Desert Jewels & Rising Stars

by Sharon Kendrick

  If she hadn’t been naked she would have lunged at him. As it was, Isobel got off the bed and grabbed at her dress to hide her vulnerability—the outward kind, anyway. For her heart was vulnerable, too—and she felt as if he had crushed it in his fist.

  ‘I can’t b-believe you could think that!’ she stuttered as she started doing up the buttons, her shaking fingers making the task almost impossible.

  ‘I suppose I can’t really blame you,’ he mused, almost as if she hadn’t objected, a slow tide of rage still building inside him. ‘Most women seem hell-bent on marriage—and the more prestigious the marriage, the better. And you can’t do much better than a prince, can you?’

  ‘You must be joking,’ she hissed back. ‘You might be a prince, but you also happen to be an arrogant and overbearing piece of—’

  ‘Let’s skip the insults, shall we?’ he snapped, as he tried to get his head around the fact that in her belly his child grew. His child! A child he’d never asked for nor wanted. A child he would never be able to love…that he didn’t know how to love. ‘I thought you were into honesty, Izzy? Except now I come to think about it you haven’t been very honest all the way along, have you?’

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Just how long have you known about this pregnancy?’

  She met the accusation which blazed from his face. ‘For a couple of weeks,’ she admitted.

  A strange light entered his eyes. He looked like someone who had been trying to solve a puzzle and had just found the last missing piece stuffed down the back of the sofa. ‘When we were in bed—the morning I got the phone call from Khayarzah about Leila—you knew you were pregnant then, didn’t you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know. I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t sure.’

  ‘But you didn’t bother to tell me? Even today you kept quiet. You let me come here and…’ She’d let him lose himself in the refuge of her arms. Lulling him into sweet compliance with the erotic promise of her body.

  ‘We had sex, Tariq!’ she declared brutally. ‘Let’s not make it into something it wasn’t!’

  She could see the faint shock which had dilated his eyes, but his reaction was breathing resolve into her and Isobel felt something of her old spirit return. Was she going to allow him to speak to her as if she was some worthless piece of nothing he’d found on the bottom of his shoe? As if she counted for nothing?

  ‘I didn’t tell you because I knew how you would react,’ she raged. ‘Because I knew that you’d be arrogant enough to think it was all some giant conspiracy theory instead of the kind of slip-up that’s been happening to men and women ever since they started fornicating!’

  His eyes bored into her. ‘I’m assuming that marriage is what you want?’

  Isobel’s eyes widened. Hadn’t he been listening to a word she’d been saying? ‘You must be mad,’ she whispered. ‘Completely certifiable if you think that I’d ever want to sign up for life with a man like you. A man so full of ego that he thinks a woman will get herself deliberately pregnant in order to trap him.’

  ‘You think it’s never been done before?’ he scorned.

  ‘Not by me,’ she defended fiercely, closing her eyes as a wave of terrible sadness washed over her. ‘Now, please go, Tariq. Get out of here before either of us says anything more we might regret.’

  His impulse was to resist—for he was used to calling the shots. Until he realised that this wasn’t the first time Izzy had called the shots. It had been her, after all, who’d had the courage to end the relationship. And, yes, he had been arrogant enough to think that she might just be playing a very sophisticated game to bring him to heel.

  But Izzy didn’t do game-playing, he realised. She hadn’t told him she thought she was pregnant because she’d feared his reaction—and hadn’t he just proved those fears a thousand times over? He looked at the haunted expression on her whitened face and suddenly felt a savage jerk of guilt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said suddenly.

  Her eyes swimming with unshed tears, she looked at him. ‘What? Sorry for the things you said? Or sorry that you ever got involved with me in the first place?’

  He flinched as her accusations hit home. ‘Sit down, Izzy.’

  She ignored the placatory note in his voice. He thought he could spew out all that stuff and that now she’d instantly become malleable? How dared he tell her to sit down in her own home? ‘I’ll sit down once you’ve gone.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere until you do. Because there are things we need to discuss.’

  She wanted to tell him that he had forfeited all rights to any discussion with his cruel comments. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Because Tariq was her baby’s father. And didn’t she know better than anyone how great and gaping the hole could be in a child’s life if it didn’t have one?

  ‘And we will,’ she said, sucking in another deep breath, her hand instinctively fluttering to her still-flat belly. ‘Just not now, when emotions are running so high.’

  Tariq watched the unfamiliar maternal movement and something tugged at his heart. To his astonishment, he found that he wanted to ask her a million questions. He wanted to ask whether she’d eaten that day, whether she had been sleeping properly at night. He’d never asked for this baby, and he didn’t particularly want it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel empathy for the woman who carried that baby, did it?

  He looked at her with a detachment he’d never used before. She did look different, he decided. More delicate than usual, yes—but there was a kind of strength about her, too. It radiated off her like the sunlight which caught the pale fire of her hair.

  He should have been gathering her in his arms now and congratulating her. Laying a proprietorial hand over her belly and looking with pride into her shining eyes. If he had been a normal man—like other men—then he would have been able to do all those things. But he knew that all he had was a piece of ice where his heart should be, and that was why they were just gazing at each other suspiciously across a small bedroom.

  But this was no time for reflection. Whatever his own feelings, this had to be all about Izzy. He had to think practically. To help her in any way that he could.

  ‘You obviously won’t be coming back to work,’ he said.

  Impatiently, she shook her head. ‘I hadn’t even thought about work.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to. I want you to know that you don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll make sure you’re financially secure.’

  Now she observed him with a kind of fury. What? Buy her off? Did he think that she’d be satisfied with that as compensation for the lack of the marriage she’d supposedly been angling for? She thought of her own mother—how she had always gone out to work and supported herself. And hadn’t Isobel been grateful for that role model? To see a woman survive and thrive and not be beaten down because her hopes of love had not materialised?

  ‘Actually, I’ve decided that I want to carry on working,’ she said. ‘And besides, what on earth would I do all day—sit around knitting bootees? Plenty of women work right up until the final weeks. I’ll…I’ll look for another job, obviously.’

  But she was filled with dread at the thought of going from agency to agency and having to hide her pregnancy. Who would want to take on a woman in her condition and offer her any kind of security for the future?

  ‘You don’t need to look for another job,’ he said harshly. ‘You could come back to work for me in an instant. Or I could arrange to have you work for one of the partners, if you don’t think you could tolerate being in the same office as me.’

  Isobel swallowed. She thought of starting work for someone new, with her pregnancy growing all the time. She wasn’t aware of how much other people at the Al Hakam corporation knew about their affair. After all, it wasn’t the most likely of partnerships, and Tariq hadn’t exactly been squiring her around town. Would people put two and two together and come up with
the right answer? Would her position be compromised once any new boss knew who the father of her baby was?

  She stared at him, wondering what kind of foolish instinct it was which made her realise that she actually wanted to work for him. For there was a certain kind of security in the familiar—especially when there was so much happening in her life. At least with Tariq she wouldn’t have to hide anything, or pretend. Tariq would protect her. Because, despite his angry words of earlier, she sensed that he would make sure that nothing and nobody ever harmed her, or her baby.

  ‘I think I could just about tolerate it,’ she said slowly. She met his eyes, knowing that she needed to believe in the words she was about to speak—because otherwise there could be no way forward. She had thought that if she quietly loved him then he might learn how to love her back—even if it was only a little bit. She had thought that maybe she could change him. But she had been wrong. Because you couldn’t change somebody else—you could only change yourself. And Tariq didn’t want love—not in any form, it seemed. He didn’t want to receive it, and he didn’t want to give it either. Not to her—and not to their baby.

  ‘We must agree to give each other the personal space we need,’ she continued steadily. ‘The relationship is over, Tariq—we both know that. But there’s no reason why we can’t behave civilly towards each other.’

  He was aware of an overwhelming sense of relief that she wasn’t going to be launching out on her own. But something in the quiet dignity of her statement made his heart grow heavy with a gloomy realisation. As if somehow there had been something wonderful hovering on the periphery of his life.

  And he had just let it go.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘THE press have been on the phone again, Tariq.’

  Tariq looked up to see Izzy hovering in the doorway of his office, lit from behind like a Botticelli painting, with her hair falling down over her shoulders like liquid honey. Although she was wearing a loose summer dress and still very slim, at four months pregnant there was no disguising the curving softness of her belly. A whisper ran over his skin. For weeks now he had been watching her. Trying to imagine what his child must be like as it grew inside her.

  And now he knew.

  Aware of the sudden lump which had risen in his throat, he swallowed and raised his brows at her questioningly. ‘What did they want?’

  Isobel stared at the brilliant gleam of the Sheikh’s black eyes, and the faint stubble on his chin which made him look like a modern-day pirate. Had she been out of her mind yesterday when she’d told him that he could accompany her to the doctor if he wanted to see her latest scan? What crazy hormonal blip had prompted that? She’d been expecting a curt thanks, followed by a terse refusal, but to her surprise he had leapt at the opportunity, his face wreathed in what had looked like a delighted smile. A most un-Tariq kind of smile. And then he’d acted the part of the caring father as if he actually meant it—clucking round her as if he’d spent a lifetime looking after pregnant women.

  In fact, when he’d been helping her into the limousine—something which she’d told him was entirely unnecessary—his hand had brushed over hers, and the feeling which had passed between them had been electric. It was the first time that they had touched since their uneasy truce—and hadn’t it started her senses screaming, taunting her with what she was missing? Their eyes had met in a clashing gaze of suppressed desire and she had felt an overwhelming need to be in his arms again. A need she had quickly quashed by climbing into the limousine and sitting as far away from him as possible.

  She sighed with impatience at her inability to remain immune to him, then turned her mind back to his question about the press. ‘They were asking why the Sheikh of Khayarzah was seen accompanying his assistant to an obstetrician’s for her scan yesterday.’

  ‘They saw us?’

  ‘Apparently.’ Her eyes were full of appeal. ‘Tariq, I should have realised this might happen.’

  Maybe she should have done. But to his surprise he was glad she hadn’t. Because mightn’t that have stopped her from giving him the chance to see the baby he had never wanted? He still didn’t know why she had done that—and he had never expected to feel this overwhelming sense of gratitude. Perhaps he should have realised himself that someone might notice them, but the truth was he wouldn’t have cared even if he’d known that a million journalists were lurking around.

  He hadn’t cared about anything except what he was to discover in that darkened room in Harley Street, watching while a doctor had moved a sensory pad over the jelly-covered swell of her abdomen.

  Suddenly he’d seen an incomprehensible image spring to life on the screen. To Tariq, it had looked like a high-definition snowstorm—until he had seen a rapid and rhythmical beat and realised that he was looking at a beating heart. And that was when everything had changed. When he’d stopped thinking of Izzy’s pregnancy as something theoretical and seen reality there, right before his eyes.

  His heart had lurched as he’d stared at the form of his son—or daughter—and the doctor had said something on the lines of the two of them being a ‘happy couple’. And that had been when Izzy’s voice had rung out loud and clear.

  ‘But we’re not,’ she had said firmly, turning to look at Tariq, her tawny eyes glittering with hurt and challenge. ‘The Sheikh and I are not together, Doctor.’

  Tariq had flinched beneath that condemnatory blaze—but could he blame her? Didn’t he deserve comments and looks like that after his outrageous reaction when she’d told him about the baby? Even though he had been doing his damnedest to make it up to her ever since. Short of peeling grapes and bringing them into her office each morning, he was unsure of what else he could do to make it better. And he still wasn’t sure if his conciliatory attitude was having any effect on her, because she had been exhibiting a stubbornness he hadn’t known she possessed.

  Proudly, she had refused all his offers of lifts home or time off. Had turned up her pretty little nose at his studiedly casual enquiry that she might want to join him for dinner some time. And told him that, no, she had no desire to go shopping for a cot. Or to have her groceries delivered from a chi-chi London store. Pregnant women were not invalids, she’d told him crisply—and she would manage the way she had always managed. So he had been forced to bite back his frustration as she had stubbornly shopped for food each lunchtime, bringing back bulging bags which she had lain on the floor of her office. Though he had put his foot down about her carrying them home and told her in no uncertain terms that his limousine would drop the bags off at her apartment.

  Now, as she walked into his office and shut the door behind her, he realised that the Botticelli resemblance had been illusory—because beneath her pale and Titian beauty she looked tired.

  ‘We’re going to have to decide what to say when the question of paternity comes up,’ she told him, wondering why it had never occurred to her that people would want to know who the father of her baby was. ‘Because it will. I mean, people here have been dropping hints about it for ages, and that journalist was on the verge of asking me outright about it today—I could tell he was.’

  His voice was gentle. ‘What do you want to do, Izzy?’

  She gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t think what I want is the kind of question you should be asking, Tariq.’

  What she wanted was the impossible—to be carrying the child of someone who loved her instead of resenting her for having fallen pregnant. Someone who would hold her in the small hours of the morning when the world seemed a very big and frightening place. But those kinds of thoughts were dangerous. Even shameful. Because wasn’t the truth that she still wanted Tariq to be that man—even though it was never going to happen?

  To Isobel’s terror, she’d discovered that you didn’t just fall out of love with a man because he’d spoken to you harshly or judged you in the worst possible way.

  ‘I don’t know what I want,’ she said quietly.

  He stared at her, and a flare of determina
tion coursed through him. He was aware that he could no longer sit on the sidelines and watch, like some kind of dazed ghost. Up until now he had allowed Izzy to dictate the terms of how they dealt with this because he had been racked with guilt about his own conduct. He had given her the personal space she had demanded, telling himself that it was in her best interests for him to do so. He had scrabbled deep inside himself and discovered unknown pockets of patience and fortitude. He had acted in a way which a few short months ago would have seemed unimaginable.

  But it was still not enough. Not nearly enough. Close examination of her bleached face made him realise that he now had to step up to the mark and start taking control. That to some extent Izzy was weak and helpless in this situation—even though she had shown such shining courage so far.

  He stood up, walked over to her, and took hold of her elbow. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, guiding her firmly towards the sofa. ‘Please.’

  Her lips trembled and so did her body, responding instantly to his touch, and silently she raged against her traitorous hormones. But it was a sign of her weariness that she let him guide her over to the sofa.

  Heavily, she slumped down and looked up at him. ‘Well?’

  He sat down beside her, seeing the momentary suspicion which clouded her eyes as, casting around in his mind, he struggled to find the right words to say. Clumsy sentences hovered at the edges of his lips until he realised that nobody really gave a damn about the words—only about the sentiment behind them. ‘I want to tell you how sorry I am, Izzy. Truly sorry.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’ve said sorry before,’ she said, blinking back the stupid tears which were springing to her eyes and which seemed never far away these days.

  ‘That was back then—when neither of us was thinking straight. When the air was full of confusion and hurt. But it’s important to me that you understand that I mean it. That in the cold light of day I wish I could take back those words I should never have said. And that I wish I could make it up to you in some way.’