Ruling Sheikh, Unruly Mistress

by Susan Stephens

  She glanced at him as if she could read his thoughts, but there was strain in her eyes—the strain of keeping that secret from him.

  Chapter Twelve

  WHEN Lucy had finished eating she went to rinse her hands in the oasis. Razi braced himself for her return when he knew he would be hearing something monumental. But she surprised him once again.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you about money,’ she said, settling down on the opposite side of the fire.

  He scratched his jaw. ‘I admire your candour.’

  She had to make this work. There was no point wishing she and Razi could thrill together at the news of their child, when Razi was the ruler of a country and she was a chef. The best she could hope for was that she could get a good job back in England and secure her baby’s future. Meanwhile, she had to open a discussion that would allow her to go home. ‘I realised there could only be one reason why you left me so much money—’

  ‘You did?’ Razi’s green eyes glinted.

  ‘You wanted me to open a restaurant.’ She let this hang, daring him to disagree. If he did, it would turn their brief, though precious—at least to her—liaison into something sordid.

  ‘That was my intention,’ he confirmed.

  This gave Lucy the courage to make her next suggestion. It was bold, but it was a way of keeping in touch with Razi, so that when she was ready to tell him about their child they could discuss their baby’s progress—though only over a boardroom table; something she believed he might agree to and she could handle. It was better than the prospect of never seeing him again and infinitely better than entrusting their child to strangers to pass between them. ‘I have identified a small site suitable for a restaurant and I’ve drawn up a business plan—’

  ‘Do you have it with you?’

  ‘Well, no…’ The one—the only thing on her mind when she had left England for Isla de Sinnebar had been the future of her child. She pressed on. ‘I’d like to use some of your money to help me with the start-up.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re here?’

  It went against the grain to tell him even the smallest white lie, but when the stakes were so high and he had just given her a way out…‘If you’re interested in taking a look at my predictions I’ll email a copy of my proposal to you as soon as I return.’

  ‘I don’t believe you didn’t think to bring a copy with you,’ he told her flatly.

  ‘I didn’t presume to—’ She dried up. What? She didn’t presume to stand her ground in front of the desert king? Razi knew her better than that. And while she hesitated it only took the slightest adjustment in his gaze to call her a liar. She couldn’t appear strong in one area and then fall back on the old, self-effacing Lucy when it suited her. ‘At first, all I wanted to do was return the money,’ she admitted, remembering how humiliated and angry she’d felt when she first found the pile of banknotes on the nightstand.

  ‘And now your situation has changed?’

  ‘I got an idea for a restaurant.’ She couldn’t hold his gaze and her cheeks were blazing.

  Razi’s expression darkened. ‘So you want to open a restaurant and you’ve drawn up a plan?’ Springing to his feet, he stood towering above her, his anger palpable. ‘You didn’t have to come to Isla de Sinnebar to tell me that, Lucy. You could have emailed me your proposals as you’ve just offered to do now. You’re a hopeless liar,’ he said grimly. ‘Isn’t it about time you told me the truth?’

  The ease that had briefly existed between them had vanished and in its place tension snapped like an oncoming storm. She stood up to face him. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry I came—I should have realised—’

  ‘Realised what, Lucy?’

  There was something potent in Razi’s stillness that made her body yearn and fear him all at the same time, but she should have remembered that he moved a lot faster than she did. She should have remembered what it felt like to have him hold her firmly in place in front of him so she was drowning in his potent heat.

  ‘You should have realised what, Lucy?’ Razi pressed fiercely. ‘That I’m not going to be easily drawn in—or fobbed off? What should you have realised? Why are you here?’

  ‘Let me go—’

  ‘Not until you tell me the real reason for your surprise visit. After—what is it? Almost twelve weeks?’

  ‘You make it sound so—’

  ‘Suspicious?’ Razi rapped, all semblance of civilised behaviour stripped from his face. ‘How would you feel in my place? Suspicious would just be a start, I’m guessing—’

  ‘Please let me go.’

  ‘Not until you tell me the truth—’

  ‘I can’t…’

  ‘Why not?’

  Her voice might be broken, but from some primal depth the fire of being a new mother rushed out of her in a shout. ‘I just can’t! Okay?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to believe you’ve come halfway round the world on the off chance I’d be free to speak to you about some plan you have to open a restaurant. Even if you didn’t email those plans through first, you’d make an appointment—’

  ‘I tried to.’

  Razi called every bluff she’d had and had never seemed more the desert King than he did in that moment. He was so darkly forbidding, she was shivering with fright, but that was no use to her here. She had to think of her baby and for the sake of that child she would fight. She wasn’t ashamed of herself or her baby and Razi was right on all counts. If she had wanted to put a business proposition in front of him a face-to-face meeting would have been unnecessary at this stage. Only a child would bring her here to face him. And now that child’s father was waiting for her to prove herself unworthy of being a mother. She had to tell him.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ Razi demanded, stealing the initiative.

  His instinct shocked her to the point where she couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘Yes, I’m pregnant.’ She would never deny the existence of her child.

  ‘You’re pregnant?’ Razi’s voice had taken on a new and frightening tone as if he had hit her with the most extreme reason he could think of for her coming to Isla de Sinnebar and had only just realised it might be true.

  Lucy’s hands flew to protect her womb as Razi stared at her and for one glittering moment the prospect of having Razi al Maktabi as her protector and the hands-on father of her child was a heady prospect, but then she accepted reality. He would never acknowledge a foreigner who was virtually a member of his kitchen staff as an equal and a royal child would never be allowed to leave the country. She had told him the truth and was damned. If she hadn’t told him she would have been equally damned, for then she would never have been able to look her child in the eyes and tell that child the truth about her father.

  ‘So that’s why you fell into a faint at my feet—and why you looked so pale when we arrived in the desert.’ Razi’s expression darkened. ‘Have you no sense of responsibility? No concern for anyone but yourself? Don’t you care about your child? Or—’

  ‘You?’ Lucy interrupted. She had paled beneath Razi’s onslaught, but rallied to defend the truth. ‘I care about you more than you know.’

  Even as he exclaimed with disbelief she saw a look in his eyes she’d never seen before. It spoke of a fierce pain—a pain from the past that still had the power to hurt him. ‘I’m pregnant, Razi,’ she said quietly, ‘and that’s a fact as well as a cause for rejoicing. I’m afraid you’ll just have to get used to it—I have.’

  Get used to it? He was already changing. A baby? He was ice. He was fire. He didn’t dare to hope. ‘A baby or our baby?’ he demanded, fuelled by unbearable suspicion.

  ‘My baby.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question, Lucy,’ he told her coldly. But he could tell it was a baby she had loved from the first moment she had realised she was pregnant. He didn’t question Lucy’s maternal instinct. She would defend her child to her last breath. He envied her that depth of feeling. But all Lucy’s thoughts were centred on the baby and on her duties as th
at baby’s mother and this passionate new love had blinded her to reality and to the world outside her own cosmos. She could have no idea of the repercussions inside a country like Isla de Sinnebar if the news leaked out. ‘How do you know it’s our child?’ he said, feeling calmer now his mind had cleared to make way for this most crucial of tests.

  ‘Because there hasn’t been anyone else,’ she said, appearing more vulnerable than ever as she made this innocent admission.

  He closed his heart to her. ‘How do I know that? How do I know I can trust you?’

  Her steady gaze shamed him, but still he drove on to seek the truth. ‘How do I know that I’m not one of many guests you…entertained?’

  He stopped the flat of her hand before it reached his face, holding her wrist in a non-negotiable grip.

  ‘Let go of me!’ she insisted, struggling to break free.

  His answer was to bring her closer so he could stare into her wounded eyes. ‘I’ll release you when you calm down and tell me the truth—and I mean all of it.’

  This wasn’t the civilised man she had met in Val d’Isere, but a warrior king, who was burning up inside with pain and fury. ‘Let go of me. Of course it’s our baby. I’ve never been with anyone else. If you need proof we can have a DNA test once the baby is born.’

  Razi held on to her, his gaze unwavering.

  ‘Do you really think I would fly halfway round the world,’ Lucy demanded, throwing Razi’s taunt back at him, ‘without knowing it was your baby? I don’t lie.’

  She stared down at his hands on her arms and he released her. ‘I also have a bank statement, showing that I set up an account exclusively for the money you left at the chalet, and that I never touched a penny of it.’

  ‘So you put your plans for a restaurant first, your child second and telling me about our baby a very poor third?’ He threw up his hands in disbelief.

  ‘I’m not saying that.’ This was all going horribly wrong. She had never meant to lie to him.

  ‘When, Lucy? When did you intend to tell me?’

  ‘When I returned to England,’ she confessed steadily. ‘I came here thinking you were Mac—a businessman—only to discover you were the ruling Sheikh—’

  And a man who clearly mistrusted women, believing them incapable of love. Lucy only had to look into Razi’s eyes to know that his inner scars went a lot deeper than she had previously supposed. Some long-held wound was festering inside him. She couldn’t know the details, but she could feel the effect, and while part of her was filled with compassion for his pain, the part of her that was a mother—and that part was swiftly becoming all of her—was terrified at the thought that the ruling Sheikh of Isla de Sinnebar’s only interest now was to secure custody of their child.

  And what power did she have to stop him? Once Razi had done that she’d be his captive for life, for she would never abandon her child to the care of strangers. Razi lived on an island halfway across the world from where she lived. How would that work? When would she see her baby? How could she bear her child to live so far away from her? She couldn’t. And Razi wouldn’t want her here.

  It was a problem to which there was no solution, and in this case the only form of attack was defence. ‘Why did you bring me to the desert? To show me a valuable ecological site? I don’t think so, Razi. You brought me here to get me away from the city and prying eyes. You brought me here because you’re ashamed of me.’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of you,’ he insisted. ‘Why did you come to the Isla de Sinnebar if not to trap me in some way?’

  ‘What? That’s absurd. How would I do that when you’re an all-powerful king?’

  ‘That’s what I want to find out.’ He raked his thick black hair with angry fingers. ‘Has it occurred to you that a scandal like this could rock my country? No—I didn’t think so. If I acknowledge this child it will be seen as my first act in power. How will that look to my people? And the mother of that child a foreigner in this, the most traditional of countries.’

  He made her feel as if she had done something wrong—and there was no mention of a baby to love, just a country to be ruled with a rod of iron, heartlessly, like a company meeting targets to be approved by the ruling Sheikh. ‘It seems to me you support all the antiquated beliefs you have sworn to eradicate. And as for me—I don’t want anything from you.’

  ‘Well, that’s clearly untrue,’ Razi informed her coldly, ‘or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I thought you should know, that’s all. I’m not trying to trap you into anything. I’m quite capable of standing on my own feet without your help.’

  ‘So you plan to have the child and I have no say in the matter?’

  ‘That’s not it at all—’

  ‘It must be one or the other,’ Razi insisted coldly. ‘Which is it, Lucy? Blackmail? Or sob story?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  LUCY drew on her inner strength. ‘The man I knew in Val d’Isere would never have said that. And let me tell you something else,’ she added without giving Razi chance to speak. ‘You say you care about a country. I don’t believe you. How can you care about anything if you’re incapable of love? And if you’re incapable of love, I don’t want you to have anything to do with my child—’

  ‘Our child,’ he reminded her fiercely. ‘Or so you say—’

  ‘Yes, I do say,’ Lucy insisted, bracing for battle. Where her child was concerned she was fearless.

  He had never felt such wild emotions. He wanted to hug Lucy and rejoice—yet also turn his back on her and never see her again. He rued the day he’d met her and yet longed for her to stay. She had to stay if she was having his child. The realisation that he was about to become a father had left him drowning in happiness, while the thought that anyone, even Lucy, might imagine she could keep him from that child was an abomination he refused to consider. The memory of a child living in lonely isolation, waiting for his brother’s visits to break the monotony of being cared for by strangers, was still too raw for that. If she was having his child he would not be denied the joy of seeing that child grow up. The thought of anyone but him protecting the baby, loving it as he would, was unthinkable. He wouldn’t stand on the sidelines for Lucy—for anyone.

  ‘Will I embarrass your wife?’

  ‘My wife?’ The red mist of anger was still on him as he refocused dazedly.

  ‘I presume there’s got to be a wife soon,’ she said, turning from shy supplicant to virago in a moment. ‘Tell me,’ she insisted. ‘I have to know. I have to protect my child. I don’t imagine you’d want me here in Isla de Sinnebar muddying the water when the time comes for you to choose a wife—’

  ‘There is no wife,’ he roared, stopping her, ‘or ever likely to be a wife.’ The face of his cousin Leila flashed into his mind. He had sent her back to university where she so dearly wanted to be and then had dispatched her greedy father with a flea in his ear and a cheque large enough to keep him off Leila’s back.

  ‘So, you’re married to duty?’ Lucy suggested, taking another tack.

  ‘And what if I am?’

  ‘That isn’t what I want for my baby, Razi. And if you’re closed off from love what good are you to a country?’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ he snapped. ‘I’m interested in cold, hard fact—like what do you want for your child, Lucy?’ He was already calculating the amount.

  Her wounded gaze said no child of hers could ever be bought. ‘I want my baby to be loved,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yet you think me incapable of love?’

  She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to and as his own doubts kicked in he turned on the person least deserving of his anger. ‘You should have told me the moment you knew you were pregnant. We could have arranged something.’

  ‘Like what?’ she exclaimed fearfully, lifting her arm almost as if she was shielding her face from so much pain. ‘Don’t say any more, Razi,’ she begged him. ‘Don’t say things I know you don’t mean.’

  He took himself asi
de until he was calmer. ‘I mean I would have supported you and the baby,’ he said then.

  ‘If I were discreet? If I bowed my head—hid my child?’

  ‘Did you really think this was something you could keep from me?’

  ‘It’s why I’m here.’

  ‘And you think I’d be happy to have no say in my child’s life? How little you know me.’

  How true, Lucy thought. They had shared the ultimate intimacy, but they were still two strangers facing up to one of life’s major turning points together. They had everything to learn about each other—everything to learn about how they would go on from here. But they had to go on from here and she had to make Razi listen. ‘I wasn’t keeping anything from you. I waited for three months to be as sure as I could be that the pregnancy was safe.’

  His reaction shocked her. Wheeling away, Razi put his head in his hands as if for once there was a problem he couldn’t solve. She gave him space, sensing the renewed onslaught of his pain, though in some ways it was a relief to see such a passionate response from a man who had grown so cold.

  Razi was a warrior, exotic, fierce and passionate—while she was a chef, neat and tidy—cautious, some might say; at least, she had been cautious up to meeting Razi. They both had so much to offer their child if only they could put their differences behind them. They must do that because only then could they start to build a future for their baby. But right now Razi was at his most untouchable, his most remote, with every sinew and muscle in his body stretched tight.

  There had never been a moment when she had been frightened of Razi, but she was frightened now, yet this was the very moment when she must reach out to him, while the pull of duty was warring with his warmer, human side. For all her ignorance of such weighty problems, one thing she did know—a country run for the sake of duty would be a cold and barren place. She touched his arm, expecting him to send her away—or, worse, ignore her. She was used to being invisible, but that didn’t mean she liked it. You never got used to that sort of thing. It always hurt. She stood quietly, feeling foolish as the silence dragged on, but then the miracle she’d hoped for happened. Razi turned to stare at her. He didn’t speak, but the fact that he had responded at all was enough for now.