Working With Cinderella

‘I’m sorry.’

‘My fiancé was too.’

With a sob she turned from him, pulled her robe over her naked breasts and did up the buttons as she ran to where the horses were tethered. She didn’t possess any fear as she untied her mare and mounted it, because fear was nothing compared to grief. She kicked her into a canter and when that did not help she galloped. She could hear the sound of Emir’s beast rapidly gaining on her, could hear his shouts for her to halt, and finally she did, turning her pained eyes to him.

‘I lay for five days on a machine that made me breathe and I heard my fiancé speaking with his mother. That was how I found out I couldn’t have children. That was how I heard him say there really was no point marrying me …’ She was breathless from riding, from anger, yet still she shouted. ‘Of course that’s not what he told me when I came round—he said the accident had made him realise that, though he cared, he didn’t love me, that life was too short and he wasn’t ready for commitment.’ Emir said nothing. ‘But I knew the reason he really left.’

‘He’s a fool, then.’

‘So what does that make you?’

‘I am King,’ Emir answered, and it was the only answer he could give.

As soon as the tent was in sight, it was Emir who kicked his horse on, Emir who raced through the desert, and she was grateful to be left alone, to gallop, to sob, to think …

To remember.

The black hole of the accident was filling painfully—each stride from Layyinah was taking her back there again. She was a troubled bride-to-be, a young woman wondering if she wasn’t making the most appalling mistake. The sand and the dunes changed to countryside; she could hear hooves pounding mud and feel the cool of spring as she came to an appalling conclusion.

She had to call the wedding off.

CHAPTER SIX

‘I HAVE run you a bath.’

Emir looked up as Amy walked into the tent. He had told Raul to watch her from a distance and, after showering, had run the first bath of his life.

And it was for another.

As he had done so his gut had churned with loathing towards her fiancé—loathing that was immediately reflected in a mirror that shone back to him, for wasn’t he now doing the same?

Yet he was a king.

Again that thought brought no solace.

‘Thank you.’

Her pale smile as she walked into the tent confused him. He had expected anger, bitterness to enter the tent with her, but if anything she seemed calm.

Amy was calm.

Calmer than she had been since the accident.

She unzipped her robe and looked around the bathing area. It was lit by candles in hurricane jars—not, she realised, a romantic gesture from Emir, it was how the whole tent was lit. Yet she was touched all the same.

Amy slid into the fragrant water and closed her eyes, trying and failing not to think of the twins and how they would be coping. Doing her best not to think of Emir and what he had proposed.

Instead she looked at her past—at a time she could now clearly remember. It felt good to have it back.

She washed her hair and climbed out of the water, drying herself with the towel and then wrapping it around her. Aware she was dressed rather inappropriately, she hoped Emir would be in his sleeping area, but he was sitting on cushions as she walked quietly past him, heading to her sleeping area to put on something rather more suitable, before she faced a conversation with him.

He looked up. ‘Better?’

‘Much.’ Amy nodded.

‘You should eat.’

She stared at the food spread before him and shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she lied.

‘You do not decline when a king invites you to dine at his table.’

‘Oh, but you do when that king has just declined you,’ Amy responded. ‘My rule.’ And the strangest thing was she even managed a small smile as she said it—another smile that caught Emir by surprise.

‘I thought you would be …’ He did not really know. Emir had expected more hurt, but instead there was an air of peace around her that he had never noticed before.

‘I really am fine,’ Amy said. She was aware there was a new fracture he had delivered to her heart, but it was too painful for examination just yet, so instead she explored past hurts. ‘In fact I remembered something when I was riding,’ Amy explained. ‘Something I’d forgotten. I’ve been struggling with my memory—I couldn’t remember the weeks before the accident.’ She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

She went again to head to her room, but again he called her back. ‘You need to eat.’ He held up a plate of lokum and Amy frowned at the pastry, at the selection of food in front of him.

‘I thought it was just fruit that we could eat?’

‘It is the twins who can eat only fruit and drink only water. I thought it better for them if we all did it.’

She saw the tension in his jaw as he spoke of the twins. Sometimes he sounded like a father—sometimes this dark, brooding King was the man she had once known.

‘They will be okay.’ He said it as if he was trying to convince himself.

‘I’m sure they’ll be fine,’ Amy said. Tonight he was worried about his children. Tonight neither of them really wanted to be alone. ‘I’ll get changed and then I’ll have something to eat.’

Was there relief in his eyes when he nodded?

There was not much to choose from—it was either her nightdress and dressing gown or yet another pale blue robe. Amy settled for the latter, brushed her damp hair and tied it back, and then headed out to him.

He was tired of seeing her in that robe. He wanted to see her in other colours—wanted to see her draped in red or emerald, wanted to see her hair loose around her shoulders and those full lips rouged. Or rather, Emir conceded as he caught the fresh, feminine scent of her as she sat down, he wanted to see the shoulders he had glimpsed moments earlier, wanted only the colour of her skin and her naked on the bed beneath him. But her revelation had denied them that chance.

‘I apologise.’ He came right out and said it. ‘To have it happen to you twice …’

‘Honestly …’ Amy ate sweet pastry between words—she really was hungry. Perhaps for the first time in a year she knew what starving was. She’d been numb for so long and now it felt as if all her senses were returning. ‘I’m okay.’ She wondered how she might best explain what she was only just discovering herself. ‘Since the accident I’ve felt like a victim.’ It was terribly hard to express it! ‘I didn’t like feeling that way. It didn’t feel like me. I didn’t like my anger towards him.’

‘You had every reason to be angry.’

‘No,’ Amy said. ‘As it turns out, I didn’t.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There were a few days before I fully came round when I could hear conversations. I couldn’t speak because I was on a machine.’

Emir watched her fingers go instinctively to her throat.

‘That was when I heard the doctors discussing the surgery I’d had.’ She was uncomfortable explaining things to him, so she kept it very brief. ‘The horse had trampled me. They took me to surgery and they had to remove my ovaries. They left a small piece of one so that I didn’t go into …’

‘Menopause.’ He said it for her, smiled because she was embarrassed, ‘I do know about these things.’

‘I know.’ She squirmed. ‘It just feels strange, speaking about it with you. Anyway, I lay there unable to speak and heard my fiancé talking to his mother—how he didn’t know what to do, how he’d always wanted children. Later, after I was discharged from the hospital, he told me it was over, that he’d been having doubts for ages, that it wasn’t about the accident. But I knew it was. Or rather I thought I knew it was.’ She looked up at Emir’s frown. ‘When I was riding today I remembered the last time I rode a horse. I don’t remember falling off, or being trampled, but I do remember what I was thinking. I was unhappy, Emir.’ She admitted it out loud for the first time, for even back then she had kept it in. ‘I felt trapped and I was wondering how I could call off the wedding. That was what I was thinking when the accident happened—he was right to end things. It wasn’t working. I just didn’t know it—till now.’

‘You didn’t love him?’ Emir asked, and watched as she shook her head. As she did so a curl escaped the confines of the hair tie. He was jealous of her fingers as they caught it and twisted it as she pondered his question.

‘I did love him,’ she said slowly, for she was still working things out for herself, still piecing her life together. ‘But it wasn’t the kind of love I wanted. We’d been going out together since we were teenagers. Our engagement seemed a natural progression—we both wanted children, we both wanted the same things, or thought we did. I cared for him and, yes, I suppose I loved him. But it wasn’t …’ She couldn’t articulate the word. ‘It wasn’t a passionate love,’ Amy attempted. ‘It was …’ She still couldn’t place the word.

Emir tried for her. ‘Safe?’

But that wasn’t the word she was looking for either.

‘Logical,’ Amy said. ‘It was a sort of logical love. Does that make sense?’

‘I think so,’ Emir said. ‘That is the kind of love we build on here—two people who are chosen, who are considered a suitable match, and then love grows.’

He was quiet for a moment. The conversation was so personal she felt she could ask. ‘Was that the love you had with Hannah?’

‘Very much so,’ Emir said. ‘She was a wonderful wife, and would have been an amazing mother as well as a dignified sheikha queen.’

Amy heard the love in his voice when he spoke of her and they were not jealous tears that she blinked back. ‘Maybe my fiancé and I would have made it.’ Amy gave a tight shrug. ‘I’m quite sure we would have had a good marriage. I think I was chasing the dream—a home and children, doing things differently than my parents.’

‘A grown-up dolls’ house?’ Emir suggested, and she smiled.

‘I guess I just wanted …’ She still didn’t know the word for it.

‘An illogical love?’ Emir offered—and that was it.

‘I did,’ Amy said, and then she stood. ‘I do.’

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘I have not explained.’

‘You don’t need to explain, Emir,’ Amy said. ‘I know we can’t go anywhere. I know it is imperative to your country’s survival that you have a son.’ But there was just a tiny flare of hope. ‘Could you speak to King Rakhal and have the rule revoked?’ Amy didn’t care if she was speaking out of turn. ‘It is a different time now.’

‘Rakhal’s mother died in childbirth,’ Emir said. ‘And, as I told you, for a while her baby was not expected to survive. The King of Alzirz came to my father and asked the same …’ Emir shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Of course my father declined his request. He wanted the countries to be one.’

‘You’ve thought about it, then?’

He looked at her and for the first time revealed to another person just a little of what was on his mind. ‘I have more than thought about it. I approached Rakhal when my wife first became ill. His response was as you might expect.’ He shook his head as he recalled that conversation. Could see again the smirk on Rakhal’s face when he had broached the subject. How he had relished Emir’s rare discomfort. How he had enjoyed watching a proud king reduced to plead.

Emir looked into Amy’s blue eyes and somehow the chill in him thawed slightly. He revealed more of the burden that weighed heavily on his mind. ‘I have thought about many things, and I am trying to make the best decision not just for my country but for my daughters.’ He had said too much. Immediately Emir knew that. For no one must know everything.

She persisted. ‘If you didn’t have a son …’

‘It would be unthinkable,’ Emir said. And yet it was all he thought about. He looked to her pale blue eyes and maybe it was the wind and the sound of the desert, perhaps the dance of the shadows on the walls, but he wanted to tell her—wanted to take her to the dark place in his mind, to share it. But he halted, for he could not. ‘I will have a son.’ Which meant his bride could not be her. ‘Marriage means different things for me. I am sorry if I hurt you—that was never my intention.’

‘I didn’t take it personally …’ But at the last moment her voice broke—because her last words weren’t true. She’d realised it as she said them. It was a very personal hurt, and one to be explored only in private, in the safety of her room. There she could cry at this very new loss. ‘Goodnight, Emir.’

‘Amy?’

She wished he would not call her back, but this time it was not to dissuade her. Instead he warned her what the night would bring.

‘The wind is fierce tonight—she knows that you are new here and will play tricks with your mind.’

‘You talk about the wind as if it’s a person.’

‘Some say she is a collection of souls.’ He saw her instantly dismiss that. ‘Just don’t be alarmed.’

She wasn’t—at first.

Amy lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling—a ceiling that rose and fell with the wind. She missed the girls more than she had ever thought possible and she missed too what might have been.

Not once had she glimpsed what Emir had been considering—not once had she thought herself a potential sheikha queen. She’d thought she might be his mistress—an occasional lover, perhaps, and a proxy mother to the twins.

Emir had been willing to marry her.

It helped that he had.

It killed that he never could.

Amy lay there and fought not to cry—not that he would be able to hear her, for the wind was whipping around the tent and had the walls and roof lifting. The flickering candles made the shadows dance as if the room were moving, so she closed her eyes and willed sleep to come. But the wind shrieked louder, and it sounded at times like the twins. She wept for them.

Later she could hear a woman screaming—the same sound she had heard the night they were born. The shouts had filled the palace a year ago this night, when the twins were being born. These screams sounded like a woman birthing—screams she would never know—and it was torture. She knew the wind played tricks, but the screams and the cries were more than she could bear.

Maybe they’d taunted Emir too, for when she opened her eyes he was standing there, still robed, his sword strapped to his hips. His kafeya was off. He stood watching, a dark shadow in the night, but one that did not terrify.

‘When you kissed me back, when you said please, what did you think I meant?’ he asked.

‘I thought it was sex that was on offer.’ If she sounded coarse she didn’t care. Her hurt was too raw to smother it with lies.

‘That is not our way.’ Emir looked at her. ‘In Alzirz they are looser with their morals. There are harems and …’ He shook his head. ‘I did not want that for you.’

Not for the first time, but for more shameful reasons now, she wished she were there—wished it was there that Emir was King.

‘I never for a moment thought you would consider me for your bride. When we kissed—when we …’ She swallowed, because it was brutal to her senses to recall it. ‘When we kissed,’ Amy started again, ‘when we touched …’ Her eyes were brave enough to meet his. ‘I wasn’t thinking about the future or the twins or solutions, I thought it was just me that you wanted …’

And he looked at her, and the winds were silenced. The screams and the tears seemed to halt. Surely for one night he could think like a man and not a king? Emir was honest in his response and his voice was low with passion. ‘It was,’ Emir said. Yes, at first he had been seducing, but later … ‘When I kissed you I forgot.’

‘Forgot?’

‘I forgot everything but you.’

She looked over to him, saw the raw need in his eyes, saw the coffee colour of his skin and the arms that had held her, and she wanted his mouth back.

‘I know we can’t go anywhere. I know …’ She just wanted to be a woman again—wanted one time with this astonishingly beautiful man. ‘Just once …’ she whispered, and Emir nodded.

‘Just once,’ came his reply, for that was all it must be, and with that he picked her up and carried her to his bed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE lay on his bed and watched as he undid the leather belt and the sword fell to the floor with a gentle thud. She turned away from him then, for she was filled with terror. All too clearly she could see his braids and royal decorations and she knew what they were doing was wrong—she wanted the man, not the King, and his status was truly terrifying.

‘Turn around,’ Emir told her.

Slowly she did so, and saw him naked, and she feared that too—for he was more beautiful then she had even imagined and, yes, now it was safe to admit to herself that she had imagined. He hardened under her gaze. Her shy eyes took in more of him—the toned planes of his stomach, the long, solid thighs and the arms she now ached to have hold her again.

‘This is wrong,’ she said as he walked towards her.

‘It doesn’t feel wrong,’ he said, and he climbed in beside her. The fact that the bodies that met were forbidden to each other only heightened their desire.

She cringed as he took off her nightgown, closed her eyes as he pushed down the bedclothes and fully exposed her. He wanted to know every piece of her skin. He kissed not her mouth but the breast that he had so nearly kissed in the desert, and she was as aroused in that instant as she had been then. She returned to that moment in the desert when he could have taken her. He kissed lower, kissed her stomach as deeply as if it were her mouth, and then he moved lower still, and she lay there writhing as he made her feel like a woman again.

Her body had craved passion for so long and he had returned it to her. She had denied herself touch, had felt untouchable, empty, and now he filled her with his tongue, touched her so intimately and not with haste.

With her moans he grew.

With her screams he lost himself more.

He had shared not an ounce of emotion since the death of his wife, but he shared it now.

There was a burden for this King that not the wisest of his council knew about. There was a decision in the making that he could only come to alone—a decision he had wrestled with for more than a year now. It was all forgotten.

He felt her fingers in his hair and the tightening of her thighs to his head. Her hips attempted to rise but he pushed her down with his mouth till she throbbed into him, and then he could wait no more.

He kneeled, looked down at all that beckoned, and she felt the roughness of his thighs part her legs further. Her body still quivered from his intimate exploration as he parted her with his thumbs. She looked with decadent, wanton fear at what would soon be deep inside her and, breathless, pleaded for it to be now.

He pulled back, for he must sheathe, and then he heard her whisper.

‘We don’t have to.’

For the first time, the fact that there could be no baby brought only relief, for neither wanted to halt things.

Now he lifted her hips, aimed himself towards her. A more deliberate lover he could not be, for he watched and manoeuvred every detail, and she let him—let him position her till he was poised at her entrance, and then he made her wait.

‘Emir …’

His smile was as rare as it was wicked.

‘Emir …’

He hovered closer and was cruel in his timing; that beat of space made her weep, and her mouth opened to beg him again, but her words faded as he filled her, as he drove into her with the ardour of a man ending his deprivation. He forgot his size and to be gentle, and never had she been so grateful to have a man forget.

He filled her completely, and then filled her again. He was over her, and the kiss he had first denied her was Amy’s reward, for he hushed her moans with his mouth until it was Emir who could not be silent. The pleasure was now his, all pain obliterated, the shackles temporarily released. His mind soared in freedom as her body moved with his. Escape beckoned and he claimed it, groaning to hold on to it, yearning to sustain it. But the pulse of her around him was too much—the rapid tightening and flicker of intimate muscles, her hot wet cheek next to his, her breath, his name in his ear.

He lost himself to her, gave in to what was and spilled into her, called out her name as they dived into pleasure. The wind was their friend now, for it shrieked louder around them, carried their shouts and their moans and buried their secret in the sands.

CHAPTER EIGHT

OF COURSE it should never have happened.

And of course it must never be referred to again.

But it was a little before morning and they’d made love again after she’d turned and looked at him while she still could. She ran a finger across the scar above his eye about which she had often wondered and was brave enough now to ask.

‘What is that from?’

‘You don’t ask that sort of thing.’

‘Naked beside you I do.’

Maybe it was better she knew, Emir thought. Maybe then she could understand how impossible it was for them.

‘Some rebels decided that they could not wait for the predictions, so they took matters into their own hands.’ He did not look at her as he spoke. He felt her fingers over his scar and remembered again. ‘They decided to take out one lineage.’ He heard her shocked gasp. ‘Of course our people had seen them approaching and they rallied. My father went out and battled, as did my brother and I …’

‘And your mother?’

‘She was killed in her bed.’

He removed her hand from his face, climbed out of bed, and dressed and headed to prayer. He had begged the desert for a solution and for a moment had thought one had been delivered; instead it had been a taunt. He must play by the rules, Emir realised as he remembered again that night and all he had inherited.

So he prayed for his country and his people.

He must forget about their lovemaking, the woman he had held in his arms. He had never felt closer to another, even Hannah, and he prayed for forgiveness.

He prayed for his daughters and the decision he was making and he got no comfort, for his heart still told him he was making the wrong one.

Then he remembered what his father had fought for and he knew he must honour it—so he prayed again for his country.

Amy lay silent, taking in this last time she would be in his bed, the masculine scent of him. Her hand moved to the warm area where he had slept and she yearned to wait for him to return to the bed and make love to her just one more time. But for both of them that would be unfair, so she headed to the bathing area and then to her own room.

She fixed her hair and put on the blue robe, became the nanny again.

For Emir there was both regret and relief when he returned from prayer and saw the empty bed. Regret and relief as they shared a quiet breakfast. She did not once refer to last night, but it killed him to see her in the familiar blue robe and to know what was beneath.

And when the silence deafened her, when she knew if she met his eyes just one more time, it would end in a kiss she wished him good morning and headed to her room. She lay on her bed and willed the twins to return, for sanity to come back to her life and to resume again her role.

But of course it felt different.

Her heart swelled with pride and relief when the birthday girls were returned.

Their squeals of delight as she kissed them made her eyes burn from the salt of unshed tears. She realised how close to being their mother she had come.

‘What are these?’ She attempted normal conversation, looked at the heart-shaped vials that now hung around their necks.

‘They are filled with the sands of the desert—they must be worn till they go to bed tonight, then they are to be locked away until their wedding day.’

‘They’re gorgeous.’ Amy held one between her finger and thumb. ‘What are they for?’