‘No, Izzy. I’m talking about much more. The firstborn of those twins will be my heir to the throne. I will be King when I reach my thirtieth birthday in eighteen months and my child will be the next in line, which is a very important role. If you don’t marry me, both our children will be automatically excluded by law from an official role in Zenara. Yet they need to be living here to learn our language, our culture and to get to know their people.’
Izzy released her breath in a long sigh because she hadn’t grasped just how deep that royal connection could go. Rafiq was going to be a king? Yes, she had already known that. So, how on earth had she contrived, even briefly, to forget such a fact? There she had been squabbling with him last night in bed as though he were just any ordinary Joe, when really he was anything but!
‘In the light of that reality, I have a suggestion to make,’ Rafiq murmured levelly.
Izzy looked up from the piece of fruit she was slicing and let herself greedily focus on him, only for a few seconds, she bargained with her conscience. He had the same effect on her, she reckoned, as a major crush would have on a teenager. Only she had never experienced one of those crushes. During the teen years, she and her sibling had been far too busy handling family problems like bailiffs and debt collectors and keeping food on the table with part-time work as shop assistants. It was just there was something so ravishingly perfect about those lean dark, chiselled features and those eyes, stunning, gleaming with gold highlights, and then there were the lashes: inky, lush and curling. Her body heated to such an extent that she thought she might expire.
‘A suggestion?’ she said jerkily, dredging her attention off him again to concentrate on eating the fruit, which was much safer and more sensible, she told herself fiercely, exasperated by the manner in which her brain kept on wandering around him.
‘That we marry now to legitimise our children and stay together until they are born,’ Rafiq outlined with clarity. ‘I need to be with you until the birth to support you, to be a responsible father.’
‘You’re a literal throwback to the Dark Ages,’ Izzy muttered helplessly. ‘But in an odd way, it’s kind of sweet.’
‘Sweet?’ Rafiq growled.
‘Most of the men I meet would run away from that level of responsibility,’ she extended, reluctant to offend him. ‘You’re the opposite. Sorry, I interrupted you. You were suggesting that we stay together until after the birth…and then?’
‘You and I go our separate ways,’ Rafiq framed, releasing his breath. ‘That agreement between us would leave all options open for all of us.’
Izzy nodded very slowly. Marry purely for the sake of that legal bond and then split up again? Yes, that did make sense to her. It would settle the essentials. It would give the twins their choices, whatever they might be, when they were adults and it would also leave both her and Rafiq free to continue with their lives. Even so, it certainly didn’t feel like the answer to her every prayer and she didn’t understand why it didn’t.
‘I think that would be almost perfect,’ she told Rafiq, because her brain believed that and she squashed the sense of unease already threatening to rise inside her. ‘After all, you can’t be any keener on the idea of marrying a virtual stranger than I am.’
The strong lines of his fabulous bone structure went taut, showing off the intriguing hollows, and her heart jumped behind her breastbone. ‘No…’ he conceded almost guiltily half under his breath. ‘I will always do my duty but my first marriage was not a happy one.’
Rafiq froze up even more as he felt those words slip from him because he had never once admitted to anyone what he had just admitted to her. Even so, the sky didn’t fall, and no piercing shard of disloyalty pained him because he had long since adjusted to the absence of a woman who had, in truth, been as absent in life to him while alive as she was after she passed. ‘I shouldn’t have said that!’ he breathed in a roughened undertone of discomfiture.
‘Why not, if it’s the truth?’ Izzy murmured quietly, skating a soothing finger down over the clenched fist lying within her reach. ‘All this will be easier if we try to be honest with each other.’
‘Yes,’ Rafiq conceded, censuring himself for that moment of weakness, that moment of unguarded frankness that was very unlike him. Something about Izzy encouraged him to break free of his normal reserve and self-discipline. He would have to watch himself around her and not make a habit of such vulnerability.
Women disliked weak men and only weak men revealed emotion, he reflected grimly. He had learned that as a child when his mother pushed him away and told him that boys didn’t cry and cling to their mothers. He had learned it as an adult when he tried to reason with his childless wife and referred to his own feelings and she went off into hysterics, outraged that he could dare to mention his side of their story and verbally abusing him for that mistake.
‘I will arrange the wedding.’
‘Wedding?’ she exclaimed in dismay.
‘Not a normal one,’ Rafiq qualified. ‘A little ceremony, which will only be witnessed by a couple of people in a quiet room here in this wing of the palace.’
Izzy’s frown evaporated. ‘Because it has to be secret,’ she guessed. ‘Well, that’s lucky. I don’t have anything to wear for a proper occasion.’
‘I will have appropriate attire brought to you. My uncle will be one of the witnesses and a bride in a dress of some kind will feel more normal to him. He is a kind man, a good man but out of touch with the
