His Defiant Desert Queen(60)

                He smiled faintly. “What shall I tell you? What would you like to know?”

                “Tell me more about your mom,” she said promptly. “And your dad.”

                “That’s not a very pleasant subject.”

                “Parents and divorces never are.”

                “So why would you want to know about them?”

                “Because they’re important people in our lives. Our parents shape us. For good, and for bad.” Her gaze met his. “Were you closer to one than the other?”

                He sighed. He didn’t want to talk about this, he didn’t, but he liked her lying here next to him. She felt good here, and he wanted her to stay. “I don’t remember being close to my father,” he said after a moment. “But I’m sure he doted on me. Saidia parents tend to spoil their children, especially their sons.”

                “And your mother?”

                “Adored me.” It was uncomfortable talking about his mother. “She was a good mother. But then they divorced.”

                “Do you know why they divorced?”

                He looked at her. “Do you know why your parents divorced?”

                “My dad was having an affair.”

                Mikael hated the heaviness in his chest. He reached out and touched a strand of her hair, tugging on it lightly. “My father wanted to take a second wife,” he confessed.

                “So they divorced?”

                “Eventually.”

                “What does that mean?” Jemma asked, turning onto her side.

                “It means it took her nearly five years to successfully divorce him. My father didn’t want the divorce, so he contested it.”

                “He loved her,” Jemma said.

                “I don’t think he loved her. But he didn’t want her to shame him. He was the king. How could his wife leave him?”

                Jemma was silent a long moment. “Your mother loved him. She didn’t want to share him?”

                “I don’t remember love. I remember fighting. Years of fighting.” And crying. Years of crying. But not the tears of Saidia women. His mother only cried quietly, late at night, when she thought no one was listening.

                But he had listened. He had heard her weeping. And he had never done anything about it.

                Jemma put her hand on his chest, her palm warm against his skin. “She had to know when she married your father that he might take another wife.”

                “She said he promised her that he would never take another wife. She said he had it added to their wedding contract. But it wasn’t there. My father said my mother never added a clause, and that she knew all along there would be other wives. That she was only the first.” He hesitated, trying not to remember too much of those years, and how awful it’d been with the endless fighting, and then his mother crying late at night when the servants were asleep. “By the time the divorce was final, he’d taken three more wives.”

                Mikael looked away from the sympathy in Jemma’s eyes, uncomfortable with it. He focused on the ceiling of the pavilion, and the whirring of the fan blades. “I was eleven when the divorce was finalized.”