Cinderella’s Royal Secret by Lynne Graham

Author:Lynne Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-12T11:59:13+00:00

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Vanishing back into his own room, Rafiq stripped for a shower and wondered why he had suggested dinner in the desert. It was surely basic courtesy to ensure that his bride enjoyed her time in Zenara and for him to act as a considerate host? Even though he had planned to avoid her? his hind brain prompted. And beneath the beat of the shower, Rafiq groaned, comprehending his change of heart with a clarity that surprised him.

Izzy was not Fadith. In nature, she was not remotely similar to his first wife. She was a totally different woman. Just as the handful of women he had had sex with in recent years could also have been dissimilar, only he had never given them the chance to prove that, had never got to know them in any but the most superficial of ways. He had never spent the night with anyone until Izzy and had never allowed an encounter to stretch into a second night.

Izzy, however, was a unique case. ‘We’re not a real couple,’ she had said, and while in one essential way that was true since they did not plan to remain together, in other ways it was quite distinctively untrue, Rafiq reasoned seriously. Of course, his outlook on marriage was very different from hers. Weddings were fun occasions in the West, associated with romantic love and deeply optimistic hopes. But being born royal, Rafiq had never expected that kind of marriage. He had always known that he was unlikely to get to choose his wife for himself and that he would have to simply make the best of whichever woman he married. That awareness had made him realistic and practical.

What Izzy had yet to accept was that, even without those Westernised notions of hers about marriage, she was still his wife and was still the mother of his unborn children, a bond that would create an unbreakable lifelong tie between them. And when she did reach that real-world state of acceptance, how would she feel then? How could he possibly know?

He was still marvelling that she was willing to surrender custody of their offspring and leave her children behind in Zenara while she returned to the UK to pursue her career plans. She was a lot younger than he was, he reminded himself, and still defiantly determined to reclaim the life she had expected to have, and he understood that tenacious streak of hers. Even so, she had seemed softer, more sentimental and had made it very clear that family meant a lot to her...

But then what did he know about a mother’s emotions, most particularly a career-orientated modern mother? he asked himself cynically. Having birthed him, his own mother had not seemed to care whether he was alive or dead, having never shown any further interest in him. At a very young age he had realised that not all women were maternal. It wasn’t every woman who wanted to raise her own child, take on that responsibility for another being’s welfare and limit her own freedom accordingly.

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