Dressed only in pyjama bottoms, his chest golden, taut and bare, he was playing chess. By himself. He held one piece, the rook, between long, brown fingers.
‘You play chess?’ Lucy exclaimed in surprise, and a wry smile flickered across Khaled’s face.
‘Is that what this is?’ he gently mocked, holding up the piece of carved ebony. ‘Do you play?’
‘Not really.’ Lucy quickly shook her head. She had painstakingly learned to play when she was eight, but she’d never actually played a proper game. She’d never had the chance. ‘Are you very good?’
Khaled shrugged. ‘How does one answer that?’ Which Lucy surmised meant he was very good indeed.
‘You’re playing by yourself?’ she remarked, moving further into the room, suffused as it was with both warmth and tension. She studied the board, and could see that Khaled had been moving the pieces on both sides.
He shrugged. ‘It is a pastime.’ His fingers tightened round the rook and he replaced it on the board. ‘What do you want, Lucy?’
Her head was bent, her hair falling down in front of her face like a dark curtain. She pushed it back. ‘I want to talk. I just agreed to marry you.’
‘Did you?’ he mocked and Lucy bit her lip.
‘I’m scared, Khaled.’ She hadn’t meant to say that, or confess it. She didn’t want Khaled to know her secrets, her weaknesses, even as she silently acknowledged that he’d given her his.
Khaled wasn’t in the mood to be forgiving. He shrugged one powerful, bare shoulder. ‘So decide, Lucy. You can’t live on the knife edge of fear for too long—you lose your balance.’
And that was how she felt, as if she were about to topple over into an endless abyss of uncertainty. Swallowing, she perched on the edge of the sofa, as far away from Khaled as was possible.
‘So, tell me what this marriage will be like.’
He shrugged again. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘I want to spend at least part of the time in London. Sam has family there—my mother especially. And I have my work—I won’t give that up, not completely.’
‘That’s not exactly describing our marriage, Lucy,’ Khaled said, his voice low yet threaded with dark amusement. ‘You sound as if you’re negotiating a business deal.’
‘And isn’t that what this is?’ Lucy pressed, stung by Khaled’s words. ‘A business deal, for Sam’s sake? I suppose many royals have such arrangements.’
‘It would seem so.’ Khaled had stretched his arms out along the back of the sofa, and Lucy was uncomfortably aware of the long, muscled length of his arm, his fingers scant inches from her own shoulder.
She felt awkward and formal, stiff and polite, and she couldn’t shake it.
They were strangers, or nearly so; their affair had been nearly half a decade ago, and had lasted a mere two months. Could she even say she really knew this man?
Or that he knew her?
‘So, tell me what you expect from this marriage,’ Lucy pressed, and Khaled smiled.
‘This arrangement?’ he mocked. ‘I expect you by my side, in my bed. For us to be a family. If more children come, then so be it. All the better. As for your little requests—’ he shrugged ‘—I see no reason why we cannot spend at least part of the year in London. Sam needs to know all his family, and I think you would probably go mad on Biryal all year. Perhaps we all would.’ His hard smile glimmered briefly in the dim lamplight. ‘If work is so important to you, then by all means work. Part-time, anyway. You will have duties, obligations as Sam’s mother, my wife…and princess.’
Lucy swallowed. Khaled sounded so cold, so unconcerned. There was no love on his side, she realised bleakly. Not even close.
‘Thinking of backing out?’ Khaled said softly, his voice too close to a sneer. ‘Cold feet?’
‘I won’t back out,’ Lucy replied. ‘For Sam’s sake.’
‘Good.’
‘I’ve come to realise,’ she replied evenly, ‘that what you said was true. Marriage is sensible.’
Khaled muttered something in Arabic that sounded like a curse. He rose from the sofa in one fluid movement, went over to a side table and poured himself a drink.
‘Have you taken your—’
‘Don’t,’ he said dangerously, turning round, ‘treat me like an invalid. God knows that’s the last thing I need from you now.’
‘I was just asking,’ Lucy said stiffly. She couldn’t think of Khaled as an invalid, not when he stood before her radiating power, beauty and strength. Anger, too. Yet she felt her insides start to yearn, melt, as they always did when he was near. She wanted to reach him, to clamber over this wall of awkward formality that her fear had built brick by unbearable brick, and yet she couldn’t.
Khaled might not leave, she realised starkly; he might not walk away as he did before, but he could still hurt her. Could break her heart…if she gave him that power. If she let him in.
‘Have you thought of a date?’ she finally asked, her throat dry and scratchy. ‘For the wedding?’
‘No later than a fortnight from now.’
‘A fortnight!’ She stared at him in disbelief. ‘But that’s—’
‘Soon?’ Khaled finished, one eyebrow arched. ‘Yes. The sooner the better.’
‘That’s impossible. I have to tell my mother, at least. This is my wedding, Khaled.’
‘And mine also. I want no time for gossip, speculation, tabloid smears. You’ll find that the things you want—what, a white dress? Some flowers?—can be arranged.’ He tossed back his drink, his eyes glinting at her over the rim of the glass.
Lucy shook her head. She wanted more than pretty flowers or a white dress. She didn’t care about the wedding; it was the marriage that mattered. And it had already started to sour.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t do this,’ she said, half to herself. ‘It might hurt Sam more to have parents who…’ She trailed off, her courage failing her, but Khaled finished the thought easily and sardonically.
‘Who don’t love each other?’
So he didn’t love her. The knowledge hurt, even though she knew it shouldn’t. She shouldn’t let it. ‘Right.’
‘The important thing is we both love Sam,’ Khaled said. He spoke in that terribly pleasant voice that Lucy knew was a cover for far darker, more dangerous emotions. ‘As long as we treat each other with kindness and courtesy, Sam won’t be affected.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Lucy pressed, and impatience flitted through his eyes.
‘I can’t. But many children have parents who aren’t madly in love with each other and manage, so I think Sam will too. Now.’ He set down his glass, his hands on his hips, every inch the arrogant, autocratic prince. ‘Tomorrow morning I will inform my father of our plans, and within a day it will be news all over the world. You can ring your mother beforehand, if you like, so she doesn’t find out about it in the papers.’
‘Fine.’ Lucy pushed aside the dizzying sense of her life spiralling even further out of control. Khaled was right; she didn’t have time to indulge her fears. It would be better for both of them if she didn’t.
And yet she couldn’t keep a sense of desolation from sweeping over her as she rose from the sofa. The future seemed unknowable, impossible. Unhappy.
‘All right, then.