The Mills & Boon Ultimate Christmas Collection. Kate Hardy

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СКАЧАТЬ This was intrusion, unwanted and unwarranted—a question she had no right to ask. Yet something tugged at him to tell her, and he couldn’t work out what that something was. Was it an instinct she possessed—the same instinct that made angry and injured horses respond to her, which perhaps she extended to humans?

      He hesitated, feeling the momentary sway of his defences as she surveyed him with that air of quiet stillness and determination. Was this why Burkaan had let her pet him, why his viciousness and pain had been temporarily forgotten in her company—because she exuded an air of healing reassurance, despite her occasional spikiness? He told himself not to confide in her, because keeping his own counsel wasn’t just a matter of privacy, it was one of power. The unique and lonely power of a monarch who must always stand apart from other men.

      But suddenly the weight of his guilt and his own dark secret felt heavy—too heavy a burden to carry on his own, and for the first time in his life he found himself sharing it.

      ‘Because I have already been married,’ he said.

      She was shocked; he could tell. For all her bravado in saying this was just about sex, it wasn’t that simple. It never was. Not where women were concerned. They always had an agenda; they were conditioned by nature to do so. They always wanted to bond with a man, no matter how much they tried to deny it. He watched as she tried to cultivate just the right blend of nonchalant interest, but he could see that her eyes had darkened.

      ‘Married?’ she said unsteadily. ‘I had no idea.’

      ‘Why should you? It happened a long time ago, when I was very young—in the days before these wretched twenty-four-hour news channels existed. Those distant days when Jazratan was a country without the world looking over its shoulder.’

      ‘And your...wife?’

      He could hear the tentative quiver in her voice. What did she expect him to say—that Alya was locked up in a tower somewhere, or that she was just one of a number of wives he kept hidden away in a harem while he entertained his foreign lover?

      ‘Is dead.’

      She didn’t respond at first. If she’d come out with some meaningless platitude he probably would have got out of bed and left without saying another word, because nothing angered him more than people trying to trivialise the past. Instead, she just waited—the same way he’d seen her wait when Burkaan angrily stamped his hooves in his box before letting her approach.

      ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said at last, her voice washing like cool, clear balm over his skin.

      ‘Yes,’ he said flatly.

      ‘She...she had something to do with the Faddi gate and the rose garden, didn’t she?’ she asked tentatively.

      He nodded, but it was a moment before he spoke. ‘She was designing it to celebrate our first wedding anniversary, only she never got to see its completion. I had landscape designers finish it, strictly adhering to her plans, but...’

      ‘But you never go in there, do you?’ she said, into the silence that followed his words. ‘Nobody does. It’s always empty.’

      ‘That’s right,’ he agreed.

      Perhaps it was the fact that she said nothing more that made Saladin start telling her the story, and once he had started the words seemed to come of their own accord—pouring from his lips in a dark torrent. Maybe because it was so long since he’d allowed himself to think about it that he’d almost been able to forget it had ever happened. Except that it had. Oh, it had. He felt remorse pierce at his heart like tiny shards of glass, and following remorse came the guilt—always the guilt.

      ‘Alya was a princess from Shamrastan, and we were betrothed when we were both very young,’ he began. ‘Our fathers wanted there to be an alliance between two traditionally warring countries and for a new peace to settle on the region.’

      ‘So it was—’ she hesitated ‘—an arranged marriage?’

      His eyes narrowed and he felt a familiar impatience begin to bubble up inside him. ‘Such an idea is anathema to Western sensibilities, is that what you’re thinking, Livvy?’ he demanded. ‘But such unions are based on much firmer ground than the unrealistic expectations of the romantic love. And it was no hardship to be married to a woman like Alya, for she was kind and wise and my people loved her. She was beautiful, too—like a flower in its first flush. And I let her die,’ he finished, the words almost choking him. ‘I let her die.’

      She tried to touch him but he shook his head and rolled away from her, turning to stare at the flicker of shadows on the walls—as if it were a betrayal to even look at her while he was speaking of Alya.

      ‘What happened?’ she said, from behind him.

      He could hear the thunder of his heart as he dragged his mind back to that terrible morning—and, despite his having locked it away in the darkness, the memory seemed as vivid and as painful as ever. ‘I had to leave at dawn,’ he said heavily. ‘For I was due to ride to Qurhah to negotiate with the sultan there, and I wanted to get away before the sun was too high.’ He swallowed. ‘I could have flown—or even driven—but I wanted to visit some of the nomadic tribes along the way and it is better to take a camel or a horse into these regions, for they are still suspicious of modern transport. I remember Alya waking up just before I left, because she always liked to say goodbye to me. She was screwing up her eyes against the morning light, but we had been awake for some of the night and I thought she was just tired.’ His voice cracked. ‘So when she complained that her head ached, I told her to go back to sleep and to see how she felt when the maid came to wake her for breakfast.’

      ‘Go on,’ she said.

      He stared straight ahead. ‘I remember she smiled at me and nodded, looking at me with all the trust in the world as I bent over to kiss her. She told me to take care in the desert. And that was the last time I saw her alive.’ His words ground down to a painful halt, because even now they were hard to say. ‘Because when her maid came to rouse her, she found Alya lying dead.’

      ‘Dead?’

      He heard the shock in her voice and he turned over to see that same shock reflected on her face. ‘Yes, dead. Cold and lifeless—her beautiful eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Struck down by a subarachnoid haemorrhage at the age of nineteen,’ he said, his voice shaking with loss and rage and guilt. ‘Lost to us all and let down by the one man who should have saved her.’

      ‘Who?’ she questioned. ‘Who could have saved her?’

      He shook his head incredulously. ‘Why, me, of course!’

      ‘And how could you have done that, Saladin? How could you have possibly saved her?’

      He clenched his fists together, so that the knuckles turned bone white as they lay against the sheet. ‘If I’d thought about her, instead of being wrapped up in my own ambition. If I hadn’t been so full of triumph about the impending agreement with Qurhah, I might have realised the severity of the situation. I should have delayed my trip and called the doctor, who would have been there by the time she started to vomit copiously. I might have been able to help her, instead of being halfway across the desert when news reached me.’

      ‘You don’t know that,’ protested Livvy. ‘That’s pure conjecture.’

      ‘It’s fact,’ he snapped. СКАЧАТЬ