Sheikh's Princess of Convenience(2)

“I’m sure your life is very fraught,” he said drily.

“I lost my mother three months ago,” she threw back at him with quiet anguish. “I’m entitled to grieve.”

“You are.” He dipped his head, but that was as much condolence as he was willing to offer. He hadn’t been allowed any self-pity after his father’s death. The circumstances had been far more disturbing and he’d been a child of six. “Drinking yourself blind will only make things worse.”

“How is that possible?” she cried softly. “My father is so grief-stricken, he’s like a shell. I can’t reach him. No one can.” She looked to the huge window where her own reflection had stood. “He misses my mother terribly.”

Karim understood that affliction, too. No matter what he did, he had never been able to ease his mother’s heartbreak over her loss, either. Protecting her from the fact that his father’s death had been a suicide was the best he’d ever been able to do.

“She had an affair,” Galila whispered. “He loved her anyway, but now we all know about it, which seems to have tripled his agony.”

Karim’s heart stopped. Even the breath in his lungs stilled.

As if she noted his jolt of alarm, she nodded to confirm her shocking statement, eyes wide and tortured.

“Your father knew but kept it from you?” Karim’s mind raced. He had never confided in a single soul, no matter how long and heavily the truth had weighed on him—and it had. Endlessly. With the death of Queen Namani, he had thought that at least the secret of the affair would die when he did.

“He’s known for years!” Her tone rang with outraged astonishment. “He helped her cover it up when she became pregnant. They sent away our half brother the day he was born.”

Karim had to concentrate on keeping his face expressionless, his feet rooted to the marble tiles so he didn’t fall over. His ears rang as though the soft words had been a cannon next to his head.

Galila gave a choking half laugh of near hysteria. “Explain to me how one processes that sort of news except to get roaring drunk?”

“You have a third brother? A half brother?” He had a half brother? His carefully balanced world wasn’t just tilting on its axis. It was reaching such a sharp angle everything was sliding into a jumbled mess at his feet.

“Yes!” She didn’t seem to notice his deep shock, too caught up in layers of emotional turmoil within herself. “My brothers and I should have been supporting each other, comforting our father, but he showed up at the funeral. Told us how our mother had been writing to him for years. How she regretted sending him away because she loved him best.” Her eyes gleamed with a thick sheen of tears. “Because he was her only link to the man she truly loved.”

Her fist went to the spot over her breast where she seemed to stem the cracks in a bleeding heart.

“Our father had a complete breakdown. Who wouldn’t? We nearly all did! Zufar had to step in and take over... And now that’s where Zufar’s intended bride is, with our half brother.” She spoke with livid bewilderment, arm flinging out to some unknown location. “Zufar wasn’t supposed to marry Niesha. Amira’s been promised to him since she was born, but Adir came back this morning and talked Amira into running away with him. I watched her go through the window. Adir said it was his revenge for being denied his birthright.”

“Adir,” Karim repeated faintly. That was the name of his brother? He barely heard the rest of what poured out of her.

“Zufar is so single-minded, he married our maid rather than admit there was anything wrong. Malak has quit the palace entirely, gone gambling or to work his way through a harem, I imagine. Where does that leave me? With no one. So excuse me if I take some comfort in a bottle of brandy.”

When she started to drink, he stole it and tipped the alcohol onto the tiles. He had to. This news was utterly explosive.

“Who else have you told?” he demanded.

“No one,” she muttered, giving a tsk of annoyance at the brandy puddle. “Now I have to walk all the way back for a fresh one.”

“Who is Adir’s father?” He kept his voice level but held the empty glass in such a tight grip he expected it to shatter in his hand, leaving him dripping blood onto the evaporating alcohol.

“No one knows.” She gave her hair a flip. “Mother took one secret to her grave, it seems. Although, I have half a mind to ask around that crowd.” She jerked her chin toward the balcony across the darkened expanse of the garden, where light poured out the open doors to the palace ballroom. “He must be there.”

The elite from all the neighboring kingdoms mingled in a kaleidoscope of colored gowns and robes. Voices competed with the music in a din that suddenly grated on him more than he could bear.

“Why do you think that?” he asked, forcing a tone of mild curiosity while his blood prickled in his veins.

“My mother wouldn’t take up with a servant. It had to have been someone of her stature, very likely one of those men congratulating my brother on his mismatched marriage.”

She was right, of course. His father had been exactly at her mother’s level, not that Karim would confirm it. Maybe the affair had started at an event like this, he imagined. His father and her mother would have been about his and Galila’s age when they met, in their prime and bursting with biological readiness. Perhaps they had slipped away into the shadows to indulge their passion, as other couples were doing even now.

He was far too practical to wish, but he had an uncharacteristic longing to be one of those carefree couples with Galila. If only he could enjoy a simple dalliance, like other people, rather than listening to her sing his personal scandal to the night sky while racking his brain on how to most quickly prevent it going further than his own ears.

She was inordinately desirable, he noted with determined detachment. He almost understood his father’s desolation at being rejected by such a woman. Of course, his father had been married and never should have started the affair in the first place, but Karim had no such restrictions.

In fact, remaining close to this pretty bird was exactly what he ought to do. He had devoted his life to ensuring his mother never learned the truth about his father’s death. He wasn’t about to watch it all come apart through one woman’s brandy-lubricated tongue. In fact, he had to ensure the entire family’s silence on the matter.

Hmm.

* * *

“We should get back to the party,” the mysterious stranger said.

Through her haze of growing infatuation, Galila distantly realized she shouldn’t be loitering alone with a man, let alone spilling family secrets in his ear, but there was something exhilarating about holding his attention. For weeks, in many ways years, she’d been an afterthought. Female, and therefore less than her male brothers. Princess, not queen.

“Mmm, yes, I’d love to fetch a fresh brandy,” she said with a cheeky slant of her lashes at him.

No smile of answering flirtation, only a circumspect look that made her heart sink under the feeling she had disappointed him.

“I don’t need your permission,” she pointed out, but her confidence was a stuttering thing in her chest.

“We’ll see,” he said cryptically and took her arm to steer her around the pool.

His touch sent a shock of electricity through her. She jolted and nearly turned her ankle. It was disconcerting, made even worse by his disapproving frown.

I’m not that drunk, she wanted to claim, but all coherent thoughts seemed to have left her brain.

Her entire being was realigning its magnetic poles with something in him. She wasn’t just aware of him. His presence beside her seemed to surround her in a glow that tingled her skin and warmed her blood. It compressed her breaths while making her feel each one come into her like scent, except it was his aura she was taking into herself.

In a daze, she let him guide her toward the path that would lead them into the garden and back to the wedding reception.

“You don’t drink at all?” she asked, trying desperately to ground herself in reality.

“Never.”

“Oh, please,” she teased, leaning into his firm grip on her elbow. “Let me be the one to initiate you.”

Some dim instinct for self-preservation warned her that provoking him was a terrible idea. Something deeper, even. A sense that her gentle mockery not only failed to impact him but was misplaced. He wasn’t weak at any level. Nor innocent. He was worldly to the point of cynical, and inimitably strong because he allowed no one to influence him.

Looking up at him as they entered the garden, she noted that his mouth was a work of art. Despite how very serious it was, his lips were full and sensual. How would they feel, crushed against hers?

The flush that went through her at that thought was pure lust, hitting in all her erogenous zones and making her feet tangle into themselves again.

He stopped and steadied her, frowning. “Do I have to carry you?”

She laughed at the thought of it. She was worldly enough to have fooled around with men, but she knew who she was. She had kept her reputation intact along with her virginity for the sake of her family. Maybe even to avoid one more harsh criticism from her mother. The deep-down truth, however, was that she’d never been overcome with enough desire to give her body to anyone.