She sat down to wait for him, realising just how little she really knew about him. He’d still never mentioned his mother, and hadn’t said much about his father either. She remembered the day she’d arrived here, when he’d resolutely silenced her questions about his upbringing. And she had let him silence her, determined to maintain a precarious kind of peace no matter what the cost.
But pregnancy was changing more than just her body; it was changing the way she viewed the world. Hassan’s mother was not just a person whose name had caused the face of her elder son to darken with pain. She was also a part of the child whose daily kicking inside her belly grew stronger each day. And impending motherhood had also forced Ella to re-examine her views on her own family. She’d recognised that while she might not always approve of the way they behaved, she loved them all very dearly and could never deny their influence on her and the child she carried.
Why, this baby might be a boy who would grow up to be the spitting image of her father! And so what? She let her hand drift to lie on the hard swell of her belly. Was this what her own mother had felt, this powerful bond connecting her to her child? For the first time in her life, she acknowledged how difficult it must have been for her mother to have reared Bobby’s children and also the children he’d had with another woman. He’d been unfaithful for much of their marriage and she had simply turned a blind eye to what was going on.
And yet Julie Jackson had somehow managed to keep it together. Ella and her brothers and sisters may not have had much money, but their messy home had been full of laughter, hadn’t it? Not like this great, silent palace where Hassan had grown up. She tried to imagine him and his brother playing in the wide corridors and thought how lonely it must have been for them.
‘Ella?’
Still lost in her thoughts, she looked up to see that Hassan had arrived at the ‘studio,’ his dark brows raised in mocking question.
‘Sorry.’ She smiled at him. ‘I was miles away.’
‘I can see that for myself. Are you ready for me?’
‘Absolutely. Come and sit over here. That’s right, just here.’
He sat where she’d asked him to and as she smoothed the headdress which covered his black hair, she resisted the urge to lean over and kiss him. It was one of their rules—or rather, it was one of his rules—no physical intimacy outside the bedroom. He’d told her that protocol demanded it, that the aides and ministers who moved with such silent deference around the palace would not approve of their king fooling around with his new bride. Because kisses tended to get out of hand and lead on to other, deeper intimacies. And Ella understood that. Just as she understood that it was yet another way for her husband to keep her at arm’s length.
He glanced up at her. ‘What must I do?’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘You know exactly what you must do. You’ve sat for paintings before.’
‘Ah, but it was always with a man, never with the woman who just a few hours ago was lying in my arms.’
‘Can you please not talk about sex?’ She began to make rapid sweeps on the paper with her stick of charcoal.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it changes the look on your face. It makes your eyes turn smoky and your mouth grow tense.’
And not just his mouth, Hassan thought wryly, shifting his position slightly. He studied the sweeping movements of her hand and remembered the sketches he’d seen of her sister back in her house in London. The subject matter may have been a little outré for his taste, but there was no doubt that she had talent. ‘You’ve never had any formal training?’ he questioned.
‘Nope.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because money was too tight to send me to art school.’
‘I thought your father made a fortune.’
‘He made several fortunes, and then lost them again. Plus, there were his many alimony payments.’
‘He is known for his liking of women,’ he observed.
‘Understatement of the century,’ she answered acidly. ‘He is also known for his love of grand schemes and the temptation to make a quick buck, which is why there’s never been any real money in our family. Everything we owned was only ever temporary.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘I see.’
‘I wonder if you do,’ she said as she put a finger to her lips to indicate that he should stop talking. He’d certainly never known what it was like to worry about paying the gas bill, or to hunt in the cupboard to find nothing but a long-forgotten tin of caviar and to wonder whether slimy fish eggs could possibly fill you up.
For a while she worked in silence and once again Hassan used the opportunity to watch her. Her movements were economical and the studio was completely quiet apart from the scrape of the charcoal and the occasional song of a bird outside. Yet beneath the calm surface of their life, he was aware of a dark kind of uncertainty. A time bomb which was ticking away inexorably. Both of them waiting for something which had the potential to change their lives in ways he couldn’t quite imagine. And didn’t want to imagine.
He had seen her patting her growing bump, her face growing almost dreamy as she did so. He’d watched her drawing little circles on the tight drum of her belly, as if she was playing some secret game with the child inside her, and his heart had given a painful wrench. He felt jealous, he realised—because his own mother could never have felt a bond like that if she’d been able to just walk away from him and his brother …?
‘Hassan, stop frowning.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Yes, you were.’ She stopped drawing, wondering what had caused that terrible bleakness to enter his eyes. ‘What is it, Hassan?’ she questioned softly. ‘What on earth was making you look that way?’
He saw the understanding on her face and instinct made him want to push her away. She wanted to probe into his past, as all women did. But with Ella he wasn’t in a position to terminate the discussion and then make a cool exit. With Ella there was no escape; the fact that she carried his child had made her a constant in his life. So why not tell her the truth and wipe all that sweet understanding from her face? Why not make her understand where he was coming from, so she’d learn why he could never really love a woman, nor she him?
‘I was remembering my mother,’ he said.
Something about the silky venom in his voice made the hairs on the back of Ella’s neck prickle with apprehension. ‘You never talk about her.’
‘No. Haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why?’
‘Of course I have.’
His mouth flattened into a grim line. He’d never told anyone, he realised suddenly. Even he and his brother had never discussed it. They’d locked the memory away in a dark place which was never allowed to see the light of day. As if such a rejection had been too painful to acknowledge, even to themselves. ‘Maybe you should know, Ella. Maybe it will help explain properly the man that I am.’
Something in his voice was alarming her, and the cold, dark look on his face was scaring her even more.
‘Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,’ she whispered, but his face looked so frozen and forbidding that she wondered if he’d actually heard her.
He shook his head as the dark memories bubbled up from the deepest recesses of his mind. ‘My mother was a princess from the neighbouring country of Bakamurat,’ he said. ‘And she was betrothed to my father from an early age—as was the custom at the time. They married when she was just eighteen, and not long after that, I was born. Two years later, Kamal came along.’
‘But the marriage wasn’t happy?’ Ella saw the clenching of his jaw and bit her lip, appalled at her own naivety. ‘I’m sorry. That’s a stupid question. It can’t have been happy if she … left.’
‘In those days there was not such a realistic expectation of happiness as there is today,’ he bit out. ‘But, for a while at least, we had a contented family life, the four of us. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me.’
She heard some odd, metallic quality enter
his tone. ‘But something happened?’ she guessed.
‘Something most certainly did,’ he agreed, his voice bitter. ‘My mother went home to visit her sister in Bakamurat, leaving Kamal and me behind. She was gone longer than my father had anticipated, and when she returned, she was … different.’
‘How do you mean, different?’
For a moment he didn’t speak. He had buried this as deeply as he could, but even now he could vividly recall the distracted air which had made it seem as if his mother barely noticed him. The way she’d looked right through him and Kamal as if they hadn’t been there. She’d gone off her food, so that the weight had dropped away from her and her beautiful face had seemed to be all large, confused dark eyes. In a way, she had never looked more lovely, and yet even at that early age, Hassan had sensed his father’s increasing concern. He remembered the sound of their raised voices when he and Kamal lay in bed at night and the terrible silences at breakfast in the mornings.
‘She had fallen in love with a nobleman from Bakamurat.’ He heard the distorted sound of his own voice. ‘She said she could not live without him. That he was the only man she’d ever loved. My father was as patient as I had ever seen him but eventually his patience wore thin. He told her she must choose between them.’
Ella broke the awful silence with a question she already knew the answer to. ‘And she chose him?’
‘Yes. She chose her lover over her husband and she left behind her two little boys while she went off to find what she described as the only man who had ever really understood her.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘My father.’
Ella nodded, her heart going out to him, cursing the loose tongues of broken-hearted adults. ‘Sometimes parents tell their children too much,’ she said falteringly. ‘I remember my own mother sobbing and telling me things about my father I wish she hadn’t said. I think she forgot who was the parent and who was the child. Sometimes people act inappropriately when their emotions get the better of them.’
‘Exactly! Which is why I don’t do emotion—or “love.”’ His lips curved into a cynical half-smile, thinking that she couldn’t have given him a better platform for the truth if she’d tried. ‘Why embrace something which makes people act shamefully?’ he demanded. ‘Which eats into what is good and what is true. And it changes—that’s the truth of it. Love is as inconstant as the wind. My mother vowed to spend her life with my father and she broke that vow. So how can anyone ever put their trust in it?’
Ella put the charcoal down, afraid that he would see the sudden trembling of her fingers. The warning in his voice was implicit; she heard it loud and clear. But she wanted to know the ending. Whether any happiness had been squeezed from the sour story he was telling her.
‘What happened to your mother?’ she questioned softly.
He shook his head, because the supposed retribution which had been heaped upon the woman who had given birth to him had brought him no comfort. ‘The shame of her desertion went with her. Her nobleman would not marry a woman who was tainted in such a way. I don’t think he’d ever intended to marry her in the first place. She’d just built up the fantasy in her head. And of course, my father refused to take her back.’
‘Did she want to come back?’ breathed Ella.
‘Oh, yes. It seemed that she realised just what she had lost—two little children and a man who loved her. But it was too late and his pride would not countenance it. He had been made a fool of once and would not risk it happening again. She began to neglect herself. She wasn’t eating properly. She went to Switzerland and it was there, in the cold of the winter snows, that she caught pneumonia.’
Ella didn’t need to hear the words to know that his mother had died; she could read it from the bleak look on his face. ‘And you never … you never saw her again?’
‘No.’
‘Hassan—’
‘No!’ he said again, shaking away the soft hand which had reached out towards him. Standing, he moved away from the chair and her tantalising proximity.
But Ella went after him because the look of bleakness on his ravaged face was more than she could bear. She moved up to his tensed, hunched body and, rising up on tiptoes, she put her arms around him.
‘Hassan,’ she breathed into his ear. ‘Darling, darling Hassan.’
His heart was thumping and he could feel the contrasting softness of her cheek against his. He should have pushed her away, but how could he do that when the hard curve of her baby bump was pressing against him and her welcoming arms were enfolding him. And that was the moment that his long-suppressed emotions ruptured. When anger and hurt and shame and resentment all came swimming darkly to the surface and threatened to swamp him.
He opened his mouth to groan but her lips were reaching towards his and somehow he was kissing her, kissing her with an urgent kind of hunger he’d never felt before. His hands splayed over her breasts and her muffled little cries urged him on, and as he felt the nipples harden beneath his palms, a primitive hunger began to rise in him.
With a low moan like the sound of a wounded animal, he pulled away from her before locking the door and, when he turned back, Ella could see from the look of dark intent on his face just what he was going to do.
His embrace was hard and his lips heated, but she matched him kiss for kiss. Greedily, she scrabbled at the silk of his robes as he slithered hers up over her thighs, his fingers skating over the cool skin there until he found the molten heat which awaited him.
She did not dare cry out, not even when he thrust deep inside her, taking her from behind because it was more comfortable that way, before beginning his inexorable rhythm. Ella swallowed as he caught hold of her shoulders, his lips on her hair as he whispered to her, strange, fractured words in his native tongue. It had never felt quite like this: with all her senses heightened by the emotion of what he’d told her and the fact that Hassan was breaking his own rules by making love to her in the makeshift studio.
Her orgasm happened quickly—almost too quickly, it seemed—and it was as if she had given him everything she had to give. She felt his own, final thrust. Heard the little choking sound he made as he clung to her, spilling his seed deep inside her.
‘Hassan,’ she whispered.
For a moment he couldn’t speak as he sucked in gulps of air, sanity returning to cool his ardour like a summer rainstorm. Against the rumpled spill of her hair, Hassan briefly closed his eyes, a wave of guilt washing over him as he realised just what he had done. He had used her, as he used all women. He had taken the sweet comfort she was offering him and had turned it into the only commodity he was familiar with. Sex.
‘That should never have happened,’ he said hoarsely.
‘But I’m glad it happened!’ came her fierce reply.
Biting back his remorse, he withdrew from her, adjusting himself before turning her around to cup her face in his hands. ‘So now do you understand why I am the man I am?’ he demanded. ‘Why I can’t love. Do you understand that, Ella?’
She looked at him, her heart twisting with pain, wanting to tell him that his mother’s rejection didn’t mean that all women were going to do the same. That she would love him and cherish him if only he would give her the chance.
‘I understand perfectly,’ she said softly.
‘But these things aren’t set in stone, Hassan. There’s no reason why you can’t change.’ I can help you change.
He saw the hope and understanding written on her face and a bitter wave of recrimination washed over him. She didn’t have a clue, did she? How horrified she would be if she knew how ruthless he had been. If she discovered that he’d brought her out here hoping that she would leave him. And leave their baby too.
He shook his head as he unlocked the door and wrenched it open. ‘I think we’d better call it a day. This session is over and I have work to do.’
And he swept from the room. Just like that. Leaving Ella watching him, blinking away the sudden shimmer of te
ars which had sprung to her eyes.
She glanced down at the start she’d made on the drawing which now bore the outline of Hassan’s face. But it was strange how a few black lines had somehow managed to capture a true likeness of the man she had married. The hawk-like nose and the shadowed jut of his jaw. The autocratic cheekbones and the empty black eyes.
A proud man who had told her he could never love.
Closing the door quietly behind her, Ella left the studio and walked in silence along the scented marble corridor towards her suite.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SO THIS was how it was going to be. Everything had changed, yet nothing had changed, and Ella felt as if she was living in a strange kind of limbo. She moved around the beautiful palace feeling like a gatecrasher who the benign host had allowed to remain at the party.
The stupid thing was that, at first, Hassan’s emotional outpouring had given her hope. She’d thought that once he’d given himself time to reflect on her words that he might come around to her way of thinking. To realise that change was possible. That anything was possible if you wanted it enough.
And maybe the simple truth of it was that he just didn’t want it. Maybe the thought of allowing himself to feel stuff secretly repulsed him. That his childhood experiences had scarred him too deeply for him ever to contemplate living his life in a different way.
Because he behaved as if nothing had happened. As if he hadn’t torn open the blackness which seemed to envelop his heart and allowed her to glimpse the bitter pain which lay beneath.
Once again, the barriers came crashing down, only this time it was worse than before. Because now she had something with which to compare it. She’d felt a snatch of real closeness when he’d opened up to her about his past. When she’d felt as though they’d discovered a new honesty … and when she’d realised how easy it would be to love this proud and tortured man.
The Sheikh’s Heir Page 12