Born Royal by Alexandra Sellers

Author:Alexandra Sellers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Man-Woman Relationships, Princes, Aristocracy (Social Class), Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Unmarried Mothers, Historical, Princesses, Pregnancy, General
ISBN: 9780373271887
Publisher: Silhouette
Published: 2001-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 11

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”Are you crazy?” Julia demanded.

“Crazy with wanting you,” he agreed. He was suddenly seeing her with new eyes. He wanted her, body and soul. “Do you think pleasure is addictive?”

His smile was both rueful and incredibly sexy. She pressed her lips together. “I wouldn’t know!”

“Liar.” He reached out and stroked her hair back from her brown cheek. They were sitting in the San Sebastian palace rose garden, at a table under the shade of a massive rose-clustered pergola. Beside them was a small pond. It looked very English, Rashid thought, and must have taken enormous work to produce. He wondered if Queen Gwendolyn was responsible, or if it was a throwback to the colonial period of Montebello.

“Can we talk about Delia and Omar, please? And about how you’re going to discover the real truth?”

He nodded, still smiling. Then he stood and reached into his pocket. He pulled out the jeweller’s box and set it in front of her.

In automatic response, Julia picked it up and opened it. “Oh!” she cried, dropping the box as if it were hot. She glanced up at him and then back at the ring. “What’s this?” she asked suspiciously. Was he trying to trap her? She glanced around nervously.

“That,” he said, seating himself again and reaching for the box with one long, strong hand, “is Delia’s engagement ring,” and Julia lost all suspicion in surprise. Absently he plucked it out of the box, picked up Julia’s hand, and slid it onto her right-hand ring finger. It slipped down over the knuckle, a perfect fit.

“Is it really?” she breathed, instantly enchanted. She lifted her hand to look more closely. “How do you come to have it?”

He told her the story his mother had told him. Julia’s eyes got wide with interest as he proceeded, and by the end of his tale she had taken off the ring and was examining the engraving on the underside.

When he was finished, she sat gazing at him, all self-consciousness lost in the mystery. “So what’s your idea of what happened?” she asked.

“Let’s look at it,” Rashid said. “A young princess becomes engaged to the prince of a neighbouring country. Her dowry is a substantial piece of land that her father owns privately. She is given an heirloom ring to seal the bargain.

“She is so in love with her fiancé that later, when he dies, she will kill herself in despair. But instead of proceeding to the marriage, the princess travels to London, where, officially, she is to make her debut and be presented at court.

“But a valuable mineral deposit has suddenly been discovered on the dowry land, and her fiancé suspects that she is actually being removed from his path so that the engagement can be broken and the dowry land retained. All right so far?”

“Yes,” Julia commented. “Except that we didn’t break the engagement.”

“Of course. The prince, maddened by thwarted love, follows the princess to London. He has the heirloom ring reset in an inappropriate diamond setting.

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