But her prayers went unanswered. The whimper became louder. It morphed into a cry and then a protesting yell and she saw Zuhal’s face change. Watched the black eyes narrow as his gaze swept questioningly over her and she quickly stared down at the threadbare rug for fear that he might see the sudden tears welling up in her eyes. She thought about all the things she could say.
She could pretend that it was a peacock, because weren’t they supposed to sound like young babies? Or maybe that was babies younger than Darius which sounded like those squawking birds. And anyway, peacocks lived in the grounds of stately homes, didn’t they? They promenaded elegantly over manicured lawns—their magnificent blue-green plumage wouldn’t dream of gracing the scruffy little garden of a rented cottage just outside Oxford.
‘What was that, Jazz?’ Zuhal questioned ominously.
She knew then that the game was up. That she could attempt evasion to try to deflect his attention and send him on his way by pretending that the baby belonged to someone else and she was just childminding. But she couldn’t. Not really—and not just because the time frame would prove her a liar. No. No matter what had happened in the past or how little Zuhal thought of her now, she was going to have to come clean. And hadn’t she always wanted that anyway, on some subliminal level?
‘What was that, Jazz?’ he repeated, only now a note of something dangerous had been added into the mix to make his voice grow even darker.
Slowly she lifted her gaze to meet the accusation in his eyes and prepared for her whole world to change in the telling of a single sentence. ‘It’s my child. Or rather, our child,’ she said, sucking in a breath of air. ‘You have a son, Zuhal, and his name is Darius.’
CHAPTER TWO
AND THEN, AS IF by magic, Darius went back to sleep. Jasmine could hear it quite plainly in the sounds which were issuing from his baby monitor. The lessening of his cry into a gulping sob which gradually became a little coo, which was so much a feature of his daily nap. She knew he would now be peacefully asleep again and that if only her son’s timing had been a little better, Zuhal would have been none the wiser.
But Jasmine knew there was no point wishing that Darius had delayed his cry until the Sheikh had been hurried away from the premises. If Zuhal hadn’t been kissing her, then he would already have left. If she hadn’t been stupidly letting him kiss her and wanting the kind of things she should be ashamed of wanting…
And anyway—wasn’t this what she had always wanted to happen? Had tried to make happen, if she hadn’t been blocked along the way by his position and power. So don’t let guilt beat you up, she told herself fiercely, even though it was difficult not to flinch as she met the naked accusation in his black eyes. You’ve tried to do your best.
‘My son?’ he repeated incredulously.
She nodded. ‘Yes, he—’
‘Don’t you dare say another word. Just take me to see him,’ he cut over her words, his voice laced with a layer of ice she’d heard him use before—though never with her.
‘You will see him. I promise—just not yet. Let him sleep, Zuhal. Please,’ she said, with the confidence of someone who’d been bringing up a baby on her own for the last nine months and knew how cranky they could get if they were woken prematurely.
‘I won’t waken him but I want to see him.’ His autocratic command hissed through the air. ‘Take me to him, Jazz. Now.’
Her lips dry, Jasmine nodded. How had she ever thought she could oppose his wishes? She’d never managed it in the past—so why should now be any different? He had dumped her without warning—and, even though he had told her from the start that she could never have any future with him, it had still seemed to come out of the blue. But she had held it together then, just as she must hold it together now. ‘Come with me,’ she said in a low voice, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling with unease as she led the way from the room.
Feeling like a participant in some bizarre dream, Zuhal followed Jazz up the narrow staircase, his mind spinning with disbelief as she reached the top and gestured towards the open door of a nursery painted in sunny shades of yellow. He wanted to convince himself that she’d been lying and that it was no child of his who lay sleeping in a cot beneath the window. But as he silently crossed the room to gaze down at the infant, he knew there was absolutely no question that this was his baby. It was more than the shock of ebony hair so like his own. More than the olive skin, which was a paler version of his. It was something fundamental and almost primitive which activated a powerful surge of recognition deep within him as he gazed down at the gently parted lips of the baby boy. He saw Jazz tense as he reached down and briefly laid his forefinger against the baby’s soft cheek, before withdrawing it and turning abruptly on his heel, to walk out the way he had come. He didn’t say a word until they were back downstairs—he didn’t trust himself to speak—and even though he wanted to rage and rail at her, he kept his voice low.
‘Do you realise the constitutional significance of what you’ve done?’ he hissed.
Jasmine flinched and a part of her wished she could have given into the luxury of tears if she hadn’t recognised the need to stay strong. Constitutional significance? Was that the only thing he cared about in the light of his discovery? Of course it was. It was why he’d ended their relationship and why he had turned up here today, to use her body as he might use a stone vessel filled with water to quench his thirst. For him nothing mattered other than the needs and demands of his beloved country and everything else came second to that.
‘Did you not think to tell me, Jazz?’ he continued, still in that icy undertone of suppressed fury. ‘That the seed of my loins had borne fruit?’
Jasmine shivered as his words created a powerful image in her mind which made her heart clench with impotent longing until she forced herself to push it away and focus on what was important. ‘I did try to tell you.’
His cold expression suggested he didn’t believe her. ‘When?’
‘After we…split up.’ When he’d sweetly informed her that she was the kind of woman who made a perfect mistress, but not the kind of woman he could ever marry. ‘Not for many weeks, it’s true. I… I didn’t realise I was pregnant. At least, not straight away.’
‘Why not?’ he bit out witheringly. ‘You may have been a virgin when we met but please don’t make out you were born yesterday, Jazz. What do you mean, you didn’t realise you were pregnant? What, were you waiting for the stork to fly in through the window and surprise you?’
His words were cruel. Sarcastic. Deliberately so, it seemed. Jasmine tried to convince herself that his anger was understandable. Wouldn’t she have felt just as angry if the situation were reversed—to have discovered that she’d become a parent and have been kept in the dark about it? ‘I was all over the place,’ she admitted. ‘I was operating in a bit of a fog—on autopilot, if you like. Just getting through the day took all my energy and I felt disorientated because…well, it was weird getting used to life without you.’
Zuhal’s lips tightened but to his surprise he found he couldn’t disagree with her because he too had been disconcerted by the discovery that Jazz had left a peculiar hole in his life. He had explained it away by reminding himself that it had all been about sex—the best sex he’d ever had. Against all the odds she had captivated him—for he had never been with someone as low-born as her before. She’d been working in the boutique attached to London’s famous Granchester Hotel where he’d been staying, and on a primitive level he had initially been drawn to her pert breasts and curvy hips. By the buttery swing of her blonde hair and the way her lips curved into a sweet smile whenever she was serving customers. But although many women caught his eye and made it clear they were his for the taking, Zuhal rarely gave into his most base desires. Sometimes he took pleasure in denying himself sexual gratification because deprivation was good for the spirit and what was easily gained was easily discarded. Plus, he liked
a challenge—and a challenge had certainly been presented to him when the humble shop girl had blushed as he’d spoken to her and had had difficulty meeting his gaze.
His hunger ignited, he had been pleased to discover she was divorced because divorced women were often cynical about marriage, with few of the marital ambitions of single women, which bored the hell out of him. They also possessed an earthy expertise which made them the best lovers.
But Jazz hadn’t been experienced.
He remembered his shock—and then his pleasure—when he had discovered her innocence. When she had opened those soft thighs and he had broken through the tight hymen, which had flagged up the gratifying knowledge that he was her first ever lover. He remembered the orgasm which had followed. Which had rocked him to the core of his being. And the one after, and the one after that…
With an effort he dragged his mind back to the present because none of that was relevant now. Not in the light of his discovery that she was a secretive little manipulator.
‘Talk me through what happened, Jazz,’ he bit out and could see her trying to compose herself, rubbing her hands up and down over the arms of her sweater, as if she were cold.
She swallowed. ‘When you went back to Razrastan I just carried on as normal, terrified someone at the hotel was going to discover I’d been having intimate relations with a guest.’
‘But nobody did?’ he probed.
Jasmine shook her head. ‘No. Not a soul. But then, we were very discreet, weren’t we, Zuhal? You made sure of that. I was never even permitted to stay with you in your fancy penthouse suite and we only ever went to the borrowed house of one of your rich friends, under cover of darkness.’
‘I have always tried to be discreet about my relationships—and the newspapers would have had a field day if they’d discovered I was sleeping with someone like you,’ he said coldly.
‘Someone like me?’ she echoed.
‘You know what I’m talking about. It was almost a cliché—the prince and the shop girl. In a way, I was protecting you.’
Jasmine bit her lip, because it had been much more likely he had been protecting his own precious reputation. Should she tell him how difficult it had felt to carry on serving behind the till with that bright smile pinned to her lips, when she had been missing him so much? Maybe it was the effort of that—of trying to appear normal—which had meant her first missed period had passed by without her noticing. And then when she had noticed something was amiss, she’d been unable to confide in anyone. Her parents were dead and she hadn’t dared place her trust in friends and colleagues, terrified someone might run to the press with the story. She had a cousin she was close to, but Emily lived miles away and Jasmine had never felt quite so lonely.
Even now, as she looked up into Zuhal’s flinty features, she could still remember the scary sense of isolation she’d felt as she’d realised she was pretty much on her own, with a tiny life to support. Factor in the fact that she’d been missing him so badly and you ended up with someone who had found herself in a precarious situation. ‘I tried to ring you but your number came up as unobtainable.’
He met the question in her eyes. ‘I make a point of regularly changing my phone number,’ he informed her coolly. ‘My security people tell me it’s safer that way.’
‘And, of course, it keeps troublesome ex-girlfriends at bay?’ she guessed, forcing herself to confront the bitter truth.
He shrugged. ‘Something like that,’ he conceded. ‘When did you try to contact me?’
Accurately, she was able to relay the exact month—because at that stage her pregnancy had been well established. She’d been determined to show Zuhal that she intended going ahead with the birth, with or without his approval. That she didn’t need a man—or a husband—in order to survive, because experience had taught her that marriage was by no means the magic bullet which so many women imagined it was.
Feeling on firmer footing now, she sucked in a steadying breath. ‘Eventually, I managed to get through to one of your aides. Adham, I think his name was. I told him I needed to speak to you urgently and he promised he would pass on the message to you.’
‘But I never got it,’ he said, his voice hardening.
‘So blame him.’
‘Adham is a loyal servant who would have been acting in my best interests. The palace was in uproar because of my brother’s disappearance and, of course, that impacted profoundly on my future. And not just that.’ His black eyes bored into her. ‘Do you have any idea of the amount of women who are eager to speak to me, who try to phone the palace switchboard?’
‘Strangely enough no, I don’t,’ she answered, colour rising in her cheeks so that suddenly she felt hot and uncomfortable. ‘Tallying up the numbers of your ex-lovers isn’t a pastime which has ever appealed to me.’
‘You could have told him you were pregnant!’ he accused. ‘You knew that would have ensured you got through to me straight away. Why didn’t you do that, Jazz?’
Jasmine licked her lips. Because she’d been scared. Scared of Zuhal’s influence and of the reality of confronting it for the first time. He’d always left his sheikh status at the door of the bedroom, but during that brief and fruitless phone call, she’d got an inkling of the real man behind the very sexy facade. It had taken her ages to get through to his office and during the long wait she’d realised just how powerful her former lover really was. She remembered the way his aide had spoken to her—as if she were a piece of dirt he’d found on the bottom of his shoe. And she’d been fearful that, although Zuhal obviously didn’t want her any more, he might want to claim sole custody of their baby—and he’d have the wherewithal to make it happen.
And that was something she could never allow.
‘You told me you were planning to marry a royal princess,’ she reminded him. ‘I thought that was another reason why your aide was so off with me. There were reports about your burgeoning romance in all the papers. About how two desert kingdoms were going to be united and it was going to be the greatest thing to happen in the region for decades. The Dream Desert ticket, I think the tabloids called it.’ Which had been another reason why she’d stopped reading them. ‘Wouldn’t it have completely ruined everything if some casual lover had come forward with the news that you were to become a father?’
Zuhal’s eyes narrowed as he forced himself to dismiss her persuasive words. Because weren’t these accusations and counter-accusations diverting his attention from the monumental discovery he had just made?
He had a son.
A ready-made heir.
Perhaps fate was showing him a little benevolence for once.
He looked at the woman standing in front of him. A few minutes ago he’d been kissing her and her response had indicated that if it hadn’t been for the baby’s cry, she would have allowed him to be deep inside her by now. Would she, he found himself wondering, with a brand-new disdain which had blossomed as a result of his unbelievable discovery? Had she become one of those women who would cast aside the needs of her baby in pursuit of her own carnal pleasures? And if that were the case, then wouldn’t that be easy to prove in a court of law—thereby putting him in a morally superior position and demonstrating his own suitability to bring up the child, instead of her? Surely that would be simpler all round.
He noted the trepidation flickering in the depths of her green-gold eyes as she returned his gaze, just as he noted the sudden tension which was stiffening her narrow shoulders. The silence between them was growing into something immense and uncomfortable but, unlike most people would be, Zuhal was unperturbed by it. Indeed, he often orchestrated silence when necessary, for it was a powerful tool in negotiation and never had negotiation been more vital than now.
‘How are you managing for money?’ he questioned casually.
He could see a look of faint confusion criss-cross her brow and wondered if she was disorientated
by his sudden change of subject.
‘I manage,’ she said defensively.
‘I said “how”, Jazz?’
She shrugged. ‘I sew.’
He frowned. ‘You sew?’
‘Yes. You remember. I always liked sewing. I was planning to go to fashion college when my mother got sick and I had to defer my place to look after her.’
He thought back. Had she told him that? Even if she had, he suspected it would have gone in one ear and straight out of the other. He hadn’t really been interested in her past, just as he hadn’t been interested in her future, because he’d known there could never be one—not for them. The only thing which had interested him, and for a time had obsessed him, had been the magnificence of her body and the sheer sexual dynamite of their coming together.
‘That’s right,’ he prevaricated as some long-buried fact swam up from the depths of his subconscious. ‘You wanted to be a fashion designer. Is that what you’re doing now?’
She gave him the kind of look which suggested he had no idea how normal mortals lived. ‘I wish,’ she said. ‘You can’t just set yourself up as a fashion designer, Zuhal, especially when you’ve got no real qualifications. For one thing, the overheads would be prohibitive, and for another, there’s a whole heap of competition out there. You see that sewing machine over there?’ Her finger trembled a little as she pointed to it. ‘That’s what I was doing when you arrived. Mostly, I specialise in soft furnishings—cushions and curtains, that sort of thing. People always need those and Oxford isn’t far away. There are plenty of folk with deep pockets who change their decor all the time, even if there’s nothing wrong with it. Probably because they’re rich and bored and can’t think of anything better to do,’ she added.
She seemed eager to deflect his attention from the life-changing news with her mundane chatter, he thought grimly. And she would be, wouldn’t she? But her words made him consider both her income and her environment and for the first time Zuhal took proper notice of his surroundings, his lips curving with ill-concealed contempt. The furniture was of the cheapest variety, the rug threadbare and the paint on the window frames peeling. Only the curtains and cushions redeemed the place, their brightness adding an unexpected touch of jollity to the small room. Presumably her own handiwork.
The Sheikh’s Secret Baby Page 3