“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,