to me here, I would like to return to my holiday plans as soon as possible.’
‘Perhaps we will discuss that tomorrow,’ Rashad fielded without batting a single lush black eyelash.
‘You do realise,’ Polly whispered, because that hard-eyed brunette she couldn’t quite warm to was seated only ten feet away, ‘that you are making me want to thump you again? I thought it might be my high temperature that caused my loss of temper yesterday but I can now see that it was merely you being you—’
A brilliant smile unexpectedly stole the grim aspect from his lean, dark, brooding features. ‘Me being me?’ he queried with perceptible amusement in a clear encouragement for her to expand on her feelings.
‘Horribly bossy. And I can see you’re used to people doing exactly as you say—’
‘Because I am the King,’ Rashad filled in helpfully.
‘But you’re not my King.’ Polly made that distinction with a slow sweet smile of mingled exasperation and reluctant amusement.
When he saw that smile, Rashad froze and leant back into his chair, squaring his shoulders while he wondered if she was flirting with him. Probably not, his brain told him. The British women he had been intimate with a few years earlier had used methods that were considerably more direct to attract and hold his attention.
‘But you are still my guest,’ Rashad retorted with lashings of cool. ‘And the Dharian rules of hospitality are strict. One should never make a guest uncomfortable—’
‘But you’re doing exactly that right now!’ Polly hissed at him in frustration.
His long brown fingers clenched taut round the cutlery. He tore his gaze from her lovely face, painfully aware that she made him very uncomfortable. With the discipline of years strengthening him, he studied his plate and he ate in complete silence.
‘In fact, you’re only making me want to stick a fork in you,’ Polly whispered across the table.
And that was it—Rashad lost that minor battle. A wholly inappropriate laugh broke from his lips when he failed to stifle his enjoyment. Polly studied him in surprise and then encountered the brunette’s chilling appraisal, which suggested that amusing the King could well be a capital offence.
‘We will talk again tomorrow,’ Rashad informed her quietly as they vacated the table they had shared.
Polly had to forcibly put a lid on her growing frustration with him. She was being too polite, she told herself. He had blocked her questions and refused to discuss the matter of the ring or tell her when she could leave. But did that really matter? After all, she was being treated like an honoured guest. Staying in the lap of luxury in a truly magical royal palace, another little inner voice chipped in gently, was scarcely a penance. It was a gift to be housed in such a gorgeous building, to be waited on hand and foot and to be wonderfully well fed. How could she possibly form a bad opinion of her host? It wasn’t as though she had been stashed in some primitive prison cell. Moreover she was being granted an intriguing glimpse of a very different and far more colourful lifestyle.
Satisfied by that more positive take on her unexpected stopover in a royal dwelling, Polly wandered off to enjoy all that the exotic palace had to offer. She ignored the troop of men, armed to the teeth, and the maid following close behind her, and roamed from the magnificent desert views available from the recently built rooftop terrace down through the state rooms, with their superb intricate brass-covered arched doors and elaborate interiors, right down to the kitchen, with its army of busy staff, who fell silent and froze in shock when she first appeared.
With the maid acting as an interpreter, Polly ended up seated in yet another shaded courtyard, being plied with chilled strawberry and honey tea and an array of fantastic little pastries. Somewhere about then she decided that she was having a truly wonderful holiday even if it was not advancing her an inch in her unlikely search to find out more about her father.
Possibly that had always been an unrealistic goal, she thought in disappointment. Too much time had passed. How did she even risk voicing the name she had been given when the poor man might not be her father at all and was probably long since married? She didn’t want to upset anyone and the mother she barely remembered had been sufficiently dysfunctional in her relationships even with her own family that she did not feel she could place much faith in Annabel Dixon’s judgement.
* * *
Later that afternoon a dialogue that would have very much shocked Polly was about to take place. Hakim had collected the DNA results and had received such a shock that he had passed much of the afternoon at prayer, wrestling with his guilt and with sentiments it was too late to express. Having unburdened himself, he had then received a shock almost as great when events that had taken place a quarter of a century earlier were clarified for him by an unexpected source. Sharing that information with his King was almost more than Hakim could bear but he did not have a choice.
‘Our guest is your granddaughter?’ Rashad repeated with incredulity. ‘How is that even possible, Hakim?’
The older man sighed heavily. ‘At the time my son Zahir died we were estranged. That has been a lifelong source of regret to me. I was aware that he was involved with the nanny but I also suspected her of having other male interests on the staff at the time. I knew that my son wished to marry her and he refused to listen to my objections. I urged him not to marry her—citing the example of my own parents, who married across the cultural divide—and my son took offence.’
Rashad was silent while his trusted adviser unburdened his troubled conscience. Zahir had been Hakim’s only child and that much more precious for that reason, and the day after the death of Rashad’s family Zahir had died heroically trying to defend the palace and its inhabitants from Arak’s squad of hired mercenaries.
‘And now you see the consequences of my miscalculation. I spoke to my son from my head instead of from my heart. He loved this woman and she was already pregnant. He would not have told me that,’ Hakim acknowledged hoarsely, his emotions roughening his usually steady voice. ‘When the nanny vanished after his death I never thought about her again...why would I have? But I have only now learnt that Zahir married her privately and secretly only the day before he died. May I humbly request some time off to go home and discuss this astounding discovery with my wife—?’
‘Of course,’ Rashad breathed tautly, struggling to absorb the apparent truth that Polly, in spite of her misleading colouring, actually carried Dharian blood in her veins. ‘But who does she resemble?’
‘My mother,’ Hakim confided tremulously. ‘That hair. I should have suspected it the instant I laid eyes on her. I must also ask you to put all matters pertaining to my grandchild and the current unrest in the streets in the hands of my two deputies, because I am no longer a suitably independent and disinterested third party—’
‘That I refuse to do,’ Rashad responded instantaneously. ‘I trust you as I trust no other man close to me.’
‘You do me great honour in saying so but I—’
‘Go home to your wife, Hakim,’ Rashad urged gently. ‘For today at least put family first and official duty second.’
Freed from the risk that Polly could be a half-sibling, Rashad smiled thoughtfully. Well, surprisingly, he was her King because although she did not know it her paternity granted her dual citizenship. He wished he could tell her that but it was her grandfather’s right to break such news, not his.
* * *
The following morning other concerns swiftly consumed him when one of Hakim’s aides brought the most popular newspaper in Dharia to him. The secret of Polly’s true name on her passport was a secret no longer and it was just the kind of nonsense liable to inflame the superstitious with fanciful ideas. A single king, a single woman named Zariyah after his great-grandmother, the return of the Hope of Dharia... Such coincidences were being interpreted as supernatural signposts of heavenly endorsement in the home of his birth.
Rashad heaved a sigh. It was