Loving the Enemy by Connelly Clare

Author:Connelly, Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three

WAITING WAS LIKE BEING on tenterhooks.

Being at the palace once more was like being transplanted into a whole other world. She’d forgotten the grandeur of this place, not to mention the sheer size of it.

She’d forgotten the protocols she was expected to observe, such as having all six of her maids in attendance at all time. It was a company she found cloying, and an expectation she most certainly intended to rail against.

If they were to have a child together, then Chloe was going to spend the rest of her life in the palace. It was a far greater commitment than marriage alone, surely, to bond themselves with a new life. That person deserved two parents who were committed to acting in his or her best interests irrespective of their own personal gripes. Besides, maybe once they got to know one another, this coldness and repressive distance would disappear?

No. Chloe stopped walking, so sharp was her determination to push that thought aside.

She was done expecting unavailable men to start valuing her! She’d wasted her whole life feeling meaningless and purposeless only because her father hadn’t valued her. She’d spent years waiting for any little crumbs of praise that he wanted to pass her way… there was no way she’d go through that miserable maze of rejection again. Not even for the man she’d married!

Raffa would never give her what she wanted – there was no hope that they’d be more than civil to one another. Civil co-parents, and co-rulers. There were other silver linings to her marriage, though. For one, the charity work she’d been free to undertake since moving to the city would continue regardless of where she lived. She loved her work – that gave her all the validation her father, and now husband, had withheld.

As for love? Malik loved her, and she loved him. After her father’s death, he’d been the only one who’d understood.

‘He failed you, child, except in one way. This marriage is the best thing he could have done for you. Here, you will be happy at last. You’ve always belonged here, even that first summer when you were little more than a fairy.’ And he’d hugged her in a rough embrace, his body – once strong and big – now a smaller version, his fingers trembling a little in that way they did now. He’d understood that she had been unloved and in small ways, he’d made sure she felt secure in her life in Ras El Kida.

He, alone, had welcomed her.

‘Do you remember when you came here, as a child? You would run the halls, singing, and I knew you belonged here. That you were a part of this Kingdom, even with your white hair and your pale skin.’

What foolish dreams she’d had when she’d entered into this marriage! To think that she could marry a man and suddenly ‘belong’!

That she’d ever belong anywhere.

How childish it had been of her to think Raffa had carried any intention of their marriage being

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