Shamed in the Sands

by Sharon Kendrick

  The truth, he reminded himself. She needed to know the truth.

  ‘Anywhere by the sea has the potential to be beautiful,’ he said. ‘But, like any town, there are rough parts—and those were the places we lived. Not that we stayed anywhere very long.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘My mother and me.’

  ‘Your father wasn’t around?’

  Gabe could taste the sudden bitterness in his mouth. He wanted to stop this unwanted interrogation right now, but he realised that these questions were never going to go away unless he answered them.

  And wasn’t it time he told someone?

  ‘No, my father wasn’t around,’ he said. ‘He and my mother split up before I was born. Things ended badly and she brought me back to England, but she had no family of her own and no money. When she met my father, she’d been working as a waitress—and that was all she was qualified to do.’

  ‘So, was your father French?’ questioned Leila, thinking that he didn’t look French.

  He shook his head. ‘No. He was Russian.’

  Slowly, she nodded, because that made sense. Much more sense. The high, chiselled cheekbones, which made his face look so autocratic and proud. The icy grey eyes. The hair, which looked like dark, molten gold. ‘So what kind of childhood did you have?’ she asked quietly.

  He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. ‘It was largely characterised by subterfuge. My mother was always afraid that my father would try to find me and so we were always on the move. Always living just below the radar. Our life was spent running. And hiding.’

  If he thought about it, he could still remember the constant sensation of fear. Of looking over his shoulder. Of being told never to give anything away to any stranger he might meet. He had quickly learnt how to appear impenetrable to those he met.

  And hadn’t the surveillance and masquerade skills he’d acquired stood him in good stead for his future career? He had discovered that the world of advertising was the world of illusion. That what you saw was never quite what you got. The masks he had perfected to keep his identity hidden had been invaluable in his role as a powerful executive. They were what had provided him with his chameleon-like reputation. As careers went, his background had been a perfect fit.

  ‘My mother took what jobs she could,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult to juggle poorly paid work around childcare and I pretty much brought myself up. I soon learnt to look after myself. To rewire dodgy electrics and to shop for cheap food when the supermarkets were about to close.’

  Leila blinked in surprise, because the image he painted was about as far away from the sophisticated billionaire she’d married as it was possible to imagine. But she still thought there was something he wasn’t telling her. Some dark secret which was lurking just out of sight. I need to know this for my baby, she thought fiercely. For our baby.

  ‘And?’

  His mouth hardened. She saw the flash of something bleak in the depths of his eyes before it was gone again.

  ‘I used to feel indignant that my father had never bothered to look us up. I wondered why he didn’t seem to care how his son was doing—or why he’d never once offered to help out financially. It became something of an obsession with me. I used to ask my mother what he was like, but she never wanted to talk about him. And the more she refused to tell me, the more frustrating I found it.’

  His words tailed off, and for a moment he said nothing. Leila held her breath but didn’t speak, not wanting to break his concentration.

  ‘As I grew older, I became more determined to find out something about him,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t necessarily want to be with him—I just wanted to know.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ she said.

  Their eyes met, and Gabe suddenly got a painful flash of insight. Maybe he’d wanted to know for exactly the same reasons that Leila wanted to know about him. Maybe everybody had a fundamental desire to learn about their roots. Or the roots of the child they carried...

  ‘But my mother was scared,’ he said. ‘I can see that now. She was scared that I would run to a man she feared. That I would choose him over her.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Of course, I only discovered this afterwards.’

  ‘Afterwards?’ she echoed as some grim ending glinted as darkly as thick blotting paper held over the beam of a flashlight.

  He nodded, and the way he swallowed made Leila think of barbed wire; of something jagged and sharp lodging in his throat and making his words sound painful and distorted.

  ‘It was the eve of my sixteenth birthday,’ he said. ‘We were living in this tiny hole of place. It was small and dark and I started wondering what kind of life my father had. Whether he was wealthy. Or whether he was reduced to eating food which was past its sell-by date and shivering like us, because it was the coldest spring in nearly thirty years. So I asked my mother the same question I’d been asking ever since I could remember. Did she have any idea where he was or what he did? And as always, she told me no.’

  ‘And you believed her?’ questioned Leila tentatively.

  He shrugged. ‘I didn’t know what to believe, but I was on the brink of adulthood and I couldn’t tolerate being fobbed off with evasive answers any more. I told her that the best birthday present she could give me would be to tell me the truth. That either she provided me with some simple facts about my parentage—or I would go and seek my father out myself. And that she should be under no illusion that I would find him. I was probably harsher than I should have been, but I had the arrogance of youth and the certainty that what I was doing was right.’

  There was complete silence, and Leila’s heart pounded painfully as she looked at him, for she had never seen an expression on a man’s face like that before. Not even when her brother had returned from that terrible battle with insurgents in Port D’Leo and his two most senior commanders had been slain in front of him. There was a helplessness and a hopelessness glinting in Gabe’s eyes which was almost unbearable to observe.

  ‘She said she would tell me the next day, on my birthday. But...’

  His words tailed off and Leila knew he didn’t want to tell her any more, but she needed to know. And he needed to say it. ‘But what?’

  ‘I think she meant to tell me,’ he said. ‘But I also think she was terrified of the repercussions. Afraid that she might lose me.’ His mouth twisted. ‘But when I got back from school the next day, she couldn’t tell me anything at all because she was dead.’

  Leila’s heart lurched as she stared at him in alarm, not quite believing what he’d just said. ‘Dead?’

  For a long moment, there was silence. ‘At first I thought she was just sleeping. I remember thinking that I’d never seen her looking quite so peaceful. And then I saw...I saw the empty pill bottle on the floor.’

  Leila’s throat constricted as she struggled to say something, imagining the sight which must have greeted the young boy as he arrived home from school. She stared at him in utter disbelief. ‘She...killed herself?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said flatly.

  Leila felt a terrible sadness wrap itself around her heart. She had wanted to understand more about Gabe Steel and now she did—but she had never imagined this bleak bitterness at the very heart of his life. She could hardly begin to imagine what it must have been like for him. So that was why he had locked it all away, out of sight. That was why he kept himself apart—why he deliberately put distance between himself and other people.

  She was stunned by what he had told her. Yet out of his terrible secret came a sudden growing sense of understanding. No longer did it surprise her that he didn’t want to trust or depend on women—because hadn’t the most important woman in his life left him?

  And lied to him.

  ‘Did you blame yourself?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘What do you think?’ he bit out, his icy facade
now completely shattered.

  She saw emotion breaking through—real, raw emotion—and it was so rare that instinctively she went to him and he didn’t push her away. He let her hold him. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tightly and she could feel his heart beating hard against her breast. Pressing her lips against his ear, she whispered, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, Gabe.’

  ‘No?’ He pushed her away, like somebody who had learned never to trust words of comfort. ‘If I hadn’t been so persistent...if I hadn’t been so damned stubborn—then my mother wouldn’t have felt driven to commit such a desperate act. If I hadn’t been so determined to find out about my father, she need never have died. She could have lived a contented old age and been cushioned by the wealth I was to acquire, but which she never got to see.’

  For a moment Leila didn’t answer, wondering if she dared even try. Because how could someone like her possibly empathise with Gabe’s rootless childhood and its tragic termination? How could she begin to understand the depths of grief he must have experienced when he was barely out of boyhood? That experience had formed him and, emotionally, it had warped him.

  Up until that moment, Leila had often thought herself hard done by. Her parents’ marriage had been awful—everyone at court had known that. Her father had spent most of his time with his harem, while her mother had sat at home heartbroken—too distracted to focus on her only daughter. As if to compensate for that, Leila had been pampered and protected by her royal status but she had felt trapped by it too. She had been isolated and lost during a childhood almost as lonely as Gabe’s.

  But his circumstances had been different. He had been left completely on his own. He had lived with his guilt for so long that it had become part of him. ‘Your mother must have been desperate to have taken such a drastic action,’ she said quietly.

  His voice was sardonic. ‘I imagine she must have been.’

  She stumbled on. ‘And she wouldn’t want you to carry on blaming yourself.’

  ‘If you say so, Leila.’

  She swallowed, because one final piece of the jigsaw was missing. ‘And did you ever find your father? Did you track him down?’

  There was a heartbeat of a pause before his mouth hardened. ‘No.’

  ‘Gabe—’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s enough. No more questions, Leila. And no more platitudes either. Aren’t you satisfied now?’

  His eyes were blazing, and she wondered if she’d gone too far. If she’d pushed him to a point where he was likely to break. She wondered if he was going to walk out. To put distance between them, so that when they came face to face again he could pretend that this conversation had never happened.

  But he didn’t do any of that. Instead, he pulled her back into his arms. He stared down at her for a long moment before bending his head to kiss her—the fiercest kiss she could ever have imagined. She knew what he was doing. He was channelling his hurt and his anger and his pain into sex, because that was what he did. That was how he coped with the heavy burden he carried.

  Leila clung to him, kissing him back with all the passion she was capable of, because she wanted him just as much. But she wanted so much more than just sex. She ached to give him succour and comfort. She wanted to show him that she was here for him and that she would always be here for him if only he would let her. She would warm his cold and damaged heart with the power of her love. Yes, love. She loved this cold, stubborn husband of hers, no matter how much he tried to withdraw from her.

  ‘Gabe,’ she whispered. ‘My darling, darling Gabe.’

  The breath he let out in response was ragged and that vulnerable sound only added to her determination to show him gentleness. Her hand flew up to the side of his face and, softly, she caressed his jaw. Did her touch soothe him? Was that why his eyelids fluttered to a close, as if he was unspeakably weary? She touched those too, her fingertips whispering tenderly over the lids, the way she had done all that time ago in Simdahab.

  Beneath the tiptoeing of her fingers, his powerful body shuddered—shaking like a mighty tree which had been buffeted by a major storm. He opened his eyes and looked at her but there was no ice in his grey eyes now. Only heat and fire.

  He picked her up and carried her over to the sofa, and she’d barely made contact with the soft leather before he was impatiently rucking up her filmy blue dress and sliding down her panties. His hand was shaking as he struggled with his own zip, tugging down his trousers with a frustrated little moan.

  She was wet and ready for him and there were few preliminaries. But Leila didn’t want them; she just wanted Gabe inside her. His fingers parted her slick, moist folds and she gasped as he entered her, closing her eyes as he filled her.

  ‘Gabe,’ she said indistinctly, but he didn’t answer as he began to move.

  It was fast and deep and elemental. It seemed to be about need as much as desire, and Leila found herself responding to him on every level. Whatever he demanded of her, she matched—but she had never kissed him quite as fervently as she did right then.

  Afterwards, she collapsed against the heap of the battered cushions, her heart beating erratically as she made shallow little gasps for breath. She turned to look at him, but he had fallen into a deep sleep.

  For a while she lay there, just watching the steady rise and fall of his chest. She thought about what he had told her and she flinched with pain as she took her mind back to his terrible story. He had known such darkness and bleakness, but that period of his life was over. He had taken all the secrets from his heart and revealed them to her—and she must not fail him now.

  Because Gabe needed to be loved; properly loved. And she could do that. She could definitely do that. She would care for him deeply, but carefully—for fear that this bruised and damaged man might turn away from the full force of her emotions.

  She must love him because he needed to be loved and not because she demanded something in return. She might wish for that, but it was not hers to demand.

  She snuggled closer, feeling the jut of his hip against her belly. She ran her lips over the roughness of his jaw and then kissed the lobe of his ear as she wrapped her arms tightly around his waist.

  ‘I will love you, Gabe Steel,’ she whispered.

  But Gabe only stirred restlessly in his sleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE DISTANT RUMBLE of thunder echoed Leila’s troubled thoughts.

  Had she thought it would be easy? That Gabe’s icy heart would melt simply because he’d revealed all the bitter secrets he’d carried around with him for so long? That he’d instantly morph into the caring, sharing man she longed for him to be?

  Maybe she had.

  She glanced out of the window. Outside, the tame English skies were brewing what looked like the fiercest storm she had witnessed since she’d been here. Angry grey clouds billowed up behind St Paul’s Cathedral and the river was the colour of dark slate.

  She had tried to reassure herself with the knowledge that, on the surface, things in their marriage were good. Better than before. She kept telling herself that, as if to accentuate the positive. Gabe was teaching her card games and how to cook eggs, and she was learning to be tidier. He massaged her shoulders at the end of a working day and they’d started going for country walks on the weekend. Her pregnancy was progressing well and she had passed the crucial twelve weeks without incident. Her doctor had told her that she was blooming—and physically she had never felt better.

  Her job, too, was more fulfilling than she could ever have anticipated. At first, Leila had suspected that most of the staff at Zeitgeist had been wary of the boss’s wife being given a plum role as a photographer, but none of that wariness had lasted. According to Alastair, her outlook was fresh; her approach original—and she got along well with people.

  Her photos for the spa campaign had
confounded expectation—the expectation being that it was impossible to get an interesting shot of a woman wrapped in a towel.

  But somehow Leila had pulled it off. Maybe it was the angle she had used, or the fact that her background had equipped her to understand that a woman didn’t have to show lots of flesh in order to look alluring.

  ‘And anyway,’ she had said to Gabe as they were driving home from work one evening, ‘these spas are trying to appeal to a female audience, not a male one. Which means that we don’t always have to portray women with the not-so-subtle subtext that they’re constantly thinking about sex.’

  ‘Unlike you, you mean?’ he had offered drily.

  She had smiled.

  Yes, on the surface things were very good.

  So why did she feel as if something was missing—as if there was still a great gaping hole in her life which she couldn’t fill? Was it because after that awful disclosure about his mother, Gabe had never really let down his guard again? Or because her expectations of a relationship were far more demanding than she’d realised? That she had been lying to herself about not wanting his love in return, when it was pretty obvious that deep down she craved it.

  There were moments which gave her hope—when she felt as if they were poised on the brink of a new understanding. When she felt as close to him as it was possible to feel and her heart was filled with joy. Like the other day, when they had been lying in bed, she’d been wrapped in his arms and he’d been kissing the top of her head and the air had felt full of lazy contentment.

  But then she’d realised that for the first time she could feel the distinct swell of her belly, even though she was horizontal at the time.

  With an excited little squeal, she’d caught hold of his hand and moved it to her stomach. ‘Gabe. Feel,’ she’d whispered. ‘Go on. Feel.’

  She knew her husband well enough to realise that he would never give away his true feelings by doing something as obvious as snatching his hand away from her skin, as if he’d just been burned. But she felt his whole body tense as he made the most cursory of explorations, before disentangling himself from her embrace and telling her that he had to make an international call.