Desert King, Doctor Daddy

by Meredith Webber

  ‘I must go, but Miryam will look after you now. Miryam’s English is excellent and she runs this house as well as other duties. She will show you where things are, get you anything you need, and take you to the women’s house for breakfast in the morning.’

  Then Almira, to Gemma’s surprise, pressed a quick kiss on her cheek.

  ‘Yusef has my number—call me if you need some company, or someone to talk to. I would like to be your friend,’ she said, and whirled away as swiftly as she’d appeared.

  ‘Through here is a bedroom and bathroom,’ Miryam said, ushering Gemma along a passageway. But they had barely walked out of the big room than a commotion outside made them turn.

  Gemma didn’t understand what was being said, until someone spoke in English. ‘The doctor, did the doctor come?’

  ‘They talk of you, they need you—one of the children cannot breathe.’

  Miryam translated, at the same time hurrying Gemma back towards the door. The women crowded around her, like the bright butterflies Yusef had described, their dresses green and blue and yellow, all chattering still, small hennaed hands waving agitatedly.

  Inside the house next door an older woman was pulling a black gown over her coloured dress and it was she who moved to greet Gemma, taking her hand and talking in halting English, explaining the baby was ill, tugging her along, while grey-clad women Gemma took as servants followed.

  Gemma heard the wheezing before she reached the child, and the moment she saw the little one’s labouring chest and scarlet face, she knew it was croup—not deadly if treated as quickly as possible, but terrifying for the little girl.

  ‘A bathroom—a small one if possible—with very hot water,’ she said to Miryam, who had stayed by her side. The young servant led her directly to a room that held a shower and little else.

  ‘For after the children swim,’ she explained, but Gemma didn’t care why the room was there, turning the hot taps full on, taking the little wheezing girl in her arms, and holding her close to the running water where the steam was thickest.

  ‘Everyone outside,’ she said to Miryam, ‘and tell them not to worry. She will be all right.’

  ‘But you cannot hold her there, let her—her nanny do it.’ The older woman who had taken charge earlier made the protest.

  ‘I can’t check on her from outside the door,’ Gemma said, and waved the cluster of women away.

  The tiny girl’s breathing was already easier, but Gemma kept her there, talking quietly to her, although she guessed the little one wouldn’t understand a word she said. Then the little arms snaked around Gemma’s neck, clinging tightly, and a multitude of emotions nearly swept Gemma off her feet. Warmth and love and pain that the little arms were not those of her child, but after her experience with Paul, how could she ever trust a man again, trust a man enough to marry him?

  The only man to whom she’d felt attraction since Paul was off limits—out of bounds—for all they’d shared a kiss or two. For all he’d talked about attraction she was fairly sure he’d kissed her out of pity—how humiliating when she thought about it. She held the baby closer, and whispered to her again, rocking her in her arms, singing a silly song that Mrs Rowan had sung when Gemma had been a toddler like this little mite.

  The little one grew heavy in her arms and, with her breathing easy now, Gemma turned off the taps. She could only imagine how she must look, her clothing damp from the steam, her hair hanging in corkscrewing ringlets around her face. Wrapping a towel around the child to protect her from the cooler air outside the room, she opened the door, to find all the women still clustered there.

  ‘I told you she’d be all right,’ Gemma said to Miryam. ‘They didn’t have to wait.’

  ‘We had to see,’ the older woman said, while another young woman in dark grey tunic and trousers came forward, holding out her arms for the little girl.

  But Gemma remembered how those arms had clung to her.

  ‘She’s asleep. I’ll take her and put her into bed, then maybe stay with her in case it recurs although it shouldn’t. Did the night suddenly become cooler? That will sometimes cause an attack.’

  Miryam turned and spoke to the other women, who all seemed to answer at once.

  ‘It was hot today,’ she explained to Gemma, ‘but in the evening the breeze from the desert came. It is cooler than the sea breeze at this time of the year.’

  Gemma nodded, then after more talk among the women and several of them coming closer to check the little girl really was sleeping peacefully, they faded away, leaving Gemma with Miryam and the young servant.

  ‘Anya is Fajella’s nanny,’ Miryam said. ‘She will go with you and show you where the baby sleeps. Anya speaks English, although she is shy because she thinks she doesn’t speak it well. His Highness wants Fajella growing up with both languages.’

  ‘His Highness?’ Gemma stopped herself adding, ‘My Highness’ just in time, for he certainly wasn’t in any way hers.

  ‘Yes, Fajella is his child.’

  Gemma was tempted to push the sleeping head away from her shoulder so she could take a good look at the child, but no doubt if Miryam said that’s who she was, then this was indeed Fajella, the child on Yusef’s screensaver. And her being Yusef’s child might explain why all the women had been so concerned—although maybe they’d have been as concerned about any child.

  But Yusef’s child?

  Why hadn’t it occurred to her that it was his own child’s picture? Gemma wondered as she followed Anya along passageways towards the back of the big house. And why should it bother her?

  Although now she understood why Yusef was so determined to get a clinic set up in his country, having never known his mother and losing his wife in childbirth. But wouldn’t his wife have had the very best of care? The toddler couldn’t be more than two years old, and surely the hospital had already been built when she was born. Would none of the women use the hospital? Was that why Yusef wanted her here?

  None of it made sense, and in spite of the sleep she’d had on the flight, Gemma was suddenly very, very tired. She followed Anya into a room furnished very like a Western child’s nursery, with a cot and coloured wallpaper and a profusion of teddy bears and beautiful dolls. Anya let down the side of the cot but when Gemma went to put her charge down, the little arms clung again, and in the end, spying a mattress on the floor, where Anya no doubt slept, Gemma sank down onto it and told Anya that she would sleep there with Fajella.

  ‘In case she has problems later in the night,’ she added, so the young woman wouldn’t suspect it was because Gemma was a softie and the clinging arms of the motherless child had tugged at her heartstrings.

  It was late and Yusef was exhausted, but he’d heard of Fajella’s sudden attack from his driver as he’d been driven back to the compound. Some woman with red hair had saved the baby’s life, according to his driver, and although Yusef guessed Fajella’s attack had been nothing more than croup, he was none the less sincerely grateful that Gemma had been there, and had acted so swiftly.

  He walked quietly along the dimly lit corridor in the children’s wing of the women’s house, a path he trod every night when he was home, for he couldn’t rest without seeing his little daughter, no matter how late the hour. He had not been here when she was born, and for that he carried guilt with him every day, for if he’d been here he would have insisted his wife go to hospital and her life might have been saved.

  The door was ajar, and Anya was asleep on the floor outside the room. Yusef frowned at her and was about to wake her, for her orders were to sleep beside his daughter, when he heard a husky little snore, no more than a snuffle really, and realised someone else was in the room with Fajella.

  Pushing open the door, the light fell on red hair and Yusef could only stare in disbelief, for there, on a mat on the floor, lay Gemma, her fiery red hair splayed across the pillow, the clothes she’d worn on the flight dishevelled and creased, but her arms were around his daughter, who was snuggled close into Gemm
a’s body.

  His instinct was to wake the visitor, to tell her this wasn’t her place, yet why seeing her there should anger him when all he should be feeling was gratitude he didn’t know.

  Or did he? Wasn’t it the stirring of his body, the shamefulness of such a reaction, that had angered him? He suspected it might be, but as he watched the sleeping woman, with his child in her arms, desire departed, replaced by a feeling he didn’t recognise, a kind of churning deep inside him, a longing, but for what he didn’t want to consider.

  He knew it wasn’t only the physical attraction that stirred him—he remembered seeing her on the plane, coming into the bedroom as she’d smoothed Massa’s hair, frowning as she’d worried about someone worrying over him. It was this empathy she had for people—because she’d been so alone herself?—that made her special in a way he couldn’t put into words.

  Had his thoughts transmitted themselves to her that her pale eyes opened and she looked around, at first in puzzlement, then remembering, checking Fajella, before easing away from the sleeping child? Yusef knew he should say something—felt somehow ashamed that she should wake and see him watching her—so he stepped quietly into the room and squatted by the bed.

  ‘I owe you much,’ he said quietly, touching the backs of his fingers to his daughter’s cheek. ‘The women have told me what you did.’

  Gemma moved awkwardly, trying to sit up, feeling foolish and vulnerable here on a thin mattress on the floor with Yusef so close beside her.

  And quite apart from that, she must look a mess, totally crushed and dishevelled, hair everywhere. Yet now Yusef was touching her cheek, with the same gentle caress he’d used on his daughter, but his daughter hadn’t felt heat spread through her body at that touch, or shivered, not with cold but with a weird kind of apprehensive excitement.

  ‘I did nothing,’ she finally managed to say. ‘No more than anyone who’d had experience of croup would have done. I wondered, though, if maybe she has it often, if you’ve considered steroids if she does.’

  Very sensible medical conversation for all that the words had sounded a little breathless even to her own ears, but the look in Yusef’s eyes told her he was past conversations over croup and steroids—that he’d handle them some other time. The look in Yusef’s eyes told her he was feeling as she did, feeling the inexplicable attraction that had flared between them from the beginning now stirring once more in his body. The attraction he said they must ignore!

  ‘There are so many reasons why this can’t happen,’ he said, very quietly, then he leaned forward and once again kissed her on the lips.

  Hard, hot, demanding! It was a kiss that denied his words yet at the same time confirmed them. Whatever this was that couldn’t be still held them in a thrall, and as Gemma kissed him back, returning heat with heat, she realised that she would take whatever he could give her—that she would accept it couldn’t be but still accept his kisses for of these she could make precious memories, weaving them together like a patchwork quilt so she could warm herself with them when she returned to her lonely apartment.

  ‘You should go. I will stay with Fajella,’ he said, when she pulled away from him, aware the kisses were so close to becoming more that pulling away was the only option. Now he was stroking her cheek, her neck, tangling his fingers in her hair, but she knew he hadn’t slept at all on the flight and had responsibilities he needed a clear head to handle.

  ‘No, you go,’ she said, and pressed her own kiss on his lips. ‘I am happy sleeping here, and the little one seems to have accepted me.’

  ‘It is how I sleep in the desert,’ he said quietly, touching the thin mattress on which she still sat.

  Gemma heard the words, but heard sadness in them as well, and sensed the loss he had suffered, this man, when he’d taken on the responsibility of ruling his country. He was a man who had already lost so much, with his mother leaving him and his wife dying in childbirth. Was it his love for her that held him back from an affair with her, or was it really the fear of repercussions within his troubled land?

  He kissed her once again then stood up, looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time, then departed, leaving his absence like a cold ghost in the room.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE sleepy stirrings of the child woke Gemma, and she looked around her, totally bemused about where she was and why. A child’s bedroom? A child in her arms?

  The little girl was patting her face, and using a tiny forefinger to touch Gemma’s freckles, smiling as she did so. Beyond her, standing by anxiously, was a young woman in a grey tunic and trousers.

  Slowly memory returned, but not the name.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gemma said, speaking quietly so she didn’t startle Fajella—that name she remembered as other memories returned. ‘I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Anya!’ The grey-clad girl dropped a little curtsey. ‘And Miryam is outside. She thinks you will wish to bathe before breakfast.’

  Gemma looked down at her crushed clothing and didn’t need to sniff herself to know the assumption was correct. She hadn’t showered since—no, she shut the memories of the flight to Fajabal resolutely away. Getting to her feet, Fajella in her arms, she gave the little girl a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek then handed her to Anya and slipped out the door.

  Miryam led her back to the guest house, and waited while Gemma showered and put on clean clothes, a long skirt and long-sleeved blouse, chosen for the trip out of respect for the customs of the country she was visiting.

  ‘Should I cover my hair?’ she asked Miryam, and was surprised when the other woman answered with a vehement, ‘No!’

  ‘It is all they talk about, the women and the servants and especially the children—the red hair of the woman who has come. Let them see it, although if you go to talk to women outside the compound, then maybe a scarf.’

  ‘Well, I brought plenty of those,’ Gemma said. She followed Miryam out of the house, retrieved her sandals and wondered who owned the rest of the collection set in a row outside the door, then followed her guide to the house next door, where sandals were again removed, only this time they joined an even larger pile outside the door.

  The women were all seated, legs tucked neatly to one side and hidden by their skirts, on the carpets in the big room, and in front of them long runners of bright cloth held an array of dishes that reminded Gemma of the ones she’d eaten at the hotel in Sydney.

  ‘Come, you will sit here,’ the older woman who had spoken to her the previous evening decreed, and Gemma obeyed, taking her place beside the woman and awkwardly tucking her legs under her skirt. She would have found it easier cross-legged but was afraid she might be breaking some rule of etiquette.

  The older woman introduced herself, then all the women around the carpet, but the names flowed over Gemma’s head, the sights and sounds of that first breakfast in the women’s house so bizarrely fascinating she could only look and listen.

  Towards the end of the meal, children appeared, coming shyly into the room, greeting each adult in turn then relaxing, being children, pushing and shoving and laughing as they found places beside the women Gemma assumed were their mothers or grandmothers. To her surprise, Fajella made her way on still unsteady legs towards her, and although Gemma assumed she was heading towards the older woman, the little girl crept into her lap, only this time instead of fascination with Gemma’s freckles, it was the red hair that held her interest, her hands touching it with wonder.

  Fortunately, before Gemma could fall completely under the spell of those exploring hands, Miryam appeared.

  ‘His Highness is here to take you to the hospital,’ she said, a statement that for some reason caused a lot of chatter among the women.

  Reluctantly, Gemma handed Fajella to the older woman, stood up, thanked the women for their hospitality and followed Miryam out of the room.

  ‘They think he would have sent a car,’ Miryam explained as they walked back to the guest house so Gemma could freshen up be
fore leaving the compound. ‘They think it must be because you saved Fajella’s life he is honouring you by coming himself. They are most impressed.’

  Honouring me? Gemma shook her head, knowing the only reason Yusef had come himself was because the project he wanted her to undertake was very important to him.

  Wasn’t it?

  Of course it was! She knew that as soon as she saw him in the back of the long black vehicle, his head bent over a laptop, the points of his white head-scarf obscuring his face. The driver opened the door for Gemma and as she slid in, Yusef glanced her way and nodded, the gentle touches and hot kisses of the night before forgotten.

  ‘I am sorry, I have emails to read and send. The driver will tell you places of interest as we pass.’

  Ha! She’d guessed correctly. Hot kisses were definitely forgotten! Erased from memory…

  Would that it was so easy, she thought as she looked dutifully to right and left, taking in the sights the driver pointed out but too aware of Yusef in the car beside her to process what she was seeing. Until they reached the hospital, a building she recognised from the previous day. The vehicle pulled up around the back of the building, and Yusef closed his laptop.

  ‘You do not need to wear the scarf.’

  The words were so unexpected—and so gruffly spoken—it took Gemma a moment to realise he was speaking to her.

  ‘There are many Western women in Fajabal,’ he continued, ‘and many of our women who wear Western clothes, so you do not have to cover your hair.’

  Gemma had to look at him now, but beneath the snowy headdress he wore with such causal poise his face was as expressionless as the blank glass façade of the building. His eyes were shadowed by the point of his headdress, but she doubted they’d have given much away.