Born Royal

Below the balcony, the huge, leafy square writhed ecstatically in the burning sunshine as the people cheered, shouted, laughed, sang, danced and kissed each other.

He was home. Their handsome Crown Prince, whom they had mourned as lost forever, had returned. And better still, he had returned a hero. As the man who had organized and masterminded the downfall of that band of murderous terrorists, the one so fearful no one liked to say its full name, but only called them Al Ikhwan. The Brothers.

Now the people need not live in fear of the threatened chemical attack. It was said he had found the actual laboratory where the filthy poisons were being made, and that the entire store of the evil virus had been destroyed.

No one needed to be told where the first attack would have occurred. But a country storyteller, who had a sizable group entranced with his version of the prince’s great exploit, told them anyway.

“Of course they would have attacked here in the islands of Tamir first,” he asserted in a terrible voice, and his audience gasped and nodded. “Such monsters as these are drawn to destroy truth and nobility, for they know instinctively there is no co-existence between evil and good.

“And for a certainty they would have come here, to the big island—and to this city, Medina Tamir. Perhaps even in this very square they would have released their foul poison, hoping to destroy the Kamal family and put their own puppet in Ahmed’s place!”

His audience of mostly city dwellers shuddered in horrified delight. The country people had a point—this was much more entertaining than the dry facts in newspapers or on television.

“And only when we died would the world have been alerted and begun to take action,” the turbaned, white-bearded ancient said, conveniently omitting the fact that the mission Prince Rashid had headed had been a joint one involving many nations. “Too late for Tamir. But what need have we of the world, when we have a prince such as Rashid? Brave, intrepid…”

The cheers redoubled as Prince Rashid was joined on the balcony by the rest of his family. The silver-haired King Ahmed, lovely Queen Alima, handsome Prince Hassan and his sisters, the beautiful and headstrong Princess Nadia, gentle, smiling Samira, and Leila—the youngest and, some argued, the loveliest.

It was Nadia who stood closest to Rashid as the family took their places, smiling and waving to the delirious citizenry. She glanced down at the crowd around the storyteller in the square, and pointed him out to her brother.

“By the end of the week you’ll have done the deed single-handed,” she remarked in an ironic aside. “Flying on the back of a giant bird, the Natobird, no doubt, and with the sword of your ancestors—I suppose they’ll call it the Kalashnikov sword—raised high, you dispatched the monsters after a fight to the death and won your way to the coffers wherein lay the terrible poison. You threw magical powder on the poison to render it harmless.”

Rashid laughed, not because she wasn’t right in her analysis. Nadia had an instinctive understanding of people and events, and it was a pity his father didn’t consult her more often in matters of state.

“Well, and if my mythical powers win the people to my side when I’m proposing a shift in foreign policy, among other things, I won’t object.”

Nadia flicked him a look. He should have known she would be quick to pick up on that hint. “Other things? As for example?”

Rashid shook his head, turning to lift his hand again and smile. The sun was high in the blue sky, burnishing the thick black curls, enhancing the glint in his dark eyes and the white, even teeth. The crowd swayed with reaction.

There was no one, Nadia reflected, whom he did not, one way or another, seduce. He had much more charisma than their rather severe father. It was no wonder that the people had been brokenhearted when Rashid went missing.

As for her, it had been like losing a limb. The miracle of having her brother back from the dead had not worn off yet. Maybe it never would.

“‘Among other things,’” Nadia repeated musingly, sliding an arm through her brother’s. “Now, what else would you be proposing besides a shift in foreign policy?” He was silent. “So the baby really is yours? I wondered.”

His gaze turning inward, Prince Rashid absently waved and smiled. The crowd cheered. He thought of Julia’s soft cry when his hands were on her, when what was going to happen was inevitable. Rashid, I’m—I’m a virgin….

He had not believed her. Other women had said it to him at such a moment; he had never understood why. Hoping to make his passion hotter, perhaps.

But it was true. When he realized it, too late, it had struck him a blow like nothing else he had experienced. A virgin. After all this time, she was a virgin.

“Yes, it’s mine,” he said.

He thought of the way she had melted at his touch, saw her face in his mind’s eye, those full lips stretched with desire. He had lost control.

“It will put an end to the feud, won’t it?” Nadia commented. “If marriage is what’s in your mind.”

Had it been his unconscious mind understanding that the one unanswerable way to bind them together was a child? Was that the reason such powerful desire had swept him, blinding him to every other consideration? His one chance offered, and he had taken it.

“The question is, what’s the best way of getting Father over the hump?” Rashid murmured. “He’s not going to like it, is he?”

Nadia laughed outright at the understatement. “The feud is what keeps him going, you know that.”

There was another round of cheers from below as their father and mother turned back inside the palace.

“I don’t want a war with him. But I have to do what I know to be right. If I could find a way to make him accept it—” He shrugged and waved to the crowds again as his sisters and brother left.

“Want some advice, big brother?”

Now there were only Nadia and Rashid. They waved a last farewell as the crowds went crazy with cheering.

“Yes, I want advice.”

“Play it the same way you played your last enterprise.” Nadia smiled and flicked her raised hand at him. “Surprise him.”

Chapter 1

Princess Julia Sebastiani twitched awake, her heart pounding, sweat on her forehead. She lay without moving, wondering where she was, as the memory of pleasure subsided in her blood. After a moment she sighed. She was in her bedroom at the palace. Alone.

The clock across the room read 6:30. Well, that was more sleep than she usually got when she dreamt of Rashid Kamal. She struggled to a sitting position and dropped her face in her hands. It was no use to try to get back to sleep; she had learned that through experience.

She slipped off the bed, crossed the room to the windows that looked southeast, and stood there, gazing out at the sun rising in splendour out of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a view she had loved all her life, but even in childhood her pleasure had been coloured by the knowledge that in that direction, over the horizon, out of sight, lay Tamir.

He was home. He was alive. Her child had a father—who was the son of her own father’s sworn enemy.

She had never known whether to think him alive or dead. Sometimes she had wondered if it had all been a plot to cast doubt on the Sebastianis—if Rashid Kamal had set it all up, the unexpected meeting, the surprised passion, and then his disappearance, so that the Sebastianis would be suspected in his disappearance just as the Kamals were suspected in the loss of her brother, Lucas. Other times she had despaired, sure that he was dead and that her son would all his life bear the stigma of belonging to a family suspected of killing his father.

He must know by now that she was pregnant. She wondered if he accepted that he was the father of her child. There was so much accusation and counter-accusation between the Kamals and the Sebastianis that it would hardly be surprising if he did not.

Julia and Prince Rashid to Marry!

A Montebello Messenger World Exclusive!

Crown Prince Rashid of Tamir and Princess Julia will marry “as soon as it can be arranged,” the Montebello Messenger has learned. In an exclusive interview with this reporter, the heir to the throne of Tamir, whose family has maintained a long-standing and well-publicized feud with Montebello’s own royal family, said that he felt the ill feeling between the two families was “a thing of the past” which should be forgotten.

“A man and woman cannot carry on an ancient feud when they are about to have a child together,” he said. “My interest is not in the past, but in the future. It is time to look ahead, to a time of peace between our two countries.”

The prince confirmed unequivocally that he is the father of Princess Julia’s child, a question about which there has been intense media speculation since his unexpected return from the dead early this week.

The palace here in Montebello has not so far responded to Rashid’s claims that a wedding between the Crown Prince and Princess Julia is in the offing.

“Damn you! Damn you!” Julia flung the Montebello Messenger to the floor with a cry of disbelief.

“Ma—madame?” a voice trembled behind her.

In the mirror her hairdresser’s face looked startled and wary.

“Oh—Micheline! Not you! Sorry!” she said, forcing a smile. She had never felt less like smiling in her life.