Harlequin Presents: January 2023 Box Set 1 of 2 by Lynne Graham

Author:Lynne Graham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

ANAÏS DUPONT HAD reached the stage of grief where anger freely flooded her veins. She’d gone through the shock and denial. Sobbed into her pillow at night when depression struck and bargained futilely with the fates while watching her beloved cousin’s body being lowered into her grave alongside her husband.

Now she was fully ensconced in anger for the senseless death of her beloved cousin. For the baby she’d never get to meet.

But most of all, she was angry at the news Riyaal’s palace councillors had delivered to her yesterday morning, three short days after the funeral.

The dispassionate and indifferent way her intention to return home to France had been curtailed. As per a request from the leader of the high council. Whose identity was wrapped in mystery.

And then the stomach-hollowing news that, far from the quiet departure she’d expected, she was to be given a new role altogether.

One to be divulged in due course. As if she had nothing better to do than sit around, twiddling her thumbs.

But wasn’t that what she’d done for the better part of three years as her cousin’s lady-in-waiting? Yasmin, rest her soul, had been nothing more than a figurehead queen, an ornament on her husband’s arm, brought out and displayed when the occasion called for it, and then placed back on her super-luxurious shelf, whiling away her time organising exquisite afternoon teas and gossiping with her friends and courtiers.

To be fair, her cousin had been content with that; and utterly blissful when she’d fallen pregnant. For that, Anaïs couldn’t fault her.

But in her dark, shameful moments, hadn’t she wished she’d stayed in France and written a letter or email instead of travelling to Riyaal to offer her personal condolences to her cousin when Yasmin’s mother had died?

Hadn’t she used her cousin as an excuse to alter the sense of her own life slipping away, and reconnected with the woman she only remembered vaguely but fondly as a child in Aix-en-Provence?

In the months after her arrival, hadn’t she wished she’d taken a little more time to consider the position before jumping at the chance to live in another country?

Of course, it had been a different story recently, just before Yasmin’s death. For one thing, her cousin had quickly become the queen of a kingdom at the brink of turmoil.

Suddenly, Anaïs’s days weren’t spent gossiping over petits fours and coffee but in soothing her newly pregnant cousin’s nerves as she alternated between morning sickness and worrying about her husband and the unrest unravelling through Riyaal.

Anaïs might have abandoned her profession as a PR executive in France but even she’d known that Yasmin’s husband, King Adnan, was slowly sliding into a PR disaster that would prove detrimental to his rule sooner rather than later.

So she’d been relieved at the announcement of an independent advisor. A renowned diplomat Adnan had baulked against for all of five minutes before he’d embraced the offer from Sheikh Tahir Al-Jukrat of Jukrat.

Anaïs had breathed a sigh of relief. Until, at what

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