Willful Blindness

Lydia Langston Bouzaid

Description

Following a disastrous marriage, Sophia hopes to reinvent herself. Instead she finds danger and excitements as both the heir to an aristocratic English estate and the wife of an Arabian prince.
At the age of thirty-one, Sophia Lawrence escapes her disastrous marriage to sail across the Atlantic in her forty-eight-foot sailboat. Her intention is to take the passage as a time to decide how to reinvent herself. After twenty-one days battling gales and near death disasters, she arrives in Ireland to find that fate has defined her reinvention.
From the hallowed halls of the British aristocracy to the winds swept lochs of the Scottish highlands, Sophia is tested and torn at every turn.
Then inexplicably she falls passionately in love. Yet her dreams of happiness are crushed in the wild Arabian Desert, as the stakes increase with deadly consequences.

Sujets

• Adventure (Guyana)
• Adventure
• Romance
• Fiction
• Action

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 18 janvier 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781665579988
• Langue: English

Extrait

Willful Blindness





Lydia Langston Bouzaid









AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: [phone]






© 2023 Lydia Langston Bouzaid. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/18/2023

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7999-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7997-1 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7998-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023900421




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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.



Contents
Section 1
Chapter 1 End of a Marriage
Chapter 2 Sailing to Ireland
Chapter 3 Sad News
Chapter 4 Back in the USA
Chapter 5 Reading the Will
Chapter 6 Number Eleven Grosvenor Square
Chapter 7 Meeting Westminster
Chapter 8 Number Eleven—July 1992
Chapter 9 A New Home in London
Chapter 10 The Bombing
Chapter 11 Stolen Goods
Chapter 12 First Time to Scotland
Section 2
Chapter 13 Getting to Know Him
Chapter 14 Meeting Princess Rima—September 1992
Chapter 15 Life in London—October 1992
Chapter 16 Walking with the Prince
Chapter 17 The Westminsters’ Dinner Dance
Chapter 18 Drama in the Highlands
Chapter 19 A Visit to the Village
Chapter 20 Show Down with a Prince
Chapter 21 Henry to Scotland
Section 3
Chapter 22 A Date with Destiny
Chapter 23 Highlands Paradise—January 1, 1995
Chapter 24 Rima Returns to Scotland
Chapter 25 Acknowledgment of a Marriage—Spring 1993
Chapter 26 Three Days of Mayhem
Chapter 27 Aratex
Chapter 28 Sophia’s Will
Section 4
Chapter 29 Arabia
Chapter 30 Abdullah’s Home
Chapter 31 The Wedding
Chapter 32 Artifacts on Tour
Chapter 33 The Desert
Chapter 34 The Royal Court
Chapter 35 The Arabian Season
Chapter 36 Two Years On
Chapter 37 Date Night
Chapter 38 State Visits, 1996 and 1997
Chapter 39 And Then They Called Her a Whore
Chapter 40 Separation
Chapter 41 The King Comes to Scotland
Chapter 42 Divorce, 1998



Section 1



Chapter 1
End of a Marriage
I t was the summer of 1992 when Sophia Lawrence realized her marriage was over. She just didn’t know how it would end. If she had ever stopped to be honest with herself, she would have realized that the union had been flawed from the start, that it had been built upon a shoddy foundation, and this inconvenient truth had plagued her for seven years.
Sophia and Edward had married suddenly in 1985 following a friend’s funeral, when Sophia had felt vulnerable. She had been so overcome with heartbreak, and it had all happened so quickly, that now, ten years on, she often found herself wondering why she had married Edward to begin with.
There were, of course, the obvious practical benefits to their marriage. Edward Lawrence was, on paper if not in practice, the total package. He was a high-powered Boston lawyer descended from a long line of British aristocrats. He was handsome if boorish, intelligent if at times closed-minded, and incredibly well-mannered save for when he’d had too much to drink.
His connections, both the professional ones and those stemming from his illustrious bloodline, were nothing to scoff at either. Since her marriage to Edward, Sophia’s extended family now consisted of her husband’s twin brother Henry and his wife Janet and her mother-in-law, Lady Barbara Lawrence, the last daughter of the Duke of Devon.
Edward had for the most part lived up to the promises of his station, and by the summer of 1992, the Lawrences appeared to have everything one could dream of—two homes, a lovely yacht, and an enviable position in society.
They split their time between a penthouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filled with art and antiques that boasted stunning views of Boston Harbor and beyond, and a lovely yet modest antique farmhouse in Newport where they spent their weekends. Set on the famed Ocean Drive with a sweeping view of the Atlantic, this house was always full of young friends and guests. On such nights their home became a salon for minor society soirees that saw the mixing of former CIA agents, well-heeled scions of rich and famous families, and sailors of all kinds. The conversations around the dinner table were some of the most interesting and engaging to be found anywhere.
Saturday nights were reserved for club functions—the yacht club, the beach club, the shooting club. When not at a club, they could be found attending a variety of parties, from charity balls to waltz evenings. Sadly, these functions always included many of the same slightly boring people, endless gossip, and high volumes of alcohol consumption. These soirees also always culminated with more drinking and dancing at the local nightclub, the Sky Bar. The last song was also the same every time. Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” floated gently in one ear and out the other of a well-dressed and stumbling crowd of people too self-centered and too inebriated to grasp its meaning, let alone the irony of the whole scene.
The truth was that despite appearances, a wonderful world it was not.
After ten years, life with Edward had become routine as well—and not in a comfortable way. After a week of work, Edward would arrive in Newport in the early afternoon. His first stop would be his men’s drinking club, where he would reconvene with his compatriots and drinking buddies. Then after a few sodden hours he would arrive at the house, friends in tow, demanding that an elegant dinner be served for him and his guests and generally expecting his every whim be catered to.
Dutifully, even if angry at being relegated to simply a cook, Sophia would prepare an exquisite gourmet dinner for ten to twenty people who would arrive around eight, loud, careless, and wreaking of alcohol.
This treatment of her, as little more than an adornment for Edward’s social aspirations, was not limited to mealtimes either. Her fundraising and consulting projects were often and effectively belittled. “Just write a larger check, Sophia. And stop talking about it,” her husband commonly remarked. There were often embarrassing remarks made at the dinner table—disparaging comments about her education, how neither William and Mary nor Boston College was in the Ivy League. Even her upbringing was called into question; apparently, California was not an acceptable place to live, not for anyone serious anyway.
While it was his general disregard that wore her down over time, there were stand-out moments of extreme cruelty. When, for example, she had been diagnosed with DCIS, a mild form of breast cancer, his answer had been that she should have both breasts removed. “After all,” he had said, “a woman over thirty doesn’t need tits.”
While the statement itself was hurtful, his uttering it in front of twenty pale-faced dinner guests was, in Sophia’s mind, simply humiliating.
Edward, the pompous Harvard-trained lawyer, was a partner in the most prestigious law firm in New England. “How proud you must be,” people often crowed.
But as was always the case with Edward, the reality was far less glamorous. Alcohol and work were her husband’s twin vices. Taken in tandem, this meant that he was never home on weekdays and often was out late with clients on weeknights. Sophia suspected that these clients were often women. When, early on in their marriage, she had prodded him on this subject, he had simply said that he preferred to stay in Cambridge. “Closer to my office,” he had grunted, and that was the last they had spoken of it.
When they were together, the pair fought constantly. As a result of the fighting and to avoid it, she spent most of her weekdays in their home in Rhode Island, alone without Edward.
Now, at the age of thirty-one, Sophia was a waif-like woman, with the body of a ballerina. Her naturally wavy dirty-blond hair was always cut to show off her slightly patrician features and her vivid blue eyes. Most men found Sophia sexy, yet her sex life could most kindly be described as quirky. It consisted of hookups in their Cambridge apartment when Edward requested, accompanied by a lot of wine. These evenings routinely became painfully masochistic.
Intellectually, Sophia had always known the harsh realities of her marriage, yet she had never emotionally come to grips with the facts. It was her nature to be optimistic, so she had pushed through the hurtful comments, the judgments, the little criticisms, and all the other hardships to build a life for both of them.
There was, of course, an answer to the nagging question of why she had married Edward in the first place. It was an answer as deeply true as it was impractical. The truth was not so much that the wrong man had proposed to her, but that the right man hadn’t.
She had told herself for years that it hardly mattered anymore. She was afraid of the stigma of being a divorced woman and petrified of the emotional toll that negotiating a divorce would entail. She had no interest in watching the sordid details of her and Edward’s life play out in the small town of Newport or the hallowed