Sabrina Philips – The Desert King's Bejewelled Bride (страница 8)

‘Well?’ he said, mocking her earlier impatience. ‘What do you say to wearing the sapphires, Tamara?’

Tamara took a deep breath. ‘I can’t marry you Kaliq.’

Kaliq straightened indignantly as the sun rose high above their heads, the mystical glow of half light beginning to fade away.

‘May I ask why?’

Is it not obvious? She wanted to retort in kind, but her pride forbade her. For how could she reply that it was because he did not love her, when to admit she loved him—when she had only known him for one week—was crazy. As ridiculous as saying yes to a man who had only proposed because she was the virgin daughter of an ambassador, and because he needed a wife in order to inherit his kingdom. And how better to escape the real reason than to answer as if she had simply been offered the job of queen, rather than asked the one question in the world that ought to have been motivated by love but which held none at all?

‘Because I wish to be free,’ she whispered brokenly, ‘to live my life out of the spotlight yours attracts.’

Kaliq looked up from the final paragraph of the international trading treaty as the plane began its descent to his homeland, and his heart settled. It had consumed almost all his waking hours for the past few weeks and, finally, it was finished. He felt all the pleasure of a plan just as he had calculated—well reasoned and considered after days of deliberation—the way his plans always were.

Always, except once. His eyes roamed to Tamara, willing himself to feel the same sense of satisfaction as she sat there compliantly in exactly the way he had intended, but his mind only filled with scorn for his younger self. That idea then had come impetuously, irrationally, awkwardly. Had presented itself as an ill-timed but doable solution to satiate both his lust and fulfil his duty.

But then there had been nothing rational about his thoughts from that very first day he had met her, when he had known, unequivocally and inconveniently, that she was both innocent and the most desirable woman he had ever encountered. Less rational still had been that night when it had occurred to him that not only was she leaving, but that it was inevitable that on her travels she would meet some other man who would have no qualms about robbing her of her virtue. He’d wanted her, with an ache unlike any he had ever known. Yet to have taken her would have made him no better than some other man himself and, as a proud descendent of the A’zam tribe who had first civilised Qwasir, that had been out of the question.

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