“A king.”
“A job I inherited my job from my father, who inherited it from his father. I told you that a king is like a servant. What glory is there in serving others?”
“Lots,” Beth said. “Sacrificing oneself for others is the greatest glory of all. Not everyone realizes that.”
Omar looked at her. “You do.”
She snorted. “Me? I haven’t done anything.”
His eyebrows rose incredulously. “That’s all you’ve done since you arrived in Samarqara. Helping others, volunteering, caring.” He paused. “It was never about seeing Paris, was it? You pretended to be your sister in the bride market because she asked you. You did it for Edith.”
“She’s my sister. My parents died in a car crash when we were thirteen. Now our grandma’s gone, she’s all the family I’ve got left.” Beth looked down at her hands in her lap. “I love her.”
Sitting this close to her on the sofa was torture. As Omar breathed in her soft scent of honey and vanilla, he could remember how it felt to have her naked body against his own. Desire pounded through him. It took all of his self-control to look away.
He took another drink from his goblet.
“My experience of family was...very different. After my brother died, my father abandoned us for his mistresses and sports cars. My mother was heartbroken by my brother’s death. She sent me off to boarding school in America so she wouldn’t have to see my face, and be reminded of the son she’d lost.” He turned away. “She rarely left her room. She couldn’t bear to. She had to endure all my father’s affairs without being allowed to divorce him.”
“Oh, no.” Beth looked stricken as she reached for his hand. He looked down at her fingers, laced softly through his own.
“When I came to the throne, the nobles were stealing from the treasury, living in luxury as regular people starved. I vowed I would not be weak like my father. I’d rule like my grandfather. Without mercy.”
Beth’s eyes were huge in the warm afternoon light from the large windows of the queen’s bedchamber.
He took a sip of his drink. “I was immediately under pressure to marry, and secure the throne with heirs.” He gave a short smile. “I was twenty-one. In my infinite wisdom I thought, who better to be queen than the most beautiful girl in the land? And how better to tame the most powerful noble family, than with an alliance of marriage?”
Omar had never told this story to anyone. He stopped.
“What happened?”
His jaw tightened, and he looked away. “I proposed marriage. The girl accepted. But the morning before I was to marry Ferida al-Abayyi, she ran off to die in the desert rather than be my bride.”
Beth gasped. For several moments, the only sound was the cheerful birds singing in the garden beneath the tower.
Omar remembered how he’d waited in the palace that day, feeling at first amused by Ferida’s lateness, then insulted. And then—then he’d gotten the news of what she’d done.
“How could she?” Beth whispered.
Staring down at his goblet, he said in a low voice, “She said in her suicide note it was because she loved another.”
“Why didn’t she just tell you that?”
Omar gave a low, harsh laugh. “It was the law then, that the king could choose any bride, and she was not allowed to refuse. Hassan al-Abayyi assured me his daughter wished to marry me. He insisted Ferida would quickly get over her shyness.” He shook his head grimly. “I barely knew her. So I believed him. Because I wanted her.”
He couldn’t look Beth in the face. Setting his jaw, he said, “Her father wanted her to be queen. But she said in her note she’d already given her virginity to another man. She did not want to betray him. Or marry me under false pretenses, since by tradition the king’s bride had to be a virgin.”
“That’s why you didn’t care about virginity with me,” she said slowly.
He gave a harsh laugh. “Ferida’s death changed everything. When they found her body out in the desert...”
Shuddering, he couldn’t go on.
“Who was the other man?” she asked suddenly.
Omar shook his head. “I never knew. Some stable boy, I expect. She was only eighteen.” He tightened his hands. “I changed the laws so women could choose their own husbands. And for the last fifteen years, when my advisers begged me to marry, I refused.”
“That’s why you did the bride market?”