Raja studied the slender blonde in the miniskirt and tee shirt, captured outside the Ashuri cathedral in their capital city. It was a tourist snap and the girl still had the legginess and slightly chubby and unformed features of adolescence. Her pale colouring was very unusual in his culture and that long blonde hair was exceptionally attractive and he immediately felt guilty for that shallow reflection with his former fiancée, Bariah, so recently laid to rest. But in truth he had only met Bariah briefly on one formal occasion and she had remained a stranger to him.
Less guarded than his elder brother, Haroun studied Princess Ruby and loosed a long low whistle of boyish approval.
‘That is enough,’ Raja rebuked the younger man in exasperation. ‘When can I hope to meet her?’
‘As soon as we can arrange it, Your Royal Highness.’ Not displeased by the compliment entailed in Haroun’s whistle of admiration, Wajid beamed, relieved by Raja’s practical response to the offer of another bride. Not for the first time, Wajid felt that Prince Raja would be a king he could do business with. The Najari regent accepted his responsibilities without fuss and if there was one thing he knew inside out, it was how to be royal. A young woman blessed with his support and guidance would soon learn the ropes.
‘Please, Ruby,’ Steve pleaded, gripping Ruby’s small waist with possessive hands.
‘No!’ Ruby told her boyfriend without hesitation. She pushed his hands from below her sweater. Although it didn’t appear to bother him she felt foolish grappling with him in broad daylight in a car parked in the shadiest corner of the pub car park.
Steve dealt her a sulky look of resentment before finally retreating back into the driver’s seat. Ruby, with her big brown eyes, blonde hair and fabulous figure, was a trophy and he was the envy of all his friends, but when she dug her heels in, she was as immovable as a granite rock. ‘Can I come over tonight?’
‘I’m tired,’ Ruby lied. ‘I should get back to work. I don’t want to be late.’
Steve dropped her back at the busy legal practice where she was a receptionist. They lived in the same Yorkshire market town. A salesman in an estate agency, Steve worked across the street from her and he was fighting a last-ditch battle to persuade Ruby that sex was a desirable activity. She had wondered if Steve might be the one to change her mind on that score for she had initially thought him very attractive. He had the blond hair and blue eyes she had always admired in men, but his kisses were wet and his roving hands squeezed her as if she were a piece of ripening fruit for sale on a stall. Steve had taught her that a man could be good-looking without being sexy.
‘You’re ten minutes late, Ruby,’ the office manager, a thin, bespectacled woman in her thirties, remarked sourly. ‘You need to watch your timekeeping.’
Ruby apologised and got back to work, letting her mind drift to escape the boredom of the routine tasks that made up her working day. When she had first started working at Collins, Jones & Fowler, she had been eighteen years old, her mother had just died and she had badly needed a job. Her colleagues were all female and older and the middle-aged trio of solicitors they worked for were an equally uninteresting bunch. Conversations were about elderly parents, children and the evening meal, never gossip, fashion or men. Ruby enjoyed the familiar faces of the regular clients and the brief snatches of friendly chatter they exchanged with her but continually wished that life offered more variety and excitement.
In comparison, her late mother, Vanessa, had had more than a taste of excitement while she was still young enough to enjoy it, Ruby recalled affectionately. As a youthful catwalk model in London, Vanessa had caught the eye of an Arab prince, who had married her after a whirlwind romance. Ruby’s birthplace was the country of Ashur in the Persian Gulf. Her father, Anwar, however, had chosen to take a second wife while still married to her mother and that had been the ignominious end of what Vanessa had afterwards referred to as her ‘royal fling’. Vanessa had got a divorce and had returned to the UK with her child. In Ashur daughters were rarely valued as much as sons and Ruby’s father had promptly chosen to forget her existence.
A year later, Vanessa, armed with a substantial payoff and very much on the rebound, had married Curtis Sommerton, a Yorkshire businessman. She had immediately begun calling her daughter by her second husband’s surname in the belief that it would enable Ruby to forget the family that had rejected them. Meanwhile Curtis had sneakily run through her mother’s financial nest egg and had deserted her once the money was spent. Heartbroken, Vanessa had grieved long and hard over that second betrayal of trust and had died of a premature heart attack soon afterwards.
‘My mistake was letting myself get carried away with my feelings,’ Vanessa had often told her daughter. ‘Anwar promised me the moon and I bet he promised the other wife he took the moon, as well. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, my love. Don’t go falling for sweet-talking womanisers like I did!’
Fiery and intelligent, Ruby was very practical and quick to spot anyone trying to take too much advantage of her good nature. She had loved her mother very much and preferred to remember Vanessa as a warm and loving woman, who was rather naive about men. Her stepfather, on the other hand, had been a total creep, whom Ruby had hated and feared. Vanessa had had touching faith in love and romance but, to date, life had only taught Ruby that what men seemed to want most was sex. Finer feelings like commitment, loyalty and romance were much harder to find or awaken. Like so many men before him, Steve had made Ruby feel grubby and she was determined not to go out with him again.
After work she walked home, to the tiny terraced house that she rented, for the second time that day. Her lunch breaks were always cut short by her need to go home and take her dog out for a quick walk but she didn’t mind. Hermione, the light of Ruby’s life, was a Jack Russell terrier, who adored Ruby and disliked men. Hermione had protected Ruby from her stepfather, Curtis, on more than one occasion. Creeping into Ruby’s bedroom at night had been a very dangerous exercise with Hermione in residence.
Ruby shared the small house with her friend Stella Carter, who worked as a supermarket cashier. Now she was surprised to see an opulent BMW car complete with a driver parked outside her home and she had not even contrived to get her key into the front door before it shot abruptly open.
‘Thank goodness, you’re home!’ Stella exclaimed, her round face flushed and uneasy. ‘You’ve got visitors in the lounge…’ she informed Ruby in a suitable whisper.
Ruby frowned. ‘Who are they?’
‘They’re something to do with your father’s family… No, not Curtis the perv, the real one!’ That distinction was hissed into Ruby’s ear.
Completely bewildered, Ruby went into the compact front room, which seemed uncomfortably full of people. A small grey-haired man beamed at her and bowed very low. The middle aged woman with him and the younger man followed suit, so that Ruby found herself staring in wonderment at three downbent heads.
‘Your Royal Highness,’ the older man breathed in a tone of reverent enthusiasm. ‘May I say what a very great pleasure it is to meet you at last?’
‘He’s been going on about you being a princess ever since he arrived,’ Stella told her worriedly out of the corner of her mouth.
‘I’m not a princess. I’m not a royal anything,’ Ruby declared with a frown of wryly amused discomfiture. ‘What’s this all about? Who are you?’
Wajid Sulieman introduced himself and his wife, Haniyah, and his assistant. ‘I represent the interests of the Ashuri royal family and I am afraid I must first give you bad news.’
Striving to recall her manners and contain her impatience, Ruby asked her visitors to take a seat. Wajid informed her that her uncle, Tamim, his wife and his daughter, Bariah, had died in a plane crash over the desert three weeks earlier. The names rang a very vague bell of familiarity from Ruby’s one and only visit to Ashur when she was a schoolgirl of fourteen. ‘My uncle was the king…’ she said hesitantly, not even quite sure of that fact.
‘And until a year ago your eldest brother was his heir,’ Wajid completed.
Ruby’s big brown eyes opened very wide in surprise. ‘I have a brother?’
Wajid had the grace to flush at the level of her ignorance about her relatives. ‘Your late father had two sons by his second wife.’
Ruby emitted a rueful laugh. ‘So I have two half-brothers I never knew about. Do they know about me?’
Wajid looked grave. ‘Once again it is my sad duty to inform you that your brothers died bravely as soldiers in Ashur’s recent war with Najar.’
Stunned, Ruby struggled to speak. ‘Oh…yes, I’ve read about the war in the newspapers. That’s very sad about my brothers. They must’ve been very young, as well,’ Ruby remarked uncertainly, feeling hopelessly out of her depth.
The Ashuri side of her family was a complete blank to Ruby. She had never met her father or his relations and knew virtually nothing about them. On her one and only visit to Ashur, her once powerful curiosity had been cured when her mother’s attempt to claim a connection to the ruling family was heartily rejected. Vanessa had written in advance of their visit but there had been no reply. Her phone calls once they arrived in Ashur had also failed to win them an invitation to the palace. Indeed, Vanessa and her daughter had finally been humiliatingly turned away from the gates of the royal palace when her father’s relatives had not deigned to meet their estranged British relatives. From that moment on Ruby had proudly suppressed her curiosity about the Ashuri portion of her genes.