Desert Prince, Blackmailed Bride

by Kim Lawrence

Rafiq stiffened and muttered a curse, unfastening her hands from his neck. ‘I thought we had agreed we will not do that?’ A nerve clenched beside his jaw as he struggled to speak calmly. ‘The doctor was clear. There is no chance of remission.’

  ‘But there might be,’ she persisted, unable to drop the subject. ‘You said yourself this is the first time in months you’ve slept properly, and you’re not tired the way you were.’

  Rafiq looked stern as he got to his feet. ‘Enough!’ he thundered. ‘We will speak of this no more.’

  ‘But—’

  He cut off her protest with an imperative wave of his hand.

  ‘Don’t tell me when I can and can’t speak,’ Gabby said. ‘Why can’t you even consider it?’

  ‘There is nothing to consider.’

  Gabby subsided onto the bed, her knees drawn to her chin as he stalked back towards the bathroom. Well, that went well…she thought.

  Rafiq’s anger burned itself out almost before he had turned on the tap and put his dark head beneath the gushing flow of cold water. He straightened up and shook his head, sending showers of icy droplets across the mirror in front of him.

  Wiping the surface with his hand, he leaned forward and looked at his reflection in the smeared surface.

  He smiled to himself. The power of suggestion was a marvellous thing. It would be easy to look in the mirror and see what he wanted to see.

  Rafiq sighed as he felt a wave of remorse.

  He hadn’t meant to be so tough on her, and he knew her intentions were good, but he had to protect her from hope.

  The idea of watching her face when she had those hopes dashed tore him apart. Better to be brutal now than let her nurse false hopes.

  Dragging both hands through his hair to remove the excess moisture, he turned and contemplated the selfish thing he had done. If he really loved her he would have let her go.

  And now he couldn’t.

  His face dark with self-recrimination, he bent to pick up a towel. As he did so his elbow hit a half-open drawer hard, and the contents spilled onto the marble floor.

  He glanced at them, but made no move to pick them up—until a small box caught his eye, or the name on the prescription label did. Was Gabriella ill?

  Concern creased his brow and quickened his heart-rate as he bent to pick it up. He read the label several times before it actually registered.

  Gabby turned at the sound of the bathroom door opening. ‘Have you cooled down?’

  Her eyes widened. Obviously not. The glitter in his eyes as he approached the bed where she still sat cross-legged was steely. She could tell he was furious by the tension in his magnificent body and the ultra-controlled way he moved. He stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at her, his lips curled into a condemnatory sneer.

  He stood there long enough for Gabby’s spine to stiffen with apprehension. She was utterly bewildered. But along with the bewilderment came anger—how dared he look at her that way?

  ‘Would you like to explain this?’

  Gabby’s glance slid from his face to the packet he had flung down on the bed. She didn’t pick it up. She knew immediately what it was. Her heart sank somewhere below her knees.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Is that all you have to say?’

  She shrugged, and his nostrils flared. ‘It’s the contraceptive pill.’

  ‘It is used. I checked.’

  ‘Yes, my doctor prescribed it a month ago.’

  ‘You were never going to be pregnant.’

  A week ago—even a few days ago—Gabby would have agreed with him. Now she wasn’t so sure. It was a subject she had been trying not to think about. That aside, Rafiq was in essence right.

  ‘No.’

  He swallowed, seemingly nonplussed by her lack of denial. ‘You let me think there was a possibility.’ His deep voice splintered into husky outrage.

  ‘That was the idea, yes,’ she agreed.

  ‘You lied by omission.’

  ‘Again true…’

  ‘Are you going to grace me with an explanation, or should I draw my own conclusions?’

  His tone brought a belated militant spark to her eyes. ‘You appear to mistake me for one of your underlings who has been conditioned to act with unthinking subservient grovelling to win your approval, Your Royal Highness. As for drawing your own conclusions—I’m sure you’ll do that anyway.’

  ‘So this is not what it looks like?’ Rafiq was amazed at how badly he wanted to be convinced otherwise.

  ‘Yes, it is. If you want to know if I lied, then, yes, I did—and I meant to lie. You have so little time, and you were using it all up in this useless, pointless crusade. You couldn’t let go. When you thought there might be a baby you stopped, and spent some time enjoying yourself. That’s what I hoped would happen.’

  The brazen admission left him speechless.

  Now the truth was out Gabby felt relief. She hadn’t appreciated until that moment what a strain it had been.

  ‘And while I’m confessing—’ she couldn’t seem to stop ‘—I told Hakim that you are ill.’

  The casual admission drew an audible gasp from Rafiq.

  ‘I think that’s what sent him back to Paris. He knew that he needed support—not from me but from the woman he loves. He’d help if you’d let him, but I don’t suppose you will. Because you’re so emotionally self-sufficient, so stupid and so pigheaded!’ she bellowed. ‘You push anyone who cares for you away. I think you’d crawl on your hands and knees through the desert rather than admit you need help—and that isn’t strong, it’s stupid!’

  Rafiq was looking at her as though he couldn’t quite believe what she was saying.

  ‘You have spoken to Hakim?’

  ‘Oh, yes—it’s regular conspiracy. You know, I would have loved to have a baby,’ she admitted with a wistful sigh. She lifted her eyes to his face and added, ‘Your baby, Rafiq.’

  She saw him swallow. He looked like a man who had just felt the world under his feet shift. A voice in the back of Gabby’s head was screaming stop but she was too far gone now to pull back. Her reckless what-have-I-got-to-lose? mindset was firmly in the driving seat.

  ‘But not for the reasons you wanted a baby.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘No, that would have been utterly wrong. I wanted your baby because I love you. There you go. I’ve said it.’ Now you’ve blown it, said the voice in her head. ‘You look amazed,’ she said.

  Actually, he looked as if she’d just walked up to him and slapped his face.

  ‘Why did you think I married you, Rafiq? For the title and the money?’

  It could have been worse—he could have said yes. Instead, Rafiq turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

  Gabby was so emotionally drained by her outburst of honesty that she sat there for ten minutes before she even moved.

  Well, what did you expect when you screamed you loved him like some lunatic? she asked herself. Did you really think that he’d suddenly confess that he loves you back?

  Not think, but hope. She had definitely hoped.

  The first step to recovery was admitting you had a problem. Perhaps there were classes for recovering optimists?

  ‘My name is Gabby and I’m an optimist.’

  She fell back on the bed and began to laugh hysterically.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  RAFIQ sat on one side of the desk, oblivious to the oddness in the doctor’s attitude to him.

  The doctor, on the other hand, had noticed the oddness in his patient. It made him want to delay breaking the news, even though he had the results of the second set of blood tests in his hand, and he worked up the courage to admit his mistake.

  ‘Sorry, Your Royal Highness, to keep you waiting.’ He consulted the figures in front of him and smiled.

  Rafiq didn’t notice the smile. The only thing he could see was Gabby’s face when she had asked, ‘Why did you think I married you, Rafiq?’ He couldn’t get the look in her eyes out of his head.

  Well, Ra
fiq, why did you think she married you?

  It was an obvious question to ask—logical, and he prided himself on logic. And now he could see the question had been there in his mind all along, unacknowledged and ignored.

  Ignored because he had known the answer.

  And if he had admitted to himself that he knew his honour would not have allowed him to marry her, or to keep her with him.

  He was a dying man with nothing to offer the woman who loved him but pain. The only honourable thing would have been to send her away—and Rafiq had been subconsciously looking for a way not to do that to do from the moment they’d met.

  He could see that now.

  He could see a lot of things.

  He hadn’t wanted an heir—he had wanted Gabriella.

  He buried his head in his hands.

  The doctor leaned across the table. ‘I know it must be a shock, and I am sorry for all the anxiety.’

  Rafiq lifted his head. ‘Shock…?’

  ‘These days we rely so heavily on computers, and the figures on your original blood samples led us to believe…’ His eyes slid guiltily away from those of the tall Prince. Were the Zantaran royal family litigious? ‘Once we discovered the problem with the machine’s calibration we rechecked all the results. Your own case, Your Highness, was in fact the only one where the result was affected. You had a mild form of the disease, and in some cases this milder form can progress to the more severe type that we thought you had. In others it can—for want of a better word—vanish, or go into total spontaneous remission…a miracle,’ he added with a laugh of false jollity. ‘But that is an emotive term, and one I would not normally use.’

  Rafiq picked up on the word. ‘Miracle? What miracle are we speaking of, Doctor?’

  ‘It must be hard for you to take in.’

  Especially when he wasn’t listening. ‘Do you mind repeating yourself? I’m not sure I have this straight…’

  ‘Of course—and I understand your caution. The faulty calibration on the computer analysing your blood samples has led to a false diagnosis. You had a mild form of the disease and it has now cured itself. I double-checked the results and there is no doubt your blood is totally normal. There are no abnormalities. As I say, I am very, very sorry.’

  Rafiq swallowed. ‘So you are saying…?’

  ‘There is no trace of illness in your blood—no trace of illness anywhere,’ he revealed happily.

  ‘I’m not going to die?’

  ‘Not in the immediate future. Although as we like to err on the side of caution with your permission we will organise some regular checks.’

  ‘For weeks I have thought I was dying!’

  The doctor winced and nodded, his medical aplomb replaced by trepidation as he met the furious and incredulous glare of the very angry Prince.

  Rafiq’s chest swelled. ‘If you are the best…show me the worst! I could have told my father…it might have killed him. My life has been…This mistake has—’ He stopped dead. The computer’s mistake had given him Gabby.

  His desire to strangle the man was replaced by an urge to hug him.

  ‘I’m not dying.’ Rafiq, his chest rising and falling like a man who had been running, stared at the doctor. Slowly a smile radiated across his face. ‘Thank you,’ he said, enfolding the shocked older man’s hand in a crushing grip. ‘Next time I will ask for a second opinion.’

  The older man flushed and nodded. ‘I am very happy for you,’ he said, weak with relief.

  Happy did not begin to describe the feelings roaring inside Rafiq. He felt released. He had his freedom and his future. He had—he hoped—his love.

  ‘Excuse me, Doctor, but I have somewhere I need to be.’ And someone I need to be with for the rest of my life.

  Oblivious to the stares that followed him, the Crown Prince of Zantara ran full-pelt across the courtyard and down the corridors until he reached his private apartments. He paused outside, gathering his thoughts.

  He found Gabriella in the courtyard. She was watching the water in the fountain fall, her expression pensive.

  ‘Gabriella?’

  She turned at the sound of her name. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’

  ‘You do?’

  She nodded. ‘Well, I’m not going away—because whether you’ll admit it or not you need me. I’m your wife. You can’t make me go away—I have legal rights.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go away.’

  She regarded him warily. There was something different about him, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  ‘You don’t? Well, that’s good. Because I did take the pill, but it looks like maybe there might be a baby…I feel different, and I did forget to take the pill on the—’

  ‘A baby?’ he cut in. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Nice!’ she choked, staring at him. He was smiling—and not in a nasty snarly way. ‘Is that all you can say? You married me to have a baby.’

  ‘No, I married you because I wanted to keep you with me. The baby was an excuse—because a dying man isn’t allowed to be in love, and he isn’t allowed to let anyone love him.’

  ‘Love…’ Gabby swallowed, hardly daring to believe what she was hearing. She pressed a hand to her throat, where her heart was trying to climb its way out of her chest. ‘You said—’

  Rafiq was by her side in two strides. His arms closed like steel bands around her as he lifted her off the ground. ‘I love you—and I’m allowed to say it because I’m not a dying man. I’m going to live—we are going to live, happily ever after.’ He rained kisses over her face until she was gasping for breath.

  ‘Stop…Stop…’ It made a change for her to be begging him to stop kissing her.

  He placed her down on her feet and cupped the back of her head in one hand, stroking her hair with the other. ‘I love your hair…’

  ‘What has happened? Tell me slowly.’ He was generating enough energy to light up a small country—the air crackled with it. ‘I can’t keep up—my head is spinning.’

  ‘You were right, my love, when you observed that I did not look ill. Apparently there is no trace of disease in my body—there was a mistake.’

  ‘You’re not ill?’ A smile spread like the sun across her face, the only shadow appearing when she added anxiously, ‘Permanently?’

  ‘Who knows? I for one have learnt that a man should live in the present, and not delay the things that are important to him.’ A wicked smile spread across his face. ‘And right now it is important to me to kiss you.’

  He did so, with a ruthless efficiency that robbed Gabby of the ability to speak for some time. She just stood in the shelter of his arms, feeling protected and cherished while she tried to take it all in.

  Rafiq loved her and they had a future. She cried. Who would not cry when their dreams had come true?

  ‘I’m so happy,’ she said between sobs.

  Rafiq blotted a tear with his thumb, and smiled at her with such tenderness that her heart skipped a beat.

  ‘It’s a miracle.’

  ‘You always believed in miracles. It was I who was the sceptic. I should have believed, because I have seen a miracle first-hand—you, my lovely and most dear Gabriella, are my living, breathing miracle.’

  The wedding party was scheduled for three weeks after the day Rafiq had been told he had a life.

  It was a lavish affair, with family from both sides and all their friends.

  Rafiq had needed all his diplomatic skills to soothe his father when he had revealed the full story—or most of it—to the King, but in the end the monarch of Zantara had been so shaken to learn he might have lost Rafiq that he was inclined to look benevolently on any slight irregularities in both his sons’ marriages.

  Hakim was there, and it had been a weight off Gabby’s mind to see the two brothers reunited. Hakim’s new wife was older than him, and nothing like the women he had dated previously. Gabby took to her immediately, and her small son was delightful—a future playmate for their child.<
br />
  Rafiq and Gabby had decided to keep this news private for the time being, but soon she would have no choice but to reveal her condition.

  The wedding party went on long into the night, and it was still in full swing when Rafiq took her hand and led her out of a side door.

  ‘We can’t leave—it’s our party,’ Gabby protested halfheartedly.

  ‘I have a more private party in mind.’

  The glow in Rafiq’s eyes as he looked at her sent Gabby’s pulses racing. ‘That sounds like an interesting idea,’ she admitted huskily.

  Outside the bedroom door, Rafiq paused. ‘Close your eyes.’

  Gabby shook her head. ‘Why?’

  ‘Humour me?’ he suggested.

  Giggling nervously, she did, and he led her by the hand into their bedroom.

  ‘You can open them now.’

  He had recreated the rose petal trail of their wedding night.

  Gabby turned and looked up at her tall, handsome husband, her luminous eyes shining with love.

  ‘It should have been perfect and it wasn’t. I told you not to love me, do you remember?’

  Gabby nodded. She would never forget.

  ‘Now I am saying—no, I am begging you to love me, Gabriella. Because I love you with all my heart and soul.’

  It was a request that Gabby was only too happy to satisfy. The only complication was getting the words past the emotional lump in her throat.

  ‘I love you, Rafiq,’ she said huskily.

  Rafiq gave a satisfied sigh. ‘When I think what might have been and what is, I know I am a blessed man. I have you, and I have our child.’ He pressed a big hand to her still flat stomach. ‘This is how it is meant to be.’

  ‘Though possibly not rose petals every night.’

  ‘On our anniversary?’

  ‘Which one?’ she laughed. So far they had celebrated weekly—the day they’d met, the day he’d found out he was going to live, and their wedding day—the first one.

  ‘All of them, my princess. Now come on,’ he said, catching her hand. ‘I want to wrap you in rose petals and wrap myself in your hair.’

  The mental image worked for Gabby—as did the wicked gleam in his eyes as he sat her on the bed. He began to slowly roll down the lacy-topped stockings she wore under the floaty sea-blue dress he had said made her look like a bird of paradise.