“Would you have preferred my uncle the King?” Ashad asked with a small lift of his lips. “I assure you, he would have been considerably less gentle about the matter.”
“I’m sorry,” she said haltingly. “I didn’t come here with the intention of being combative.”
“What did you intend, when you arrived this morning?”
“I don’t know,” she said warily.
“Please, sit,” he gestured towards the seat and she crossed to it slowly. “I have known about this wedding for a long time. I’ve made my peace with it.”
“Meaning it upsets you?”
“No,” she spat the word out with a growl. “Stop putting words into my mouth.”
“You are putting words into my ears,” he corrected with that spiced accent of his. “And they are intriguing me.”
Charlotte drew in a deep breath. He was looking at her as though she was an enormous present he wanted to unwrap. The air crackled with awareness and Charlotte knew it wasn’t one-sided. “Perhaps we should stick to the terms of the marriage contract,” she said after a moment, in an attempt to be sensible.
“We are,” he insisted. “And your feelings on the matter.”
She sat straight, her back could have been made of steel. “Are my feelings relevant?”
“Isn’t that why you came here?” He leaned forward, and the air seemed to spark louder, willing him to touch her. Or was that Charlotte’s wayward wishes? “To show that your feelings count?”
“Perhaps we should have a table of discussion,” she murmured, her pulse a thready beat in her body. And a chaperone, she added silently, thinking that she wouldn’t be feeling so absolutely windswept if Mika had been with her. At the thought of Mika, the woman who had been Charlotte’s nanny and then nurse maid and finally now friend, Charlotte relaxed.
Mika expected more of Charlotte than this silly, ill-thought-out interest in the diplomat from Kalastan. She stood, sliding her feet back into her shoes without breaking eye contact with Ash.
“A table of discussion?” He stood, and skirted the dark wooden bench between them, his eyes throwing questions at her she knew she couldn’t answer.
“Why don’t you email me with your agenda,” she suggested, doing her best to find her poise.
“I think it is you who has the agenda,” he pointed out, stopping just a foot or so away from her, his hands by his side, his body carefully still.
“Fine, I’ll email you,” she said with a curt nod. “I presume one of my staff will have your details?”
His nod was perfunctory but then he turned and strode towards his desk. He reached for a card. It was shaped like a square and printed with a golden damask pattern. On one side, in discreet black print it had his name, an email address and a cell phone number.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
His nod was watchful. Was he always like this? So intent and invested, as though her every mood was speaking to him?
Charlotte forced herself to smile. “For the card,” she lifted it between her fingers, “and your time, and the fruit.”
“Of course.” He dipped his head forward slightly. “It was a true pleasure, your highness.”
“Charlotte, please.” She took a hasty step backwards. “We’re going to be family, remember?”
His look gave nothing away. Good. If the awareness only flowed in one direction, then it should be easier for her to pretend it didn’t exist.
Charlotte disappeared from the room, her heart pounding, her blood burning, her stomach in knots. She kept her head dipped forward and walked efficiently, all but holding her breath until she reached the bottom step of his embassy. She paused then and turned, her eyes drawn to the door to his office. It was closed.
* * *
His card was stunning.
Just as the man had been.
Oh, there was no other word for him, really. Physically, mentally, in every way, he had bowled her over.
Charlotte stared across the room mutinously, a frown etched on her face as she threw the tennis ball from one hand to the other, her eyes not shifting from the fourteenth century tapestry that hung opposite her.
It wasn’t that she’d never seen a gorgeous guy, or been alone in the room with one. Her upbringing had been relatively liberal. Her circle of friends was comprised of Falinese children like her. True, she was the only royal, but the rest were similarly unique, whether children of oil barons, mining magnates, film stars, financiers – they lived in a rarefied way, and they were all of them confident, young and yes, glamorous.
Perhaps that’s why Ashad had knocked her sideways.
He wasn’t glamorous. Not like his business card or his office. He was rugged. Real. Raw. Primal, almost. There had been an energy emanating from him that would have been at home in the desert sands of Kalastan. He was a desert prince, she thought with awe, like one of the badawi she’d heard so much about.
He was all man. There was nothing manicured or pretentious about him, and yet he’d listened to her and honed in on her concerns as though he really cared.
She grunted, tossing the ball harder so that it made a pocking sound when it collapsed into her palm. She threw it again, back and forth, back and forth, hoping to deaden the direction of her thoughts.
“So? How did it go?” Mika asked, striding into the room with a tentative smile on her face.
Charlotte flicked her eyes at her friend and then grabbed the ball in both hands and held it in her lap. “Fine.”
“It does not look like it went ‘fine’,” Mika murmured with a shake of her head. “You are angry.”
“I’m not!” Charlotte denied. “I’m … confused.”
“Why should you be confused? You know this wedding is what you want. It is what your parents want. And now it is so close. Why should you be confused?”
Charlotte bit down on her lip, her mind spinning on the point. “I want the marriage because my parents want it,” she said carefully.
“So?” Mika took the seat beside her charge, her eyes not wavering from the young woman’s profile.
“I don’t know. I have a strange feeling. A presentiment of disaster if I go through with this.”
“Wait a second.” Mika gripped Charlotte’s arm, a look of grave concern crossing her features. Her almond-shaped eyes, an ice blue courtesy of her Danish mother, were drawn together. “You mean a bride has got cold feet before her big day? I’m shocked! This is unprecedented! This has literally never happened before in the history of weddings.”
“Oh, ha, ha, ha,” Charlotte said, though her lips twitched with a smile. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is just jitters.”
“Of course I’m right. I’m Mika.”
It was something Mika had said when Charlotte was young – the princess had been five and Mika only twenty when she’d come to work for the royal household. The two had formed an instant bond and Charlotte had insisted, stridently, that only Mika was to help her. Whether it had been convincing Charlotte to wash before bed, or brush her teeth, or later, to do her homework and put her cell phone away for the night, Mika would always refrain, “I’m right. I’m Mika.”
Now, in her early forties, Mika was just as valued by Charlotte – she was also, undoubtedly, just as right.
“So you think it’s what I should do?”
Mika wrinkled her nose. “I think Syed Al’Eba is one seriously handsome prince and I wouldn’t kick him out of my bed.”
Charlotte’s jaw dropped and she nudged her friend lightly. “Mika!” She laughed, dropping her head forward and catching it in her palm. Unshackled by the chains of royalty that bound Charlotte, and with European parents, Mika was by far Charlotte’s least conservative friend. Charlotte so admired those aspects of Mika, even though Mika took great care to keep her private life private, so as not to draw the King and Queen’s disapproval.
Charlotte might have been laughing at Mika’s comment, but a retort had been born from the statement.
She didn’t say what she was thinking, though. It was her little secret to hold onto. The thing was, the problem Charlotte faced, was that if Syed Al’Eba was handsome, Ash had surely broken the mould when he was born.
* * *
He didn’t hear the phone ringing at first. His mind was elsewhere. Two feet elsewhere, to be precise, on the seat she’d occupied during their brief and troublesome meeting earlier that day.
His attraction to her had very little to do with how she looked. He knew that now, because several hours after she’d left, the things he kept obsessing over were the tiny details of who she was. The way she’d eaten her fruit. The way she’d considered her words carefully at times and fired them at him like bullets from a gun at others. The way emotions seemed to run just beneath her skin, flicking and firing almost beyond her control.
The way she’d seemed to bring a tornado of life with her into this very room, creating a different universe than the one he existed in.
He frowned as the ringing became louder, and stood, walking towards his desk and scooping up his phone. In the back of his mind he wondered if it would be her, calling to organise their next meeting. She wouldn’t wait long, surely, to make contact. The wedding was supposed to go ahead as soon as possible.