“My father at least never used his grief as an excuse to grab Tamir land—”
“Your father accused my father of masterminding your brother’s disappearance,” he interrupted ruthlessly. “Also of planting bombs and orchestrating the kidnap attempts on you and your sister. What was this, if not an attempt to undermine my father’s reign, distance his allies and assist the Ikhwan al Zalaam—the Brothers of Darkness—in their bid to unseat us?”
His voice flicked her like a whip.
“There was good reason to suspect the Kamals!” she cried. “One bomber even confessed he’d been hired by your father! What would you expect my father to think?”
“The bomber lied. It was deliberate disinformation,” Rashid informed her levelly, as if she didn’t already know. “And I would expect from your father what I would expect from any intelligent person in a position of power—a calm and reasoned response to something that could easily have provoked a crisis.”
“Like King Ahmed’s, I suppose! Waiting till my father’s beside himself over Lucas and then demanding Delia’s Land again.”
They were almost shouting. He realized, not for the first time, how little self-control he had around her.
Rashid shook his head in exasperation. “Julia, can’t you understand that what Delia’s Land represents to my father isn’t land, but a sense of closure, of justice? Rightly or wrongly, a century ago the Kamal family believed that their Crown Prince was murdered by the Sebastianis. In their view they were entitled—”
Julia flared up. Nothing was more certain to get Sebastiani blood hot than a repetition of this stupid, baseless accusation. Tamir’s Crown Prince Omar Kamal and Montebello’s Princess Delia Sebastiani had been engaged lovers when copper was unexpectedly discovered on the Montebellan land marked out as her dowry, and to suggest that the Sebastianis had been so greedy as to murder the prince in order to prevent the marriage and retain the rich dowry land was an appalling slur against the Sebastiani name.
“In their view,” she interrupted in a hot, unstoppable flood, “the Kamals figured if they made an accusation of foul play they could still get their hands on Delia’s dowry land after Omar’s and Delia’s deaths. It was cynical manipulation then and it’s cynical manipulation now. The Sebastianis were just as horrified as the Kamals when Omar was killed. Your family doesn’t seem to want to remember that Delia was so unhappy over Omar’s death she committed suicide! The Sebastianis were hit just as hard as the Kamals. And then to be accused of murder on top of it! The accusation was disgusting enough a hundred years ago. For your father to—”
Rashid held up a hand. “Whatever my father feels about this feud, Julia, I am not interested in prolonging it.”
She stared at him, her anger arrested in surprise. This was the first she had ever heard that Rashid did not share his family’s century-old obsession.
“Really? Why?”
“Because it is futile. It serves no good purpose. You must see this. If I could uncover the truth about Omar’s death and satisfy my father’s need to know, I would. But for myself I have no need to know. We are where we are. If Omar had lived, I would be only a very distant cousin of the Crown Prince of Tamir, if I existed at all. He did not live. I am Crown Prince. Mash’Allah. What occupies me is not how I came to this position, but how I will fulfill it for the people’s good.”
Julia said nothing.
“You and I could work together in this, Julia. And bequeath to our son a nation that lives in peace.”
“Oh!” She drew a long, enlightened breath. So this was the answer. Not an elaborate game, not that he loved her, or even that he felt obliged to protect her unborn child.
It was a political marriage that motivated him. Her heart clenched painfully. She couldn’t speak.
“Over the past few months I have had time to think,” Rashid began quietly. “I thought about whether you had a reason for what happened. Sometimes I wondered if it was your intention to put us in this very situation—you pregnant with my child. I thought perhaps we had a similar view of the stupidity of this feud between our families, and how to heal it. Was I right?”
She stared at him. “What do you mean? That I planned to—that I meant to trick you into getting me pregnant so you’d be forced to marry me, for the sake of…” She faded off, swallowed, and continued in a whisper, “For the sake of peace between Tamir and Montebello?”
“Is it not so?”
She flung herself to her feet, unable to contain her feelings. “Is that what my child means to you—he’ll force us into a political marriage that will be advantageous to your country?”
He was watching her from where he sat, not quite understanding her ferocity. “To both our countries, I hope,” he said. “It is an end I have had in mind for a long time.”
“An end you’ve had in mind for a long time?” she repeated blankly.
“It is years since I first thought of it as the surest way to re-establish peace between our countries. A marriage between the two ruling houses would be as advantageous now as it would have been a century ago. But when you married, I naturally gave up on it.”
She blinked at him in amazement. “Why? You clearly didn’t care about me personally.”
“I did not know you personally. But I had seen you—”
She didn’t want to hear the calm appraisal he had made of her suitability for the post of royal wife taken to cement a peace.
“Why not Christina, then? She wasn’t married up until last month! Or Anna? She’s available!”
“I never considered them,” Rashid returned. Having said it, he was aware that such a position required some explanation. “Christina had renounced public life.”
He understood only distantly that this was an after-the-fact rationalization. The truth was, he had never once considered Princess Christina in his plans—not even to reject her. And facing that fact now, he found it oddly inexplicable. He had given up his ideas of a political marriage with the Sebastianis when Julia married. “And Anna is too young.”
“So when Luigi and I divorced your plans kicked right back in,” she said dryly.
“It was not as simple as this, Julia. Let’s not argue over the past. We have a child to think of. And our countries.”
“There’s a little drawback here. I’m not interested.”
Rashid suddenly found himself exasperated. “Do you tell me you prefer to give birth to a child unmarried? You are a princess! You are in the public eye whatever you do! Have you not had enough of scandal?”
Julia gritted her teeth. The fact that he was only saying aloud what she had been saying to herself did nothing to calm her.
“I’ve already been through the worst of it in your absence,” she said. “You may be a hero to your citizens, but don’t try riding into my life on your white horse! You have overwhelmed me once. That will have to be enough for you. I intend to use my own judgement here, and that tells me—”
His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed as he watched her. “What did you tell your father about how your pregnancy happened?” he interrupted roughly.
“Not much.”
“And the police?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Have I been looking in the wrong direction? Is this merely another Sebastiani attempt to make the Kamals look like wild animals?”
Julia