His Defiant Desert Queen(40)

“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.”

Her fingers curled against his chest. “Did you go live with her?”

“No. I stayed with my father.”

“You wanted to?”

“I didn’t have a choice. I had to stay with my father.” He glanced at her. “In Saidia, like many Arab countries, mothers do not retain custody of the children in a divorce. The children usually go to the father, or the closest male relative, and the sons always remain with the father.”

She rolled closer to him, both hands against his chest now. “But you saw your mom sometimes?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“She was expelled from Saidia.” He reached out and caught her hair again, playing with the strand. “I wouldn’t see her again for almost twenty years. In fact not until just a few months before your sister Morgan’s wedding.”

“What?”

He let go of the strand. “I couldn’t see her after she left, and then, I wouldn’t see her.”

Jemma just stared at him, eyes wide, her expression shocked. “You punished her for the divorce.”

He shrugged. “I had a hard time forgiving her for divorcing my father. Because yes, she knew that by divorcing my father, she’d lose me. He made it clear he wouldn’t let me leave with her. But she divorced him anyway. She chose to leave Saidia and leave me behind.” Mikael abruptly pulled away, rolling from the low cushions to stand up, and offered her his hand. “It’s hot. We talked. I think it’s time to cool off with a swim.”

* * *

They swam and splashed for a half hour until their lunch was brought to them. They sat in their wet swimsuits beneath the shade of a palm tree eating lunch.

As Jemma nibbled on her salad she watched Mikael from beneath her lashes.

She was still processing everything he’d told her in the pavilion about his parents’ marriage and divorce. Knowing that his mother was an American made it worse as Jemma found it so easy to identify with the woman, and how she must have felt in this Arab country with her powerful royal husband. And yet, even though his mother was an American and unhappy here, how could she leave her child behind?

How could she adore her son but then walk away from him?

“Do you look like your father?” she asked Mikael as they finished their meal.

Mikael ran his hand through his short black hair. “I wish I hadn’t told you about the divorce.”

“Why?”

“I’m not comfortable with it. Or proud of my father. Or myself. Or of any of the decisions made.”

Jemma understood, more than he knew. She’d wanted to go live with her mother when her parents divorced, but she hadn’t wanted to lose her father. And for years after the divorce, she’d still looked forward to seeing him, and she’d cherished the gifts he’d sent in the early years after the divorce—the dolls, the pretty clothes, the hot pink bike for her twelfth birthday—but then her parents quarreled again when she was thirteen, and all contact stopped. Her father disappeared from her life completely.