Heir to a Desert Legacy - By Maisey Yates Page 0,23

and I was going to school there. And I miss trees, dammit. But...but not nearly as much as I’ll miss Aden if I leave. I can’t leave.”

“This is what you want?”

She shook her head, looking down at the floor. “I don’t know what I want anymore. I spent most of my life wanting one thing, and now it just doesn’t mean what it did anymore. Now I don’t know what I want. All I know is what I can live without, and what I can’t.”

“And how is it I’m to explain to the world that Aden’s life-saving nurse can’t bear to leave him?”

“Sounds plausible to me,” she said. “You know how we women are with our emotions, and other nonsense sheikhs just don’t bear.”

“There’s a chance it will cause suspicion and that’s one thing we can’t have.”

“Why?” she asked, weak. Pitiful. She was showing her vulnerability. He could crush her now, emotionally, as easily as he could crush her if he wrapped his fingers around her soft, lily-white throat.

The showing, so artless, so genuine, sent a shock of anxiety through him. Didn’t she know what people could do with such an open expression of emotion? How much power it gave to others? She had just given him a weapon capable of destroying her, one that would enable him to manipulate her into doing whatever he chose.

She had revealed her biggest weakness to a man who had been trained to exploit weakness in others. To use it with ruthless precision. He both rejoiced in it, and feared for her.

Now the decision he had to make was what he would do with it. If anything.

“You know why,” he said, keeping his tone calm, collected. “It’s not just to preserve the memory of Rashid and Tamara, it’s so that Aden’s right to the throne is never contested. DNA testing is fine and good, but can you imagine what the more traditional citizens of my country would think about you carrying the sheikha’s child? If he is perceived to be illegitimate, or the product of something unnatural, then the way they view their future king could be compromised and I will not allow it.”

“Protect the king,” she said. “At all costs.”

“Otherwise the game is lost.”

Chloe took a shaky breath, feeling outside of herself, as if she was above her body somewhere, watching, rather than living in the moment.

“There has to be a way. There has to be...”

“Six months was the agreement, Chloe,” he said, his voice hard. “Anything beyond that cannot be guaranteed.”

“I see.” She heard herself answer, but she wasn’t sure if she spoke the truth. Or how she’d managed to get the words out past the lump in her throat.

“It is not my intention to hurt you, but I have to think of Attar. Of Aden.”

“I am thinking of Aden.”

“In a sense, yes. But I am thinking of his future as a ruler, not of his need to be tucked in at night. I’m thinking of the essential things.”

She wanted to argue that being tucked in at night was essential. At least, she imagined that it was. Her mother had been too caught up in the husband who used and mistreated her to take time for her daughter. And her father... She had started shrinking away from his touch at an early age, her survival instinct screaming that he was a predator who saw those smaller and weaker as prey. She’d retreated into her mind, found comfort there, because there had never been anything physical for her to find comfort in.

But she imagined it could be essential. That it could be wonderful.

“There’s more to life than duty,” she said.

“Not when you’re royalty, habibti, not then. Because the happiness, the future, of millions of people depend on you. A royal is both the most important person in a country, and the least. For they must give it all in the name of serving the people.”

Her stomach clamped down hard. “I don’t want that for him.”

“It is what he was born for.”

“I know.”

“Then you cannot stand in the way of it.” He looked back down at his paperwork, and she could tell by his posture that he was through with her.

She was through with him, too. For now. She wasn’t letting go of the idea. The certainty that she was asking for the right thing by asking to stay with Aden had only grown when he’d refused her. If there was one thing she knew how to do, it was put her head down