzie into that same conflict with her. Lizzie was pregnant again and the very last thing she needed was added pressure and anxiety. A court case would be nerve-racking and would attract the sort of publicity that her sister and brother-in-law abhorred, for in spite of their wealth they led quiet, private lives. However, if Chrissie plunged into a divorce and custody battle with Jaul, the press were sure to pick up on it because an Arab king’s secret marriage to an Englishwoman would be all too newsworthy to ignore. No, she couldn’t possibly risk exposing her family or her children to that kind of intrusive publicity. They all deserved better from her, she conceded heavily. After all, she had chosen to marry Jaul and the consequences were hers to deal with. Why should anyone else pay the price?