CHARLOTTE HEGARTY OPENED her palm and released the damp earth. Thud by thud it fell onto her father’s coffin, deep brown against a beech veneer, and she felt...nothing. Numb. Completely empty.
Her flimsy ballet flats sank into the mossy ground as she turned her back on the grave and on the empty scene behind her. Empty all but for her and the vicar.
No one had bothered to show up. Not even his drinking buddies. Friends who were only ever there when the drinks were flowing... She took another step, and another, hating the feel of her too-thin blazer and the starched white shirt chafing against her skin. But she kept moving. Away from the past, from the hopes and dreams she’d laid at his feet. Time after time he’d squashed them, choosing the bottle over her. And in the end the bottle had won. It had taken him and any hope that one day he would turn around and see her.
His daughter.
The wake loomed in her mind, as big and dark as the large black ornate gates coming into view. She still hoped someone would remember him. Grieve for him. But there was no free bar at the wake. Only memories. Only pain. Only regrets. His friends didn’t do real, did they? They didn’t want to see the real-world consequences of their lifestyle.
She’d remember him for them.
Her last act as a dutiful daughter. She’d walk to the pub across the road, where she’d been given the back room for free, and pretend to eat the little triangle sandwiches filled with fish paste and cucumber. And then it would be over.
On heavy feet, she closed in on the wooden double doors in desperate need of paint, and opened them with unnecessary force.
She froze. Every atom of her being was suspended as her heart stopped pumping blood to her vital organs.
She’d conjured a ghost.
‘Akeem?’ His name left her gaping mouth before she’d processed...him. She took a step forward. ‘You’re here—it’s you.’
‘Here and in the flesh, Charlotte,’ he confirmed, lazing back against the bar.
Her eyes locked on his mouth, to those full brown lips making each syllable of her name sound wrong. Just the way he’d made her feel nine years ago, when he’d reminded her of exactly who she was. Charlotte Hegarty, unworthy of unconditional love. The daughter of an alcoholic, living in the roughest end of London, surviving a poverty-stricken life and barely functioning as a normal sixteen-year-old should...
Bitterness swept through her and it made her ache. Deep in her core.
Her name shouldn’t be in his mouth or in his mind.
He shouldn’t be here.
But he was.
She unfurled herself, squaring her shoulders, and locked her gaze on his. How appropriate, on the day when there was nothing left to fight for but herself, that he’d show up.
‘Why are you here?’
She asked the question she’d spent countless nights rehearsing this very scene with him. But in her solo rehearsals she’d been the definition of cool indifference as he’d begged her forgiveness. The forgiveness she was going to pretend there was no need for and send him on his way.
But she’d never expected it to actually happen—and definitely not today.
Akeem shrugged, one broad, black-sheathed shoulder dipping to expose the pure breadth and size of him. ‘To offer my condolences.’
Indignant rage curled her toes. ‘Still telling lies, Akeem?’ she accused, before the words had time to linger in her mouth. He’d lied his way into her bed and then left her behind without so much as a note.
His movements effortless, he pushed free from the age-stained bar. He was six feet plus of sheer male presence, closing in on her, and he was daring to smile. Full, gleaming white teeth in a sea of a short-cropped black beard.
‘I never lied to you.’
The memory was vivid—visceral. It pulled her gaze back to his mouth, and to the last lie he’d spoken to her while climbing out of her bedroom window. He’d pressed a kiss to her swollen lips before sliding down to the porch roof with promises of tomorrow and for ever.
That lie had hurt the most.
‘Whatever helps you sleep at night,’ she countered, marvelling at the levelness of her tone.
‘Sleep is for the dead.’
His long, lithe legs crossed the wooden floor and she couldn’t breathe. His hair was thick and pushed to the side, as though he’d recently dragged his fingers through it.
He was breathtaking.
‘I’m very much alive, and I never sleep.’ He stopped, statue-still, in front of her.
Heat bloomed in her cheeks, down her throat, to spread out over her chest and deeper—lower. Her body recognised him before she could tell it not to. And she didn’t like it. Not one bit. Because it was terrifying. This effect he had on her by simply being in the same airspace, stealing the air she needed to survive when he simply inhaled it.
‘It must exhaust you, avoiding the demons haunting your bed.’
She planted her feet, readying herself to fight against a lifetime of remembering to keep quiet and do what had to be done. Don’t argue, don’t fight—just to get on with it. She’d been readying herself for this confrontation for nine long years. And she hated confrontation. But here it was.
Her moment.
His mouth flared into life. Not a grin, but a tilt of those sensuous lips as he leaned in. A hair’s breadth away from her mouth, he whispered, ‘My stamina has yet to be a concern.’
The air hissed from her lips. She knew what he was doing. He was intent on reminding her how she’d shared his bed. He had slept then. Wrapped around her like a second skin.
‘What you do in your bed has nothing to do with me,’ she said, Because it didn’t—not any more. ‘But you’re not welcome here.’
‘Am I not?’
His features were unmoved—a vision of innocence. But she knew better.
‘No.’ She moved her head from side to side in small, quick flicks. ‘My father wouldn’t have wanted you here, nor your condolences.’
‘My condolences are for you,’ he corrected, ‘not him.’
‘I’m surprised you have anything for me, let alone that you think of me,’ she countered, and prepared herself for the bit she’d practised the most. The biggest and best lie. ‘Because I don’t think of you at all.’
If she’d felt nothing at the graveside she was feeling everything now. Her sixteen-year-old self was bursting out, reminding her twenty-five-year-old counterpart that it had unfinished business.
And here he was—the unfinished business—now undoing the top two pearl buttons at his neck. Slowly, he revealed his bronze throat, thick and pulsing inside the crisp white collar of his shirt.
He didn’t respond. He simply watched her for a beat too long. His eyes searching hers. And a magnetic pull urged her to close the distance between them, to step inside the earthy scent of wood and sand and touch him.
The words had been easy, but what she hadn’t expected was the primitive reaction her body was having to him. This wasn’t part of the script. But she wouldn’t show it! She wouldn’t break on the outside, even if her insides were melting.
‘I think of you often, qalbi,’ he admitted, his voice low and soft, and she felt it like a physical caress on her cheek. ‘I think of the life you chose.’
‘The life I chose?’ she repeated, and she hated the crack in her voice. It had been nine years. She couldn’t blame him entirely that she’d stayed where he’d left her. But she did.
She pulled her lower lip between her teeth.
She blamed him for everything.
He nodded, his dark head dipping only once. ‘This pitiful existence you call a life.’
‘What?’
She stepped back then. Only slightly, but enough to give her room to strike him. Squarely, on that beautifully chiselled chin of his.
She knew how pitiful her life was, but—‘You have no right to judge my life,’ she said, finishing her thought out loud.
‘Don’t I? You could have been anything. Anything,’ he stressed. ‘Instead you continued to nurse a man who belittled you at every chance he got for another decade.’
She blinked hard and fast. ‘I...’
She could have been anything?
‘I’m twenty-five,’ she reminded him, ‘not dead.’
But his words curdled in her gut, despite her feigned confidence. She didn’t know what her life might have looked like now. She knew nothing apart from the all-consuming fact that she had no one and nothing to call her own.
‘Tell me it’s not true and regale me with your exciting plans now you are free. Are you still drawing?’
She gasped. Drawing? He remembered. He remembered the one part of herself that had allowed her freedom. Her pencil had been her ticket to adventure. Her escape. And she’d given it up. Her drawing. Her art. Her one talent. Because her dad had called her drawings stupid, a waste of time when she should have been caring for him. He’d destroyed all her work. Crushed her dreams. And she’d let him because she’d felt selfish, taking those precious moments to draw and dream for herself.
How could she have taken time for herself when her dad had needed her help to survive? How could she have chased her foolish dream of becoming a portrait artist when her reality had been so heavy?
‘Are you still chasing your dreams?’ Akeem continued, and she swallowed the memory of what she’d lost. What her dad had taken from her. Not only her art, but her identity. Because the only thing that had defined who she was—not a daughter, not a carer—had been her art.
But quickly she had let her dreams go as if they’d never existed—what would have been the point of holding on to them?
She zeroed in on his face. On the man determined to make her remember. To make her regret.
His eyes, intense, were moving over her face. ‘Or have you been wasting your life filling those empty whisky bottles with cold tea to fool your drunken father? Have you been wasting your life, qalbi, trying to save a man who did not want to be saved?’
He raised his hand, those long, elegant fingers moving towards her cheek. She backed up, one step at a time. He was too close. Too intimate.
But his questions spoke to her at her deepest level of consciousness. Because she hadn’t done—still wasn’t doing—any of the things they’d whispered about late at night, hidden in her bedroom...those dreams and hopes of being...more.
Her insides twisted and snaked around her lungs.
Her dad had needed her when no one else had, even if he’d never recognised her sacrifice. Her time. Her art... He’d never seen that it was her keeping him alive and forgetting to live her own life. Never acknowledged how she’d managed their minimal income by getting to the bank before he did to withdraw their welfare benefit money before he spent it on whisky so they couldn’t eat. He’d never seen her visiting food banks when she’d been too late and her father had taken the money before she had.
She’d made things work on a frayed string of hope and prayer, and not once had he thanked her. The daughter who had become the parent instead of the child. Who had worked in temporary jobs from catering, to retail, to office cleaning as soon as she had been old enough to get a job.
She’d worked in one meaningless job after another... She’d stood still for nine years. Exactly where Akeem had left her...
Her chest heaved.
She hadn’t had a choice!
‘I did what I had to,’ she said, feeling the past snarling between them. ‘I stood by my father as a daughter should.’ She exhaled heavily, felt the cheap cotton of her shirt loosening on her chest. ‘He was all I had left.’
‘No,’ he corrected, his voice laced with steel. ‘Your father was all you allowed yourself to have.’
‘Stop!’ she demanded breathlessly.
She didn’t want to hear this—any of it. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. This wasn’t it! Why wasn’t he on his knees, begging her forgiveness for leaving her behind?
‘Are you the woman you wanted to be, Charlotte?’ he asked, ignoring her.
She’d dared to believe she could be someone else once—that life had more to offer her than being her father’s keeper—and Akeem had smashed those notions to smithereens. She had no clue who she was now, or what she was going to do. But she wouldn’t admit that to him. It was hard enough to admit to herself that caring for her father had become her life.
‘Stop,’ she said again.
She rubbed forcibly at her exposed collarbone. She hated him. Hated what he’d done to her. Akeem had made her question everything. Not only question why he’d broken his promise to take her with him, but question herself on who she was and what she could never be. And he still was!
‘Stop it, whatever this is, and leave.’
‘But I’ve only just arrived.’
She glared at him. ‘I didn’t ask you to come.’
‘You’d rather mourn alone—’ he spread his hands wide, arching a thick dark brow ‘—in a room like this?’
‘How graceful of you to remind me.’ She smiled unkindly. ‘But you have no right to tell me how to grieve.’
‘All you should feel is relief.’ His nostrils flared, but she watched him shutter the exasperation glazing his eyes. ‘But you’re right,’ he conceded. ‘I have no right to tell you how to grieve, or where, because I am not sorry he is dead. But I am sorry you have lost your father, Charlotte,’ he continued, keeping his voice low and firm. ‘I know you loved him for reasons I’ll—’
‘This is not the time.’
‘What better time is there?’ he asked.
She watched the white shirt and black jacket becoming taut over his shoulders, hinting at the hard and muscular body beneath. The body she’d once coveted so wantonly.
Letting out a harsh breath, she uncurled her hands and scrubbed them across her face. It was time to end this.
‘What do you want?’
He closed in, removing the space she’d created between them. ‘It’s not what I want that matters. It’s what I have that you need, Lottie.’
‘What is it that I need, Akeem?’ she echoed back at him. His use of the name he’d used to call her by was doing things to her insides she didn’t want to recognise.
‘You need me.’
‘You?’ she whispered, disgusted that her body was having such a visceral reaction to his statement.
‘Yes.’ He smiled, his brown eyes burning black. ‘Me. Akeem Abd al-Uzza.’ His voice, deep and proud, oozed masculinity. Power.
‘Not Akeem Ali?’ she asked.
‘Abd al-Uzza is my father’s name.’
‘Your dad’s? But your mum—’
She closed her eyes. It didn’t matter. She didn’t want to know. He’d given up his name just as he’d given her up. Abandoned them both as if they meant nothing.
Forcing herself to chuckle, she tilted her head. ‘Akeem Ali—’ she shrugged ‘—or Abd al-Uzza, I don’t want you here, and I certainly don’t need you.’
‘Today is the beginning of the rest of your life. What better way to start that new life than with a night of pleasure in my arms, surrounded by opulence?’
‘You want to take me to bed?’ she spluttered.
‘Yes. You will spend one night in my bed—one night of extreme pleasure.’
‘Why?’
‘Call it what you will—closure...’ he stretched the word.
‘Closure?’ Her heart hammered. ‘You came here uninvited because you thought I’d sleep with you one last time for closure?’ Her eyes widened, and she hooked a brow. ‘How very arrogant of you.’
‘Does my arrogance surprise you when I can see your pulse pounding wildly beside the hollow of your throat?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘The boy I knew would ask—never demand.’
Unbidden, memory claimed her. The swipe of tentative fingers across her naked hipbone. The press of his mouth behind her ear as he asked if she liked his hand there...did she want him to bring her pleasure with his fingers?
She shuddered. Her Akeem had been gentle, caring—never demanding. The Akeem she had known was not this man standing in front of her.
‘I am not the boy you remember.’ His voice was silk. Seductive. ‘The pleasure you will experience in my arms will be unlike any you’ve known before or after me.’
He raised his hand and applied pressure to the frantic beating at her throat. It took everything she had in her arsenal not to react to his touch and to remain indifferent. But she wasn’t indifferent. She’d only ever known him. All she could do was watch—feel all the things she shouldn’t be feeling.
She hated him, didn’t she?
‘Should I put my mouth here, so you may understand the power of attraction still between us?’
‘No!’ she shrieked, unable to breathe or to think about anything but her disloyal body. It tingled from the intensity of his gaze—his touch. And she wanted to step into his embrace.
What was wrong with her? It was the day of her father’s funeral. She was on the edge. And here was Akeem, magnifying her overwrought emotions to fever-pitch. She couldn’t stand it. His ability to still affect her. He would not trick her into forgetting what he’d done. How he’d abandoned her.
‘No,’ she said again, ‘my bed is off-limits to you.’
‘It’s not your bed I want you in,’ he corrected. ‘It’s mine.’
‘Whatever bed,’ she huffed, knowing he’d purposely missed her point. ‘I won’t be in it with you,’ she declared, and hoped she meant it. ‘You’re the one that needs this.’ She waved her hands. ‘Not me. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’
‘You need to close the door on the past as much as I do,’ Akeem concluded, and moved his thumb up the taut lines of her throat. With his forefinger beneath her chin, he tilted her head. ‘Take a chance and come to bed with me.’
Temptation teased through her, and the knot in her abdomen was an acknowledgment of the desire she felt. She didn’t need his mouth on her skin to understand that whatever was still between them was powerful—more than it had been nine years ago. But it was different—stronger. An older kind of yearning... It was lust, she recognised. Desire.
She was a fool.
‘No,’ she whispered, and his hands fell away to his side. ‘I can’t.’
‘Fear stopped you when you were a girl, and now you are a woman—’ his eyes swept over her ‘—you’re still scared.’
‘How so?’ she asked, because he’d been the one to run away. He’d been the one who was afraid.
‘What do you have to lose?’ he asked, and she bit back the immediate response clinging to the inside of her mouth.
Nothing.
‘You have no job, no family, no money, and soon you’ll be homeless. Do you wish to remain exactly where you have always been until they forcibly evict you from everything you know? Your house? Your home?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘It is easy to imagine the life you have led.’ His lips thinned, and silently he held her gaze.
Of course he knew everything. He was a man of means now. She recognised it in every stitch of his handmade suit. He knew she hadn’t moved forward. To him, she was still the same girl he’d known. Scared, and alone, and thrust into a system she had been frightened would take her away from her dad.
She’d always kept her mouth shut. As her dad had taught her. Outsiders didn’t matter. Outsiders didn’t count. And she had told no one anything—not even the police who’d hammered on the door because the school hadn’t been able to contact her dad for three days and they’d had concerns for her welfare. They’d found her dad barely conscious. The social services team had delivered her to a children’s home, and still she’d remained silent. But she had told Akeem.
Eight weeks, they’d told her. An interim care order. If in eight weeks her dad could prove he was well enough to take care of her, she could go home. For those eight weeks it had been her and him. Akeem and Charlotte.
He’d been her first and only friend. She’d opened up for the first time in her life—because he’d offered her something she’d never had. Friendship.
But she wasn’t that girl any more. She didn’t want to be. Because that girl had given everything to her father until there had been nothing left for her.
A recklessness she’d never known before pulsated through her. Urging her to throw caution to the wind and admit that his touch on her body was welcome and she wanted more. Much more. Because when had she ever been selfish? Or allowed herself to behave any way rather than steadfastly, working out the pros and cons first?
Once was the simple answer. Once when she’d packed her suitcase, ready to run away with Akeem, and he’d gone without her...
She had nothing to lose by spending the night with him.
Only pleasure—however fleeting.
Every muscle in her body strained as she moved towards him and stood on tiptoe.
‘One night?’ she hissed and waited, nose to nose, eye to eye, for him to respond—like a boxer squaring off against an opponent before a fight, just as her dad had done in his youth.
The only time her father had fought for anything it had been for those few trophies on the mantelpiece at home. He’d never fought for her. For their family. The only things he’d taken pride in had been his boxing achievements. And what did she have to be proud of? A few awards for her portraits from secondary school? An unconditional place to study for a diploma at college she’d never taken up because she’d had to get a job instead? She’d had to take care of her dad...
‘Yes.’ Akeem agreed, his eyes hungry, his breathing shallow. ‘One night.’
It was desire. That was all. Right now, she needed to connect, and she was reacting to the havoc of the day and to the storm of emotions he was evoking inside her. The indulgence of being impulsive was equally as exciting as it was frightening, but she was surrendering to it. To a spontaneity she’d never been allowed to have.
Until now.
Her hands had made their way to the solid wall of his chest. The fabric of his shirt was cushioning her fingers. She pushed away and stepped out of his embrace.
‘Let’s get it over with,’ she said, trying on for size the indifference she wanted to project. But she wasn’t indifferent. She was excited. Scared. Slick in places she shouldn’t be.
His eyes narrowed. ‘As you wish. But we will not “get it over with”. It will be long and gratifying.’
Tingles shot through her. ‘One night and one night only. Then we part ways. Nothing changes. We’ll be the same as we are now. A distant memory in each other’s life.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, his beautiful face carved in granite.
Charlotte hesitated. He was lying. Again. Or was she? Because it would change everything. It would change her. But wasn’t that what she wanted? To be completely brand-new and forging forward into a shiny future, not beholden to the past?
‘No more thinking, Charlotte,’ he said, his voice gruff, and he extended his arm. ‘Take my hand.’
With bated breath, she did.
Blindly, she followed him. Took his hand, without pause and without question. To be deposited neatly into a waiting car.
She looked at him, folded against the leather interior, seemingly oblivious to her presence, and her traitorous heart did a double beat. Her hand still burned. Her palm still radiated the heat of their hands’ union. And her mouth...oh, her mouth...it throbbed with the memory of his lips so close to hers.
Her heart threatening to explode, she looked away from him. Sweat beaded her palms and she smoothed them down her black pencil skirt. There was a ladder in her tights. A run where thigh met knee. She pulled at it. She didn’t belong here, with her cheap skirt and ninety-nine pence tights.
This wasn’t how a woman should look on her way to a hotel to be seduced.
She turned to the window. The scene beyond was a whizzing blur.
Her clothes didn’t matter. She wanted this. She wanted him.
Keeping her back to him, she felt the warmth of his breath hit her nape before he moved his mouth to her ear.
‘So tense...’
A soft but firm finger traced the outline of her spine, and she shivered as a heavy sensation dragged through her in its wake.
‘I have every intention of easing this tension.’
She hadn’t been touched in almost a decade. She didn’t need to ask what he meant. Of course there’d been dates. She’d worked in endless jobs, and meeting people hadn’t been the problem. But she’d never connected with them, never wanted them, because their lips hadn’t been his lips.
They hadn’t given her this. Whatever this was still burning hotly between them.
Arching her neck, she leaned into him and closed her eyes. One night—that was all—and his hands would be everywhere... On her—in her. They’d be naked and anonymous in some swanky London hotel. She needed this. He was right. She needed him.
The car slowed to an almost-crawl. Or was she slowing down? She didn’t seem to be breathing—just feeling.
‘Does it scare you?’ she asked.
He pressed his chest against her back. Strength surged from him. Solid and all-consuming confidence.
‘Does what scare me?’
She twirled in his embrace, splaying her hand against his seemingly impenetrable chest, keeping him at bay, although every instinct told her to pull him in. Grab him by the lapels and pull him in. Closer.
‘This energy between us?’
‘What I feel is excitement,’ he admitted, ‘not fear.’
‘Me too,’ she whispered truthfully. ‘But it’s been nearly ten years.’ She grappled with her tongue. ‘We are strangers, and yet...’
‘We are strangers?’
‘How can we not be? I was only sixteen when we met at St John’s Children’s—’
‘I was nearly eighteen.’ His eyes widened. ‘We were both innocents, finding solace in each other.’
‘But the trajectory of our lives since then has been...’ She wanted to say different, but it didn’t feel right.
He vibrated luxury. The suit caressing his body. The car. He’d moved on to bigger and better things and she—
She shook her head and looked at her hand touching his chest. Crashing into this flesh and muscle nine years ago at the children’s home had opened a whole new world for her. They’d become each other’s secret. They’d been each other’s escape.
Akeem had offered her companionable silence in a world that had refused to be quiet, offered her comfort in the endless task of worrying about her dad by just letting her be still with him. They’d sat watching TV in the communal lounge, or talking in the garden, and she’d offered him a reprieve too, from the care system he’d been so eager to escape, by listening to his dreams. He’d wanted to build. That had been his dream. To go from labouring on a renovation site to building skyscrapers in the sky.
She’d never imagined that nearly a decade later this was where she’d be. A stranger to him.
Her fingers moved of the own volition. Testing the firmness—the realness—of him.
She’d wanted a family to call her own...a career that fulfilled her fanciful dream of becoming a portrait artist... And then the one person who’d believed in her dreams had vanished and so had they. Her dreams. Vanished as soon as she’d dared to believe they were possible.
Charlotte encircled the pearl button in the middle of his shirt with the pad of her thumb. Lifting her gaze, she eyed him cautiously, the pink tip of her tongue poking through her mouth to moisten her lower lip.
Akeem had made her believe.
She swallowed—hard. He’d made her believe in lots of falsities. Her breath caught and she pushed a finger inside the buttonhole. Her finger met a fine fuzz of hair. And heat.
But this was real.
This want.
‘You know me,’ he declared. ‘You still want me and you are looking for a way to justify your desire. The connection still between us should dispel any shame attached to spending the night with me.’
She gasped, unable to contradict his pinpoint accuracy over her tumultuous emotions. Could he read her so easily? Could he see her?
‘We are not strangers,’ he continued. ‘Your body knows mine.’ He placed the pad of his thumb on her top lip and instinctively she opened her mouth to accept him. He pulled his hand away and reached for hers, placed it on the hard length of him beneath his trousers. ‘And my body knows yours.’
She couldn’t move. The heat of him mesmerised her. The hardness. The open conviction with which he wanted her.
‘There is no shame or guilt to be found here, qalbi,’ he promised, ‘only pleasure.’
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. And the silence stretched, palpable with the heaviness between them.
‘We’ve arrived,’ he informed her, nodding towards the window.
And before she’d caught her breath he was opening the door on her side and offering her his hand. She stepped out to join him.
Planes.
They were everywhere she looked. Small ones, big ones, and some bigger still.
She rounded on him. ‘Where’s the hotel?’
‘There was never a hotel.’
‘Then where—?’ A plane in the distance took flight, and she watched as it ascended into the skies. How had they got to an airport?
Her heart hammering, she turned her eyes on him. ‘You said one night?’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed. ‘For one night I mean to have you in my bed. There is no trickery at play. No deception.’ His voice was low. Gruff. ‘My bed. Not one anyone else has enjoyed, and one where only my body knows the dips and springs.’
‘Sounds like you need a new mattress!’
A sting of heat worked its way from her chest to slash across her cheeks. She was reacting to him. Her traitorous body had hardened and softened in places she’d forgotten could melt with the mere sound of his voice.
‘I need you, qalbi,’ he contradicted. ‘And I mean to have you in my bed. In my desert kingdom.’
‘What?’ Her heart hiccupped. ‘Your desert kingdom?’
‘I am Crown Prince Akeem Abd al-Uzza, son of the late King Saleem Abd al-Uzza and soon to be named King of Taliedaa.’
‘How?’ Her mouth gaped as she reeled from his announcement. ‘When your birth father contacted you on your eighteenth birthday I thought—’
‘You thought wrong. It was not my parent who contacted me. It was my father’s senior aide, who’d been watching over me my entire life. Waiting.’
‘Waiting for what?’ Anger replaced her shock. ‘To see how much life could kick you?’
She knew how much life had kicked them both. And he was saying someone could have saved him from that. But hadn’t.
‘Your first thought is how it was unfair to me?’ Thick brows arched over coolly observant eyes. ‘And not what you could have become?’
‘What I could have become? It’s not about me...’ she dismissed easily, with a wave of her wrist. ‘He left you—a child—alone to fend for yourself when you are of royal blood? You’re a prince—’ she pressed a trembling hand to her chest ‘—and they let you be tossed from children’s home to foster home to children’s home again because they were...waiting?’
‘Spare me your pity, Charlotte. I do not need or want it.’
‘It’s not pity I’m feeling.’ And it wasn’t. It was hot rage, with a cooling dose of empathy.
Red lines shadowed his high cheekbones. ‘Then do not look at me with those eyes.’
‘They’re the only eyes I’ve got.’ She shook her head. ‘Why did they—he,’ she corrected, ‘wait so long after your mother died?’
‘My mother was of no consequence to the crown.’
‘Wasn’t she a secret royal, too?’
‘No.’ The response was dry—husked. ‘My mother was a plaything of my father’s—a commoner working in the palace. She left my father’s kingdom the minute she discovered she was pregnant for fear of being ostracised.’ Harshness contorted his face. ‘Her death changed nothing.’
The confession was low and deep. She could see how much it had cost him to admit that.
Confusion narrowed her eyes. ‘What about you? Why did they leave you in the care system until your eighteenth birthday?’
‘Kings do not trouble themselves with their bastard sons unless they are a security risk or they suddenly need them.’
He hadn’t said want and that chafed at her skin.
Had they both been unwanted by their fathers?
‘Which were you?’
‘I was—I am,’ he emphasised, ‘the only heir by blood to the Taliedaaen throne.’
His voice was toneless. Not proud. Not...anything. Her eyes flicked across his features. Vacant.
A heaviness expanded in her core. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Would it have made a difference?’ he asked. ‘I told you the truth. My birth family got in contact and wanted to meet me. Would the rest of it have mattered?’ His eyes, black and granite, held hers.
‘Of course not.’ The denial was hot in her mouth. ‘But we were planning to elope—’
‘You promised yourself to a boy with callused hands. A boy who worked from dawn till dusk in manual labour to learn his trade.’ His face was unreadable, a mask of emptiness. ‘You did not promise yourself to an orphan prince raised in poverty, who would one day be a king. You wanted the man and not the crown. There was no need to tell you.’
‘Is that why it was such a rush? Your plan to meet my dad? To tell him we were leaving, with or without his consent? Because you weren’t only leaving London, you were leaving England altogether? Is that why you left—’ She cut herself off and trapped the last words in her mouth.
Without me?
‘When I suggested we run away together—run away from a system that had cared for neither of us and away from your father—I was taking us to a bedsit with the leaving care grant they’d offer me on my eighteenth birthday. But that day I was going home. To my country. It was that day or never. Because I was leaving and I wasn’t coming back.’
We? Us?
‘And you chose never?’ she asked quietly, his choice of words making her gut churn.
‘I didn’t choose. But I’m here now.’
She wanted to push. Wanted him to say to her face that she hadn’t been enough. That she hadn’t been princess material and he’d forged on without her. But the words clung to her throat.
That was why he’d left her behind. He’d abandoned her because he’d believed she wasn’t capable or worthy of his new life. He’d known the daughter of an alcoholic would never be accepted by royalty. By his family. Or anyone, really.
She was unlovable—destined to fail. Just as her dad had reminded her every time she’d got something wrong. No, more often than that—every time she’d breathed too loudly, spoken too confidently.
Her chest ached for the girl she’d been. The girl who’d poured all her simple hopes and dreams into his ear. Believing he was accepting her as she was. For who she was.
‘I can’t go to Taliedaa,’ she said, ignoring the past nagging at her in the bitter depths of her memories. She wanted to close the door on the past—not wrench it open! ‘I don’t want to go to a world where you’re a crown prince and I’m...me.’ She looked down at the splintering fabric on her knee. ‘I have ladders in my tights. I can’t possibly get on a plane.’
His gaze locked on hers. ‘Then take them off.’
She gasped. ‘I...’ Exhaling heavily, she shrugged. ‘I can’t.’
And she couldn’t. Because she might take off her tights, but she couldn’t take off her skin. She couldn’t shrug off who she was. And she couldn’t change who he was now.
‘Where will you go, qalbi?’ he asked. ‘Back to the same little house where we became lovers?’
‘Once hardly makes us lovers,’ she responded stiffly.
‘I stand corrected,’ he said placatingly, and there were those teeth again. Perfect in their insincere symmetry. ‘The same little house where we spent countless hours hiding from your father—hiding from that robotic children’s home manager—to talk.’
He didn’t blink, those eyes holding fast to hers, and her stomach flipped. Painfully.
His smile faded. ‘The same little house where I lost my virginity and you lost yours.’
Her breath caught tightly in her lungs. Memories claimed her. Just as he’d intended. Memories of the one and only time they’d made love. Of the night they’d surrendered their virginities to one another to seal their pact to marry. It had been the night before they’d agreed to tell her dad. The night before they would leave together and never return.
Instead he’d left her behind, with her father full of ‘I told you so,’ because she’d strayed from the plan and told her dad everything before Akeem would arrive.
And he never had.
‘I am not that boy any more,’ he reminded her again, and reached for her. His fingers held lightly to the tops of her arms. ‘I will not fumble or hesitate.’ His eyes darkened. ‘My touch will be...controlled.’
‘You were never out of control.’ Charlotte stared at him. ‘Not with me.’
He released her. ‘Wasn’t I...?’ He continued without a reflective pause. ‘It matters not, because the pleasure you will experience in my arms now will be nothing like our night together. It will be...’ He exhaled sharply, his nostrils flaring. ‘It will be full of the pleasure only a king can give you. Only me. Only what I have become.’
‘King?’ she croaked.
‘This is your last chance,’ he warned, ignoring her question. ‘Get in—’ he stood aside, waving his hand towards the long red carpet leading up to a gigantic plane’s entrance ‘—or stay exactly where you have always been.’
He dropped his hand to his side, turned and walked towards the plane.
‘Wait!’
He snapped his head back round. ‘Wait?’
Her heart slammed against her ribs, the breath in her lungs choking her. The funeral had been for her dad. The wake had become all about Akeem. But this...
This could be for her.
‘I’m not the girl you remember, either.’
And she wasn’t. She didn’t want to be. She wasn’t a secret royal, but she wanted to be someone else, if only for a minute. She wanted to be selfish. Bold.
Worthy of...more.
Her gut was gripped in a tight fist. She would never be her father. She wouldn’t allow herself to let life pass her by again. Her father had been nothing more than a shadow on the doorstep of death for far too long, and he’d been dead long before she’d found him.
A heart attack brought on by alcoholism and no one had been there. She hadn’t been there. He’d died because she’d failed to do the one thing she’d been trying to do her whole life. Keep him alive.
Closing the memory down before it consumed her, Charlotte focused hard on the man before her. The living flesh of a man offering her life.
She was alive. She could live. The only person she had left to fail now was herself. And she was tired of failing.
Shaking her waist-length curls behind her back, she moved ahead of him, keeping her head high.
She was getting on board.