‘No?’ Izzy queried in surprise as she spun back. ‘But I thought—’
‘This far we have not had much of a wedding day,’ Rafiq breathed in taut continuation. ‘No celebration, nothing…’
Izzy shrugged a tiny dismissive shoulder, her head high, her chin at an I-can-cope-with-anything angle. ‘We’re not a real couple,’ she pointed out quickly.
‘We may as well be,’ Rafiq countered, brilliant dark-as-Hades eyes locked to her triangular face, lingering on her pale flawless skin and the brightness of her bluer than blue eyes. ‘Tonight, we will do something different…’
‘Don’t think there’s a lot of different around this neck of the woods,’ Izzy warned him ruefully, having only seen sand and more sand out of any of the windows that looked beyond the walls and the courtyard. And Izzy didn’t like sand, had never liked sand, whether it was sand on a beach or sand in a sandpit when she was a kid. Sand in giant rolling dunes that formed the entire landscape left her cold.
‘We will dine in the desert this evening,’ Rafiq proposed, striving to think feminine, romantic, even frilly and getting absolutely nowhere in his imagination because he had absolutely no experience in that line. Instead he was forced to settle on an experience that he was pretty sure she could not previously have encountered.
‘Oh…’ Izzy was just quick enough to kill the grimace threatening her facial muscles. ‘Well, that would be different, special,’ she added hastily, not wanting to be picky or ungracious because there truly wasn’t much available in the way of alternative options.
‘The stars are amazing at night,’ Rafiq told her with sudden warmth, his smile illuminating his bronzed features like the sun and dazzling her. ‘The desert at night is wondrous.’
Engulfed by that astonishing smile, Izzy decided she could bear to picnic in a mud puddle should that be what was required of her.
* * *
Vanishing back into his own room, Rafiq stripped for a shower and wondered why he had suggested dinner in the desert. It was surely basic courtesy to ensure that his bride enjoyed her time in Zenara and for him to act as a considerate host? Even though he had planned to avoid her? his hind brain prompted. And beneath the beat of the shower, Rafiq groaned, comprehending his change of heart with a clarity that surprised him.
Izzy was not Fadith. In nature, she was not remotely similar to his first wife. She was a totally different woman. Just as the handful of women he had had sex with in recent years could also have been dissimilar, only he had never given them the chance to prove that, had never got to know them in any but the most superficial of ways. He had never spent the night with anyone until Izzy and had never allowed an encounter to stretch into a second night.
Izzy, however, was a unique case. ‘We’re not a real couple,’ she had said, and while in one essential way that was true since they did not plan to remain together, in other ways it was quite distinctively untrue, Rafiq reasoned seriously. Of course, his outlook on marriage was very different from hers. Weddings were fun occasions in the West, associated with romantic love and deeply optimistic hopes. But being born royal, Rafiq had never expected that kind of marriage. He had always known that he was unlikely to get to choose his wife for himself and that he would have to simply make the best of whichever woman he married. That awareness had made him realistic and practical.
What Izzy had yet to accept was that, even without those Westernised notions of hers about marriage, she was still his wife and was still the mother of his unborn children, a bond that would create an unbreakable lifelong tie between them. And when she did reach that real-world state of acceptance, how would she feel then? How could he possibly know?
He was still marvelling that she was willing to surrender custody of their offspring and leave her children behind in Zenara while she returned to the UK to pursue her career plans. She was a lot younger than he was, he reminded himself, and still defiantly determined to reclaim the life she had expected to have, and he understood that tenacious streak of hers. Even so, she had seemed softer, more sentimental and had made it very clear that family meant a lot to her…
But then what did he know about a mother’s emotions, most particularly a career-orientated modern mother? he asked himself cynically. Having birthed him, his own mother had not seemed to care whether he was alive or dead, having never shown any further interest in him. At a very young age he had realised that not all women were maternal. It wasn’t every woman who wanted to raise her own child, take on that responsibility for another being’s welfare and limit her own freedom accordingly. He had not the slightest doubt that, had it not been for the royal nursery staff, he would have starved and cried without comfort as a baby. He wasn’t making a poor judgement of Izzy’s character, he assured himself staunchly, just as he hadn’t judged his mother for the same lack of interest. After all, he freely acknowledged that his father had been no more concerned than his mother about their son’s well-being. And with his private jet at her disposal, Izzy would be able to come back and visit their children any time she wanted…
* * *
In the bedroom next door, Izzy cradled her mobile phone and tried to work out what she could afford to tell her sister when she called her. And she had to call Maya because they had never been out of contact for so long.
‘Where the heck have you been?’ her twin shrilled down the line with worried emphasis. ‘I’ve been worried sick! You vanished… I mean, who can afford to do that on our
