Born Royal

“Oh, for sure!” There was a giggle from Christina that reminded Julia of those long-ago, carefree days of childhood. It was full of mischief and fun that was very unlike the cool Dr. Sebastiani Christina had become, and she thought, They really are in love.

Suddenly she felt like crying. Why couldn’t it happen like that for me? Why is it I only get proposed to for political convenience?

“Are you still there, Tiss?”

There was the sound of the other receiver being gently replaced. Julia swallowed the lump in her throat. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“What is it? Is everything all right?”

Where to begin?

“We heard about your engagement on the news. Congratulations.” There was just a hint of hurt in her sister’s voice. “It was a bit unexpected. First they were hinting that Rashid would deny pat—”

“Squidge, it was a surprise to me, too. The first I heard I was marrying him was when I read it in the Messenger.”

There was an sharp intake of breath, and she had the satisfaction of knowing she’d shocked Christina. “Excuse me?”

“He didn’t bother to propose to me. He was so sure I’d be grateful for his offer he—”

“Grateful!” Christina yelped. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Thank you for that. I’ve been wondering if I’m the crazy one and should be panting with gratitude for being offered another chance at the married state.”

“Is that his attitude? I thought at least that he loved you. I wasn’t sure about your feelings, but—”

“He does not love me,” Julia said ruthlessly.

“Then why would he want to marry you?”

“For the same reason he cooperated with NATO to get those terrorists. Because he wants to signal that Tamir’s ready for an alliance with the West. He wants peace between us and Tamir. All those good things. And all we have to do is sacrifice our personal happiness for the good of our countries.”

“My God.” A long silence. “I’m sorry, Julia. The newscaster said…I confess I was really hoping that you did love him. It would be so nice to think of you being happy at last.”

“No, it’s the same old question here. Do I marry for the sake of the kingdom?”

“That’s awful. What does Papa say about it?”

“They’re still away, thank God. After an initial apoplectic attack, Papa backed off. I think he just can’t cope. You know how old-fashioned he is, he hates to think of a baby being born outside of marriage. On the other hand…”

Christina gave a breathless little laugh. “On the other hand, when the father’s a Kamal… Oh, Tiss, what a mess. What are you going to do?”

Suddenly the tears were threatening again. “That’s what I called to ask you. What am I going to do? Got any ideas?”

A humming silence. Then, “It’s not like they teach this sort of thing in grad school, Tiss. Of course it would be better if you could be married, but not… Are you sure Rashid doesn’t love you? Not even just enough to build on?”

“Yes, I’m sure. He told me himself he wanted the marriage for political purposes. Apparently he’s had this dream of ending the feud through a marriage for years. He even imagined I might have deliberately got pregnant because I had the same goal, can you believe it?”

“No,” Christina said. “I can’t believe anyone would think you’re that calculating. But Julia, how did it happen?”

“I guess for a critical moment I went out of my mind. It’s not based on anything real.”

“But you did—Tiss, forgive me if I’m missing something here, but there must be something between you.”

“Squidge,” Julia began a bit desperately, “it happened the night they announced they were calling off the search for Lucas. It was—I mean, my feelings were just so close to the surface…. I’m sure you must have felt the same.”

A long, sorrowing silence fell between the sisters. “Has there been any news at all?” Christina asked quietly.

“Nothing. And Papa still can’t accept it. Well, neither can I, in my heart.”

“Me neither. And that’s what caused you to lose your head with Rashid that night? Don’t you think that just the very fact that you could turn to Rashid in such a moment shows—”

“No!” Julia’s heart was beating fast suddenly. “I wasn’t really attracted. I was just out of my mind.” She said it like a mantra, as if the denial might protect her from something. Something like truth.

Christina sighed with regret. “Well, you can’t marry him, then. And you shouldn’t feel you have to. This isn’t the fourteenth century, Julia. Our countries don’t need a marriage contract. They need a peace treaty.”

Julia breathed deep. “Yes, you’re right. You’re right.”

“Don’t marry someone you don’t love, Tiss. You know how bad a loveless marriage is, but you don’t know how good a loving one is. You deserve better next time around—a man you love, and who loves you, with a once-in-a-lifetime sort of love.”

Warmth and certainty flowed through the phone line. She could hear the smile behind Christina’s words that said her sister had found that kind of love. She felt a pang so painful she almost gasped.

“All right. Thanks, Squidge. Go back to bed now,” she ordered softly.

“Well…are you really all right?”

“Yes.”

“Good night, then.”

“Night. Give my love to Jack.”

“Mmmmm.” It was a sound of rich happiness. “And Tiss—”

“Yes?”

“Don’t let them make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

Julia sat with her hand on the phone for a long time after they had hung up, feeling the connection with her sister. Imagining Christina going back into the bedroom and snuggling down beside her husband, knowing he loved her…. How lucky they were. Alone together on their honeymoon in the middle of nowhere, no staff, no bodyguards, no servants. Just two people who loved each other.

You don’t know how good a loving marriage is.

Suddenly the tears burned up and overflowed, and this time she couldn’t stop them. It was as if she was crying for everything at once—for Lucas, for her loveless marriage, for her child who would be raised without a father…for the fact that Rashid wanted to marry her for all the wrong reasons.

A newsmagazine with his photo on the cover was lying on her bedside table. No doubt because some romantic member of the domestic staff imagined she would want the picture of her intended. She glanced down at his face. His eyes were at once stern and laughing, and they seemed to pierce her defences.

If he had pretended he loved me instead of telling me the truth, I might have imagined…. She quickly broke off the train of thought. Thank God he didn’t. My emotions are close to the surface, and I miss Lucas so much. I’ll have to be careful. I could weaken. I weakened once before.

At the age of nineteen, Princess Julia had felt herself to be at the doorway of an exciting future. She had passed her university entrance exams with excellent marks at the Swiss school she attended, and a small documentary film she had made as an extracurricular project, about Montebello’s famous street market, had won her a place at a prestigious college of film in London. That was the future she had yearned for. She had wanted to make films.

Papa had had other ideas. His ideas all centred upon duty. And he wanted Julia to come home, marry and have children in the good, old-fashioned Montebellan tradition.

He even had a husband all picked out for her. Handsome Luigi di Vitale Ferrelli, scion of one of Montebello’s wealthiest aristocratic families, was among Julia’s large circle of friends. Papa knew that Julia already liked Luigi. The di Vitale Ferrellis had always been staunch allies of the Sebastianis, but never before had there been a marriage to cement the bond.

Julia and Luigi had announced their engagement and the country had gone crazy with delight. She was so beautiful, he was so handsome—and one of Montebello’s own! So much better than marrying her off to some foreign prince.

The engagement would be a long one. Luigi, only two years older than Julia, was learning about his family’s business from the ground up. He was often out of the country, travelling to distant parts of the family empire, and his schedule was impossible to predict.

Julia’s father would not agree to her going to London, even so. Instead she stayed in the palace, working with her father, learning a job she enjoyed, but would never be called upon to perform.

Julia had believed—or wanted to believe—that the liking between her and Luigi could develop into love. Lots of the girls in her set were half in love with him. He was good fun, and had charm.

Luigi was very respectful, and surprisingly old-fashioned. Right from the start he treated her as untouchable. “Don’t worry, Julia,” he assured her during one of their brief meetings between his flying trips. “I won’t rush you. There’s plenty of time. When we get married, everything will fall into place.”

For a while she accepted it. But there was a lot of pairing off among her friends, and Julia began to yearn for romance in her own life. Once, when Luigi came home on one of his increasingly rare visits, she tried to hint this fact to him.

He took her in his arms and kissed her passionately for the first time. His passion seemed almost anguished, and Julia had responded openly, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing into his embrace.

Then he had stopped. “No, Julia,” he said. “We can wait. We should wait. Be patient. My father will bring me home soon to work at head office, and we can be married.”

The months passed, and stretched into the first year, and then the second, and Luigi never budged from this position. He swore that he loved her, with a torment in his eyes that mystified her. If they loved each other and they were going to marry, what was the point of his torment? She teased him, she touched him, she enticed him, using all the confidence of her new young sexuality, trying to break down the wall of his reserve.

Her attempts failed. And gradually, humiliatingly, she saw the truth—much as he liked her, and she didn’t doubt that, Luigi just didn’t want to make love to her. When she finally accepted it, she was awash with embarrassment and shame for the way she had exposed herself.

And she had a clear understanding that marriage between them could never work. She made the decision to go to her father and tell him that she wanted out of the engagement.

With cruel precision of timing, before she could act on her decision, her sister Christina’s scandal broke. Her photo appeared in the tabloids—topless, with the newspapers making no secret of the fact that it was her own boyfriend who had sold them the pictures.

Before she could talk to her father, King Marcus came to speak to her. To protect Christina from further media attention, he wanted to make the date of Julia’s wedding firm. He had spoken to Luigi’s father, who had agreed that it was time to bring the young man home and let him settle down. The wedding would be next month.

Julia had tried to tell her father then, but it was too late. It was the first time her father had pleaded with her. “Please don’t bring another scandal on our heads, Julia. I ask this as your father and as the king. Montebello asks you….”

The wedding had thrilled her father’s subjects, but Julia had repeated her vows with misery in her heart. And in Luigi’s eyes had been a hunted look that told her, too late, how desperately he, too, had wanted out.

She was not surprised at his complete inability to consummate the marriage. She was a lot less naive at twenty-two than she had been at nineteen. She tried to help in every way she could, but the end was always the same—frustration and anger.

After a while Luigi began to blame her, and worse, to mock her attempts to arouse him. That was the beginning of a much deeper humiliation. Luigi told her she was the only woman with whom he was impotent, listed the names of others—her friends, sometimes—with whom he had had very successful, satisfactory flings. Every time he bedded another woman he would brag to her about it.

She learned to doubt his bragging, just as she learned to dread the appearance of the regular stories in the press speculating about the reasons for the golden couple’s lack of children. Inevitably it would mean Luigi coming to her bedroom to try again. And blaming her.

She knew that he was telling his friends that she was frigid and that was the reason for the lack of children. His friends dutifully leaked the information to journalists. When she pointed out the unfairness of this, he responded with a furious attack on her lack of femininity, lack of sex appeal…what do you want me to tell them? The truth? That you disgust me?

Julia buried her misery in work. She was intelligent, and she had an instinct for public work. Her father came to rely on her more and more for a calm and reasoned opinion on foreign and domestic affairs.

Publicly, and within the family, she and Luigi presented a united front. No one knew how deeply, fundamentally flawed the storybook marriage was.

Until the scandal broke like a tidal wave over all their heads. Without warning, photographs of Luigi in an unmistakably compromising position with George Dimarno, Julia’s own chauffeur, were published in a tabloid paper.

Even the fact that the media universally condemned Luigi and sympathized with Julia was unbearable. They speculated endlessly about his treatment of her. They published tidbits from palace staff eager to set the record straight at last. In the end they published the horrible, self-exculpating interview that Luigi, driven almost to insanity, had given. It was awful to see him expose himself so brutally, painful to read how he had turned on her.

That interview had been the breaking point for Julia. She withdrew into herself, distancing herself from public life, and even from her family, as she slowly sank into the depression she had been keeping at bay for so long.

It was himself Luigi hated, not her. She could see now that he had rejected his own sexuality, rejected for as long as he could, even the knowledge of it. She could understand, but understanding did not undo the cruel damage he had inflicted on her sense of herself.

It took her a year to get through it. A long, cold year in which she had had no interest in life, no appetite. The only place she felt comfortable was alone in her private gym. She ate too little, exercised too much, lost too much weight. She had enjoyed the feeling of control over her body. It was the only part of her life over which she felt any control.

And then one day the long black tunnel showed light, and Julia realized that there would be an end to her shapeless, colourless days. She resolved to start over, to make a life for herself more in line with what she wanted.

But it wasn’t a light at the end of the tunnel. It was Rashid Kamal, on a collision course.

Chapter 4

“The course of true love not running quite smoothly?” Nadia asked Rashid over dinner that night. Brother and sister were alone in the palace in Tamir. Everyone else was at one or another function tonight, except for their brother Hassan, who was miles away in the oil fields as usual. They were sitting at a little table on the East Terrace, overlooking the gorge. In the velvety darkness the sea rushed and shushed against the rocks.

Rashid leaned back in his chair. “Why do you say so?” he hedged. They were speaking English so that the serving staff would not understand.

His sister smiled mockingly. “Because Nargis told me. And before you ask, Nargis looks after my wardrobe. The staff is buzzing with the news that you are being uncharacteristically rude and withdrawn today. Everyone knows you went to Montebello to talk to Julia earlier.”

“Do they? Damn it!”

“So there’s speculation about whether it’s because Princess Julia has accepted you, in which case you’re regretting the loss of your playboy lifestyle, or rejected you, in which case your heart is broken. Naturally everyone prefers to believe the intensely romantic version. Care to comment?”

“Damn it to hell.”

“I believe it’s nothing more than a bad headache,” Nadia said with a grin, “but then I’m your sister and I know it’s a rare woman who makes you snarly.”

“She is a rare woman,” he couldn’t stop himself saying, and watched Nadia’s eyebrows go up.

“Ah! And am I to infer from this that she has rejected your proposal?”

He was aware of mounting irritation. “Yes, she has! I can’t figure her out!” He glared at his sister as if she were part of this mystery. “Why would she turn me down? She’s pregnant and the press have been on her like wolves! Why won’t she see that—”

He stopped because Nadia was laughing. “Haven’t you ever before met with a woman who turned you down, Rashid?”

“I’ve never proposed to a woman before,” he said shortly.

“You didn’t propose to Julia, the way I hear it.”

“What do you mean? I proposed very publicly!”

Nadia shook her head. “There’s a difference, big brother, between asking a woman to marry you and telling the world that she’s going to marry you and then expecting her to agree.”

He looked at her, indignant. “You’re the one who advised me to rush my fences.”

“With Father, not with Julia! Can’t you see how arrogant it is to assume that a woman will jump at the chance to marry you? And a beautiful princess, too! Why on earth didn’t you talk to Julia first?”

“You know what the speculation was like! What was so wrong? I realized what Julia had been going through for the past few months and wanted to put an end to it.”

“Knight in shining armour, huh?”

Rashid moved his shoulders, reminded of Julia’s Don’t try riding into my life on your white horse. “Look,” he said forcefully, as if somehow he were justifying himself to Julia, “if I delayed, someone was going to put words in my mouth! I didn’t want Julia reading that I was surprised to hear I’d been named the father of her child, or considering my options, or something like that. What would be worse, do you think? To get a proposal after someone has spent time considering whether he’s really the father of your child, or—”

“Pax!” His sister lifted her hands and laughed. “This is Nadia here, not Julia, notice?”

He subsided with a clenched jaw.

“I couldn’t make her see it.”

“A new experience, I take it. I think I’m going to like Julia. When I remember all the women who have cried on my shoulder trying to solve the mystery of how to reach your feelings, it does my heart good.”

Rashid frowned. “This has nothing to do with my feelings. I’m trying to do what’s right for all concerned!”

“Noble. Sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. What do you mean?”

“Well, there is a certain question of how she got pregnant in the first place.”

Rashid grunted. “It was nothing but a kind of—insanity.”

“At your age,” Nadia agreed in cheerful incredulity. “I see.”

“And however it happened, it’s done. What I have to think about now is what I’m going to do in the future. Julia is going to issue a statement denying the engagement tomorrow, I think.” Rashid irritably waved away the waiter who was trying to pour him more coffee. “I’ve got to prevent that.”

Nadia opened her eyes at him in mute reproach and, pointedly gracious, said to the waiter in Arabic, “Yes, thank you, Iqbal, I will have some more coffee.

“And how are you going to do that?” she asked, when Iqbal had retreated.

“I have to swear you to secrecy, Nadia.”

“All right.”

“I’ve got to get her alone. I think she’d see sense if she didn’t have that coterie of Kamal-haters around her.”

Nadia’s eyebrows went up. “And?”

Rashid rubbed his chin and stared out into the darkness. For a moment they listened to the sound of the waterfall.

“I’m going to have to kidnap her.”

It was when Lucas’s plane went missing, oddly, that Julia woke up at last. Perhaps because she suddenly saw how precious life was. And she had given away a whole year of hers.

No one knew whether Lucas would be found alive or dead. All they had was hope. Julia had returned to the family emotionally to share that hope with her sisters and her parents, and keep it alive.

She had learned a lot during her year of self-exile. She felt she had come a long, long distance from the repressed, self-doubting perfectionist she had become in order to cope with Luigi’s rejection.

Mariel de Vouvray had been her friend since the two girls had attended private school in Switzerland together. When Mariel’s wedding invitation had arrived, she had turned it down, like every other invitation she received during that year of darkness.

But as the day grew closer, Julia began to change her mind. She and Mariel had been very close for a while, and it was only physical distance that had changed that. She wanted to see Mariel married to her prince. Haroun al Jawadi was a man Julia didn’t know, brother of the new Sultan of Bagestan.

Mariel had said on her invitation that the wedding was going to be “as private and personal as we can make it. We emphatically are not selling the story to Hello! magazine. So you won’t be on show—we hope!—if you come.”

She knew that a last-minute acceptance would cause logistical problems. The high-profile wedding guests were staying overnight in the château where the wedding was being held, as Julia had been invited to do. She didn’t want to put Mariel to the trouble of a reshuffle. She also knew that if word got out that Princess Julia was making her first public appearance at the wedding after a year’s exile it would boot up the media interest in the wedding.

She decided to go incognito. She travelled on her private passport and put up in a tiny family hotel where, if she was recognized, at least no one made a fuss.

The ceremony itself would take place in the beautiful old chapel attached to the château. Julia slipped into the church with a group of non-celebrity arrivals. No photographer recognized her in the ankle-length dark blue coat and low-brimmed hat. For good measure she had pulled her white silk scarf up over her chin.

Inside, she sat on the bride’s side of the church, tucking herself beside a pillar where she couldn’t be seen from most of the church. She couldn’t see, either, and she didn’t look around for people she knew.

So she didn’t realize until the ceremony was almost over that one of the guests was Rashid Kamal.

“We need to talk,” Rashid’s voice said firmly in her ear. Julia twitched nervously, feeling hunted. She shifted the receiver to her other hand.

“Do we? Why?” She had had a mostly sleepless night last night, and she wasn’t ready for this.

She could almost hear him gritting his teeth. “Because you are pregnant with my child and I want to marry you. And we need a reasoned discussion of the choices before you go public with a denial of our engagement.”

Julia was silent.

“You haven’t already done it, have you?”

“No.” Coward that she was. She should have picked up the phone when the mood was on her and called the newspaper reporter most loyal to her. She had told herself that she needed breathing space before stirring up yet another round of speculation. “Not yet.”

“No, of course not,” he reminded himself. “Someone would have called me for a comment immediately if you had.”

“And what would you have said?” She did not want a war with Rashid to be fought in the media. But she did not forget that he was the one who had put her in this position.

“What could I say? That I regretted your decision. And I do, Julia. But I don’t believe that decision is final, or should be.”

“It is!” she cried, almost panicking. “Totally final! I’m going to do it today!”

Damn it, did he always have to handle her wrong?

“Look,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I’d like us to talk. Before you do that.”

She sighed uneasily, not sure why she didn’t feel safe talking to him. He had such charisma. Suppose he convinced her to marry him against her better judgement? Once was enough.