‘I needed some air. The room was very hot.’
‘I’m sorry you weren’t comfortable.’ They were the words of a cordial host, impersonal, distant, forcing Lucy to half-apologise.
‘No, no. Everything has been lovely. I’m not used to such star treatment.’ She paused, and gestured to the moonlight-bathed gardens behind her. ‘The palace gardens look very beautiful.’
‘I will have someone show you them tomorrow. They are one of Biryal’s loveliest sights.’
She nodded, feeling somehow dismissed. There was a howl inside her, a desperate cry for understanding and mercy.
After everything we had…
But in the end, it—she—had meant nothing to Khaled. Why couldn’t she remember that? Why did she always resist the glaring truth, try to find meaning and sanctity where there had been none? ‘Thank you,’ she managed, and then lapsed into silence as the night swirled softly around them.
Khaled said nothing, merely looked at her, his gaze sweeping over her hair, her face, her dress. Assessing. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said quietly, almost sadly.
Surprised by what felt like a confession, Lucy blurted, ‘You have.’
Khaled stilled. Lucy hadn’t realised there had been a touch of softness to his features in that unguarded moment until it was gone. His smile, when it came, was hard and bitter. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Khaled…’ She held one hand out in supplication, then dropped it. She didn’t want to beg. There was nothing left to plead for. ‘I’d like to talk to you.’
Khaled arched one eyebrow. ‘Isn’t that what you’re doing?’
‘Not now,’ Lucy said, suddenly wishing she hadn’t started this line of conversation. ‘Tomorrow. I just wanted you to know… Perhaps we could arrange a time?’ Her voice trailed away as Khaled simply stared, his lips pressed in a hard line, a bleakness in his dark eyes.
‘I don’t think we have anything to say to each other any more, Lucy.’ Startled, she realised he sounded almost sad once more.
‘You may feel that way, but I don’t. I just need a few minutes of your time, Khaled. It’s important.’
He shook his head, an instinctive gesture, and Lucy felt annoyance spurt through her. She hadn’t come to Biryal to be rejected again, and for something so little. Was he not willing to give her anything? Would she always feel like a beggar at the gates when it came to Prince Khaled el Farrar?
‘A few minutes,’ she repeated firmly, and without giving him time to respond, or time to betray herself with more begging, pleading, she moved past him. Her shoulder brushed his and sent every nerve in her body twanging with feeling as she hurried back into the palace.
Lucy didn’t sleep well that night. She was plagued with half-remembered dreams, snatches of memory that tormented her with their possibility. Khaled inhabited those dreams, invaded her heart when her body and mind were both vulnerable in sleep. Khaled, laughing at a stupid joke she’d told, his head thrown back, his teeth gleaming white. Khaled, walking off the pitch, his arm thrown casually yet possessively over her shoulders. My woman. Khaled, smiling lazily at her from across the lounge of his penthouse suite.
Come here, Lucy. Come to me.
And she had, as obediently as a trained dog, because when it came to Khaled she’d never felt she had a choice. What hurt more than her own foolish infatuation was Khaled’s easy knowledge of it. He’d never doubted, never even had to ask.
Muttering under her breath, Lucy pushed the covers off and rose from the bed. The sun had risen, fresh and lemon-yellow in a cloudless sky, and she was relieved to be free of her dreams, for the new day to finally begin.
The day she’d been waiting for since she’d heard of the match with Biryal. The day Khaled would find out he was a father.
As she dressed in her physio scrubs, she found her mind sliding inexorably to the question of how Khaled would react to the news, wandering down that dangerous path. Would he deny it? Deny responsibility? Lucy couldn’t see many other possibilities. You couldn’t trust a man who walked out; it was a lesson she’d learned early. A lesson her mother had taught her. And, after the way Khaled had walked out on her, she couldn’t imagine him taking an interest in his bastard child.
She didn’t want him to; that wasn’t the point. The point, as she’d explained to her mother and to Eric—who’d both disapproved of her intention to come to Biryal—was for Khaled to know the truth. He had a right, just as she felt she’d had a right to a goodbye all those years ago. And now she had a right as well: to finish with Khaled once and for all. To know it was finished, to feel it. To be the one to walk away.
Turning from her own determined reflection, Lucy left her bedroom in search of the others.
Biryal’s new stadium, completed only a few months before, was an impressive structure on the other side of Lahji with a breathtaking view of a glittering ocean. All modern chrome and glass, it was built in the shape of an ellipse, so the ceiling appeared to hover over the pitch.
As Lucy arranged her equipment in the team’s rooms, she saw the stadium was outfitted with every necessity and luxury. Khaled clearly had spared no expense.
‘It seats twenty thousand,’ Yusef, one of the staff who had shown them to the rooms, had explained proudly. Considering Biryal’s population was only a few hundred thousand, it seemed excessive to Lucy. The building also jarred with Lahji’s far humbler dwellings. Yet she had to admit the architect had designed it well; despite its modernity, it looked as if it belonged on the rocky outcropping facing the sea, as if about to take flight.
Lucy was used to before-game energy and tension, although the match with Biryal did not have the high stakes most matches did. There was something else humming through the room, Lucy thought, and she knew what it was.
Memory.
At least a third of the team had played with Khaled, seen him fall on the pitch. Had felt the betrayal of his abrupt and unexplained departure. The reason Brian Abingdon had agreed to this match at all, Lucy suspected, was because of Khaled and the victories he had brought to England’s team in his few years as its outside half.
As the match was about to start, Lucy found herself scanning the crowds for a glimpse of Khaled. Her eyes found him easily in the royal box near the centre of the stadium. As usual, he looked grim, forbidding.
The match started without her realising, and almost reluctantly she turned to watch the play. After a few moments a man came to stand next to her, and out of the corner of her eye she saw it was Yusef.
‘The stadium’s full,’ she remarked, half-surprised that twenty-thousand Biryalis had come to watch.
‘This match is very important to us,’ Yusef replied with a faint smile. ‘Although it’s small to you, this is one of Biryal’s first matches. The team was only organised two years ago, you know.’
‘Really?’ Lucy hadn’t realised the team was quite so recent a creation, although perhaps she should have. Biryal was a small country, and there was no reason for it to possess a national rugby team.
No reason save for Khaled.
‘Khaled began it,’ Yusef explained, answering the half-formed question in Lucy’s mind. ‘When he returned from England. Since he couldn’t play himself, he did the next best thing.’
‘He couldn’t play himself?’ Lucy repeated, a bit too sharply. Yusef glanced at her in surprise.
‘Because of his injury.’
‘He’d always had trouble with his knee,’ Lucy protested, and Yusef was silent, his expression turning guarded