Chantelle Shaw - The Royal House of Karedes - Two Crowns - The Sheikh's Forbidden Virgin / The Greek Billionaire's Innocent Princess / The Future King's Love-Child

Then, taking another deep breath for courage, she slipped through the flap and out into the cool night.

The air was cold and sharp, the sky glittering with stars. The sand dunes were cast in silver by the moonlight, and the air after the storm was perfectly still.

Signs of devastation could be glimpsed, shadows of broken rocks, twisted roots. Briefly Kalila offered up a prayer for the rest of her party, sheltering at the airport. She prayed no one would lose a life because of her own folly.

Her own selfishness.

She moved gingerly across the sand to Aarif; his back was to her, one arm braced against the rock overhang. His head was bowed, every taut line of his body radiating anguish. Anger.

She stood a few metres behind him, her arms creeping around herself in the cold, and waited.

What could she say? What could he say?

What, she wondered distantly, could happen now?

A long moment of silence passed; the horses shifted fretfully and a slight breeze stirred the hair lying limply against her face. Then Aarif spoke.

‘What we’ll do,’ he said in a cold, flat voice, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, ‘is tell everyone I found you this morning. You sheltered here alone, and I found a protected place of my own. Then at least your reputation will not be called into question. I don’t think there is anyone in the party who wishes to cast doubt on you or this marriage union.’

Kalila heard his words echoing relentlessly through her, but they didn’t make sense. He was sticking a plaster on a wound that required major surgery.

‘That’s all very well,’ she finally said when she’d found her voice, ‘but it hardly addresses the real situation.’

‘I hardly think you want your father’s staff knowing what happened,’ Aarif replied, his voice still cold and so horribly unemotional. ‘I am trying to salvage this mess, Princess.’

‘How? By lying?’

‘By protecting you!’ Aarif turned around, and Kalila took an instinctive step backwards at the anguished fury twisting his features. ‘God knows I made this mess, and I will be the one to clean it up.’ He spoke with such a steely determination that Kalila quelled.

‘How?’ she whispered.

‘I will have to tell Zakari.’

She closed her eyes, not wanting to imagine that conversation, or what it meant for her. For her marriage. ‘Aarif, if you do that, you will ruin my marriage before it even begins.’

‘I will tell Zakari that it is my fault—’

‘And you think he will believe that? That you raped me?’ She shook her head, disbelief and disappointment warring within her. She didn’t want this, this sordid discussion of what had just happened between them. She couldn’t bear to talk cold logistics when her heart cried out for him now—still—

‘I was responsible,’ Aarif insisted in a low voice. ‘I should have stopped, turned away—’ He shook his head. ‘I accused you of being selfish, Kalila, but it is I who have been the most selfish of all.’ He muttered something under his breath and stalked away, his body so taut his muscles almost seemed to be vibrating with a seething self-loathing.

Kalila took a few tentative steps towards him. She wanted to touch him, to reach him, yet every instinct told her she couldn’t. He had shut himself off completely, walled himself with his own sense of responsibility and guilt.

Still, she tried.

‘Aarif, I could have protested. I could have stopped. We are both to blame.’ His back was to her, and he said nothing. Dragging a breath into her lungs, she forced herself to continue, to lay her heart open to him as her body had been. ‘The truth is, I didn’t want to. I wanted to be with you, Aarif, from the moment you touched me. The moment I touched you, for if we are going to apportion blame, then I was the one who first—’

‘Don’t,’ he cut her off, ‘romanticise what was nothing more than a bout of lust.’

Kalila blinked. She felt as if she had been slapped. Worse, she felt as if he’d taken the handful of memories they’d just created and crumpled them into a ball and spat on them. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘it wasn’t.’ Aarif was silent, and she spoke again, her voice wavering and then finally breaking, ‘Aarif, don’t make this into something sordid—’

‘It is sordid!’ he snapped. ‘Everything about it is sordid, Kalila, can’t you see that? My brother trusted me, trusted me, with your care. He asked me to come fetch you because he believed he could depend on me, and I did the worst thing—the only thing—that would betray him utterly.’ He swivelled to face her, his face pitilessly blank. ‘There is nothing good about what happened, Kalila. Not one thing. You might have felt a brief pleasure in my arms, but it was cheap and worthless, and if you had any sense of honour or duty, you would know it.’

Kalila opened her mouth but she couldn’t think of a single thing she could say. Tears rolled slowly, coldly, down her cheeks. Aarif watched her with such an obvious lack of sympathy that she felt as vulnerable and exposed as she had underneath him, her body open to his caress.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said, his voice as sharp and cutting as a razor. ‘You’re thinking you’ve fallen in love with me.’ He spoke the word—love—with such contempt that Kalila could only blink. ‘You told me you wanted love. Not an arranged marriage, you said. And so now you think this is it. Love.’ He shook his head, holding up one hand to stop her from speaking, although Kalila’s mind was too shocked and numb to frame even a syllable. ‘Oh, I don’t think you realised what you were doing. You were caught up in the moment as much as I was, but now you’re desperate to make it into something, to believe we have something.’ He spoke with a sneer that reverberated through her. ‘Well, we don’t, Princess. All we have is a mistake, and it is my duty to rectify it. As for your marriage—Zakari is a kind man. He can forgive.’ He paused, his lip curling. ‘He’ll have to.’ He turned to walk away, to leave her alone with his harsh words, his cold condemnation.

Kalila’s head was bowed under the weight of his judgment, and she spoke through stiff lips. ‘You are saying this because it’s the only way you can accept what happened.’

Aarif stilled, stiffened. ‘Still clinging to fairy tales?’ he mocked, but she heard—hoped she heard—a current of deeper hurt and even need beneath his sneering tone.

‘This doesn’t feel like much of a fairy tale to me,’ Kalila replied, lifting her head, her chin tilted at a proud, defiant angle. ‘I’m not going to cheapen what happened between us, Aarif, simply because it was wrong. And, yes, I know it was wrong. I accept that, but I also accept that for a few moments you clung to me, you needed me, and I needed you. And we found something together that I can’t believe everyone finds.’ Tears sparkled on her lashes, she felt another one drip onto her cheek, but she kept his gaze. ‘Believe what you want, if it makes you feel better,’ she said. ‘Believe your own version of the fairy tale, Aarif, but I know the truth.’

Aarif’s mouth tightened in a hard line, his eyes dark and angry. Kalila looked up and saw the stars were fading into an eerie grey dawn, the first pale pink finger of daybreak lighting the flat horizon. ‘It’s morning,’ she said. ‘Time to go.’

They packed up in stiff silence. Kalila wrapped herself in numbness; the pain and the realisation, the repercussions and the bittersweet memories, could all come later. They would come, she knew; she wouldn’t be able to stop them.

For now, she busied herself with mundane tasks of rolling blankets and folding the tent, feeding the animals and making herself as presentable as she could given their limited resources.