He stared up at the ceiling. ‘She was the youngest of seven sisters—beautiful and completely spoiled, by all accounts—and although my father was warned it was an unsuitable match, he would not listen. Ironic, isn’t it? That I chose so carefully when selecting a bride. I wanted more than anything not to repeat the mistake of my father, which is why I picked a supposedly suitable princess.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘And look how that turned out. Which just goes to prove that the majority of relationships are doomed from the start.’
‘So what happened?’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘He was completely obsessed with her and, in a way, that seemed to diminish her respect for him. And the more she played him for a fool, the more it seemed to feed his desire for her. He found himself unwilling to commit to the very demanding role of monarch because that would take him away from the wife he was so infatuated with. But she...’ He stopped for a moment, wondering if there was any need to tell her this and then he thought—why wouldn’t he tell her when he had come this far, when he had already broken the rule of a lifetime by confiding such intensely personal matters? ‘She took a series of lovers, which broke his heart. His loyal courtiers tried to protect him—the less scrupulous ones took advantage. And he went to pieces.’
‘And what about you?’ she questioned cautiously. ‘It must have affected you, too.’
He shook his head, determined his expression would show no sign of the pain which had hit him so hard as a child and made him feel even more isolated. ‘I tried to block out as much of the chaos as possible. And then, when I was nineteen, my father died, and my mother soon afterwards, and by the time I acceded to the throne, everything was in a mess.’
She looked as if she wanted to ask him a question and he guessed that maybe she was too shy to frame the words. ‘You want to know what all this has to do with celibacy?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘History has always acknowledged the power which abstinence from sex confers upon a man,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t the great knight Lancelot eventually ruined by his weakness for a woman’s flesh? And don’t great sportsmen deprive themselves of sex before a big game, in order to achieve the highest honours in their field?’
‘I guess so,’ she said uncertainly.
‘I vowed that I would enter my marriage without impediment, so I could offer my bride not just my untouched body and my fidelity, but intense pleasure, too. That is why I studied erotic texts so extensively for so many years, for there are many ancient books which provide comprehensive guidance on the subject.’
There was silence for a moment while she seemed to absorb this.
‘But what about your wife?’ she questioned eventually. ‘Surely she wanted you to consummate your marriage?’
‘It never got that far. Or rather, the subject remained purely academic and there was no consummation.’ His mouth twisted. ‘For there is only one thing which makes addicts happy and that is their chemical of choice. Adiya simply wasn’t interested in sex, not at any time during our short marriage.’
‘But why...?’ She looked as if she was trying to understand. ‘I mean, there must have been a thousand more suitable women to choose from, so why me?’
This was, Kadir realised, what Americans sometimes called the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Could he put his response to Caitlin Fraser down to frustration and lust and being in the right place at the right time? Of course he could, because what other possible explanation could there be?
‘Just before I met you, I’d spoken to one of Adiya’s doctors, who had explained that she could live in that vegetative state for many years and it was highly unlikely she would ever recover.’ He swallowed. ‘And I accepted that, as my destiny.’
He had decided to embrace the life which fate had afforded him. He would be a celibate king. So he had buried his once fervent desire to sire a child and had used his energies to rescue his battered homeland, throwing himself into a series of demanding battles to reclaim the areas of his country which had been unlawfully occupied.
The war had been won but he had lost Rasim, his oldest friend, and for a while that had derailed him. And then, on a business trip to the UK, he had seen Caitlin Fraser standing on a hillside with her camera, her flame-red hair calling out to him, the soft crumple of her lips imploring him to kiss her when she turned round to reproach him for frightening the eagle away. It had been the most overwhelming temptation of his life, even though many women had propositioned him. He had resisted them—but he hadn’t been able to resist her. Like some tame puppet he had asked her to meet him for dinner—made physically vulnerable by a woman in a tweed skirt and a scratchy sweater. Of course he hadn’t known she was a virgin—he had no template with which to compare his night with her. Nor she him. Yet she had been, he recognised with a sudden unwanted rush of exultation.
She had been a virgin, too.
‘And why me?’ he said suddenly, turning the question on its head. ‘There must have been men who had tried it on with you before.’
Now it was Caitlin’s turn to hesitate, but she saw no reason to hide the truth from him. She wriggled up the divan a little.
‘Because I had an inbuilt fear of men. My mother may have failed in many of the more accepted parental skills, but she was very good at teaching me that men were never to be trusted. That men would do you down if you gave them the chance. If you’re told something enough times, then eventually you start to believe it. Oh, I went out with people from time to time, but nobody ever lit my fire.’
‘And what was so different about me?’
He had been irresistible, that was what. With his towering stature and flashing black eyes, he had seemed more like someone who had stepped from the pages of a story. But what she’d felt for Kadir had transcended the physical. When she had talked to him it was as if she’d known him all her life, as if there were no barriers between them, nor ever could be. And when he had kissed her, she’d believed she could trust him with not just her body, but her heart and soul, too. The reality had been very different, of course. Maybe her mother had been right all along.
She wanted to hurt him as he had hurt her. To tell him she had fallen into bed with him because he had obviously been very rich and that had turned her on. But that wouldn’t have been true and, anyway, he was the father of her child and they needed to find some way to work through this seemingly impossible situation in which they found themselves.
She reached down and touched her finger against the ridging scar which marred the perfection of his body. ‘This is new,’ she said quietly.
He nodded as he laid his palm over the faint stretch marks left behind after her pregnancy. ‘So are these.’
It was unexpectedly poignant, this unspoken acknowledgement of the time which had passed and the ways in which they’d both changed. For a moment the atmosphere became undeniably intimate and Caitlin was fearful of the way it made her feel. ‘What happened?’ she said
, quickly moving the conversation on.
For a moment he didn’t reply and she half thought he wasn’t going to. But then he spoke and she had never heard a voice sound quite so heavy, or defeated.