Khalifa?
She backed away into a shadowy corner because the baby was stirring, and although the little one hadn’t made a sound Khalifa must have sensed she was awake, for he straightened up and peered into the crib, then, smiling, lifted the little bundle into his arms, talking to her, rocking her, smiling all the time. The baby lay still, yet Khalifa didn’t return her to the crib but held her in his arms, sitting down again, speaking so quietly Liz couldn’t tell if it was in Arabic or English.
Liz crept away, more confused than ever.
Was the baby a replacement to him—for the daughter he had lost? If not, why was he doing this, sitting with her, holding her, talking to her?
Bonding!
She should go and ask him, but in truth she was glad the baby had someone holding her and talking to her, especially a male so she’d know the man smell of him.
But thinking of the man smell of Khalifa was dangerous when she was in this muddled state of mind, so she returned to bed and forced herself to count camels until she fell asleep. Although, she thought muzzily as she drifted off, she couldn’t recall actually seeing a camel since she’d been here.
She spent the next day avoiding Khalifa, avoiding the nursery when she saw him there, spending time with Phil as they worked out costings for the new unit, and checking equipment that was already coming in. But it was hard to avoid him when she returned to her room to find not only Khalifa in it, but a crib, complete with baby, presumably the one she’d carried, though not hers, never hers.
Her eyes filled with tears and she cursed her own weakness, but Khalifa’s attention was on the baby, so maybe be hadn’t noticed.
She dashed them away with her hand and hardened her voice.
‘What’s this?’
He turned abruptly, as if caught out in wrongdoing, then smiled the smile that touched her heart every time she saw it.
Coming towards her, he took both her hands in his, guiding her to the bed and settling her on it, sitting beside her and curling his arm around her shoulders.
‘Liz, there’s been news and I had to tell you personally. But I didn’t want to leave the baby so I brought her along as well.’
The words made so little sense Liz shook her head, but her eyes were darting towards the crib, towards the little pink and white bundle with a shock of dark hair lying, swaddled, in it.
Khalifa’s arm tightened and his voice was deep and grave.
‘Oliver is dead,’ he said.
Shock held her silent but only for a moment.
‘He can’t be. I spoke to Gill last night.’
‘I’m sorry, my love, but he is,’ Khalifa responded. ‘His parents decided to turn off the life support this morning.’
Although a little bit of her had grabbed those two words—my love—and clung to them, Liz knew she had to understand the real message, and the implications of it.
Implications that had started panic in her chest.
‘But the baby? What about the baby?’
‘We don’t have to decide that right now,’ Khalifa told her gently, ‘but I rather hoped she might be ours.’
Confusion joined the panic.
‘Ours?’
‘Yours and mine, but we’ll work that out later. Right now, do you want to hold her, nurse her, talk to her, think about a name?’
‘But…’
Had he sensed her total confusion? For he left her sitting on the bed and went to the crib, lifting the baby, murmuring to it in a foreign language, the voice deep and soothing, switching to English as he took a step towards Liz.
‘See, farida, precious pearl, this is your mother. I was telling you about her, and now she really can be your mother and hold you, just as I told you.’
Liz could only stare at him, but she held out shaking arms and took the infant, no longer concerned about the tears that flooded from her eyes and fell to dampen the tiny bundle’s wrappings.
Khalifa stood and watched her, seeing the happiness behind the tears, understanding the welter of emotion Liz must be going through. The loss of her friend, but the confirmation that the baby she’d carried so generously for her brother and his partner would now be hers.
If only he could take the pain away from her, carry it for her, help her through it.
If only he had the right.
He sat and held them both, a million thoughts flashing through his head, but paramount among them was the need to make this woman his—so that he and she and the baby would make a family and he could help her through her grief.
‘She’s eating well and sleeping well and needs no special care,’ he told her. ‘If we take Laya to help you look after her while you regain your strength, can we take her home?’
‘Home?’ Liz queried, turning to look at him, dampness from her tears still lingering on her cheeks so he had to touch her to brush it away.
He took a deep breath and plunged into what he later realised was a most prosaic and loveless proposal. But he had to get it said before his courage failed completely. The thought of losing this woman was so overwhelming he had to know where he stood.
‘This is not the most romantic spot for what I want to say, but I don’t know when there’ll be another time for us to be together—just the three of us.’
He was frowning and Liz realised that his voice, for the first time since she’d met him, was slightly hesitant. Then he smiled, and while her body went into its usual reaction of delight, her brain told her that something important was coming up.
Tension built to snapping point as Liz waited.
And waited.
Now he tried for a smile, tightened his grip on her shoulders, and said, with a pathetic smile, ‘How would you feel about marrying a bloke with more money than sense?’
Khalifa knew he was making a complete hash of this. The moment the words had come out he’d known they were wrong, but apart from yelling ‘Marry me’, which was what he’d most wanted to do, he’d not had a clue of how to propose.
No wonder Liz looked confused.
‘M-m-marry you?’ she stuttered. ‘Why?’
‘Because we like each other and we’ve got the baby. I’ve been bonding with her, like you said, and I can give you both a comfortable life, and you can still work if you want to, and you seem to like the country and the people you’ve met, and there’s no one left for you at home—you told me that—and, besides, I’d like it.’
He had a vague feeling he’d made things worse but was still surprised by her reaction.
‘Is this to do with guilt?’ she demanded. ‘Guilt about your wife and child dying, guilt about taking me out into the desert? I might not have known you long, Khlaifa, but I know how you treasure your guilt, piling it up inside you like the nomads pile their belongings on their camels.’
His turn to be stunned!
He tried to protest but she was speaking again.
‘And would a replacement wife and child, no matter how well you’ve bonded with the child, ease that guilt?’
‘Liz, no, believe me, that’s not true.’
She eyed him with suspicion written clearly on her face, but when she spoke it was to comfort him. She took his hand and used both of hers to hold it.
‘It wasn’t your fault your first wife died,’ she said gently. ‘You know that. As for me, the scorpion stung me because I was there and I was careless. I knew about scorpions and should have shaken out my clothes before putting them on, so you don’t have to marry me out of guilt, okay?’
‘I didn’t offer out of guilt,’ he muttered at her, annoyed now that something he’d thought would be so easy was turning into a nightmare.
‘Then why did you offer?’ she demanded, her blue eyes behind the horror glasses so huge he could have drowned in them.
‘I told you,’ he said desperately. ‘We’re good together, I already love the baby, you like my country, there are plenty of reasons for us to marry.’
For a moment he thought those eyes had filled with tears but she tu
rned away from him before he could be sure, looking out the window, her shoulders lifting with a sigh that seemed to echo around the desert beyond the car.
‘No!’ she said, just no, nothing more, sitting there, not even looking at him.
He stood up and began to pace the room, trying to work out how things had gone so disastrously wrong.
Would asking why help?
Not if her answer was she didn’t love him.
In fact, that would make things worse.
Then he asked anyway, because he had to know.
Just one word—why?
Liz beckoned him back to sit beside her before she began to speak.
‘You gave a lot of reasons for wanting to marry me,’ she said, thinking through each word because she knew she had to get it right. ‘But not the one I wanted to hear—the one I needed to hear.’
She moved and touched her hands to his face, cupping it and looking into his eyes.
‘I know it will probably sound stupid to you, Khalifa, but all my adult life I’ve known the one thing I wanted out of marriage, and that wasn’t money, or a job, or even a palace. Just love. I wanted love like my parents had, like Oliver and Bill’s. Mutual love that transcends all else, that distracts you at the most inconvenient time, that maddens and annoys and makes you ache when your loved one isn’t near. You told me of the sand sprite and somehow made it sound as if she regretted making love to her human lover. But if she loved him there’d have been no regrets. There are no regrets with love.’
He put his hands on hers where they still rested on his face, his heart so full he doubted he could speak.
But speak he must.
‘You don’t love me?’ he asked, and to his surprise she laughed.
‘Oh, Khalifa,’ she whispered. ‘If you only knew how much! I love you to distraction and probably have since soon after we first met. But that’s not enough. It has to be returned, or our life would be like a see-saw with one of us always up and the other always down, never balanced.’
‘And you think it’s not returned?’ he murmured, and now he took her face in hers and kissed her lips, claimed them, consuming her with kisses.
‘You say I’ve driven you to distraction since we first met, but you…!’ he murmured against the soft skin of her neck. ‘You’ve blown my mind, you’ve turned my life upside down, you’ve got me in such a state the whole country could have fallen apart, so absorbed I’ve been in you. Then when you went into labour, I panicked that something would go wrong and I would lose you. Yes, I did feel guilt—but most of all I felt pain. Then I delivered your baby and it was as if heaven had given me a gift. I thought if I offered you a wonderful life for you and the baby you might stay here, but I should have known you better. Love? Of course I love you. More than I can ever say, more than you could ever know, always and for ever.’
‘But you didn’t think to mention it in your proposal?’ she teased.
He rested his hands on hers and tried to explain.
‘I was—I suppose scared sounds stupid, but that’s what I was. Terrified more like—because after all it’s just a word but…’
He couldn’t do it, not sitting here so close, so he stood again and paced.
‘I’d never realised quite how powerful a word it was, but even thinking about saying it made me feel vulnerable, and I doubt I’d ever felt that way before. Even when I was a child in the desert, or at boarding school. I’m a sheikh, with a long line of tough warriors behind me. We cannot be vulnerable. What if you hadn’t loved me back—how much more vulnerable would that have made me? I know this must sound strange to you, but when I told you I loved you just now, that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word—in English or in Arabic.’
She held out her hand to him and he drew her up and wordlessly they held each other, together protecting the vulnerability of love.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE toddler went straight to the fountain, standing on tiptoe to splash her chubby little hands in the cool water, splashing Khalifa, who hovered over her, ready to catch her when her excitement brought her crashing down, as it inevitably would.
‘A klutz, like her mother,’ he said fondly, still waiting for the fall but turning part of his attention to the woman who lay back in a lounger beneath a nearby peach tree, the bulge of her pregnancy obvious beneath the fine cotton gown she wore.
‘Demanding, like her father,’ Liz countered, when her daughter grabbed Khalifa’s snow-white kandora in her wet hands and scrunched a patch of it while yelling his name—or the Da, Da, Da she called him.
Farida Olive Wilhemina bin Khalifa al Zahn was prattling up at her father, and both Liz and Khalifa knew exactly what she wanted, which was to be stripped off and lifted into the water, where she would immediately fall over and emerge yelling her indignation.
‘No,’ Khalifa said, very firmly, but Liz could see he was already shuffling out of his sandals and hitching up his kandora, and in a minute would climb into the fountain himself so he could hold his daughter—the precious pearl he’d named her—while she splashed.
The year had passed so quickly. Settling into life at the palace, life as a mother, life as Khalifa’s wife—this last made her body burn, pregnant though she was—had made the time pass quickly, but at last Liz felt at peace. Thinking of the loss of Bill and Oliver would always cause a little ache inside her, but the gift they’d given her, this beautiful little girl, eased it immensely, while the gift of Khalifa’s love had made her complete in some way she could never explain, even to herself.
He turned towards her now, as if drawn by her thoughts, and smiled. Her toes curled and inside the sparks and fizzing was just as bad as ever.
Or as good as ever…
‘The sand sprite would have had no regrets,’ she said to him, and knew he understood.
ISBN-13: 9781460377581
THE SHEIKH AND THE SURROGATE MUM
© Meredith Webber 2012
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum Page 16
