A Royal Bride at the Sheikh's Command. PENNY JORDAN

of us born of the desert to live in a city of water,’ she had once told him.

      Kadir’s mouth hardened with bitterness. He had thought he had known his mother; had believed he shared a special closeness with her, but he had been deceiving himself just as she had deceived him. The last thing he had expected in those final days before she had finally succumbed to the fatal illness that had stalked her all summer was to hear her tell him that the man he had always thought of as his father had been no such thing and that, instead, he was the result of a youthful affair she had had with a European. And not just any European, but King Giorgio of Niroli, the head of what was reputed to be Europe’s richest royal family. Not that money was of any primary concern to him. Kadir had turned the million-plus inheritance he had received from his maternal grandfather into a billion-figure empire before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, thanks to his own financial and entrepreneurial skills. No, he had no need of King Giorgio’s wealth, and no real need either of the title he would inherit from him, but what he did need was to find out if this new persona his mother’s revelations had given him fitted him more comfortably than the one he had always previously worn. And if didn’t? If he felt as alien and apart from those he lived amongst as King Giorgio’s son and heir as he had done as Hadiya’s sheikh, then what? Then he would just have to live with it. He was forty now, after all, not an untried boy who knew nothing of himself. Niroli would give him the chance to stretch himself, to prove himself in many ways that ruling Hadiya could not. Besides, it was too late now for him to change his mind. He had given his commitment to his brother, Ahmed, to support his claim to become Hadiya’s new sheikh and he had also given his commitment to his as yet unmet father to become Niroli’s next King.

      But whilst the outcome of his mother’s revelations might ultimately be to his benefit, Kadir could not overcome his sense of betrayal that his mother could have kept something so important to him a secret.

      She had begged him to understand and to forgive her, telling him that she had already been promised in marriage to her husband when she had met King Giorgio. She’d stopped off on the island of Niroli on her way home to Hadiya. According to her, theirs had been an intensely passionate and equally intensely brief affair, and her marriage to her husband had taken place before she had realised she was carrying King Giorgio’s child.

      ‘So why tell me now,’ he had demanded angrily, ‘since you have not seen fit to do so before?’

      ‘Before I was afraid for you,’ she had told him. ‘Everyone assumed that you were the legitimate heir to the sheikdom and I could not bear to be responsible for taking that from you. But now…I am close to death, my son, and I have watched you these last weeks since your uncle died. For all that you are ready to assume your responsibilities to Hadiya I can see that you do not have the heart to do so. You have always yearned to be free of the restrictions our small kingdom has imposed on you. Where your brother is content to go and count the revenues from Hadiya’s oil wells and listen to the state advisers, you could never exist beneath the yoke of another’s rule.