Born Royal

“All right, go ahead,” she said, suddenly wishing she had Christina here to support her through this.

She heard him expel an exasperated breath. “Not over the phone, damn it, Julia! I need to see you face-to-face. And away from the palace somewhere.”

Panic threatened in her stomach. The baby did a somersault. “Where? We’ll be chased wherever we go.”

He said dryly, “I think I can promise to get us to a venue where there will be no journalists.”

“I don’t see what there is to talk about.”

“How about the fact that at the moment a Sebastiani child is the only direct descendant of the Kamal ruling house in the next generation and my father’s people will want to know whether he’s to be in line for the throne?” Rashid said impatiently. “Do you feel that question could be important enough to discuss?”

The panic rushed up to grip her throat. Might the old man name her son a prince of Tamir? She supposed he had the right to confer the status of prince on his illegitimate grandson, if he wished. She was pretty sure that in the dim and distant past of Tamir, Rashid himself had a bloodline that dated back to a favourite concubine.

What kind of chaos would it cause in her life, to be raising the child destined, however briefly, for the throne of another nation? An enemy nation. And what suffering was in store when Rashid married and had a legitimate son, as he surely would, and her son was displaced as heir?

“He can’t do that!” she cried. Rashid was right. They had to talk. “All right, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to agree not to issue any statement until we’ve talked.”

Her nerves tightened. “Twenty-four hours,” she said.

She heard him breathe. “That’s not much time.”

“Twenty-four hours,” she repeated.

“Twenty-four hours it is. If you can convince your father not to have my helicopter shot down on arrival,” Rashid said with mordant humour, “I’ll pick you up in an hour. Pack a swimsuit.”

It was a beautiful ceremony. Mariel was stunning, with an unusual and artistic scrunch of white veil and flowers framing her head, and a gorgeous silk brocade dress styled with a medieval flavour that exactly suited the chapel. Haroun al Jawadi looked proud and handsome, and every time he gazed down at his bride a shiver of delight went through the congregation.

She wasn’t sure how Rashid Kamal had drawn her eye. When the congregation was kneeling, Julia was no longer hidden by her pillar. A baby started to babble, and her gaze automatically flicked towards the groom’s side of the church.

A man’s black hair was burnished by the winter sunlight streaming in through a stained-glass window. She watched with a smile of absent pleasure before she suddenly recognized the shape of his brow and chin.

Then she pressed her lips together and resolutely bowed her head, feeling as if someone had just walked over her grave. It wasn’t the first time they’d been at the same function, but always before it had been at large, formal gatherings. She’d never been invited to such an intimate gathering with him before. There probably weren’t a hundred people here.

She had no one to blame but herself. If she had accepted the invitation in the normal way, of course Mariel would have forewarned her. And if she had thought for even a moment, she might have guessed that the Crown Prince of Tamir might number among the friends of the groom. For a few moments Julia considered slipping away immediately after the ceremony, but she didn’t want to go without even saying hello.

“Julia! Oh, thank you for coming after all! How wonderful to see you!” Mariel cried with delighted surprise when, in the château later, Julia came over to give her friend a hug. “I’m so glad! It must mean you’re feeling better.”

Then her eyes widened at a thought. “Oh, my goodness!” she said faintly.

Julia laughed. “It’s all right, I’ve seen him.”

“He’s one of Harry’s best friends,” Mariel confided in a low voice. “I was going to warn you if you accepted.”

“I’m keeping out of his way. We’ve done this kind of thing before, after all.”

“Maybe he won’t even recognize you! You look so different, Julia! Have you changed your style completely?”

“Do you like it?”

“Absolutely! You look—softer. You’re way too thin, but—there’s a glow that wasn’t there before. And I love your hair! Is it metaphorical? Are you letting your hair down at last?”

Julia enjoyed herself at the party that followed, and it was easy to avoid Rashid Kamal. People recognized her, but there were quite a few celebrity and royal faces in the room. No stranger paid her particular attention until a gorgeous redhead she vaguely recognized stopped beside her.

“I was just wondering if you’d heard any more news,” she said apologetically, when the two women had exchanged greetings. Astrid had dated Lucas for a while a couple of years ago.

“There’s nothing,” Julia said sadly. “We’re just waiting.”

“But it was definitely his plane?”

Julia frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The piece of wreckage they found yesterday. Are they definite that—” Astrid broke off in horror when she saw Julia’s face. “My God, haven’t you heard?”

Julia clutched at her. “They—they found the wreckage? Lucas? Did they find—” she gasped breathlessly.

“Oh, hell! I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you! But I don’t—the newscast I heard just said a piece of wreckage had been found and they thought—”

Julia was already groping in her bag for her phone. “I left home yesterday.” And last night had been spent in the tiny, old-fashioned hotel with no TV in the room. Her mother had said nothing last night when she phoned. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go and phone!”

She dashed out the nearest door, into a hallway. But there were people strolling up and down, and she took the nearest stairwell up. She came out in a shadowed, darkly wainscotted hall, with doors along one side and arched windows on the other. Looking for a place to hide, Julia ran to a corner at the far end that was partly protected by a carved panel, and huddled in the darkness, dialing home.

It was the private line, and her mother answered. “Mama? It’s Julia!” she breathed.

“Hello, darling. Having a good time? Where are you?”

“At the château. Mama, someone just told me—”

“Oh, Julia,” said her mother, and those words were enough. Her hopes that it could be a mistake died. She sobbed a breath.

“It’s true, then?”

“Yes, we heard late last night.” Her mother’s voice held the memory of tears. “After you called. I didn’t—I didn’t want you to be alone with the news, so I didn’t call back. I suppose it was foolish to hope you wouldn’t hear before you got home. I’m sorry, darling. I wanted you to have a good time at your friend’s wedding. You’ve had so little enjoyment lately.”

“I don’t know any details, Mama. Just that they’ve…” She swallowed, her throat aching with unshed tears. “Is it true they’ve found the plane?” Julia asked.

Her mother’s voice trembled. “A piece of the wreckage. They’re pretty sure—” she swallowed and continued in a calmer voice “—pretty sure it’s Lucas’s plane.”

“Was there any sign of—of Lucas?”

“No. At the moment they seem to think the plane broke up in the air. Julia, the worst of it is, they—the authorities there have called off the air search.”

It was like hearing her own death warrant.

“No!” she protested, and the unshed tears burst from her in a flood. “Noooo! Oh, Lucas!”

“Anna’s very distressed. Your father is insisting that some sort of search should continue, but—well, at this distance it’s hard to know exactly what’s…what’s…oh, Julia,” she wailed helplessly. “What are we going to do?”

“Going off with Rashid Kamal?” her father repeated, his voice rough with incredulity. “Why? Where?”

Anna was staring at her sister with a wild surmise. Only the queen went on calmly drinking her coffee.

Julia bit her lip. She might have known she’d run into flak on this. It wasn’t anything she liked, either, but it had to be done. She wished her father would accept it without a lot of argument. Argument just made her more jittery.

“I am not going off with him, Papa. We are simply going somewhere we can talk for a few hours over lunch.”

“Where?” he repeated grimly.

“I don’t know. Somewhere we can be reasonably alone, I imagine. I’ve left it to him.”

“You’ve lost your bearings, Julia!” He looked at his wife for support.

They were sitting in the small breakfast room over a late Saturday breakfast. Anna was now hiding a smile. She flicked Julia a conspiratorial, admiring look and picked up her cup. Julia wanted to cry, I am not sneaking off to a lovers’ assignation!

The queen remained silent, and her father returned to the attack. “I forbid you to go anywhere with a Kamal! Have you forgotten your brother’s fate?”

“Papa, you have surely accepted by now that it wasn’t the Kamals who did that. If anyone, it was the Brothers of Darkness. And who has done most lately to spike their guns?”

Her father subsided a little. “That still doesn’t make it safe for you—”

“Look,” Julia interrupted. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But like it or not, Rashid Kamal is the father of my child. And at the moment, according to him, his father is contemplating naming my son as his heir. Whether that’s an empty threat or not, it just points up the fact that there are things we have to discuss. And since I don’t want those things leaked to the media, we are going somewhere alone, and I will not be taking a bodyguard.”

She won the argument. But by the end she was so worn out with pretending to trust Rashid Kamal that she was sweating with nerves.

The helicopter beat the air as it slowly settled onto the grass, whipping Julia’s long hair and the full skirt of her soft yellow dress. She put a hand up to hold her hat. Rashid watched the way her dress clung to her stomach, looking for the signs that a child was growing there.

When he cut the rotor, she came across the lawn towards him and leaned in the passenger door, peering towards the seats in the back of the helicopter. Rashid pulled his mouthpiece away from his chin so she could recognize him.

“Hello!” he cried over the engine noise.

Julia did a double take. She hadn’t been expecting him to be piloting the helicopter himself, and a fresh wave of nervous energy swept her.

“Hello!” Her voice held the sound of her determination to keep this pleasant. She had a deep, primitive urge to turn and flee.

“Can you climb in?” He spoke so matter-of-factly that her fears were momentarily calmed. He’s a Kamal, she told herself. That doesn’t mean he’s going to murder me in cold blood.

He leaned across to offer her a hand, but she clambered in without his help. He frowned to himself without knowing why. Something to do with wanting to be needed. Especially because she was pregnant.

With his son.

He helped her strap herself in, however, and gestured towards a headset in front of her. Julia took off her straw hat and slipped the headset over her ears. A moment later the chopper lifted smoothly off under his guidance, and they were airborne.

“Did you bring a bathing suit?” Rashid’s voice said in her headset.

It felt too intimate to have his voice inside her head like this. It reminded her of the last time she had heard him so close. Then he had not needed the assistance of a headset to give the impression of closeness; his voice had sounded close because his mouth was against her hair.

Beautiful, he had murmured. You are so beautiful….

Julia’s cheeks burned with the memory. “I did,” she said, hefting her drawstring bag as evidence without meeting his eyes. She dropped the bag between her feet and turned to look out. He had taken them out over the water and was heading north.

So the private place he had in mind was not on any of the Tamir Islands. She had wondered if he meant to take her to his horse farm on Siraj.

“Are we going to a yacht?” she wondered, half to herself, forgetting that her headset, too, had a microphone.

“No, an island.”

“An island? Rashid, I don’t have a passport with me!”

He laughed. “Stop worrying, Julia.” Again his voice was intimate and seductive in her ears. “Your seat reclines. Lie back and relax.”

In the cocoon of the helicopter with him, she felt strangely detached from the normal world. If she had not known Rashid was a Kamal, she would have felt an instinctive trust of him.

There was nothing she could do about this situation except start screaming to be taken home. Or go along with it.

She was tired after her sleepless night, and she would do better in the coming discussion if she caught some sleep now. With a resigned shrug, Julia found the mechanism, reclined her seat, and, with the sun bright above them, and sparkling almost painfully from the deep blue of the Mediterranean below, closed her eyes and let herself drowse. The memory was never far away….

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