A wail of distress, a cry of absolute agony, rent the air, and she was on her feet and at the door in a moment, her black hair swinging crazily as she hauled it open and disappeared before anyone knew what was happening.
‘Sera!’ he shouted, as he wrenched the door open behind her, but the passageway was empty and she was gone. He turned back to the room, confused, wondering just when it had been that he had started losing control of this day—when his world had tilted sideways and everything he’d known, everything he’d held precious, had somehow slipped out of his grasp.
‘I’ll find her,’ his mother assured him, her hand soft on his forearm. ‘You have things to discuss with Akmal.’ And he blindly nodded and let her glide from the room. Let his mother talk to Sera. Let his mother soothe her fears and doubts. Because if he could be King, surely she could be Queen? After being an ambassador’s wife for so many years, how hard could it be?
‘Akmal,’ he said, getting back to business, trying to forget Sera’s impassioned cry, the tortured look on her face as she’d fled, ‘have you had any luck with my other request?’
The older man nodded. ‘The team arrives later today, and the procedure is scheduled for tomorrow morning.’
Rafiq sighed with relief. At least something in his world was going to plan.
His mother told him where he would find Sera: down the carved steps that wound their way down from the palace to the small, secluded private beach. ‘Sera will talk to you there,’ his mother had said, ‘away from the palace and prying eyes and ears. ‘She will explain.’
He didn’t understand what there was to explain. She’d agreed to marry him less than twenty-four hours previously. What was there to explain—unless it was her erratic behaviour of today?
She stood at the far end of the small cove, looking out to sea as the sun settled low on the horizon, her blue robe fluttering in the breeze, her black hair lifting where the breeze caught it over her shoulders and her breasts imprinted on the fabric by the kiss of the wind. So beautiful, he thought, as he crunched his way through the warm sand of the tiny cove, and yet so very forlorn.
This beach had seen so much, he thought, wondering if that was a good omen or bad. For it was here that Queen Inas had found Zafir, the Calistan prince, washed up half-dead on the shore. It was in this place that, drunk with grief, she’d taken him for her own dead child, Xavian, and denied Rafiq’s own father the crown.
This was a beach that had seen a lie perpetrated that would come majorly unstuck some three decades on. And now the unbelievable events of the past weeks had taken a more dramatic turn and the unimaginable had happened. Now, instead of his brother, Kareef, he himself would be King.
And the woman he wanted for his queen stood looking out to sea, lost and alone.
She looked around as he neared, and again he was struck by her pallor, and the look of dread that filled her eyes. ‘What is it?’ he asked, wanting to take her in his arms, but she held him away and he had to settle for taking her hand, and even that slipped from his fingers as she turned to walk along the shore. ‘Sera, what’s wrong?’
She shook her head, turning her black hair alive. ‘Everything’s wrong.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you ever think that we were not meant to be together? That the fates were against us from the very beginning, that destiny was against us?’
Her words made no more sense than anything else that had happened today. ‘But we have been together—these last nights. We are good together.’
She smiled a smile that told him she agreed, a bittersweet smile that curled her lips and came nowhere near her eyes. ‘That’s destiny playing tricks again, giving us each other for a few magical hours before twisting the knife in a final, savage act of fate.’
She went to turn away again, but before she could he grabbed her shoulders, wheeling her around. ‘What are you talking about? Fate? Destiny? We are together now. You are a widow. I am free to marry whoever I choose. And I choose you, Sera, above all others. I want you to be my wife. I want you to be my queen.’
She pressed her lips together, but he could already see the moisture seeping from her eyes, turning her eyelashes to spikes.
‘But I can’t marry you, Rafiq.’
Her softly spoken words tore at his heart like razor-sharp claws. ‘Can’t? Or won’t?’
‘I can’t! And you can’t marry me. Not now. Not ever.’
‘This makes no sense! Last night you agreed. Last night you said yes. What is the difference now?’
‘Because now you will be King!’