by Dani Collins
“That’s not what I meant,” Tariq said with an exasperated roll of his eyes. “I meant do I have to say Mama. It’s so babyish. I’d rather call you Mother. I can’t call you by your name. That would be too confusing for my little brother or sister. And disrespectful.”
“Yes, I suppose it would be,” Fern said, pinching her lips together in a poor attempt to suppress a laugh. “Then yes. I would be delighted if you’d call me Mother. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” Tariq said with offhand confidence. “I don’t remember my mother and I like you quite a bit. I was very disappointed when I visited my cousins and you weren’t there,” he declared with a pointed look. Then he transferred his attention to Zafir. “May I call my cousins and tell them Miss Davenport is my mother now?”
“You may text your uncle and ask when would be a good time to have that conversation,” he said. “Then you should get back to class.”
“Will you take over my lessons?” he asked, turning back to Fern.
“I think I will be busy with the baby very soon, but I will always take an interest in your studies. Please ask your tutor if I could sit in sometimes, particularly for language or history, so I can learn, too.”
Tariq nodded and started toward the wide archway of the main passage back to the palace. He checked himself and came back to give Fern’s expanded waist a befuddled search, arms half-raised for an embrace.
“Oh, um—” Fern bent awkwardly, accepting Zafir’s quick grasp of her hand so she didn’t lose her balance. Tariq’s arms went around her neck and he landed a quick kiss on her cheek. She closed her eyes, mouth pressing into a smile of deeply touched emotion.
“I’m really happy you’re my mother,” Tariq said, making Zafir’s heart swell with pride. “My cousins will be so jealous,” he added with an impish grin and raced off.
“Oh,” Fern said, placing a hand over her heart. “I didn’t expect that.”
“The kiss or the part where he treated us like half-wits?”
She laughed, glanced at the marble floor and tucked her hair behind her ear. “The part where he made me feel like we’re a family. I never had that. It means a lot.”
The glitter of happy tears on her lashes filled him with the impulse to cradle her close. Sex? Yes, he wanted to fondle and caress, push into her and know the exquisite clasp of her again and again, but this desire was more than that. He wanted to feel her against him, smell her hair, bring her into his life as much as his home.
How had she come to mean so much to him when he’d only known her a little over a week last year and not even two full days in the last forty-eight hours?
She caught his eye, read something in his face that made her bashfully turn away and move to the low wall of the balcony, where she followed the curve of the nearest staircase with her eyes, leaning to study the benches and broad-leafed plants surrounding the pool.
“This place is incredible. Can you imagine what it was like— When was it built?”
“Five hundred years ago. And yes. As a teen I stood in this empty wing more than once and fantasized about exactly how incredible it must have been.” He could still manifest the pictures he’d created in his mind: the abundance of naked breasts and bottoms, the mysterious configuration of a woman’s body that he’d only barely understood, yet longed for the authority to command for further study.
She giggled as though reading his thoughts.
He moved closer. “But my days of valuing quantity over quality are gone,” he assured her.
She blushed and retreated toward the stairs. “Are you sure? There are an awful lot of rooms here, looking ready to be filled by women of every shape and size.”
“Is that why are you’re in here?” he asked, moving to descend beside her, one hand clasping her elbow in case she lost her footing on the worn, slippery steps. “Are you checking up on me? Ensuring I’m not hiding anyone?” Or scoping out a residence for herself? His muscles hardened with tension.
Culpability flashed in her eyes. “I didn’t realize where I was going when I started snooping. But isn’t this where I’m supposed to be? Why are you here? Isn’t it forbidden? That’s what harem means, doesn’t it?”
“Most Westerners think the word means brothel.” He liked the slant of her smile. If he wasn’t mistaken, she was flirting with him, but very shyly. Because she had so little experience with it, he supposed. He probably volleyed back a little too hard when he stated arrogantly, “I’m the sheikh. Nothing in this palace is forbidden to me.”
She blushed, no match for his suggestive tone.
“These rooms are for the children?” she asked, peering into an alcove with sleeping benches around three sides. It only had a curtain, not a door.
“The children of wives—yes, plural,” he confirmed at her look, “stayed with their mothers upstairs. Girls moved into their own space as rooms became available. Boys left the harem around six or seven. I moved Tariq when his mother died, since there was only his nanny to keep him from falling in the pool in here.”
“Then all these little rooms were for servants?” she asked.
“Concubines and eunuchs,” he explained, thinking with affectionate amusement, so naive.
“Oh. Of course.” Her cheeks pinkened. Her expression grew more speculative as she peered into the spare accommodations with new eyes, making her way back toward the corner below where they’d come in. “This one’s quite spacious,” she remarked, stepping into the biggest room on the ground floor.
“Reserved for the sultan’s favorite. You’ll notice that aside from the Number One Wife, she has the shortest distance to walk to be with him.” He pointed to where the stairs ended near the passageway to his chamber. “And all who visited him had to pass the wife’s door.”
“Politics are not a modern invention, are they?” she remarked, moving deeper into the concubine’s lair. “She had air-conditioning,” she said with surprise, studying the window of latticed marble that stood behind a waterfall that ran in his front courtyard. Glittering light bounced off the gold plate behind him to brighten this space more than the other rooms.
“One resident of this room was so prized, the most trusted eunuch slept beside her so she wouldn’t be murdered by the other women.” He stalked closer to her, fully sympathetic to his ancestor’s beguilement.
Something wistful passed over her face. Her lashes fluttered as she realized how close he was. She tried to make her retreat look casual, but that’s what her quarter turn and step away was.
He’d been chasing her around the harem long enough.
“Fern,” he said quietly, keeping her from walking out of the room altogether. “We should talk about what the doctor said. About making love.”
She stopped, but didn’t turn. Her hands moved to clench together and her upper arms stained with an extensive blush. “Do you want to?”
A sudden pang of juvenile fear hit him. He didn’t want to admit to his feelings before she did. He might be staring down his first marriage all over again. But if trust was an issue, the only way to gain hers was by being completely honest.
“Do I want to talk? Or make love? I’m prepared to wait until after the baby, if you’re not up to it, but yes. I would like to make love to you.”
“Even though I’m fat?”
“You’re not fat. You’re beautiful,” he said with sincerity that bordered on reverence, moving closer. “Is that why you’re hesitating? You’re feeling self-conscious?”
“Yes,” she said in a small, overwrought voice. “And because feeling this way seems so brazen in my condition.”
A laugh of relief started to rise in him, but was knocked back into his throat by her next words.
“And so sinful if it’s just lust.”
CHAPTER NINE
“NOT THAT I expect you to love me
,” Fern hurried to add, afraid to turn and see how he was taking what she’d accidentally blurted.
But it was hard to say those words when it might be true that she didn’t expect his love, but she yearned for it. As she’d turned his grandmother’s ring on her finger in the car on the way here, taking in the way her own life had revolved into something completely unexpected, she’d realized there was only one reason she would allow it to: love.
She loved him so much. It wasn’t a surprise. She’d known she did, but somehow she’d convinced herself it wouldn’t sustain. Like such an intense feeling could wear off. It hadn’t. She was carrying his baby and had held him right in the space between her heart and their child’s the entire time she’d been apart from him. Her love had grown with each passing day, just as their baby did.
“Fern.”
She could hardly bear the careful way he said it, like he was treading into very delicate territory.
“It’s okay,” she insisted, telling herself it was. “We barely know each other. When have we had time to really talk?” They’d been too busy trying to bite back their cries of pleasure. She covered where her cheeks ached, they went so ruddy and hot. “And we’re married now, so it’s not really a sin to feel this animal attraction, but is it enough? Was it enough for you and your wife?”
“You are my wife,” he said forcefully. Then his chest expanded as he drew in a long, deep inhale, his expression closing her out. He indicated the door and the stairs that began right outside them.
Fern deflated as she climbed alongside him, sorry she’d brought up his first wife when it was so obviously a sore subject. Warm feelings would never grow between them if she alienated him.
Rather than open the door to the passage to his bedroom, however, he touched her elbow to draw her into the quarters closest to it.
“This is where Sadira should have slept if not with me.”
Fern had glanced in here when she began her explore. She’d been taken with the round bed and its red quilted headboard and silk canopy that reminded her of their tent in the oasis. The suite had a beautiful modern bathroom along with a sitting room of Ottoman furniture and a private balcony. It was screened even though it only looked over Zafir’s private courtyard and pool. She supposed the small room off the side would have been used for a nursery.
“I said the other day that because she gave me Tariq, I would never speak a bad word about Sadira. I meant that.” He glanced sideways at her while he stood in the door and looked diagonally across the harem to Sadira’s old rooms.
Despite his thobe and gutra and constant air of command, she sensed a kind of despondency in him. Powerlessness.
“She allowed her father to talk her into marrying me for the good of the country. I thought she felt as I did. That it was an advantageous match and that we had enough respect and liking to form the foundation of a strong relationship.”
“I feel like you and I have that,” she felt compelled to say, instantly concerned. “Don’t you?”
His expression flickered across to her with fierce pride. “We have a hell of a lot more than she and I did. One of those things...” His gaze fell to the floor before he turned to face her. His gaze brooked no hesitations or prevarications. “Fern, does it bother you that I’m only half-English?”
Taken aback, she could only say, “No! Of course not. I barely give it any thought.” He was Zafir, so sexy and striking she walked around dumbfounded that he’d ever looked twice at her. “It’s only something I worry about from the side of, you know, the politics. Those things your mother worries about. Obviously it would be nice if the whole world could get over bias and never exclude someone for skin color or other superficial reasons. I kind of wish I wasn’t English. If I was Arab, I could help you instead of being a problem.”
“Don’t wish yourself something you’re not,” he commanded with a twitch of cynicism. “Especially when you can’t change the circumstances of your birth any more than I can. I couldn’t remove the English part of me and Sadira had no use for it. In fact, I have come to believe, she felt soiled by having anything to do with me.”
“What? No!” Fern denied.
He cast her a look that was both disparaging of her naiveté and deeply shadowed by old hurt.
“You really think so?” she asked softly. Cautiously.
He ran a hand down his face. His reluctance to confide was plain in the time it took him to form a response.
“She refused to sleep with me. Barely spoke to me. After she gave me Tariq, she kept to her wing of the palace and, I have come to fear, left her cancer undiagnosed because she saw it as her only escape.”
“That’s— No! But you have divorce here. Don’t you?”
“She wouldn’t have asked. Divorced women are looked down on as having done something wrong. And she’d already lowered herself by marrying me.”
“How could she think like that?!” Fern couldn’t even comprehend such a thing.
“Because of what I was. Illegitimate with tainted blood. Birthing Tariq was her duty and she fulfilled it, but when I say she gave him to me, I mean it. It was like he had contaminated her. She didn’t breastfeed him, didn’t care for him. I changed him and gave him his bottles along with the nanny.”
She found herself shaking her head, the new mother in her feeling the cleave in her heart at the thought of anyone rejecting a helpless infant. “Amineh said you always talk about her like you loved her—”
“Amineh has no idea. No one does,” he said with a snap of impatience. “Do you think I want Tariq to know his mother felt nothing toward him? Reviled him as much as she was repulsed by me?”
Fern’s heart broke for the boy and the man. “Oh, Zafir. I’ll never breathe a word to him, I swear.” She would, in fact, do everything in her power to be the mother Tariq should have had. “But I can’t believe anyone would look down on either of you for anything, especially something you couldn’t help!”
He said nothing, only stared back into the harem, jaw pulsing with tension, brooding.
“So you didn’t even try for more children? You love Tariq so much. I can’t imagine you not wanting more.”
He choked out a laugh, following it with a pained pinch of the bridge of his nose.
“I couldn’t bring myself to try. Our wedding night— It was awkward, obviously. We didn’t know each other. She was a virgin. I thought she was just bashful. I did everything I could to make it nice for her. I stopped more than once, aware she wasn’t responding, but she insisted...”
He dropped his hands to his sides and closed them into fists, swallowed, his mouth a line of disgust. “I thought the second time might be better, but I felt like some kind of monster. It was just wrong. I wound up leaving before we were even naked. I couldn’t work out where I’d gone wrong. I carried that. I agonized for weeks. Just when I found the nerve to talk to her about it, she turned up pregnant and made it clear there was no need for me to touch her again. She delivered a boy and, aside from one night when Tariq went into hospital with a bad fever, never offered herself to me again.”
“What do you mean. She actually came to you...? What did you say?”
“I asked her if she wanted another child. She said no, and I said I hoped he would be fine. He was.”
“She sounds so mean,” Fern breathed, hurting for him. Here were the shades of suffering she’d seen in Amineh that she’d thought Zafir too strong to feel, but of course he felt it. He was just better at hiding it.
“I don’t think she was capable of sexual feelings for me. There is a lot of prejudice in this world and I was subjected to it from both sides of my life. I know what it looks like and that’s what it was. She was pressured to marry me for my position and her father’s political gain. She saw herself as a martyr.”
“Zafir, I’m so sorry.” She went across to him, setting a
light hand on his arm. “I can’t believe anyone would not see what a remarkable man you are and feel privileged to be near you.”
His face spasmed with emotion. Hooking his arm around her, he pulled her in close, one hand crushing into her hair as he pressed his mouth to her temple for a long moment.
She closed her eyes, overcome at the poignant sweetness of his embrace, for once not sexual, but emotional. It felt healing. Loving.
But the effects of his proximity were there, too. She was aware of his torso beneath the familiar, thin fabric of his thobe, the scent of cotton and man, the humid air and the musical tinkle of the water below. It all pulled her into the sensual spell that was Zafir. Her blood began to heat and her skin prickled into receptiveness.
Self-conscious at her instant response, she started to draw away.
“Don’t,” he murmured and made her tilt her head to look up at him. “Given everything I’ve just told you, you must realize how important it is to me that you feel physical desire for me. Don’t hide it from me. Even if all you feel is lust, Fern, I’m glad it’s there.”
She struggled to hold his gaze, certain her true feelings were painted all over her face. He was too astute and experienced not to see the signs.
“It’s love,” she whispered, feeling worse than naked. Like her soul was exposed. The agony of having no defenses left against him at all twined through her voice. “I think it happened at the oasis. That’s why I was so afraid to tell you about the baby. I couldn’t bear for you to hate me when you’d seemed to like me a little—”
“A lot,” he amended, cupping her face in two hands. “Ah, Fern.” His face spasmed with great pain. “I fell in love, too. And I couldn’t admit it even to myself. Not when it made me just like my father.”
“I’m s—”
He set his thumb across her lips, stilling them. “I’m sorry that I wasted months when we could have been together. I thought I should be able to control my feelings, especially if it was only lust, but I couldn’t. I can’t. You’re everything I want, the only woman I think about.”