Born Royal

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Julia was already groping in her bag for her phone. “I left home yesterday.” And last night had been spent in the tiny, old-fashioned hotel with no TV in the room. Her mother had said nothing last night when she phoned. “Excuse me, I’ve got to go and phone!”

She dashed out the nearest door, into a hallway. But there were people strolling up and down, and she took the nearest stairwell up. She came out in a shadowed, darkly wainscotted hall, with doors along one side and arched windows on the other. Looking for a place to hide, Julia ran to a corner at the far end that was partly protected by a carved panel, and huddled in the darkness, dialing home.

It was the private line, and her mother answered. “Mama? It’s Julia!” she breathed.

“Hello, darling. Having a good time? Where are you?”

“At the château. Mama, someone just told me—”

“Oh, Julia,” said her mother, and those words were enough. Her hopes that it could be a mistake died. She sobbed a breath.

“It’s true, then?”

“Yes, we heard late last night.” Her mother’s voice held the memory of tears. “After you called. I didn’t—I didn’t want you to be alone with the news, so I didn’t call back. I suppose it was foolish to hope you wouldn’t hear before you got home. I’m sorry, darling. I wanted you to have a good time at your friend’s wedding. You’ve had so little enjoyment lately.”

“I don’t know any details, Mama. Just that they’ve…” She swallowed, her throat aching with unshed tears. “Is it true they’ve found the plane?” Julia asked.

Her mother’s voice trembled. “A piece of the wreckage. They’re pretty sure—” she swallowed and continued in a calmer voice “—pretty sure it’s Lucas’s plane.”

“Was there any sign of—of Lucas?”

“No. At the moment they seem to think the plane broke up in the air. Julia, the worst of it is, they—the authorities there have called off the air search.”

It was like hearing her own death warrant.

“No!” she protested, and the unshed tears burst from her in a flood. “Noooo! Oh, Lucas!”

“Anna’s very distressed. Your father is insisting that some sort of search should continue, but—well, at this distance it’s hard to know exactly what’s…what’s…oh, Julia,” she wailed helplessly. “What are we going to do?”

“Going off with Rashid Kamal?” her father repeated, his voice rough with incredulity. “Why? Where?”

Anna was staring at her sister with a wild surmise. Only the queen went on calmly drinking her coffee.

Julia bit her lip. She might have known she’d run into flak on this. It wasn’t anything she liked, either, but it had to be done. She wished her father would accept it without a lot of argument. Argument just made her more jittery.

“I am not going off with him, Papa. We are simply going somewhere we can talk for a few hours over lunch.”

“Where?” he repeated grimly.

“I don’t know. Somewhere we can be reasonably alone, I imagine. I’ve left it to him.”

“You’ve lost your bearings, Julia!” He looked at his wife for support.

They were sitting in the small breakfast room over a late Saturday breakfast. Anna was now hiding a smile. She flicked Julia a conspiratorial, admiring look and picked up her cup. Julia wanted to cry, I am not sneaking off to a lovers’ assignation!

The queen remained silent, and her father returned to the attack. “I forbid you to go anywhere with a Kamal! Have you forgotten your brother’s fate?”

“Papa, you have surely accepted by now that it wasn’t the Kamals who did that. If anyone, it was the Brothers of Darkness. And who has done most lately to spike their guns?”

Her father subsided a little. “That still doesn’t make it safe for you—”

“Look,” Julia interrupted. “I don’t like it any better than you do. But like it or not, Rashid Kamal is the father of my child. And at the moment, according to him, his father is contemplating naming my son as his heir. Whether that’s an empty threat or not, it just points up the fact that there are things we have to discuss. And since I don’t want those things leaked to the media, we are going somewhere alone, and I will not be taking a bodyguard.”

She won the argument. But by the end she was so worn out with pretending to trust Rashid Kamal that she was sweating with nerves.

The helicopter beat the air as it slowly settled onto the grass, whipping Julia’s long hair and the full skirt of her soft yellow dress. She put a hand up to hold her hat. Rashid watched the way her dress clung to her stomach, looking for the signs that a child was growing there.

When he cut the rotor, she came across the lawn towards him and leaned in the passenger door, peering towards the seats in the back of the helicopter. Rashid pulled his mouthpiece away from his chin so she could recognize him.

“Hello!” he cried over the engine noise.

Julia did a double take. She hadn’t been expecting him to be piloting the helicopter himself, and a fresh wave of nervous energy swept her.

“Hello!” Her voice held the sound of her determination to keep this pleasant. She had a deep, primitive urge to turn and flee.

“Can you climb in?” He spoke so matter-of-factly that her fears were momentarily calmed. He’s a Kamal, she told herself. That doesn’t mean he’s going to murder me in cold blood.

He leaned across to offer her a hand, but she clambered in without his help. He frowned to himself without knowing why. Something to do with wanting to be needed. Especially because she was pregnant.

With his son.

He helped her strap herself in, however, and gestured towards a headset in front of her. Julia took off her straw hat and slipped the headset over her ears. A moment later the chopper lifted smoothly off under his guidance, and they were airborne.

“Did you bring a bathing suit?” Rashid’s voice said in her headset.

It felt too intimate to have his voice inside her head like this. It reminded her of the last time she had heard him so close. Then he had not needed the assistance of a headset to give the impression of closeness; his voice had sounded close because his mouth was against her hair.

Beautiful, he had murmured. You are so beautiful….

Julia’s cheeks burned with the memory. “I did,” she said, hefting her drawstring bag as evidence without meeting his eyes. She dropped the bag between her feet and turned to look out. He had taken them out over the water and was heading north.

So the private place he had in mind was not on any of the Tamir Islands. She had wondered if he meant to take her to his horse farm on Siraj.

“Are we going to a yacht?” she wondered, half to herself, forgetting that her headset, too, had a microphone.

“No, an island.”

“An island? Rashid, I don’t have a passport with me!”

He laughed. “Stop worrying, Julia.” Again his voice was intimate and seductive in her ears. “Your seat reclines. Lie back and relax.”

In the cocoon of the helicopter with him, she felt strangely detached from the normal world. If she had not known Rashid was a Kamal, she would have felt an instinctive trust of him.

There was nothing she could do about this situation except start screaming to be taken home. Or go along with it.

She was tired after her sleepless night, and she would do better in the coming discussion if she caught some sleep now. With a resigned shrug, Julia found the mechanism, reclined her seat, and, with the sun bright above them, and sparkling almost painfully from the deep blue of the Mediterranean below, closed her eyes and let herself drowse. The memory was never far away….

Chapter 5

After her mother hung up, she had crouched on the floor, her head in her arms, alternately sobbing her brother’s name and begging God to let him live. “Lucas, oh, Lucas! Please, God, please, no!”

She’d thought she’d faced the possibility, been prepared for the worst ever since learning that Lucas’s plane had gone missing. She saw now what an illusion that was. Now, when all her hopes came crashing down around her, she could see how wildly she had been hoping, how she had staved off any real acceptance that the worst might happen.

She was crouched in the gloom, sobbing wildly, when a hand touched her shoulder.

“Please go away,” she hiccuped desperately, hiding her face in her hands. “Please.”

“I can’t do that,” said a voice. “I can’t leave you here like this. Come.” The voice was strong with masculine authority, and perhaps it was because she felt lost without Lucas in the world, felt as if her sheet anchor was gone, that she took comfort from his presence.

He drew her to her feet, and she allowed him to do it, then buried her face in a strong, comforting shoulder as he held her and gently stroked her hair. “My brother,” she sobbed. “My brother—”

She was swept by another bout of inconsolable weeping, and her knees collapsed. He caught her as she slumped, and without a word bent and swung her up in his arms.

His hold was strong and sure, like her father’s when she was a child. He strode down the corridor and stopped by a door, and she heard the sound of a key in the lock. In another moment she was inside in deep darkness. He bent and she felt something soft under her back. A bed. He tried to straighten, but she clung to him. “Hold me,” she begged. “Just hold me for a minute, please.”