Kitabı oku: «The Desert Lord's Love-Child»
Family is all that matters to these proud and passionate kings of the desert, so discovering they’re fathers means claiming their children at any cost…
THE
Desert LORD’S LOVE-CHILD
Three intensely emotional stories from favourite authors
OLIVIA GATES KATE HEWITT MEREDITH WEBBER
The
Desert Lord’s Love-Child
The Desert Lord’s Baby
Olivia Gates
The Sheikh’s Love-Child
Kate Hewitt
The Sheikh Surgeon’s Baby
Meredith Webber
MILLS & BOON
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The Desert Lord’s Baby
Olivia Gates
About the Author
OLIVIA GATES has always pursued many passions. But the time came when she had to set up a “passion priority", to give her top one her all, and writing won. Hands down. She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters and then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heartache and hope and heart-pounding doubt until she leads them to their indisputably earned and glorious happy ending. When she’s not writing she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding angora cat.
Please visit Olivia at http://www.oliviagates.com.
To an incredible lady, my editor
Natashya Wilson, for her belief in me, her
constant encouragement and spot-on guidance.
And to wonderful Melissa Jeglinski for
opening up a fantastic new path for me.
Prologue
“Do you know what it felt like, being trapped for two days in those hellish negotiations, away from you?”
Farooq’s voice swept over Carmen, dark and fathomless like the night sky she was staring into, the exotic accent turning it into a potent weapon, an irresistible spell.
She’d felt him the moment he’d entered the penthouse. The skyscraper. Long before that. Probably the moment he’d stepped out of the closed negotiations that had taken him away from her every day for the past six weeks. The nights had been all hers. All theirs. Madness and magic’s.
She’d thought she’d braced herself, was ready for her first exposure to him after forty-eight hours of deprivation.
After she’d found out something that had changed her life forever.
She wasn’t ready. His approach felt like that of a hurricane. Her teeth chattered with the convulsion of emotions ripping through her. How she loved him.
It had happened so fast, so totally. When she’d thought she stopped believing in love, wasn’t even equipped to feel lust. Then, everything inside her had shuddered with the first sight of him, stumbled with the first hours in his company, crashed with the first night in his arms. She’d been hurtling deeper ever since.
She’d known that, when her time with him was up, she’d keep on plunging, hadn’t cared what would happen then, had only been desperate to experience every minute afforded her of him.
Until today.
She gazed blindly through the floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass overlooking Manhattan, which sparkled beyond the sprawling darkness of Central Park. Each quiet step of now-bare feet on the luxurious carpet echoed inside her, along with the hiss of cashmere sliding off silk, then silk off living velvet steel, his masterpiece body slowly revealed, not in reflection, but in her memory, where his every nuance was etched in obsessive detail.
She still couldn’t turn to him. The scalpel edge she’d been balancing on began to slice into her, cutting slow and deep.
This would be their last night.
She wanted to cram a lifetime into it. Tear open every second and fill it with him, with them. She wanted to consume him, needed all his contradictions, patience and arrogance, tenderness and ferocity, all devastating, all at once.
“Wahashteeni, ya ghalyah.” His croon dipped into the bass reaches of her torment. Hearing him say he missed her, the endearment he favored—precious, treasured—hit a chord of blind yearning inside her. Her breasts heaved, her nipples hardened to points of agony. She couldn’t bear the crush of cotton over her inflamed skin, the chafing emptiness inside her. Then he made it far worse. “I shouldn’t have stayed away no matter what. Now I’m almost afraid to touch you, afraid that when I do, it will take us to the very edge of survival.”
He was half a breath away now, and inside her a tornado tore everything apart. She gasped for air. It screeched down her lungs, riding a scent of intoxication, the musk of tension, virility and desire. Of him. A phantom touch moved her cascade of burgundy hair to one shoulder, exposing her neck. He leaned a fraction closer … and breathed. Inhaled her. Drew her whole into him.
Then his hands moved over her, hovering an inch away, creating a field of sensual friction. He brought his lips to her ear and his soft rumble hit her with the force of a clap of thunder. “I couldn’t even call you, knew I’d lose every ground I’d won if I heard your voice, felt your desire. I would have dropped everything and come to you.”
And she knew. She couldn’t take even tonight with him.
If she did, she’d stay. And in six more weeks, he’d know.
He’d know she was pregnant.
And she couldn’t let him know.
She’d promised him it was safe to make love without protection. And it hadn’t been. He’d see her as a liar, a cheat. He’d be incensed. Or worse. Far worse.
He might have behaved magnificently with her, but she had no illusions about what she was to him. She was a diversion to let off steam during negotiations that taxed his soul and psyche. After that first night together, his offer had been clear. Be his lover during his three-month world tour to broker peace and relief. She was certain he intended to end their arrangement with all the largesse of the prince that he was, probably with an ultragenerous settlement. A settlement she would never have accepted.
But fate had given her something far more precious than anything he could have offered her, the ultimate gift …
She shuddered. She’d been so lost in misery, she’d left it too late to move away. Now he took her, wrapped her in his cabled arms, her back to his chest, her head in the curve of his neck as his towering body encompassed her, sending her reeling with wave after wave of such craving, she almost risked everything for one more taste of heaven in his arms. Almost.
She lurched out of his tightening embrace, tottering, trying to pretend it was a natural move, and croaked a distraction, “Did you manage to propose your relief projects without the Ashgoonian prime minister screaming that your monarchy has some nerve, criticizing his ‘democracy’s’ internal affairs?”
It took him a moment to answer. A moment during which he tried to pull her back into his arms. A look of incomprehension stained his overpowering beauty when she evaded him again.
Then he seemed to dismiss her action as nothing to analyze, shrugged his Olympian shoulders. “He did better than that. He gave me unconditional access into Ashgoonian territory for a hundred-mile zone across the borders with Damhoor.”
A surge of pleasure and pride in his extraordinary achievement, something the UN itself hadn’t been able to manage, overtook her, momentarily suppressing her misery. “Oh, Farooq, that’s incredible. You’re going to save so many lives.”
His sensuous lips twisted. “Let’s not count our saved lives before they’re saved, Carmen. In diplomacy I project only worst-case scenarios. But enough of that. I’m not Prince Aal Masood now. I’m the man who has untold pleasures in store for the woman who’s his most magnificent gift for his life’s best birthday.”
His birthday. She’d found out only yesterday, and it had been during her shopping trip for supplies to make the man who had multitudes of everything a handmade gift that she’d collapsed, ended up in hospital and found out that what she’d thought impossible had happened. Farooq’s baby was growing inside her.
He reached for her again. This time when she dodged him, his arms fell to his sides and bewilderment flashed over his sculpted face. Then comprehension dawned in the honeyed depths of his eyes.
He exhaled. “It’s that time of month at last?”
He thought she was having her period? God, how ironic.
She grabbed at the excuse, nodded.
He sighed again. “It has been longer than expected coming, hasn’t it?” He didn’t even know how long it had been. And why should he? He wasn’t counting the moments with her, counting down to the moment their time together came to an end. A wicked gleam suddenly entered his hypnotic eyes. “It’ll never stop stunning me, how delightfully wanton you are at times only to squirm with shyness at others.” She looked away from his teasing. A finger under her chin dragged her aching gaze back to his. “I may be burning to possess you, ya ghalyah, but I’ll take equal pleasure in comforting you. You look so tired, so pale.” He took her arm, pulled her toward the gigantic, circular bed draped in midnight blue silk. “Are you in any pain? I’ll summon my physicians.”
She shook her head, faltered. “I’m just … cramping a bit.”
His smile was all indulgence. “Then I’ll give you a massage. And under my hands, rubbed down with my kingdom’s magical oils, all your aches and discomforts will dissolve.”
The images he provoked speared through her loins, his thoughtfulness through her head and heart. She lurched away. “No.”
The rugged majesty of his face stiffened with confusion. He approached her again, his hands spreading in solicitude that became bafflement, then frustration when she jumped out of reach again.
He finally rasped, “What’s wrong?”
She had to do it now. Before she weakened. Before she succumbed. She blurted it out. “I’m going back home.”
He stared at her, all expression frozen on his face. At last he inhaled.
“Again I ask, what’s wrong?” His voice was measured now, careful, as if he were talking to a frightened mare.
“Nothing’s wrong. I just want to go back to L.A.”
Puzzlement and watchfulness still hovered in his eyes as he persisted. “And the reason is?”
Her gaze wavered, her lungs closed. She hadn’t thought for a second that his response to her declaration would be anything beyond a sigh and a shrug, before he moved on to the next conquest. His unexpected probing cornered her, made her blurt out the first thing that came to her. “I thought I was free to go whenever I wanted.”
Imperiousness, something she knew was innate in him but which he’d never subjected her to, blazed in his eyes. “You’re not. Not without justification for your abrupt demand.”
Floundering, she said, “It’s a decision. And it’s not abrupt. I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time.”
Harshness crept into his eyes, into his voice when he drawled, “Oh, yes? Were your cries for more forty-eight hours ago part of telling me you wanted to cut our time together short?”
She turned away. She’d collapse where she stood if she tried to hold his gaze one more second. He didn’t let her get far, his hands clamping her shoulders, his lips feathering along her neck.
“Enough of this, Carmen.” His groan jolted more longing and misery through her. “Whatever this is. If you’re angry with me for some—”
She jerked out of his hands, rasped, “I’m not.” His jaw muscles worked. “There must be something. You can’t just want to leave. I won’t let you—”
And she cried out, the shrillness of panic creeping into her voice. “I’m not asking you if I can leave, I’m informing you.”
His face became implacable. “You’re going nowhere until you tell me the truth. If you’re in any trouble—”
“I’m not.” God. She’d underestimated his sense of entitlement. She’d forgotten he was more than the man she loved with everything in her. He was a prince of unlimited power. He expected, and always got, his way. He’d probe and press until she broke down, gave him what he asked for. And she couldn’t.
One way out flashed inside her mind. Desperate. Dangerous. She could think of nothing else.
Suppressing tremors of anguish and anxiety, she murmured, “Contrary to what you’re used to in your native Judar where your word is law, this is a free country, your highness. A woman has the same rights as a man here to take her pleasure where she pleases, and change her mind when she pleases.”
He flinched as if she’d slapped him. “And you’ve changed yours? When you can barely stand with wanting me?”
She felt the twitches of loss of control seizing her. God. She’d made her life’s worst mistake coming back here, being so weak she’d needed to see him one last time. She should have just disappeared.
Feeling crazed with desperation, she taunted, “That is what you’d like to think, isn’t it?”
He stared at her, his eyes deadening.
When he finally spoke, he sounded smooth, tranquil. “How about we drop the charade? I have nothing but games everywhere in my life. But in my bedroom I allow only sexual ones. You think the remaining six weeks should carry a more substantial price tag than sharing my bed and privileges? How remiss of me. I should have put an offer you can appreciate on the table. So if you have demands …” He suddenly yanked her to him, bent her over a potent arm, his other hand pressing her hips to his, his erection grinding against her long-molten core, the refined man she’d known receding fast. “Make them. I’ll meet them, whatever they are.”
Her heart crumpled.
Oh God. This had gotten uglier than anything she could have imagined. He thought she was bargaining with the unstoppable desire that had raged between them from the first glance. Though his repugnance was total, he seemed willing to pay anything for more of her.
She tore herself out of his arms. She had to end this. Now.
Only the ugliest lie would do.
Feeling the resignation of a death sentence settling over her, it flowed from her in a lifeless voice. “I thought I owed you the courtesy of not disappearing without saying goodbye. But it seems I should have spared myself the unpleasantness, should have known you’d react with the barbarism of your culture and the conceit of your inherited status. You may be good in bed, Farooq, but so are a hundred other men. I like variety, and I always leave when my lovers start to bore me. I thought it best to go before I was sick of you. I didn’t want to spell it out, but it’s clear I shouldn’t have bothered with civility.”
Before she collapsed at his feet in a weeping mess, she staggered around him, snatched up her handbag, images of a baby who looked like him fueling her march out of his bedroom, out of his world.
But the image that would remain imprinted on her retinas for the rest of her life was of his face. The face of the hostile stranger she’d managed to turn him into in mere minutes.
The hostile stranger she’d never see again.
One
“Bagha … bagha …”
Carmen paused in the middle of hanging the nursery’s new curtains. She looked down at Mennah, listened to her chirping her latest “word,” her heart in a state of expansion.
She’d gotten used to feeling her heart filling her whole chest, her whole being, since she’d given birth to her daughter.
She’d demanded Mennah the moment she’d come out of her womb, disregarding the doctor’s grumbling that he had to close said womb first. He’d succumbed, though, had placed the smeared, nine-pound miracle on Carmen’s bosom. And for long moments, as she’d first touched her baby, felt her precious weight, her flesh and heat and reality, Carmen had been afraid she wouldn’t survive the explosion of emotions raging through her.
She’d searched for the right name long and hard. She’d found the perfect one, what this baby was, in her father’s mother tongue. Mennah. Her gift from God.
Now her gift was latching chubby fingers onto her playpen’s railings, hauling herself up to a standing position. She then tried to stand unsupported and landed on her diaper-padded bottom with a cry of chagrin-mixed glee, tearing a laugh from Carmen’s depths.
“Oh, Mennah, darling, you’re in such a hurry.”
And she was. At only nine months, she’d been sitting unsupported for almost three, crawling for almost two and was now clearly on her way to overtaking another milestone.
Carmen slotted the last hook, climbed down the ladder and headed to the playpen. Her sunny angel grinned at her, good nature brimming from golden eyes, displaying her newly acquired set of teeth, her dimples flashing in the perfection of her cherubic face. A surge of emotions clogged Carmen’s throat, rising to her eyes.
Could she have been so blessed?
Mennah held up her arms. Carmen obliged at once, bent and cradled the robust little body that was her reason for living. Mennah mashed her face into her mother’s neck, and Carmen’s arms convulsed around her. It was a good thing Mennah loved fierce hugs. Carmen bore down on the flare of love, rocked Mennah in her arms, one hand luxuriating in the raven silk of her locks. Hmm, the bald patch from before Mennah started rolling around was totally gone.
Suddenly Mennah pushed away, looked up expectantly. “Bagha bagha.”
Carmen tickled her nose. “Yes, darling, you’re trying to tell me something and your mommy is so dense she hasn’t figured it out yet. But that’s a new word. Give me a day and I’ll figure it out. Say—could it be you’re telling me you’re hungry? It has been a couple of hours since you’ve eaten.” Carmen started to undo her shirt only for Mennah to slap her hands on top of Carmen’s, squealing, part playful, part admonishing. Carmen sighed. “No mommy-produced sustenance?”
Mennah giggled. Carmen sighed again. She’d been hoping to prolong nursing. But this was another area where Mennah was in a hurry. She’d been refusing to nurse more and more ever since she’d been introduced to solid foods, decreasing Carmen’s milk flow. This was the second day with no nursing at all. During that time Mennah had even given her grief about eating previously much-loved foods. And Carmen could guess why.
“I shouldn’t have given you a taste of my filet mignon, darling. Seems you share more than your looks with your father. He, too, is a big panther who relishes red meat—”
Carmen stopped. Mennah was looking up at her with such absorption, as if she was memorizing everything her mother said.
Carmen had been indulging in the heartbreaking pleasure of constantly talking to her about her father. Maybe she should resist giving in to the urge. There was no way Mennah understood now, but maybe before Carmen realized, she would. And she didn’t want to explain her father’s absence for years. Not that she’d ever have enough time to come up with an adequate explanation.
Exhaling, shaking off a resurgence of the despondency that had suffocated her all through her pregnancy, she walked out of the nursery, headed to their open-plan, sunlit kitchen.
She secured Mennah in her high chair, dropped a kiss on top of her glossy head. “One bagha bagha coming up.”
She placed plastic toys in front of Mennah, set the iPod to a slow rock collection and started preparing the dish that had converted her baby to gourmet cuisine. Amidst singing along with her favorite songs and Mennah’s accompanying shrieks of enthusiasm, she stopped periodically to gather the toys with which Mennah gleefully tested gravity, giving them back to her so she’d restart her experiments over and over again.
She was finishing the mushroom sauce when she noticed it had been a couple of minutes since she’d fetched for Mennah, since her daughter’s squeals had disharmonized with her singing.
She turned around and her heart overflowed with another gush of love. Mennah was out like a light on the high chair’s tray.
She always did fall asleep without warning. But she couldn’t have been hungry after all, if she could fall asleep among all those mouthwatering aromas.
Sighing, eyeing the meal that had to be served hot to be good, Carmen turned off the music, unbuckled Mennah from her seat then went to put her down in her crib.
The singing had stopped.
The crashing of Farooq’s heart hadn’t.
And it wasn’t only his heart that manifested his upheaval. Every muscle in his body was clenched, every nerve discharging.
He’d been standing there for what felt like a day, listening to the sounds coming from inside. Wistful love songs accompanied by the gleeful noises of an infant. And the overpowering melody of a siren.
He’d willed himself over and over to ring the bell. Better still, to break down the door.
He’d just stood there, his ear almost to the door to catch every decibel of a slice of life of the tiny family that lived inside, his hands caressing the door as if it were them.
He felt as if he’d disintegrate with an emotion so fierce he had no name for it, no experience and no way to deal with it.
It had to be rage. An unknown level that made what he’d felt when Carmen had told him she was leaving pale in comparison. It dwarfed what he’d felt when he’d pursued her, bent on erasing the ugliness, the madness of that confrontation, on bringing back his Carmen and the perfection they’d shared, only for more betrayal to tear at him when he’d seen her getting into his cousin Tareq’s car. It even eclipsed what he’d felt when he’d confronted Tareq and discovered why she’d really left.
His cousin and arch nemesis had confessed that he’d sent Carmen to seduce Farooq, to get pregnant and create a scandal large enough to stop Farooq’s rise to the succession. Tareq had snickered that their uncle’s latest decree had thrown a sabot in the cogs of his treachery, turning a pregnancy into an asset, not a liability, forcing him to order Carmen to leave, going back to the drawing board to think of something else to eliminate Farooq from the running.
It had all made sense to Farooq then. From the moment he’d seen her to the moment she’d walked out on him.
Or he’d thought it had.
It had been only hours ago that he’d learned the full truth.
Another tidal wave of emotion crashed over him.
Ya Ullah—he’d never struggled for control, had never even contemplated its loss. He’d been born in control, of himself before others. His urges and desires were his to command, never the other way around. Then there was Carmen.
He’d lost control with his first sight of her, had lost his discretion while drowning in her pleasures, had almost lost his restraint upon her desertion.
Now he was a hairsbreadth from losing his reason.
And it was her doing yet again.
He leaned his forehead on the door, forced inhalations into his spastic lungs, order into his frenzied thoughts, willing the blinding seizure to pass.
It took minutes and the nosiness of two neighbors to bring him down. He regained at least enough control to settle a semblance of composure over the chaos, smothering it. Enough to make him reach a resolution.
He’d never let her affect him that deeply again. Ever.
He’d go in, take what he wanted. As he always did.
He straightened, set his teeth with great precision and almost drove his finger through her doorbell.
Carmen jerked up from watching Mennah sleep. The bell!
Though it almost never rang, she’d been waiting for her super to come fix the short-circuit in the laundry room. He’d said within the next two days. Four days ago.
But it was the way the bell rang that had made her jump. It had almost … bellowed, for lack of a better description. Maybe it was about to give, too, and that sound was its dying throes?
Sighing, she checked Mennah’s monitor and the wireless receiver clipped to her jeans’ waist. On her way to the door, she smoothed her hands over her hair but gave up in midmotion with a huff. A disheveled greeter was what her super got for coming unannounced, catching a single mother with a dozen chores behind her and a shower still in her future.
Fixing a smile on her lips, intending her greeting to be thanks for his arrival if no thanks for his delay, she opened the door.
Her heart didn’t stop immediately.
It went on with its rhythm for a moment, the kind that simulated hours, before it lost the blood it needed to keep on pumping. The blood now shooting to her head, pooling in her legs. Then it stopped.
And everything else hurtled, screeched, into consciousness.
Denial, dread, desperation.
She’d changed her career to work from home, had relocated to the other side of the continent, had still remained scared that he’d find her. But he hadn’t, and eventually she’d believed he hadn’t tried, or hadn’t been able to.
But he had found her. Was on her doorstep. Farooq.
Filling her doorway. Blocking out existence.
She found herself slumped against the door, her fingers almost breaking off with the force with which they clutched it. Some instinct must have remained functioning, saving her from crashing to the ground. Some auxiliary power must be fueling her continued grip on consciousness.
“Save it.”
That was all he said as he pushed past her, walking into her apartment as if he owned it. And his voice …
This wasn’t the voice etched in her memory. The voice that echoed in every moment’s silence, haunting her, whispering seduction, rumbling arousal, roaring completion, always charged with emotion. This voice contained as much life as a voice simulation program.
God, what was he doing here?
No. She didn’t care what he was doing here. She didn’t care that her insides were crumbling under the avalanche of emotion the sight of him had triggered.
She had to get rid of him. Fast.
She had to regain control first, of her coherence, to think of something to say, of her volition, to be able to say it.
She leaned against the door she didn’t remember closing, feeling as if the least tremor would shatter the tension keeping her upright. She watched his powerful strides take him into the formal living room, felt him shrinking it, converging all light on him like a spotlight in the dark.
And even through her shock and panic, everything inside her devoured each line of his juggernaut’s body, even bigger and taller than she remembered, the sculpted suit worshipping it from the daunting breadth of shoulders, to the sparseness of waist and hips, to the formidable power of thighs and endless legs.
Memory was a sadistic master, lashing open festering wounds with images and sensations, of those shoulders dominating her, those hips thrusting her to a frenzy, those thighs and legs encompassing her in the aftermath of madness.
She tore her gaze and memories away, choking on longing. Then he turned, and everything in her piled up with the brunt of his beauty, the rawness of her still-burning love.
His heavy-lidded gaze documented her reaction before he raised both eyebrows, a movement rich in nonchalance and imperiousness. “Finished with your latest act, or shall I wait until you’ve delivered the full performance?”
It wasn’t only his voice that was different. This wasn’t the Farooq she remembered. This wasn’t even the hostile stranger she’d walked out on. That man had been seething with harshness, with emotion. This man was even more forbidding, as he eyed her with the clinical coldness of a scientist dealing with inanimate matter.
His lips pursed as if he were assessing a defective product. He finally gave a slight shake of his awesome head, lips twisting on his unfavorable verdict. “As an unbiased viewer, I must tell you, your acting abilities are slipping. Exaggeration is not your friend.”
Before she could even process his dispassionate comment, let alone find words to answer it, he relieved her of his focus, cast his gaze around her space.
She could see his connoisseur’s mind adding up the worth of every square foot, every piece of furniture, brush stroke and decorative article and felt defensive. Though she’d made this place chic and cheery, it could well be derelict compared to the opulence he was used to. Which was a stupid thing to feel and think.
She had to make him leave. Now. Before Mennah woke up. Before he saw the childproofing she’d begun installing.
He finally returned those empty eyes to hers as he walked back toward her. She watched him cross the distance between them with the fatalism of someone about to be hit by a train.
“It cost a bundle, this place,” he murmured. “I would have wondered how you afforded it. If I didn’t already know.”
She almost blurted out “What do you mean by that?”
She didn’t. She couldn’t locate her voice. Her heart had long invaded her throat. She could barely breathe enough to keep from passing out. And his indifference and disparagement were encasing her in frost, hurrying her descent. Everything was taking on a surreal tinge. She began to hope this was a scenario out of her Farooq-starved imagination.
Then he was within touching distance. And she had to prove to herself he was—or wasn’t—really here.
She reached out a trembling hand, half expecting her fingertips to encounter a mirage. Instead they feathered over black-silk-covered flesh, the layered sensations of softness and steel, heat and hardness. Her fingers pressed into him, shudders engulfing her, like an electrocution victim unable to break the deadly circuit.
