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Raja studied the slender blonde in the miniskirt and T-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.
‘Your brothers were brave young men,’ Wajid told her. ‘They died fighting for their country.’
Ruby nodded with a respectful smile and thought sadly about the two younger brothers she had never got the chance to meet. Had they ever wondered what she was like? She suspected that royal protocol might well have divided them even if, unlike the rest of their family, they had had sufficient interest to want to get to know her.
‘I share these tragedies with you so that you can understand that you are now the present heir to the throne of Ashur, Your Royal Highness.’
‘I’m the heir?’ Ruby laughed out loud in sheer disbelief. ‘How is that possible? I’m a girl, for goodness’ sake! And why do you keep on calling me Your Royal Highness as if I have a title?’
‘Whether you use it or otherwise, you have carried the title of Princess since the day you were born,’ Wajid asserted with confidence. ‘It is your birthright as the daughter of a king.’
It all sounded very impressive but Ruby was well aware that in reality, Ashur was still picking up the pieces in the aftermath of the conflict. That such a country had fought a war with its wealthy neighbour over the oil fields on their disputed boundary was a testament to their dogged pride and determination in spite of the odds against them. Even so she had been hugely relieved when she heard on the news that the war was finally over.
She struggled to appear composed when she was actually shaken by the assurance that she had a legal right to call herself a princess and then her natural common sense reasserted its sway. Could there be anything more ridiculously inappropriate than a princess who worked as a humble receptionist and had to struggle to pay her rent most months? Even with few extras in her budget Ruby was invariably broke and she often did a weekend shift at Stella’s supermarket to help make ends meet.
‘There’s no room for titles and such things in my life,’ she said gently, reluctant to cause offence by being any more blunt. ‘I’m a very ordinary girl.’
‘But that is exactly what our people would like most about you. We are a country of ordinary hard-working people,’ Wajid declared with ringing pride. ‘You are the only heir to the throne of Ashur and you must take your rightful place.’
Ruby’s soft pink lips parted in astonishment. ‘Let me get this straight—you are asking me to come out to Ashur and live there as a princess?’
‘Yes. That is why we are here, to make you aware of your position and to bring you home.’ Wajid spread his arms expansively to emphasise his enthusiasm for the venture.
A good deal less expressive, Ruby tensed and shook her fair head in a quiet negative motion. ‘Ashur is not my home. Nobody in the royal family has even seen me since I left the country as a baby. There has been no contact and no interest.’
The older man looked grave. ‘That is true, but the tragedies that have almost wiped out the Shakarian family have ensured that everything has changed. You are now a very important person in Ashur, a princess, the daughter of a recent king and the niece of another, with a strong legal claim to the throne—’
‘But I don’t want to claim the throne, and in any case I do know enough about Ashur to know that women don’t rule there,’ Ruby cut in, her impatience growing, for she felt she was being fed a rather hypocritical official line that was a whitewash of the less palatable truth. ‘I’m quite sure there is some man hovering in the wings ready to do the ruling in Ashur.’
The court advisor would have squirmed with dismay had he not possessed the carriage of a man with an iron bar welded to his short spine. Visibly, however, he stiffened even more. ‘You are, of course, correct when you say that women do not rule in Ashur. Our country has long practised male preference primogeniture—’
‘So I am really not quite as important as you would like to make out?’ Ruby marvelled that he could ever have believed she might be so ignorant of the hereditary male role of kingship in Ashur. After all, hadn’t her poor mother’s marriage ended in tears and divorce thanks to those strict rules? Her father had taken another wife in a desperate attempt to have a son.
Placed in an awkward spot when he had least expected it, Wajid reddened and revised up his assumptions about the level of the princess’s intelligence. ‘I am sorry to contradict you but you are unquestionably a very important young woman in the eyes of our people. Without you there can be no King,’ he admitted baldly.
‘Excuse me?’ Her fine brows were pleating. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.’
Wajid hesitated. ‘Ashur and Najar are to be united and jointly ruled by a marriage between the two royal families. That was integral to the peace terms that were agreed to at the end of the war.’
Ruby froze at that grudging explanation and resisted the urge to release an incredulous laugh, for she suddenly grasped what her true value was to this stern little man. They needed a princess to marry off, a princess who could claim to be in line to the throne of Ashur. And here she was young and single. Nothing personal or even complimentary as such in her selection, she reflected with a stab of resentment and regret. It did, however, make more sense to her that she was only finally being acknowledged in Ashur as a member of the royal family because there was nobody else more suitable available.
‘I didn’t know that arranged marriages still took place in Ashur.’
‘Mainly within the royal family,’ Wajid conceded grudgingly. ‘Sometimes parents know their children better than their children know themselves.’
‘Well, I no longer have parents to make that decision for me. In any case, my father never took the time to get to know me at all. I’m afraid you’re wasting your time here, Mr Sulieman. I don’t want to be a princess and I don’t want to marry a stranger, either. I’m quite content with my life as it is.’ Rising to her feet to indicate that she felt it was time that her visitors took their leave, Ruby felt sorry enough for the older man in his ignorance of contemporary Western values to offer him a look of sympathy. ‘These days few young women would be attracted by an arrangement of that nature.’
Long after the limousine had disappeared from view Ruby and Stella sat discussing the visit.
‘A princess?’ Stella kept on repeating, studying the girl she had known from primary school with growing fascination. ‘And you honestly didn’t know?’
‘I don’t think they can have wanted Mum to know,’ Ruby offered evenly. ‘After the divorce my father and his family were happy for her to leave Ashur and from then on they preferred to pretend that she and I didn’t exist.’
‘I wonder what the guy they want you to marry is like,’ Stella remarked, twirling her dark fringe with dreamy eyes, her imagination clearly caught.
‘If he’s anything like as callous as my father I’m not missing anything. My father was willing to break Mum’s heart to have a son and no doubt the man they want me to marry would do anything to become King of Ashur—’
‘The guy has to be from the other country, right?’
‘Najar? Must be. Probably some ambitious poor relation of their royal family looking for a leg up the ladder,’ Ruby contended with rich cynicism, her scorn unconcealed.
‘I’m not sure I would have been so quick to send your visitors packing. I mean, if you leave the husband out of it, being a princess might have been very exciting.’
‘There was nothing exciting about Ashur,’ Ruby assured her friend with a guilty wince at still being bitter about the country that had rejected her, for she had recognised Wajid Sulieman’s sincere love for his country and the news of that awful trail of family deaths had been sobering and had left her feeling sad.
After a normal weekend during which her impressions of that astounding visit from the court advisor faded a little, Ruby went back to work. She had met up with Steve briefly on the Saturday afternoon and had told him that their relationship was over. He had taken it badly and had texted her repeatedly since then, alternately asking for another chance and then truculently criticising her and demanding to know what was wrong with him. She began ignoring the texts, wishing she had never gone out with him in the first place. He was acting a bit obsessive for a man she had only dated for a few weeks.
‘Men always go mad over you,’ Stella had sighed enviously when the texts started coming through again at breakfast, which the girls snatched standing up in the tiny kitchen. ‘I know Steve’s being a nuisance but I wouldn’t mind the attention.’
‘That kind of attention you’d be welcome to,’ Ruby declared without hesitation and she felt the same at work when her phone began buzzing before lunchtime with more messages, for she had nothing left to say to Steve.
A tall guy with luxuriant black hair strode through the door. There was something about him that immediately grabbed attention and Ruby found herself helplessly staring. Maybe it was his clothes, which stood out in a town where decent suits were only seen at weddings and then usually hired. He wore a strikingly elegant dark business suit that would have looked right at home in a designer advertisement in an exclusive magazine. It was perfectly modelled on his tall, well-built frame and long powerful legs. His razor-edged cheekbones were perfectly chiselled too, and as for those eyes, deep set, dark as sloes and brooding. Wow, Ruby thought for the very first time in her life as she looked at a man… .
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_b7fb9611-c85c-5cfb-9ed2-a5b95fed9759)
WHEN PRINCE RAJA walked into the solicitor’s office, Ruby was the first person he saw and indeed, in spite of the number of other people milling about the busy reception area, pretty much the only person he saw. The pretty schoolgirl in the holiday snap had grown into a strikingly beautiful woman with a tumbling mane of blonde hair, sparkling eyes and a soft, full mouth that put him in mind of a succulent peach.
‘You are Ruby Shakarian?’ the prince asked as a tall, even more powerfully built man came through the door behind him to station himself several feet away.
‘I don’t use that surname.’ Ruby frowned, wondering how many more royal dignitaries she would have to deflect before they got the hint and dropped this ridiculous idea that she was a princess. ‘Where did you get it from?’
‘Wajid Sulieman gave it to me and asked me to speak to you on his behalf. Shakarian is your family name,’ Raja pointed out with an irrefutable logic that set her small white teeth on edge.
‘I’m at work right now and not in a position to speak to you.’ But Ruby continued to study him covertly, absorbing the lush black lashes semi-screening those mesmerising eyes, the twin slashes of his well-marked ebony brows, the smooth olive-toned skin moulding his strong cheekbones and the faint dark shadow of stubble accentuating his strong jaw and wide, sensual lips. Her prolonged scrutiny only served to confirm her original assessment that he was a stunningly beautiful man. Her heart was hammering so hard inside her chest that she felt seriously short of breath. It was a reaction that thoroughly infuriated her, for Ruby had always prided herself on her armour-plated indifference around men and the role of admirer was new to her.
‘Aren’t you going for lunch yet?’ one of her co-workers enquired, walking past her desk.
‘We could have lunch,’ Raja pronounced, pouncing on the idea with relief.
Since his private jet had wafted him to Yorkshire and the cool spring temperature that morning, Prince Raja had felt rather like an alien set down on a strange planet. He was not used to small towns and checking into a third-rate local hotel had not improved his mood. He was cold, he was on edge and he did not relish the task foisted on him.
‘If you’re connected to that Wajid guy, no thanks to lunch,’ Ruby pronounced as she got to her feet and reached for her bag regardless because she always went home at lunchtime.
The impression created by her seemingly long legs in that photo had been deceptive, for she was much smaller than Raja had expected and the top of her head barely reached halfway up his chest. Startled by that difference and bemused by that hitch in his concentration, Raja frowned. ‘Connected?’ he queried, confused by her use of the word.
‘If you want to talk about the same thing that Wajid did, I’ve already heard all I need to hear on that subject,’ Ruby extended ruefully. ‘I mean…’ she leant purposefully closer, not wishing to be overheard, and her intonation was gently mocking ‘…do I look like a princess to you?’
‘You look like a goddess,’ the prince heard himself say, speaking his thoughts out loud in a manner that was most unusual for him. His jaw tensed, for he would have preferred not to admit that her dazzling oval face had reminded him of a poster of a film star he recalled from his time serving with the Najari armed forces.
‘A goddess?’ Equally taken aback, Ruby suddenly grinned, dimples adorning her rounded cheeks. ‘Well, that’s a new one. Not something any of the men I know would come up with anyway.’
In the face of that glorious smile, Raja’s fluent English vocabulary seized up entirely. ‘Lunch,’ he pronounced again stiltedly.
On the brink of saying no, Ruby recognised Steve waiting outside the door and almost groaned out loud. She knew the one infallible way of shaking a man off was generally to let him see her in the company of another. ‘Lunch,’ Ruby agreed abruptly, and she planted a determined hand on Raja’s sleeve as if to take control of the situation. ‘But first I have to go home and take my dog out.’
Raja was taken aback by that sudden physical contact, for people were never so familiar in the presence of royalty, and his breath rasped between his lips. ‘That is acceptable.’
‘Who is that guy over there watching us?’ Ruby asked in a suspicious whisper, long blonde hair brushing his shoulder and releasing a tide of perfume as fragrant as summer flowers into the air.
‘One of my bodyguards.’ Raja advanced with the relaxed attitude of a male who took a constant security presence entirely for granted. ‘My car is waiting outside.’
The bodyguard went out first, looked to either side, almost bumping into Steve, and then spread the door wide again for their exit.
‘Ruby?’ Steve questioned, frowning at the tall dark male by her side as she emerged. ‘Who is this guy? Where are you going with him?’
‘I don’t have anything more to say to you, Steve,’ Ruby stated firmly.
‘I have a right to ask who this guy is!’ Steve snapped argumentatively, his face turning an angry red below his fair, floppy fringe.
‘You have no rights over me at all,’ Ruby told him in exasperation.
As Steve moved forward the prince made an almost infinitesimal signal with one hand and suddenly a big bodyguard was blocking the younger man’s attempt to get closer to Ruby. At the same time the other bodyguard had whipped open the passenger door to a long sleek limousine.
‘I can’t possibly get into a car with a stranger,’ Ruby objected, trying not to stare at the sheer size and opulence of the car and its interior.
Raja was unaccustomed to meeting with such suspicious treatment and it off balanced him for it was not what he had expected from her. In truth he had expected her to scramble eagerly into the limo and gush about the built-in bar while helping herself to his champagne like the usual women he dated. But if the angry lovelorn young man shouting Ruby’s name was typical of the men she met perhaps she was sensible to be mistrustful of his sex.
‘I live close by. I’ll walk back home first and meet you there.’ Ruby gave him her address and sped across the street at a smart pace, deliberately not turning her head or looking back when Steve called her name.
The prince watched her walk away briskly. The breeze blew back her hair in a glorious fan of golden strands and whipped pink into her pale cheeks. She had big eyes the colour of milk chocolate and the sort of lashes that graced cartoon characters in the films that Raja’s youngest relatives loved to watch. A conspicuously feminine woman, she had a small waist and fine curves above and below it. Great legs, delicate at ankle and knee. He wondered if Steve had lain between those legs and the shock of that startlingly intimate thought sliced through Raja as the limo wafted him past and he got a last look at her. A woman with a face and body like that would make an arranged marriage tempting to any hot-blooded male, he told himself impatiently. And just at that moment Raja’s blood was running very hot indeed and there was a heavy tightness at his groin that signified a rare loss of control for him.
Ruby took Hermione out on her lead and by the time she unlocked the front door again, with the little black-and-white dog trotting at her heels, the limousine was parked outside waiting for her. This time she noticed that as well as the bodyguard in the front passenger seat there was also a separate car evidently packed with bodyguards parked behind it. Why was so much security necessary? Who was this guy? For the first time it occurred to Ruby that this particular visitor had to be someone more important than Wajid Sulieman and his wife. Certainly he travelled in much greater style. Checking her watch then, she frowned. There really wasn’t time for her to have lunch with anyone and she dug out her phone to ring work and ask if she could take an extended lunch hour. The office manager advanced grudging agreement only after she promised to catch up with her work by staying later that evening.
