The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum

by Meredith Webber

  The silence stretched, so awkward she was wondering if she should break it, but what could she say to this stranger that wasn’t just more chat? And though she certainly hadn’t given that impression earlier, she really didn’t do chat.

  Relief flooded her as he spoke again.

  ‘Very well. I will be in touch later today with a date and time for our departure. I have your details from the HR office. In the meantime, you might make a list of equipment you will require. My hospital is the same size as Giles, and I would anticipate the unit would be similar in size to this one.’

  The words were so coldly formal Liz had to resist an impulse to drop a curtsey, but as the man wheeled away from her, she gave in to bad behaviour, poked out her tongue and put her thumbs to her ears, waggling her fingers at him.

  ‘He’d have caught you if he’d turned around,’ her friend Gillian said, before taking up what was really worrying her. ‘And what on earth are you thinking? Agreeing to traipse off to a place you’ve never heard of, with a strange man, and pregnant, and with Oliver the way he is, not to mention leaving all of us in the lurch?’

  Liz smiled. The sentiments may have been badly expressed but Gillian’s concern for her was genuine. Could she explain?

  ‘You know Oliver’s family won’t let me near him,’ she began, ‘and Carol is the perfect replacement, and she’s available so no one’s being left in the lurch. That said, what is it you’re most worried about—the pregnancy, the strange man, or that I’ve never heard of this Al Tinine?’

  ‘It’s the decision,’ Gilliam told her. ‘Making it like that. It’s totally out of character for you. You took months mulling over doing the surrogacy thing—could you do it, should you do it, would you get too attached to the baby? You asked yourself a thousand questions. And while I know you’ve been through hell these last few months, do you really think running away will help?’

  Liz shook her head.

  ‘Nothing will help,’ she muttered, acknowledging the dark cloud that had enshrouded her since Bill’s death, ‘but if I’m going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable somewhere new. Besides, setting up a unit from scratch might be the distraction I need. I love this place, would bleed for it, but you know full well the staff could run it without much help from me, so it’s hardly a challenge any more.’

  ‘But the baby?’

  Gillian’s voice was hesitant, and Liz knew why. It was the question everyone had been wanting to ask since the accident that had killed her brother and put his partner in hospital, but the one subject they hadn’t dared broach.

  Liz shrugged her shoulders, the helplessness she felt about the situation flooding through her.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she admitted slowly. ‘The accident wasn’t exactly part of the plan when I agreed to carry a baby for Bill and Oliver, and with Oliver the way he is and me not being able to even see him, who knows what happens next? Certainly not me! All I can do is keep going.’

  She suspected she sounded hard and uncaring, but from the moment she’d agreed to carry a child for her brother and his partner, an agreement made, as Gillian had reminded her, after much soul-searching, she’d steeled herself not to get emotionally involved with a baby that would never be hers. She’d played it music Bill and Oliver loved, told it long stories about its parents, cautious always to remember it was their baby, not hers.

  It would never be hers.

  Now its future was as uncertain as her own, and she had no idea which way to turn. No wonder the challenge the man had offered had seemed like a lifeline—a tiny chink of light shining through the dark, enveloping cloud.

  Then another thought struck her. Had the man said ‘our’ departure? Did he intend to hang around?

  She felt a shiver travel down her spine, and her toes curled again…

  * * *

  Khalifa sat in the hospital’s boardroom, listening to his lawyers speaking to their counterparts from the hospital, but his mind was on a woman with heavy-framed glasses, a pregnant woman who seemed totally uninvolved in her own pregnancy. Zara had been transformed by hers, overjoyed by the confirmation, then delighting in every little detail, so wrapped up in the changes happening in her body that any interest she might ever have had in her husband—not much, he had to admit—had disappeared.

  To be fair to her, the arranged marriage had suited him as he’d been building the hospital at the time, busy with the thousand details that had always seemed to need his attention, far too busy to be dealing with wooing a woman. Later, Zara’s involvement in her pregnancy had freed him from guilt that he spent so little time with her, though in retrospect…

  He passed a hand across his face, wiping away any trace of emotion that might have slipped through his guard. Emotion weakened a man and the history of his tribe, stretching back thousands of years, proved it had survived because of the strength of its leaders. Now, in particular, with El Tinine taking its place among its oil-rich neighbours and moving into a modern world, he, the leader, had to be particularly strong.

  ‘Of course we will do all we can to assist you in selecting the equipment you need for the new unit in your hospital,’ the chief medical officer was saying. ‘Dr Jones has updated our unit as and when funds became available. She knows what works best, particularly in a small unit where you are combining different levels of patient need. I’ll get my secretary to put together a list of equipment we’ve bought recently and the suppliers’ brochures. Dr Jones will be able to tell you why she made the choices she did.’

  He hurried out of the room.

  Dr Jones…The name echoed in Khalifa’s head.

  Something about the woman was bothering him, something that went beyond her apparent disregard for her pregnancy. Was it because she’d challenged him?

  Not something Zara had ever done.

  But Zara had been his wife, not his colleague, so it couldn’t be that…

  Was it because Dr Jones running from something—the father of her baby?—that she’d leapt at his offer to come to Al Tinine? There had been no consultation with anyone, no consideration of family or friends, just how soon could she get away.

  Yes, she was running from something, it had to be that, but did it matter? And why was he thinking about her when he had so much else he hoped to achieve in this short visit?

  It had to be her pregnancy and the memories it had stirred.

  The guilt…

  He, too, left the room, making his way back to the neonatal ward, telling himself he wanted to inspect it more closely, telling himself it had nothing to do with Dr Jones.

  She was bent over the crib she’d been called to earlier and as she straightened he could read the concern on her face. She left the unit, sliding open the door and almost knocking him over in her haste to get to the little alcove.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said automatically, then stopped as she realised whom she’d bumped into. ‘Oh, it’s you! I am sorry—I’m a klutz, always knocking things over or running into people. My family said it was because I live in my head, and I suppose that’s right at the moment. The baby in that crib was abandoned—found wrapped in newspaper in a park—and the police haven’t been able to trace the mother. We call her Alexandra, after the park.’

  Liz heard her rush of words and wondered what it was about this man that turned her into a blithering idiot, admitting to her clumsiness, thrusting ancient family history at a total stranger.

  ‘The baby was found in a park?’

  Despite the level of disbelief in the man’s voice, her toes curled again. This was ridiculous. It had to stop. Probably it was hormonal…

  ‘Last week,’ she told him, ‘and, really, there’s nothing much wrong with her—she was a little hypothermic, occasional apnoea, but now…’

  ‘Who will take her?’

  Liz sighed.

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ she admitted. ‘She’ll be taken into care. And while I know the people who care for babies and children are excellent, she won’t get a permane
nt placement because she obviously has a mother somewhere. And right now when she desperately needs to bond with someone, she’ll be going somewhere on a temporary basis.’

  Why was she telling this stranger her worries? Liz wondered, frowning at the man as if he’d somehow drawn the words from her by…

  Osmosis?

  Magic?

  She had no idea by what. Perhaps it was because he was here that she’d rattled on, because worrying about Alexandra was preferable to worrying about her own problems.

  ‘You think the mother might return to claim her? Is that why the placement is temporary?’

  Liz shook her head.

  ‘I doubt she’ll return to claim her. If she’d wanted her, why leave her in the first place? But if the authorities find the mother, they will do what they can to help her should she decide to keep the baby. It’s a delicate situation but, whatever happens, until little Alexandra is officially given up for adoption, she’ll be in limbo.’

  Like me, Liz thought, and almost patted her burgeoning belly.

  The man was frowning at her.

  ‘You are concerned?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I’m concerned,’ Liz told him. ‘This is a baby we’re talking about. She’s already had a rough start, so she deserves the very best.’

  It didn’t add up, Khalifa decided. This woman’s attitude to a stranger’s child, and her apparent disregard for her own pregnancy, although perhaps he was reading her wrongly. Perhaps this was her work face, and at home she talked and sang to her unborn child as much as Zara had to hers.

  She and her partner talked and sang—

  ‘Will the authorities also look for the baby’s father?’ he asked, and surprised a smile out of her.

  ‘Harder to do, especially without the mother, although Alexandra’s plight has been well publicised in local and interstate papers. The father may not have known the mother was pregnant. A man spends the night with a woman, and these days probably takes precautions, but there’s no sign that flashes up in the morning, reminding him to check back in a few weeks to see if she’s pregnant.’

  There was no bitterness in the words and he doubted very much that her pregnancy had resulted from a chance encounter. Klutz she might be, but everything he’d read about her suggested she was very intelligent.

  Though klutz?

  ‘What’s a klutz?’

  Now she laughed, and something shifted in his chest.

  Was it because the laughter changed her from a reasonably attractive woman to a beautiful one, lit from within by whatever delight the question had inspired?

  Because the blue eyes he was drawn to behind the glasses were sparkling with humour?

  He didn’t think so. No, it was more the laughter itself—so free and wholesome—so good to hear. Did people laugh out loud less these days or was it just around him they were serious?

  ‘It’s a word we use for a clumsy person. I’m forever dropping things—not babies, of course—or knocking stuff over, or running into people. Hence the really, really horrible glasses. Rimless ones, thin gold frames, fancy plastic—I kill them all. Bumping into a door, or dropping them, or sitting on them, I’ve broken glasses in ways not yet invented. I tried contact lenses for a while but kept losing them—usually just one, but always the same one. So I had five right eyes and no left, which would have been okay for a five-eyed monster, of course. Anyway, now I go for the heaviest, strongest, thickest frames available. I’m a typical klutz!’

  She hesitated, as if waiting for his comment on klutz-dom, but he was still considering his reaction to her laughter and before he could murmur some polite assurance that she probably wasn’t that bad, she was speaking again.

  ‘Not that you need to worry about my work abilities, I’m always totally focussed when I’m on the job. In fact, that’s probably my problem outside it—in my head I’m still in the unit, worrying about one or other of our small charges.’

  Yes, he could understand that, but what he couldn’t understand was how freely this woman chatted with a virtual stranger. Every instinct told him she wasn’t a chatterer, yet here she was, rattling on about her clumsiness and monsters and an abandoned baby.

  Was she using words to hide something?

  Talking to prevent him asking questions?

  He had no idea, but he’d come to see the unit, not concern himself with this particular employee.

  Which was why he was surprised to hear himself asking if there was somewhere other than this alcove off the passageway where they could sit down and talk.

  ‘Of course! We’ve got a canteen in the courtyard, really lovely, but I suppose you’ve seen it already. I’ll just let someone know where I’ll be.’

  She stepped, carefully, around him and entered the unit, stopping to speak to one of the nurses then peering behind a screen and speaking to someone before joining him outside.

  ‘How much space do you have at this new hospital of yours?’ she asked, the little frown back between blue eyes that were now sombre.

  He glanced back at the unit, measuring it in his mind.

  ‘I’ve set aside an area, maybe twice the size of what you have here,’ he told her, and was absurdly pleased when the frown disappeared.

  ‘That’s great,’ she declared, clearly delighted. ‘We can have decent, reclining armchairs for the visiting parents and a separate room where mothers can express milk or breastfeed instead of being stuck behind a tatty screen. Beginning breastfeeding is particularly hard for our mothers. The babies have been getting full tummies with absolutely no effort on their part because the milk comes down a tube. Then suddenly they’re expected to work for it, and it’s frustrating for both parties.’

  She was leading him along a corridor, striding along and talking at the same time, her high-heeled strappy sandals making her nearly as tall as he was.

  A pregnant woman in high-heeled strappy sandals?

  A doctor at work in high-heeled strappy sandals?

  Not that her legs didn’t look fantastic in them…

  What was he thinking!

  It was the pregnancy thing that had thrown him. Too close to home—too many memories surfacing. If only he’d been more involved with Zara and the pregnancy, if only he’d been home more often, if only…

  ‘Here,’ his guide declared, walking into the leafy courtyard hung with glorious flowering orchids. ‘This, as you can see, is a special place. Mr Giles, who left the bequest for the hospital, was a passionate orchid grower and these orchids are either survivors from his collection or have been bred from his plants.’

  Khalifa looked around, then shook his head.

  ‘I did notice the courtyard on one of my tours of the hospital, but didn’t come into it. It’s like an oasis of peace and beauty in a place that is very busy and often, I imagine, very sombre. I should have thought of something similar. I have been considering practicality too much.’

  His companion smiled at him.

  ‘Just don’t take space out of my unit to arrange a courtyard,’ she warned. ‘Now, would you like tea or coffee, or perhaps a cold drink?’

  ‘Let me get it, Dr Jones,’ he said, reaching into his pocket for his wallet. ‘You’ll have…?’

  ‘I’m limiting myself to one coffee a day so I make it a good one. Coffee, black and strong and two sugars, and it’s Liz,’ she replied, confusing him once again.

  ‘Liz?’ he repeated.

  ‘Short for Elizabeth—Liz, not Dr Jones.’

  He turned away to buy the coffees, his mind repeating the short name, while some primitive instinct sprang to life inside him, warning him of something…

  But what?

  ‘Two coffees, please. Strong, black and two sugars in both of them.’

  He gave his order, and paid the money, but his mind was trying to grasp at the fleeting sensation that had tapped him on the shoulder.

  Because of their nomadic lifestyle in an often hostile country, an instinct for danger was bred into him and all his tribal pe
ople, but this woman couldn’t represent a danger, so that couldn’t be it.

  But as he took the coffees from the barista, the sensation came again.

  It couldn’t be because they drank their coffee the same way! Superstition might be alive and well in his homeland, but he’d never believed in any of the tales his people told of mischievous djinns interfering in people’s lives, or of a conflagration of events foretelling disaster. Well, not entirely! And a lot of people probably drank their coffee strong and black with two sugars.

  Besides, he only drank it this way when he was away from home. At home, the coffee was already sweet and he’d drink three tiny cups of the thick brew in place of one of these…

  CHAPTER TWO

  COULD ten days really have flown so quickly?

  Of course, deciding on what clothes she should take had consumed a lot of Liz’s spare time. Khalifa…could she really call him that? So far she’d avoided using his name directly, but if she was going to be working with him she’d have to use it some time.

  Not that she didn’t use it in her head, sounding it out, but only in rare moments of weakness, for even saying it started the toe curling—and she had to stretch them as hard as she could to prevent it happening.

  Anyway, Khalifa had given her a pile of wonderful information brochures about his country, explaining that the capital, Al Jabaya, was in the north, and that his eldest brother, while he had been the leader, had, over twenty years, built a modern city there. The southern part of Al Tinine, however, was known as the Endless Desert, and the area, although well populated, had been neglected. It was in the south, in the oasis town of Najme, that Khalifa had built his hospital.

  For clothes Liz had settled on loose trousers and long shift-like shirts for work, and long loose dresses for casual occasions or lolling around at home, wherever home turned out to be. Wanting to respect the local customs, she’d made sure all the garments were modest, with sleeves and high necklines.

  Now here she was, in a long, shapeless black dress—black so it wouldn’t show the things she was sure to spill on herself on a flight—waiting outside her apartment block just as the sun was coming up. Gillian, who would house—and cat-sit, waited beside her.