Born Royal. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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      “I call it going out of my tiny mind,” he admitted. “But why only once?”

      She swallowed, her eyes widening at the implication. “You—” she began, half-panicked.

      He stepped forward with his hands outstretched to grip her arms. Julia avoided the touch by backing up. Her knees bumped up against the sofa, and she sat down with less grace than she was known for. He stood looking down at her, his eyes dark and assessing. She moved her shoulders nervously.

      “You are pregnant with my child. You must have been expecting this.”

      “Expecting an offer of marriage?” she repeated disbelievingly. “From the man whose father used every opportunity to accuse me of having slept with you in order to murder you? I’m afraid not!”

      She stiffened as Rashid sank down beside her. “I am sorry,” he said. “But you must see I had no control over this. We were working to stop the Brothers of Darkness. There was nothing I could do to set the record straight, without jeopardizing the whole enterprise.”

      “Set the record straight? Why would you do that?” she cried. “You’d worked so hard to get me where I was!”

      “Worked?” he repeated with a half smile. “You really were a virgin, weren’t you? That wasn’t work, Julia.”

      She bit her lip as humiliation flooded her. What a fool she had made of herself with him. And how cruel of him to mock her.

      “And how could I have known that you would get pregnant?”

      “You knew damned well you were going to disappear that night, though, didn’t you?”

      “Yes, I did.”

      “Yes. And you arranged it so that I was the last person to see you ‘alive.’ I wonder if you can imagine what’s it’s like to have some very polite police detectives asking you in the kindest terms about the feud your families have been waging for the past century and how strongly you feel about it!”

      “It was no part of my plan to incriminate you. Is that what you’ve been thinking? No. It was completely wrong of me to—” he paused and reached out a finger to stroke back a tendril of hair from her temple “—to allow myself to make love to you. But you know what inducement I had, Julia.”

      “Inducement? I never—”

      His voice changed, turning into a seductive growl as he reminded them both. His fingers caught the delicate curl of her hair, stopping her as she tried to move her head away.

      The memory of his touch rippled over her skin.

      “You were irresistible. So beautiful. You called my name, and I was lost.”

      She struggled to subdue the heat his voice summoned up in her. She could not bear it if he made her look a fool again.

      “If it hadn’t been for Lucas’s d-disappearance…” Julia choked. She felt the tears burn again, undermining her. Even now she could not say the word. Like her father, she couldn’t apply the word death to Lucas.

      She burned with humiliation. “Yes, all right, I threw myself at you! But if Lucas…if I hadn’t been so distraught over my brother, you wouldn’t have got near me,” she finished.

      “It should not have happened,” Rashid agreed, with an edge to his otherwise calm voice. “But it did happen, and we are left with the results. What is the benefit in arguing over how we got where we are? The important thing now—”

      “It might help to clear the air!” Julia exclaimed.

      “Damn it, what is unclear?”

      “What is unclear is what can be feeding your delusion that we are going to get married! Or what you thought gave you the right to undermine me with the announcement of our engagement!”

      “Undermine you? Julia, I came home to a barrage of media speculation that I was going to repudiate you and your claim to be carrying my child. My first thought was to protect you from any suspicion that I doubted your child was mine.”

      “Your first thought was to get Delia’s Land,” she corrected him. “I suppose it was to please your father.”

      Prince Rashid abruptly lost his grip on his calm. “How dare you accuse me of this? You must know that my father was distraught over my disappearance—too distraught to be rational. Your own father has expressed his sufferings in the same unintelligent way!”

      “My father at least never used his grief as an excuse to grab Tamir land—”

      “Your father accused my father of masterminding your brother’s disappearance,” he interrupted ruthlessly. “Also of planting bombs and orchestrating the kidnap attempts on you and your sister. What was this, if not an attempt to undermine my father’s reign, distance his allies and assist the Ikhwan al Zalaam—the Brothers of Darkness—in their bid to unseat us?”

      His voice flicked her like a whip.

      “There was good reason to suspect the Kamals!” she cried. “One bomber even confessed he’d been hired by your father! What would you expect my father to think?”

      “The bomber lied. It was deliberate disinformation,” Rashid informed her levelly, as if she didn’t already know. “And I would expect from your father what I would expect from any intelligent person in a position of power—a calm and reasoned response to something that could easily have provoked a crisis.”

      “Like King Ahmed’s, I suppose! Waiting till my father’s beside himself over Lucas and then demanding Delia’s Land again.”

      They were almost shouting. He realized, not for the first time, how little self-control he had around her.

      Rashid shook his head in exasperation. “Julia, can’t you understand that what Delia’s Land represents to my father isn’t land, but a sense of closure, of justice? Rightly or wrongly, a century ago the Kamal family believed that their Crown Prince was murdered by the Sebastianis. In their view they were entitled—”

      Julia flared up. Nothing was more certain to get Sebastiani blood hot than a repetition of this stupid, baseless accusation. Tamir’s Crown Prince Omar Kamal and Montebello’s Princess Delia Sebastiani had been engaged lovers when copper was unexpectedly discovered on the Montebellan land marked out as her dowry, and to suggest that the Sebastianis had been so greedy as to murder the prince in order to prevent the marriage and retain the rich dowry land was an appalling slur against the Sebastiani name.

      “In their view,” she interrupted in a hot, unstoppable flood, “the Kamals figured if they made an accusation of foul play they could still get their hands on Delia’s dowry land after Omar’s and Delia’s deaths. It was cynical manipulation then and it’s cynical manipulation now. The Sebastianis were just as horrified as the Kamals when Omar was killed. Your family doesn’t seem to want to remember that Delia was so unhappy over Omar’s death she committed suicide! The Sebastianis were hit just as hard as the Kamals. And then to be accused of murder on top of it! The accusation was disgusting enough a hundred years ago. For your father to—”

      Rashid held up a hand. “Whatever СКАЧАТЬ