by Penny Jordan
Then, Christa had been too young to recognise the very warm heart her great-aunt kept hidden beneath her slightly stern exterior, and certainly too young to understand how very, very hard it had been for a woman of her great-aunt’s age and upbringing to take over the family business and make her way in what was, then, very much a man’s world.
She had thought her great-aunt was telling her that the business was far more important than she was, not understanding that the older woman was concerned about how she was going to manage to bring up her orphaned great-niece and continue to earn enough money to support them both as well.
She had, in those days, seen the business as her rival, Christa acknowledged. Of course, later she had come to understand and see the true position and to appreciate just how difficult things must have been for her great-aunt when she had first come into her life.
And that initial jealousy had become a dim memory over the years. Something to smile at a little when she looked back on her younger self.
But, like the death of her parents and her subsequent subconscious belief that they had somehow deserted her, and that consequently anyone she came to love might do the same thing, perhaps that jealousy had left a far deeper mark on her psyche than she had realised.
Daniel was very much involved in his work. He believed very deeply in its benefits and it was an area of his life that, through her choice, she could not share.
Did she, then, perhaps subconsciously see it as a rival, a threat to her own relationship with him, something which might ultimately take him away from her…be more important to him than she was? And was it perhaps her jealousy which had been motivating her in her rejection of his way of life?
Was she, perhaps at some subconscious and yet childish level, attempting to dispose of her ‘rival’ by making him choose between them and then telling herself that, unless he could put her first, his love wasn’t worth having?
Deep in thought, she started to frown. It wasn’t either pleasant or easy facing up to such a facet of her personality. In fact, her instinctive reaction was one of shocked rejection.
She would never do anything so manipulative. It simply wasn’t in her nature…Not in her mature, adult nature, perhaps, she acknowledged, and certainly never in any premeditated way, but, subconsciously, might not the child within her…? Oh, Daniel—if only he were with her now. If only she could explain, talk to him.
Suddenly she was filled with an imperative urge, not only to correct his misinterpretation of what he had overheard, but also to discuss with him what she felt she had discovered about herself.
The relief of discovering why she had been so afraid of trust and commitment, and the pain of not having Daniel there to share it with her, brought the soft sting of hot tears to her eyes.
If only she could just close her eyes and, by some magical means, transport herself back to Wales, to the farmhouse, to Daniel’s arms.
* * *
She tried to ring him one more time before she went to bed, but once again there was no answer.
During the night the heaviness of the monsoon rains caused minor flooding on the outskirts of the city and damage to the telephone system, which meant that, when Christa woke up in the morning, not only could she not telephone Daniel, she couldn’t get in touch with any of her suppliers either.
A day spent dashing from one appointment to another, and trying to keep her thoughts clear enough of Daniel to try to concentrate, not only on examining the samples of fabric she was being shown, but also on keeping firmly in control of her negotiations with Karachi’s astute cotton traders, left her feeling as exhausted mentally as the heat and damp of the monsoon was doing physically.
When she returned to her hotel at the end of the day, her hair and her clothes were clinging stickily to her skin. But, much as she longed for the cool refreshment of a long shower, the first thing she did was to rush to the phone.
The disappointment that flooded her as she realised that it still wasn’t working was sickeningly acute.
Today, studying the fabric samples she was being shown, she had known that her mind was not on what she was doing. The fierce exhilaration she normally felt on first seeing the new designs simply hadn’t been there. She might as well have been looking at a piece of sacking, she recognised hollowly.
Oh, Daniel…Where was he? What was he doing? Was he thinking about her, missing her…wanting her…?
The way he had stormed off like that had been so out of character; he was not an irritable, easily angered man. Far from it. Of the two of them, she was the one who was the most impulsive…the more volatile.
Oh, Daniel!
She sat down on her bed, her eyes blurring with tears.
* * *
The days dragged by, long-drawn-out hours of misery and anguish, despite all the work she had to do. The telephone systems were repaired, but the telephone at the farmhouse still continued to ring emptily into the silence.
She was taken round factories, shown a vast array of fabric samples, taken out to dinner, wined and dined and flirted with, but the real essence of her simply wasn’t there, she acknowledged tiredly when the morning of her departure finally arrived.
The longing to be back at home which had coloured her first few days in Pakistan had now gone. Instead, she was almost dreading her return home. While she was here it was still possible—just—for her to play ‘let’s pretend’ and kid herself that everything was all right. That Daniel had not walked off and left her; that everything was still as it had been before they left Wales. That she was going home to him…to his love…to their future together.
But, now that she was about to go home, that comforting fiction could no longer be maintained. She was dreading her arrival in Britain, she acknowledged, dreading having to face up to the reality of having lost Daniel’s love.
And she must have lost it, otherwise…surely he would have been in touch with her?
* * *
At Karachi airport she discovered that there had been a mix-up with the tickets and that her flight was overbooked. An apologetic official promised her that they would put her on standby and give her the first vacant seat available.
Eighteen hours later, when she finally climbed on board the flight for Manchester, Christa wasn’t sure whether the nausea and cramps that were making her feel so ill were caused by a bug she had picked up or by the nervous tension of her delayed return. As she shook her pale face in rejection of the meal the stewardess was offering, fighting down the queasy nausea which had persisted all through the flight, the woman seated next to her grimaced sympathetically and confided, ‘I know what it’s like; I was sick the whole of the first six months with my first. Morning sickness! That’s a joke…I was throwing up morning, noon and night, twenty-four hours a day, every day…Still it was worth it—in the end,’ she added with a smile.
Stunned, Christa stared at her. Pregnant…Her…Oh, no…Impossible—she couldn’t be…Could she?
‘If there are any consequences it will mean marriage,’ Daniel had told her. But that had been then, and this was now.
The woman could be wrong, of course. She might not be pregnant.
But what if she was, what would Daniel say…? Do…?
By the time the plane landed at Manchester airport, Christa was both physically and mentally exhausted.
She had, she reflected tiredly, been through every permutation of what her possible pregnancy could mean during the long flight home, and the stark truth stalked her like a silent enemy as she made her way through Customs.
If Daniel insisted on marrying her because she was pregnant, she would never truly know if he had done so out of duty rather than out of love, and he would never know if she had lied to him when she told him that he now had her complete trust. The baby, their baby, their child would be burdened by their mutual inability to be completely open and honest with one another, when it should have been born into a world of love and joy.
By the time she was through Customs she h
ad made up her mind. She was not going to tell Daniel that she was pregnant, not just for his sake but for their child’s as well.
Lost in the slow pain of her own thoughts, she would have walked straight past the solitary figure standing watching the weary travellers trudging towards the exits if he hadn’t suddenly called out her name.
‘Daniel!’ She stared at him in open disbelief.
He looked tired and grim, his eyes slightly bloodshot, his jaw rough with shadowy stubble.
‘Thank God you’re all right,’ Daniel told her hoarsely as he relieved her of her luggage and took hold of her arm. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you but the hotel had no record of you booking in, and then when you weren’t on your flight…’
He was holding her, Christa recognised, as though he was determined never—ever—to let her go.
‘There was a problem with the hotel room,’ Christa told him dizzily, suddenly beginning to feel oddly lightheaded.
Daniel was here. He had come to meet her. He had tried to contact her…
‘I tried to ring you,’ she told him, ‘but you were never there…’
‘No, I’ve been up at Dai’s farm. He collapsed with alcohol poisoning the night you left and I’ve been staying up there trying to keep things going.
‘Christa…’
‘Daniel…’
They both stopped and looked at one another.
‘Daniel,’ Christa began shakily again, her heart overflowing with love and the joy of knowing that he still cared; that she mattered enough to him for him to be here, that…
‘No,’ he denied her softly, ‘let me speak first-please…’
Emotionally Christa watched him. Once she had explained to him just how wrong he had been in suspecting that she had been going to tell Paul Thompson she did not trust him, then she intended to make sure that he knew, irrevocably and for all time, just what it had meant to her to see him waiting for her here and to see his love for her in his eyes.
‘I love you, Christa,’ he told her fiercely, ‘and if it makes me less of a man to admit that I need you more than I need my pride, then so be it. I’m not going to pretend that your trust isn’t—’
‘Daniel, don’t,’ Christa begged huskily. ‘I do trust you…I realised that when I was listening to Paul Thompson spouting all that rubbish about you telling people that you’d taken me to bed to get me to change my mind about your courses. It was so obvious that it couldn’t possibly be true,’ she added scornfully, her voice softening slightly as she said, ‘That was what I was going to say to him when you walked in. Ridiculous, isn’t it, she added, her voice becoming dangerously wobbly, ‘that it took listening to someone like Paul to make me see the truth? I was jealous of your business, of your enthusiasm for it. I was afraid that somehow it would come between us.’
‘Nothing, nothing could ever do that,’ Daniel assured her roughly. ‘You’re my life, Christa, my love…my soul…’
As she listened to him, Christa felt her bones starting to melt, her body beginning to ache.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Daniel warned her hoarsely. ‘Not here in public. Have you any idea what it’s been like—not knowing where you were? How you were…I’ve spent the last eighteen hours checking the passengers on every flight from Pakistan…’
‘There had been a mix-up over the booking and I had to wait for a standby seat,’ Christa told him. ‘Oh, Daniel…’
As they stood facing one another, gazing into each other’s eyes, someone bumped into Daniel, apologising as he hurried past.
The forceful contact had dislodged some papers from the inside pocket of Daniel’s jacket. As he bent to retrieve them one of them became separated from the others. It was a letter, Christa realised, the paper headed with the name of one of the country’s most prestigious universities.
Frowning, she stared at it and then, before Daniel could stop her, she bent down and picked it up, reading it quickly before he could retrieve it from her, her face pale with shock as she stared at him.
‘You’ve applied to go back to lecturing,’ she said in disbelief. ‘But you said that that was something you would never do.’
‘Yes,’ Daniel agreed quietly.
‘Then why?’ Christa asked him, even though she suspected she already knew the answer.
‘Because you mean more to me than the centre does, Christa, and I could see that it was always going to come between us, that while it existed you would always have fears and doubts.’
‘No, Daniel. No,’ Christa protested. She felt as though he had held a mirror up to her soul and shown her how mean and selfish she had been.
‘Oh, no. You mustn’t do that,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You mustn’t.’
Christa saw from the look in his eyes that she hadn’t convinced him.
Taking a deep breath and then crossing her fingers behind her back for good measure, she said quickly, ‘You can’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair. A baby…a child needs fresh air and freedom…not…not the cloistered atmosphere of a university.
‘He or she needs a father who will be there for him, not one who’s too busy lecturing or constantly away on lecture tours.’
‘A baby…’ Daniel had gone oddly pale. ‘Are you sure?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ Christa admitted honestly. ‘But…but sooner or later there will be a baby, Daniel…a child…our child. Won’t there?’
‘Yes,’ he told her thickly. ‘Yes. Yes…Yes…Oh, God, Christa what the hell are we doing here? Let’s go home…’
Two hours later, curled up next to him in the chair in her workroom, the samples she had brought home with her scattered all over the floor, Christa sighed happily and snuggled closer to him.
‘You’ve never asked me what exactly I did say to the Chamber of Commerce head,’ Daniel reminded her.
‘I didn’t need to,’ Christa responded. ‘It isn’t important…’
‘Mmm…perhaps not, but, just for the record, what I actually told him was that, in view of the personal relationship which had developed between us, I wanted it put on record that my challenge to you and my claim to the chamber was null and void.
‘It was the honourable thing to do,’ he added, when Christa looked lovingly at him.
‘Like marrying me because I might be carrying your child?’ she teased him, her lips touching his.
‘No, not at all like that,’ he laughed. ‘That is extremely dishonourable, given the fact that, if I’m honest, I’ve been secretly praying that you have conceived.’
‘And if I haven’t?’ Christa asked him.
His mouth against hers, Daniel told her lovingly, ‘Well then, in that case, we’ll just have to try harder, won’t we, my love?’
Christa’s response was non-vocal, but abundantly plain nevertheless.
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Sharon Kendrick’s next book,
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABY
Sheikh Zuhal is shocked to discover he has a son! To claim his child, he must get former lover Jazz down the palace aisle. And he’s not above using seduction to make her his wife!
Read on for a glimpse of
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABY
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS THE LAST place he’d imagined her living.
Zuhal frowned. Jasmine? Here? In a tiny cottage in the middle of the English countryside, down a lane so narrow it had challenged the progress of his wide limousine? The woman who had loved the sparkle and buzz of the city, hiding herself away in some remote spot. There had to be some kind of mistake.
His frown became a flickering smile of anticipation. Not that he had given a lot of thought to her accommodation. If ever he’d stopped to think about his lusciously proportioned ex-lover—something he tried not to do, for obvious reasons—then it had usually been a predictable flashback to her soft skin. Or the tempting pertness of her breasts. Or the way she used to rain kisses all over his face so that his heart used to punch with pleasure. His groin, too
.
He swallowed.
And that, of course, was the reason for his unexpected appearance today. The reason he’d decided to drop in and surprise her.
His throat dried. Why not? He liked sex and so did Jasmine. Of all his lovers, she had been the one who had really lit his fire. Sparks had flown between them from the start and it seemed a pity not to capitalise on that explosive chemistry with a little trip down memory lane. After all, it wasn’t as if either of them had entertained any unrealistic expectations. There had been no dreams to be shattered. They hadn’t asked for the impossible and had known exactly where the boundaries lay. They had conducted their affair like adults. What possible harm could it do to revisit the past and revel in a little uncomplicated bliss at a time in his life when he needed some light relief like never before?
He felt the smile die on his lips as part of him questioned the sanity of revisiting the past—and a woman—like this. Because he never went back. If you reignited an old relationship, then a woman could almost be excused for thinking it meant more to you than it really did…and no relationship ever meant more than sex to Zuhal Al Haidar.
And since Jazz was realistic enough to accept that, maybe this one time he could be excused for breaking one of his own rules, because destiny was leading him down an unwanted path—a path which had altered his whole future. Silently, he simultaneously cursed and mourned his foolish brother, but all the wishing in the world wasn’t going to bring him back, or rewrite the pages of history which had changed his own destiny. He wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to concentrate on Jasmine Jones and her soft body. To have her obliterate everything except desire and fulfilment. He was growing hard just thinking about it, because she was the sweetest lover he had ever known.
He stepped over a cracked flagstone, through which a healthy-looking weed was pushing through. It had crossed his mind that she might have replaced him in her affections during the eighteen months they’d been apart, but deep down Zuhal refused to countenance such a scenario—mainly because his ego would not allow him to.
