Claimed for the Desert Prince's Heir

by Heidi Rice

  Her stomach rumbled as he sat on the bed, leaning against the headboard. Stretching out his legs, he beckoned her. ‘Come.’

  She crawled towards him, impossibly touched when he wrapped an arm around her. She went to rest against his right side, enjoying the moment of closeness, but remembered the appendectomy scar just in time.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Stop apologising,’ he said, tugging her back down again, until she was nestled under his arm. ‘It doesn’t hurt.’

  She didn’t entirely believe him, but he seemed unconcerned. He was clearly a man who had endured a lot of pain in his life—enough that a wound such as this was insignificant.

  ‘What is it you wish to talk about?’ he asked.

  There were so, so many things she wanted to know about him, she realised, but she didn’t have the right to ask them. Not until she had told him about her baby. Their baby. So she settled for something she did have the right to know.

  ‘Why did you pretend you were still just the Kholadi Chief at the oasis...’ Just. The qualifier echoed in her consciousness.

  Whatever had happened to change his circumstances in the last five years, to turn him into a billionaire with considerable power and influence outside his desert kingdom, he had never been just a chieftain. He had always been charming, intelligent, a brilliant political strategist and a worthy diplomatic opponent, according to Zane. Hadn’t Cat once mentioned that he spoke seven languages fluently?

  The Bad-Boy Sheikh tag was one the girls in the palace’s women’s quarters had created for him, because it had added to the fantasies they’d all whispered about him. It had made him hotter. But he really didn’t need to be any hotter than he already was. Maybe he had no formal education, unlike her, but he had risen to the task of leading his people as a teenager and she would guess that was the motive behind what he was doing here now.

  She looked up at him. His brows quirked, the smile widening, and she wondered why her question amused him.

  ‘I did not pretend to be something I am not.’

  ‘But you could have told me about your other life. Your life in the West. As a businessman. Why didn’t you?’ She looked away, out into the night sky. Embarrassed at the memory of telling him about Cambridge University as if he would never have heard of the place.

  Wow, she’d really messed up—in so many ways.

  Strong fingers captured her chin and tugged her gaze to his. The sparkle of amusement had died, his eyes intent. ‘You think because I have money now, because I know how to work the stock market, how to invest and diversify the riches of my people, my country, so they can have more options, that this makes me a better man than I was before?’

  She shook her head furiously. ‘No, no, not at all.’ She had insulted him and it hadn’t been her intention. ‘But it does make you different from the man I believed you to be.’

  ‘How?’ he said. ‘I am the same man underneath the suit as the robe. As you can see.’ He spread his arm out, drawing her eyes to the many scars on his chest, illuminated by the light from the bathroom, the red marks where her nails had scored his skin during their lovemaking, and the faded ink of the tattoo. ‘It is only your perception that is different.’

  Was it? Perhaps he was right, and her impression of him was about her own prejudices—her own fantasies. And the truth was that so much of him was unchanged from their night in the desert. But, still, she couldn’t quite give up her argument.

  ‘Really? Would you have chosen to get that tattoo now?’ she asked, seizing on the crude, pagan and unsettling design—which made him look even more wild than all the injuries he had suffered. He must have got it when he’d become Chief of the Kholadi, as a teenager, the serpent a well-known symbol of the tribe.

  He glanced at his shoulder, almost as if he had forgotten the tattoo was there. Then stared back at her.

  ‘This tattoo was not my choice. My father had me inked before he threw me out.’

  ‘Sheikh Tariq forced you to have that tattoo?’ Shock and sympathy hit her like a punch to the stomach. ‘But... Why?’

  ‘So everyone would know I was nothing more than a Kholadi whore’s brat.’

  She tried to absorb the horror of that, and the sadness at the casual way he made the remark. ‘How old were you?’

  He shrugged, making the snake writhe in the dim light. ‘Ten.’

  Ten? ‘But that’s... That’s hideous.’

  She’d heard the stories about Tariq’s abuse of Zane. When she and Cat had gone to the marketplace together during the early days of her friend’s employment, an old woman who had delivered fabric to the palace had told of how Zane had been beaten for trying to run away, after being kidnapped from his mother in LA.

  Why was she even surprised that Tariq had treated his other son with equal brutality? The old Sheikh had become mad with bitterness after Zelda Mayhew, Zane’s mother, had run away from him with her baby son. But this wasn’t just cruel, it was twisted. To permanently mark a child, to treat him with such contempt, your own flesh and blood. How could Tariq have done such a thing? And how had Raif survived it?

  ‘Do not be distressed.’ He sent her a confused half-smile. ‘I survived. Once you get used to the needle, it doesn’t hurt. And I wear the tattoo with pride now as the Kholadi’s Chief. He was crueller to my mother.’

  * * *

  The minute he had mentioned his mother, Raif knew he should not have done. Because Kasia shot upright, dislodging his arm, the curiosity in her gaze outstripped by the concern and compassion that had already turned her eyes into twin pools of amber. Pools he had lost himself in a moment ago.

  Was that why he’d mentioned his mother, because he was basking in the compassion? Exactly how weak and pathetic did that make him?

  ‘Your mother? You mean...’ She paused and looked down, her fingers toying with the robe’s belt. She didn’t want to say the word, he realised—and was trying to think of a more polite way to describe her. At last she raised her chin, the honest sympathy turning the pang in his chest to an ache.

  ‘I’m sorry, I only know the stories about your mother, that she was a...’ He waited for her to say it, a word he had heard many times, a word he himself had used to describe his mother. A word he had always been determined to own. People had judged him because of her and he had hated her for it, but had refused to admit the shame he felt, persuading anyone who would listen, his brother included, that he was proud to be a whore’s son.

  Strange to realise that when he’d finally discovered the truth about her, two years ago, while reading his father’s papers, the only real emotion he had felt, instead of anger or regret or sadness for the woman who had given birth to a sheikh’s son and been destroyed in the process, had been a vague feeling of disappointment. That he had gone through his childhood, his whole adult life fighting to prove it didn’t matter that his mother was something she had never really been.

  ‘That she was Tariq’s paid companion,’ Kasia finally managed.

  The ache in his chest became more pronounced when he realised how hard Kasia was trying to spare his feelings. Feelings that no longer existed. Or hadn’t until he’d taken her virginity all those weeks ago and triggered a reaction he’d found hard to explain.

  ‘A whore, you mean?’ he said flatly.

  ‘I wouldn’t use that term,’ Kasia replied fiercely.

  ‘Why not, if it is the truth?’ He was baiting her now, and he knew it, because the truth about his mother was more complex. But he couldn’t help wondering how Kasia would have reacted to his heritage if his mother had been the whore everyone had convinced him she was? Would Kasia have judged him, too? And his mother? Or was her sweetness, her innocence as real as it appeared?

  ‘Because it’s a cruel and derogatory term and it doesn’t take into account why women are often forced to make those choices,’ she said without hesitation, the pas
sionate defence making the ache in his chest worse.

  Apparently she was as sweet as she appeared.

  He wondered how different his life might have been if he had met Kasia before the lies about his birth—and the degradation he had suffered because of them—had forced him to grow up far too soon and had hardened him into the cynic he was today? He rubbed his knuckles over his chest, determined to take the foolish ache away. They could not turn back the clock. Maybe he had become the man he was today—hard, cynical, immune to love—based on a lie, but he had no desire to change who he was.

  ‘Perhaps it is good, then, she was not so much of a whore after all,’ he said, deciding to tell Kasia the truth. ‘Or not until after she became pregnant with me.’

  ‘I don’t...I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘But I thought she died when you were born?’

  ‘She did,’ he said, then watched her make the connection. His mother had taken men into her bed for money while she had been with child.

  A part of him wanted to let Kasia believe that was all there was to the story, the truth he had lived with his entire life. What difference did it really make why his mother had become a prostitute? And when?

  But instead of looking shocked, or disgusted, Kasia’s eyes brimmed with tears and the ache he was trying to numb started to pulse again.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he said, as he watched her swipe the moisture away.

  ‘She must have been so desperate. I can’t even imagine it.’

  No one had ever cried for his mother, no one had ever mourned her, not even him. But as he watched a single tear track down Kasia’s cheek, something was released inside him and the prickle of guilt and shame—in himself, not his mother—that he had held at bay joined the brutal ache in his chest.

  Why would she cry for his mother? Defend her? Lament the terrible choices his mother had been forced to make?

  And if this girl could cry for her, who had never known her, and still only knew the worst about her, how much of a bastard did it make him that he could not?

  ‘She was desperate,’ he said, no longer able to deny the truth he had never confided in anyone, never wanted to acknowledge or confront, until now. ‘She was a virgin, only sixteen years old when he took her to his bed. But he refused to marry her, and when she became pregnant he discarded her, had her branded a whore. She did not return to the Kholadi because of the shame, so she ended up in a brothel in Zafari,’ he said, mentioning the city that had sprawled around the walls of the Golden Palace for generations.

  ‘The madam there brought me to the palace after my mother died in childbirth. And the women took me in. My father was furious, of course, but even he could not order a baby cast out of the palace, especially one that carried his blood, however tainted. But he never acknowledged me and always refused to see me—until Zane arrived in the palace and Tariq wanted me gone. Everyone told me always that my mother was a whore, and I believed it, but I found out two years ago, when Zane gave me our father’s journals, that it was not the whole truth.’

  He had been furious with Zane for giving the journals to him and insisting he read them, especially when he had discovered the inconvenient truth contained within them. He had felt nothing for his mother’s plight, his heart already hardened towards her, but he had been instantly suspicious of Zane’s motives.

  Why would Zane presume he would want to unearth ancient history? To revisit something about his birth that would rewrite the principles on which he had founded his life? Was Zane expecting him to be grateful? Expecting him to give Narabia political and economic concessions in their trade negotiations in gratitude for this interference in his private life? Or was it even simpler than that? Did Zane simply wish to weaken him?

  Zane, of all people, had to know that the chaos, the struggles, the disadvantages of his childhood had ultimately given him strength—therefore he must have known that showing Raif that his mother had been a victim too might undermine that strength.

  But as Raif watched Kasia struggle to hold back her tears, the sympathy and understanding in her eyes probed that place deep inside him that he had never wanted anyone to find—and the ache in his chest rose up to push against his larynx.

  * * *

  No. No. No.

  Kasia pressed a hand to her belly, trying to contain the pain, not just at the hideous truths Raif had revealed about his childhood and his mother’s mistreatment and exploitation but also at the guilt tying her stomach in tight knots. Because Raif’s revelations about his mother put a whole new complexion on what had happened a month ago.

  ‘Is that why...?’ She paused, her throat dry as the guilt sharpened. ‘Is that why you were so insistent we marry? Why you wanted to obey the Law of Marriage of the Sheikhs.’

  Had he been trying to right the wrongs his father had done his mother, and him, by observing the same sacred law his father had broken so callously?

  She had so easily dismissed his demand that they marry as a backward and autocratic request based on arrogance and a misguided honour system that had no place in modern society, but it had always been much more personal than that. How could it not be after what he had discovered about his mother’s treatment? She had put him in an untenable position by not telling him about her virginity, then had compounded it by dismissing his attempt to solve the problem. She had used him for her own pleasure, and then underestimated him at every turn.

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged, the movement stiff. ‘I’m not sure what I was thinking at the time. I was shocked by your untouched state. I had not expected it. Or the intensity of our lovemaking.’

  Her skin flushed at the bald statement, and the knots in her abdomen heated. She wasn’t sure whether she was moved or flattered or simply aroused by his honesty and the knowledge she wasn’t the only one who had been blindsided by their intense physical connection.

  ‘But afterwards...’ He sighed. ‘Especially as I lay for days in the Golden Palace with nothing to do, I kept recalling our last moments together. And questioning why I had been so inflexible, so belligerent, so determined to insist upon marriage.’ He hesitated. ‘And it occurred to me that maybe I was more affected by what I had learned about my parents’ past than I had assumed.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘For putting you in that position.’ It wasn’t the first time she had apologised for not telling him of her virginity, but it was the first time she had meant it without reservation.

  Maybe she’d had no knowledge of his past, his priorities, when she had slept with him, but she had assumed he was a thoughtless man, and had never examined his motives properly. His honour was important to him, not because he was arrogant or overbearing but because he had been forced to fight for it every single day of his life.

  He lifted her hand, stared at her fingers as he brushed his thumb across her knuckles.

  The heat in her stomach warmed further and glowed, and seemed to wrap itself around her heart, making her ribs feel tight.

  The guilt twisted, though, when he raised his head, his expression tense. And guarded.

  ‘I think perhaps it is I who should apologise to you,’ he said, his voice gruff but forceful.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  He touched a finger to her cheek, drew a tendril of hair behind her ear. Then sent her a lopsided smile that made her heartbeat slow and thicken.

  ‘For trying to bully you into marriage, perhaps?’ he murmured, the rueful twist of his lips beguiling. ‘And for scaring you away. If I had not reacted so recklessly, made such a ridiculous demand, we could have found a better way to end our time at the oasis, is this not so?’

  She forced a smile to her lips, stifling the ripple of sadness that he now considered marriage a ‘ridiculous demand’. Of course he did, because it was ridiculous, they didn’t know each other. Not really.

  Should she tell him now, about the baby? The question had th
e guilt tightening in her stomach, but she dismissed it. Why destroy this moment of closeness, of connection? She would tell him soon, just not yet.

  At least now she knew she didn’t have to be scared to tell him when the time came. He was a much more intelligent and thoughtful man than she had given him credit for, despite the harshness of his upbringing.

  ‘Perhaps we both need to apologise?’ she offered.

  He chuckled, the sound helping to release the knot of guilt still lodged in her belly. ‘An excellent compromise.’

  Warmth flooded her system at the approval in his gaze.

  She would tell him about the pregnancy soon, but for tonight she just wanted to enjoy his company.

  He was the father of her child, and while this liaison was based on a sexual connection and would not last—because they were still such different people, with such different goals in life—he would always have a place in her life now. And her child’s life. It was good to know that didn’t scare her any more, it excited her. She hadn’t given much thought to what kind of father he would make, had been too scared to consider it because of her assumptions about the kind of man he was—rough, uneducated, wild—but now she could see she didn’t need to be scared about that either.

  He cradled her face, pulled her close for a kiss, and the pheromones gathered—as they always did—to overwhelm her thoughts. But as his lips touched hers, the electric contact sending a familiar shiver down her spine, a loud knock sounded in the next room.

  ‘Mr Khan, room service. We have your order.’

  He swore against her lips in Kholadi—his frustration palpable—and she let out a strained laugh.

  Shifting to kiss her forehead, he drew back. ‘I think we had better let them in,’ he said, not sounding at all pleased at the prospect.

  ‘Must we?’ she shot back, surprising herself. Was she actually pouting?

  He let out a rough chuckle. ‘Unfortunately, yes, my little witch.’