Secret Sheikh, Secret Baby

by Carol Marinelli

  And she couldn’t weep—because if she started she would never stop. She had to try and hold it together as the plane landed, then had to wait for everyone to offload so they could bring a stretcher on.

  The case Helen had packed for her still had to be collected, Customs regulations still had be adhered to, but it was all dealt with efficiently and speedily.

  She was in England. She was home.

  An ambulance was waiting, and the paramedics told her to rest on the stretcher as they put in a drip because her blood pressure was low. Still she didn’t cry.

  It wasn’t an emergency, the bleeding had stopped now, so there were no lights or sirens. Only with the airport out of sight did she dare to turn on her phone. Texts and voicemail messages bleeped, filling her inbox. In a matter of seconds it rang, and only then did Felicity fall apart.

  ‘I lost it.’ She hated him so much in that moment, she screamed her torment into the phone. ‘I lost it on the plane. You can hate me and you can find me, but I don’t care. I hate you, Karim. I hate you for never trusting me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  FELICITY.

  As he’d sat in the hospital awaiting news of his father still his mind had been on her.

  She gave him strength.

  A different sort of strength from the type he was used to. Holding her hand today had helped him.

  The surgery had been long and delicate. For twelve hours the country had paused, and so too had Karim.

  Refusing food, he’d drunk only water. Hassan hadn’t been talking to him, Ibrahim had been immersed in his own thoughts, the aides and servants had stayed silent.

  Oh, there had been many hours to think.

  He’d rung her once, but she was resting, so he’d left her alone to do that. She would need all her strength for tonight, when he must tell her. Whatever the outcome, she had to know the plans that had been laid. How reckless he had been with their baby and the decision he had made.

  Their baby.

  It had been at the forefront of his mind even as he’d spoken with his father’s surgeon. He hadn’t spoken with his brothers or his aides. He’d walked out of the hospital with apparent dignity. Yet he had felt filthy inside. He’d wanted to fall into bed and into her arms instead of telling her the truth. But he wanted it out all the same.

  But she was gone.

  There was no fresh scent in the bedroom, no movement in the bed. Even as he demanded answers from Security, from his drivers, from the airport, even as all the accommodation at the university and the hospital complexes were checked, he knew that she was gone.

  Every minute he rang her—and it nearly killed him when she finally answered.

  His baby was gone. Before he had even acknowledged it. Before he’d had a chance to love it. Felicity too. They had both gone, never to return.

  The news was confirmed by the airline. Yes, a Miss Felicity Anderson had suffered a miscarriage on the plane.

  Except she was a sheikha, Princess Felicity Zaraq. Had he alerted them, had he kept her in the desert, maybe they would both still be here?

  ‘It is probably better.’ Hassan now spoke to him. ‘She was weak. She would have revealed—’

  It took Ibrahim’s hand to block Karim’s punch.

  ‘I must go to her.’

  ‘Why?’ Hassan frowned. ‘Our people need you here. You don’t even know where she is. She would be a fool to go straight home. Get security to trace her, and then you can decide her punishment.’

  ‘She’s just lost a baby.’

  ‘It probably wasn’t even yours.’

  This time Ibrahim’s block was too slow.

  His mother was kinder, her voice at the end of the phone gentle and worried, and Karim knew she was speaking the truth.

  ‘Is that what you really wanted for her? To keep her trapped in the desert or locked in your palace with the airport on alert? That is not how you love a woman. It is how you keep her, perhaps, but that is not love. Let her go, Karim. For two years I lived in fear of your father finding me. If you really love her, ring her or write to her and tell her that you are letting her go. Zaraq’s ways are too different for some. I loved your father, I tried to fit in, but I couldn’t. I am ashamed of what I did, but I was bored, unhappy. Your father was always in demand, myself always silent. Is this the life you want for the woman you love?’

  ‘It would be different for Felicity. I would change.’

  ‘Your father promised me the same.’

  His mother’s voice brought him the closest to tears he had ever been in his life.

  ‘I am sorry you lost the baby.’

  He had doubted Felicity and now he was paying the price. But there had been so many women, and never an accident. Karim dredged his memory bank, and as he sorted the blitz of emotions and feelings into slightly neater order he suddenly knew.

  Opening his bedside drawer, he pulled out a condom, opened it and headed for the sink, filled it with water and watched its slow leak.

  Leila. He remembered her jumping when he’d caught her in his bedroom, understood now her reluctance for anything oral. She had been damaging the condoms, procuring his seed, doing her best to ensure that the marriage he had been resisting would take place with her.

  He just wished he’d worked it out earlier.

  Wished he had had it in him to believe in Felicity sooner.

  It would be easy to lie down now, to give in to tears, to follow all the advice. But that had never been Karim. Picking up the phone, he listened to his heart and summoned the royal jet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THEY kept her in for two days.

  As she lay there, Felicity decided to lie to her mother, to ring her as she had from the desert and pretend that she was fine. But mid-conversation she couldn’t do it. She broke down. And even if her mother was anxious when she arrived at the hospital, even if Georgie was in tears, crying on a nurse, somehow it was worth the pain she had caused.

  It was such a relief to be in her mother’s arms.

  Later, she took a call from Georgie at the flat, and answered calmly when she was informed there was a man called Karim at the door and Georgie asked should she call the police or let him in.

  ‘Let him in,’ Felicity said calmly. ‘Tell Karim that when I am ready I will talk to him—you go to Mum’s.’

  Her eyes screwed closed as she hung up the phone. Even with freedom beckoning, still her mind searched for closure.

  She went from the hospital to her mother, and let herself be looked after. She refused to call Karim, and he, as requested, did not call her. The waiting game they had played in the desert was being repeated again.

  ‘Here.’ Georgie brought her a tray laden with toast and scrambled eggs and a vast mug of tea. ‘You’re to finish it,’ she instructed, and it was nice that finally it was Georgie telling Felicity this and not the other way around. As Felicity ate her lunch she glimpsed a future that was better—where the Anderson women were stronger—and knew that day was about to come.

  But she had to deal with something first.

  Stepping into her flat on day five, she was ready to face him.

  He looked terrible.

  Sitting on her sofa, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he looked like a man who hadn’t slept in a week. Or shaved, come to that.

  ‘I’ll never go back,’ she said. She dropped her handbag on the floor next to Helen’s case and told him, ‘Nothing you can say will make me go back—you’d have to kill me first.’

  ‘You really think I would do that?’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Felicity said. ‘But, frankly, I’m so tired right now I actually don’t care.’

  ‘About the baby…’

  ‘I hate what you were planning.’ She watched him flinch. ‘If you want to do your precious DNA test, if you need to check, then you still can—at the hospital.’ She was talking as if she didn’t care, except tears were rolling out her eyes and she spat out her words. ‘It was your child—and you would ha
ve given it to Hassan rather than be King yourself.’

  ‘No!’ He was on his feet. ‘When I thought it might be another man’s, then we spoke of it…’

  ‘Do you think that helps?’ Felicity demanded. ‘You would have done that to me—you would have ripped my baby from my arms and given it to your brother just so Zaraq had its heir.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have.’

  ‘Your father told me your plans.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have,’ Karim said again, his voice strangely calm. ‘I thought I would. I thought I could. But, no. That night we were together, I knew that I could not.’

  ‘Please,’ Felicity scoffed. ‘You told me you didn’t want to be King—and without an heir, without our baby, Hassan couldn’t be either.’

  ‘No!’ He demanded her attention, his black eyes fierce—not with anger, but with something she couldn’t interpret. ‘I did not want to be King. Have you any idea how hard that is to say? If I didn’t hand over the baby Hassan would have stepped aside and I would have been King. It was my duty, it was my role and yet it was the last thing I wanted. And if it is the last thing that I want, how could I wish it for my son?’

  And for the first time he cried.

  ‘I did not want that future for him,’ Karim explained. ‘I did not want it because I knew what was coming—the burden that it would place not just on him but on you.’

  She recalled her own words and realised how hard it would have been to hear them. Every cell in her body paused as he told her the truth.

  ‘I told my brothers the night before my father’s operation that the baby would stay with me. Hassan and Jamal were furious. They want to rule, they were bred and raised for it, yet I was denying them the chance. They kept telling me that it wasn’t even mine…’ He was silent for a moment. ‘And I told them that even if it wasn’t mine, I would rather love it than lose you.’

  She turned to his proud face, looked at the tears that had dried on his cheeks, and prayed she would never have to see them again—would never see this proud man reduced by her doing.

  ‘I told them too that I would not be King.’

  ‘Then who?’ Her mind darted, remembering the daggers Ibrahim had thrown at his brother. ‘Ibrahim?’

  ‘We did not know.’ Karim shook his head. ‘We chose to keep the decision from my father before surgery, but when he came round we told him what had happened.’

  ‘He’s alive?’

  ‘He has many years left in him,’ Karim said firmly. ‘And Hassan has many years more.’

  ‘Hassan?’

  ‘He loves Jamal—that stuffed shirt of a guy actually does have feelings, and he loves Jamal. Even if she can’t give him a son. Infertility happens to everyone—and if the people of Zaraq can’t accept that yet, then there are many years left to educate them, to work out a solution.’ His eyes met hers. ‘To learn that there are other ways of doing things.’

  And she wanted to believe, wanted to tell him so, but she was too tired to think straight, too tired to trust in her own heart.

  The Sheikh, Prince Karim of Zaraq, would just have to learn patience.

  ‘I’m tired, Karim.’

  She slept in her own bed for a day and a night, and a day and a night more. She padded out occasionally, to the loo or the kitchen, and always he was there.

  A sexy sheikh, topless in jeans, struggling to squeeze a teabag.

  Once she had to smother a smile as she walked past and saw Karim on his knees, trying to work out how to change the loo roll.

  He didn’t really know what to say when she wept, so instead he just held her or, when she didn’t want him, pushed a tissue under her bedroom door. And then, when she emerged from her room for longer intervals, he sometimes patted the sofa and sat silent as they watched a movie.

  And she healed a heart that was broken, because that was what women did.

  There was a lot of healing still, but Felicity knew she was starting to get there one morning when she laughed at a silly joke he had made. And later that day when she glanced out of the window to smile at a daffodil.

  She healed, and he let her do so at her own pace—until the third night, when she sat on the sofa beside him and he said those three words that she wasn’t sure she was ready to hear.

  ‘I love you.’

  She stared at the TV screen, at her favourite soap, and wondered if they got it in Zaraq. Then she remembered who he was—a sheikh, a prince, a man who could do anything. Of course she’d get her programme. He had just given her his heart.

  ‘I will stay here as long as you want me to. I will stay here for ever if you will have me. I have duties and commitments, but they are nothing compared to my duty and commitment to you.’ And then he said it again, but this time he added her name. ‘I love you, Felicity.’

  ‘Say it again.’ Still she stared at the screen, the indecision that had plagued her these last days fading as over and over he said it.

  ‘I love you…Felicity, I love you…I love you, Felicity.’

  Every way possible he said it, and whatever road her mind darted down, he blocked it with his words.

  And then she turned and faced him.

  ‘So you should, given I’m your wife.’ She accepted his nod, and then she said it, tears streaming down her cheeks as she let herself trust him. ‘And given that I’m having your child.’

  ‘You lost it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You told me…’

  ‘I thought I had…’ Felicity gulped. ‘When I rang you, I truly thought I had.’

  His eyes were stunned. ‘You let me grieve. You let me think I’d lost my child!’

  ‘Because you almost did,’ Felicity said angrily, because it was essential that he see how close he had come to losing them both. As little as fifteen minutes ago, still she had had doubts, wondered if he was just saying and doing the right thing in order that the Prince could collect his wife. ‘I had a placental abruption, like Bedra, only not as severe. I was told to rest and heal, told that there could be no stress if I wanted to hold on to my baby.’

  He closed his eyes. He understood why she had done it to him after all he had put her through, could see why she had felt unable to tell him.

  ‘When I was having the scan, and I realised the baby was alive, I promised her I would never go back, promised her that I would keep her safe. I promised her I would never let you know…’

  ‘Her?’

  It had never really crossed his mind that they might have a girl!

  His hand moved to her belly, uninvited but very welcome.

  ‘Meet your daughter.’ She handed him the ultrasound photo from her purse, and watched as his face softened and a tender smile spread across that haughty face.

  A smile reserved for the daughter who would unashamedly melt his heart and twist him around her little finger.

  ‘I am perhaps the only royal prince who would rather have a daughter.’

  And the sofa was too small, so despite the early hour he took her to bed, just so he could hold her properly. And he remembered the first time he had realised he might love her—the night when he had held her without lust—and he closed his eyes in sweet relief as he did it again.

  He held her close and relished that he could.

  And because she should rest, because she was dozing, it was Karim who reached out and answered the phone, speaking for the first time to his mother-in-law. She wasn’t anxious, as he’d expected, in fact she was very assured. She told him in no uncertain terms how she expected him to treat her daughter. Karim held the phone from his ear as Felicity lay half awake, smiling.

  ‘Give me that.’ She took the phone from Karim and spoke to her mother as he lay back on her rather small bed and stared up at her. His throat tightened when he heard her words. He was humbled at how far her love went.

  ‘I really am, Mum—once the baby’s a bit stronger…’ She smiled at her man and he smiled back. ‘I’m going to live in the Kingdom of Zaraq.’

  EPILOGUE


  ‘I CAN’T do this!’ Jamal screamed.

  And she might have been raised to be Queen one day, but Felicity and Dr Habib shared a hint of a smile as this very prim lady uttered a few choice words.

  ‘I should be in the Royal Suite!’ Jamal demanded.

  ‘It’s being painted,’ Felicity soothed for the fiftieth time. ‘For your baby’s arrival!’

  ‘Well, it’s coming now,’ Jamal said, her face darkening as she bore down.

  Five weeks premature, the future King had caught Zaraq on the hop!

  The suite wasn’t being painted—that was a midwife’s lie—there had been a shift in the building and it had been closed off. But Jamal didn’t need a long explanation. Jamal just needed to concentrate on the important task at hand.

  Felicity had wanted to be there. In the past year or so she and Jamal had put aside their differences and become friends, and Felicity had been building up to asking if she could attend the birth. But babies came when they were ready—and this one had decided to make its entrance sooner rather than later.

  Karim was in the middle of operating, Hassan was in the middle of a speech on the other side of Zaraq, and the King was over in London—as he seemed to be rather a lot these days. So not only was Felicity birthing coach, she was also shouting orders to Khan through the labour ward doors between contractions, telling him that Hassan must hurry if he wanted to see his child born.

  ‘He is here!’ Khan said excitedly.

  ‘In a few more minutes he will be allowed in…’ Dr Habib said, because traditionally males didn’t enter till the very last moment.

  But Jamal had other ideas.

  ‘Hassan!’ She screamed for her Prince, and who was Felicity to deny her? She invited Hassan in to share in the miracle of birth. And as cameras were set up at the entrance to the hospital, and people buzzed with rapid excitement, a strange peace filled the room as a baby was born.