Free For Duty's Sake by Lucy Monroe

Mom.”
    â€œShe would not even try to give me a son.”
    â€œI am sorry to have been such a disappointment to you.” And she’d never even known she had been.
    â€œThat is not what I meant.”
    Strangely she believed him. Her father hadn’t ever done anything to make her feel like he had wished she’d been a boy. “I thought you didn’t care if you had an heir since you aren’t actual royalty.”
    â€œYou know our people, though you were not raised full-time among them.”
    And in the culture of his homeland, to have no son to leave his name and worldly possessions was a great tragedy.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said again, feeling her father’s pain across the distance between them.
    She understood the dynamics of her parents’ marriage a little better, but she still had no desire to emulate it. “Mom loves you. She always has.”
    â€œI know that now.” For the first time since their initial greeting, her father’s voice held a measure of contentment. “I say again, Zahir is not me. He will not make my mistakes.”
    Memories of the photos she had left in Zahir’s room rose to taunt Angele as she pulled her rolling case to the private plane security checkpoint. Even so, she did not reveal to her father that Zahir was no lily-white duty-bound sheikh, no matter what everyone else believed.
    â€œI can’t marry him, Father.”
    â€œYou must.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThese are just prewedding jitters.”
    â€œWe aren’t even officially engaged.” Sheesh. “Thisis me being smart enough to avoid a future that holds no appeal for me.”
    â€œIt’s a future you are imagining, not the one that will be.”
    â€œHave you always loved Mom?” she asked instead of answering.
    The answer was immediate and without doubt.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd still you hurt her for years, as she apparently hurt you as well.” Angele understood now it had gone both ways, but that certainly did not give her more hope for her own future. “If you two, loving each other, could do so much emotional damage, how much worse in a marriage that only one person feels love?”
    â€œZahir is not a man to love.” Her father’s instant answer without even pausing for thought to consider which of them felt that love was another brick in the wall Angele was trying so hard to build around her heart.
    â€œMy flight is leaving in a few minutes.”
    â€œYou are not leaving Zohra.”
    She heard the threat in her father’s voice, but she ignored it. She’d taken precautions to make sure she could and would leave today. She’d finagled a spot on a private plane headed to the States. So, even if the commercial flights were grounded while the royal guard searched for her, she would be going. Even so, she had timed her call to her father so that it would take a miracle for her flight to be discovered and stopped in time.
    â€œPlease, accept it. The press release has already gone out.”
    â€œWe can say it is a hoax.”
    â€œI’ll do a live interview.”
    â€œYou will not.”
    She would do whatever it took to stand by her decision and let her silence tell him so.
    Her father cursed fluently in Arabic. “Malik will disown our friendship.”
    â€œHe’s not that vindictive.”
    â€œIt is a matter of pride.”
    â€œYours. If it was all that important to either of the kings, one, or both of them, would have pressed for an official date before now. The agreement has been in place for a decade.”
    â€œYou have only been an adult for five of those years.”
    â€œHalf a decade.”
    â€œThey are pressing for it now,” he said, rather than argue the point.
    Very typical for her father. Focus on the now, on the positive and ignore everything else.
    She wasn’t so sanguine and never had been. “It’s too late.”
    Her father