A Secret Birthright(54)
She grabbed his forearm, urgency emanating from her. “I trusted you with Ryan’s life, with both our lives when I came to the land I feared most on the strength of nothing but my belief in you. But it’s more complicated than you think. And when we…we…”
“Became lovers?” He placed his hand on top of hers before she could retract it. “I can see how this made you feel more trapped. But after I was furious with Emad when he revealed the truth, then told my father, I can’t be more thankful to him now. Like we say here, assa an takraho shai wa hwa khayronn lakom.”
She nodded. “You may hate something and it’s for your best.”
He smiled. “I’ll never stop being impressed by how good your Arabic is. Hesham taught you well.”
She blushed. Blushed. With pleasure at his praise. And at the ease with which he now referred to Hesham, and the beauty of the relationship she’d shared with him?
Then her color deepened to distress again. “But Emad didn’t find out the full truth. And when you know it, you won’t find acceptable excuses for my half truths.”
He took her by the shoulders. “No, Gwen, whatever you hid, I’m on your side, and only on your side, always.”
The tears gathered in her eyes slipped down the velvet of her cheeks as she nodded. “Hesham said your father told him his life story when he was fifteen. He said he married three women, one after the other for political and tribal obligations, had children from each, sometimes almost simultaneously.” Fareed knew well the story of his father and his four wives and ten children. He had a feeling she’d tell him things he didn’t know. “But he didn’t love any of them.”
“It was mutual, I assure you.”
Gwen winced. “Yes. Then he met Hesham’s mother and they fell in love on sight.” Fareed’s jaw dropped. That he surely didn’t know. He believed his father was love-proof, let alone to the on-sight variety. “But even if his marriages were to serve the kingdom, she wouldn’t be a fourth wife. So he divorced his wives wholesale, and dealt with the catastrophic political fallout.”
He was only six when this happened. He still remembered the upheavals. “My mother and the other two women say it was the best day of their lives when they finally got rid of him.”
She nodded. “It was how he convinced Hesham’s mother to marry him. She feared if he could divorce the mothers of his children so easily, that she couldn’t trust him. So he let her interview them and they told her it was what they longed for, how they, like him, had felt trapped in the marriages, that he’d never loved anyone but her in his life. He pledged only death would part them.
“Their marriage was deliriously happy, and when she got pregnant, he told her he’d love her child the most of his children. But she died, and he almost went insane. He at first hated the son he blamed for killing his love. Then as Hesham grew up and he saw her in him, he transferred all his love and expectations and obsessions to him. He ordered no one to mention her because it made him crazy with grief.”
Fareed felt more disoriented than when his father’s guard had struck him. “And it seems I will keep finding that I know nothing about those I considered my closest people.”
She shut her eyes. “Th-there’s more. Much more.”
“Then arjooki, please, tell me everything.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “What nobody knew is that a few years after Hesham’s mother’s death, her tribe, the royal family of Durrah, invoked an ancient Jizaanian law. That if a king married more than one woman, the sons of his highest-ranking wife would succeed him to the throne, with no respect to age. Since Hesham’s mother was a pureblood princess, that made Hesham the crown prince.”
He stared at her, beyond flabbergasted.
This…this…explained so much. Yet was totally inexplicable.
Not that he considered disbelieving her for a second.
But he had to ask. “Kaif? How could my father hide something like this? How is that not common knowledge?”
“Your father pledged to Hesham’s maternal relatives that Hesham would be his crown prince. On one condition—that they reveal this to no one until he prepared his kingdom and his other sons, especially the one who lived his life believing he was his heir, for the change in succession. But most important, until he prepared Hesham for the role he’d be required to fill. They agreed, in a binding blood oath. The king told Hesham when he turned fifteen and your oldest brother, although still in confidence. Hesham said Abbas was sorry for him, if relieved for himself. He didn’t relish being crown prince.”