The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus (14 page)

For a moment Mariella couldn’t do anything. Xavier was watching her as she had been watching him. Excitement exploded inside her. She took a step towards him and then another, measuring his reaction as best she could, but it wasn’t easy given the extent of her own intense arousal.

She was only a breath away from him now, close enough to reach out her finger and draw the tip of it recklessly down his body, teasing the silky body hair.

‘You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to do this,’ she breathed truthfully.

‘No? Well, I certainly know how much I’ve wanted you to do it,’ Xavier responded throatily, ‘and how much I’ve wanted to...’

He gasped and shuddered as her fingertip stroked lower, and suddenly in the space of one single heartbeat she was lying on the bed, with Xavier arching over her.

‘Play with fire like that and you’ll make us both burn,’ he told her, his eyes darkening as he groaned. ‘Do you know what seeing that look in your eyes does to me? Do you know how much I’ve wanted to see just what colour they turn when I touch you like this?’

Mariella hadn’t realised just how ready she was for his intimate caress until she felt his hand stroke softly over her quivering belly, his fingers gently touching the swollen mound of her sex, his gaze pinioning hers as he parted the lips of her sex and began to caress her.

Mariella knew that she cried out, she knew too that her body arched to his touch actively seeking it, eagerly opening to it, but it was only a vague, distant knowledge, at the back of her awareness. Her self was concentrated on the mind-exploding battle to accept the intensity of her own feelings.

Frantically she reached for Xavier. Touching him, holding him, wrapping herself around him as she pressed passionate kisses against his skin, willing, aching for him to complete what he had begun.

And when he did enter her, moving into her, filling her moist sheathed muscles, filling her with such a soaring degree of pleasure that they and she clung to him, wanting to wring every infinitesimal sensation of pleasure from him, it was like nothing she had ever imagined feeling, a pleasure beyond any known pleasure, a sensation beyond any experienced sensation, a driven need that shocked her in its wanton compulsion as she urged him to drive deeper, harder, breaching every last barrier of her body until she knew instinctively that he could not and would not withdraw from her without giving her body the satisfaction it now craved.

They moved together, his thrusts carrying them both, delivering a pleasure so intense she could scarcely bear it, crying out against it at the same time as she abandoned herself to it.

She heard his guttural cry of warning and felt her body open up completely to him, the first tiny shudders of her orgasm sensitising her to the pulse of his, to the knowledge that she was receiving from him what she had so much wanted.

Was it that knowledge that made her orgasm so intense, so fierce that she felt almost as though she could not endure so much pleasure?

Long after it should have been over, the aftermath continued to send little shudders of sensation through her, shaking her whole body as she lay locked in Xavier’s arms.

She had done it, instinctively she knew it. Her child, of the desert and of a man who was equally compelling, equally dangerous, had been given life.

* * *

R
ELUCTANTLY
, M
ARIELLA
OPENED
her eyes. She could hear a shower running, and her whole body ached with an unfamiliar heaviness.

‘So you are awake!’

She stiffened as she saw Xavier coming towards her, his hair damp from his shower, a towel wrapped carelessly round his hips.

Leaning towards her, he bent his head to kiss her. He smelled of soap and clean, fresh skin and her body quivered helplessly in reaction to him.

‘Mmm...’

He kissed her again, more lingeringly, his hand stroking down over her bare arm.

The quivers became open shudders of erotic pleasure as he pulled the bedclothes back.

She had got what she wanted, and so surely she shouldn’t be feeling like this now that there wasn’t any need for her to want him!

The towel was sliding from his hips, quite plainly revealing the fact that he most definitely wanted her.

A sharp and unmistakable thrill of female excitement gripped her muscles.

It was just nature’s way of making doubly sure, Mariella told herself hazily as his hand cupped her breast, his thumb and forefinger teasing the already eagerly taut crest of her nipple. That was all, and, since nature wanted to be doubly sure, then obviously she must give in to her urgings. Urgings that were demanding that she experience the pleasure Xavier had given her the night before, and right now...

His hands were on her hips, holding her, lifting her. Already Mariella was anticipating the feel of him inside her, longing for it and for him. Needing him.

* * *

‘T
HERE
WILL
BE
things we shall need to discuss once we return to the city.’

‘Mmm...’ Mariella agreed, too satiated to lift her head off the pillow as Xavier turned to brush a kiss across her mouth.

She looked so tempting lying there in his bed, her face soft with satisfaction and her eyes heavy with their lovemaking, he acknowledged, ruefully aware of the way in which his senses were still reacting to her.

It would be all too easy to let the desire between them flare into life again, but there were practicalities that had to be considered.

‘Mariella.’ The abrupt note in his voice caught her attention. ‘Because of my position as leader of our tribe, I have always believed that I do not have the...freedoms of other men. I could never commit myself to a relationship with a woman who might not be able to understand or accept my duties and responsibilities to my people. Nor could I change my way of life, or...’

‘Xavier, there’s no need for you to say any more,’ Mariella checked him swiftly. Her heart was pounding heavily, a sharp, bitter little pain, piercing her even though she was fighting against admitting to it, stubbornly refusing to listen to the message it was trying to give her.

‘I would never ask you or any other man to do any such thing! And I can assure you that you need have no fear that I might misconstrue what’s happened. I shan’t. I am most definitely not looking for any kind of commitment from you.’

Only the commitment of conceiving his child, she admitted inwardly.

‘In fact, commitment is the last thing I want.’ Assuming a casualness that defied everything she had always inwardly believed in, she gave a small shrug and told him, ‘We are both adults. We wanted to have sex. To satisfy a...a physical need... And...now that we have done so, I don’t think there is any purpose in us holding a post-mortem, and even less in getting involved in needless discussions about the wherefores of why neither of us want a committed relationship. Truthfully, Xavier, I don’t want to marry you any more than you want to marry me! In fact, I shall never marry.’ Mariella delivered the words in a strong voice underpinned with determination.

‘What?’

Why was Xavier looking at her like that? Where was the relief she had expected—the cool acceptance of her claim that they had come together merely to slake their sexual appetite for one another? Xavier was looking at her with a mingling of barely controlled fury and bitterness.

‘What are you saying?’ she heard him demanding savagely. ‘You are not your sister, Mariella! You are not one of those shallow, surface-living women who think only of themselves; who give in to their need to experience what they want when they want, who go from man to man, bed to bed without...whose whole way of life—’ He paused and shook his head.

‘You are not like her! You don’t even know what you are talking about! Mere physical sex is not something...’

Mariella could see and feel the intensity of his growing anger, and she could also feel her own increasingly disturbing reaction of panic and pain to it, but she refused to allow herself to be intimidated by them.

‘I am not going to argue with you, Xavier. I know how I feel, and what I do and don’t want from life.’

Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it? She did know what she wanted, and she had every hope that last night had given her...

‘Do you really expect me to believe that you drove all the way out here just because you wanted sex?’

‘Why not?’ Mariella shrugged. ‘After all, I could hardly have come to your room at the villa, could I?’ she pointed out, trying to make herself react as though she were the woman she was trying to be—a woman who thought nothing of indulging her sexual appetite as and when she wanted to do so!

‘This was the perfect opportunity!’

Xavier was looking at her as though he would dearly love to make her take back her words, Mariella recognised uneasily. It had to be his male pride that was making him react in such an unexpected manner, she decided. Men were quite happy to use women for sexual pleasure without being emotionally committed to them, but apparently they didn’t like it very much when they thought that they were the ones being used.

Her legs began to tremble shakily as she mentally digested his reaction and tried to imagine what he might say—and do if he knew that she hadn’t even actually wanted him out of sexual lust, and that the desire that had really driven her had been her own female need to conceive his child!

Somehow instinctively she knew that the reaction she was seeing now would be nothing when compared with what he was likely to do were he ever to discover the truth!

The unexpected shrill sound of his mobile ringing broke into the thick silence stretching tensely between them.

Out of good manners Mariella turned away whilst he answered the call, but she could tell from the sound of his curt replies that it involved some kind of crisis.

Her instincts were confirmed when he ended the call and told her abruptly, ‘There is a problem with the tribe—a quarrel between two of the younger men, which needs to be dealt with. I shall have to drive out to do so immediately.’

‘That’s okay. I can find my own way back to the city,’ Mariella assured him.

‘This matter isn’t closed yet, Mariella,’ he told her grimly. ‘When I do return to the villa, we shall discuss it further!’

Mariella didn’t risk making any response. There wasn’t any need, not unless she wanted to provoke a further quarrel. The frieze was finished; there was nothing now to keep her in Zuran, no reason or need for her to stay, and she had already decided that she was going to make immediate plans to return home!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘E
LLA
,
you have to go! The prince will be mortally offended if you don’t and, besides, just think of the potential commissions you could be losing. I mean, I’ve done some discreet checking on the guest list for this do, and everyone who is everyone in the horse-racing world will be there, plus some of the classiest A-list celebs on the planet! This is going to be the most prestigious event on the racing calendar this year, and here you are announcing that you don’t want to go! I mean, why? You already know just how impressed the prince is with your frieze, and this is going to be its big unveiling. If you’d been hired by the National Gallery itself you couldn’t have got yourself more publicity for your work!’

Mariella could hear the exasperation in her agent’s voice, and ruefully acknowledged inwardly that she could perfectly understand Kate’s feelings.

However, Kate did not know that she had two very good reasons for her reluctance to return to Zuran.

Xavier...and... Instinctively she glanced down her own body. At three months, her pregnancy was not really showing as yet. She and the baby were both perfectly healthy, her doctor had assured her, it was just that being so slight she was not as yet showing very much baby bulge.

‘Just wait another couple of months and you’ll probably be complaining to me that you feel huge,’ she had teased Mariella.

Even now sometimes when she woke up in the morning she had to reassure herself that she was not fantasising, and that she actually was pregnant.

Pregnant... With a baby she already desperately wanted and loved. Her baby! Her baby and Xavier’s baby, she reminded herself warily.

But Xavier would never need to know! No one looking at her could possibly know!

And if she was not careful she could potentially be in danger of arousing more suspicions by not returning to Zuran for the extravaganza that was to be the opening of the new enclosure and the first public airing of her frieze than by doing so.

Tanya for one would certainly have something to say to her if she didn’t go!

And of course it would be a perfect opportunity for her to see Fleur, whom she still missed achingly. Her niece would also always have a very, very special place in her heart!

But against all this, and weighing very heavily on the other side of the scales, was Xavier. Xavier whom disturbingly she had spent far too much time thinking about since her return home! Mystifyingly and totally contrary to her expectations, not even the official knowledge that she had conceived her much-wanted child had brought an end to the little ache of longing and loneliness that now seemed to haunt both her days and her nights. There was surely no logical reason why she should actually physically ache for Xavier now. And there was certainly no reason why increasingly she should feel such a deep and despairing emotional longing for him. Those kinds of feelings belonged to someone who was in love! And she knew far better than to allow herself to do anything as foolish as fall in love!

She had actually begun to question, in her most emotional and anguished moments, whether what she was feeling could in some way be generated by the baby—a longing on his or her part for the father that he or she was never going to know. She had promised herself that her child would never suffer the anguish of being rejected by his or her father, because she had made sure there would be no father there to reject it. She would make sure right from the start that her baby would know that she would provide all the love it could possibly need! She would bring him or her up to feel so loved, so secure, so wanted, that Xavier’s absence would have no impact on their lives whatsoever. Unlike her, her child would never suffer the pain of hearing his or her mother talk with such longing and need about the man who had abandoned them both, as she had had to do. Her child would never feel as she had done that somehow he or she was the cause of that father’s absence; that, given the real choice, her mother would have preferred not to have had her and kept the love of the man who had quite simply not wanted the responsibility of a child!

‘You must go,’ Kate was insisting.

‘You must come,’ Tanya was pleading.

‘Okay, okay, I give in,’ she told Kate, grinning as her agent paused in mid-argument to look at her in silence, before breaking into a flurry of relieved plans.

* * *

‘Y
OU
’
LL
BE
STAYING
with us, of course,’ Tanya was chattering excitedly as she bustled Mariella outside to the waiting limousine. ‘I didn’t bring Fleur because she’s been cutting another new tooth. It’s through now, but we had a bit of a bad night with her. I can’t wait for the opening. It’s going to be the highlight of our social calendar. Khalid has bought me the most fabulous dress. What are you going to wear? If you haven’t got anything yet, we could go shopping—’

‘No, it’s okay, I’ve already got an outfit,’ Mariella stopped her quickly, mentally grateful for the fact that Kate had insisted on taking her on a whirlwind shopping trip, following her decision to attend the opening, so that she could vet the outfit Mariella would be wearing, to make sure it made enough of the right kind of statement! Her small bulge might not show yet when she was dressed, but someone as close to her as her half-sister had always been would be bound to spot the differences in her body in the intimacy of a changing room with her wearing nothing more than her underwear!

Of course she was going to tell Tanya about her baby—ultimately—once she was safely back in England, and all the questions her sister was bound to ask about just who had fathered her coming baby could be answered over the telephone rather than in person! The last thing Mariella wanted to do was to risk betraying herself by a give-away expression.

She knew exactly what she was going to tell Tanya. She had already decided to claim that her child was the result of artificial insemination, the father an unknown sperm donor.

They were speeding along the highway towards the familiar outskirts of the city.

‘How far is it to your new villa, Tanya?’ Mariella asked her.

She had been receiving a constant stream of emails from her sister full of excitement about the new villa she and Khalid were having built, and which they had recently been due to move into.

‘Oh, it’s several miles up the coast from Xavier’s. I’m really looking forward to moving into it now, but I must admit I’m a bit worried about how Fleur is going to adapt. She adores Hera, and to her Xavier’s villa is her home and so—’

‘What do you mean you’re looking forward to moving in?’ Mariella checked her anxiously. ‘I thought you already had!’

‘Well, yes, we were supposed to, but then all the furniture hasn’t arrived yet, and so we’re still living with Xavier. His great-aunt is visiting at the moment as well. You made a real hit with her, Ella—not like me. She’s always singing your praises and in fact... I...’

Mariella could feel her heart, not just sinking, but literally plunging to the bottom of her ribcage with an almighty thump before it began to bang against her ribs in frantic panic. She wasn’t prepared for this, she admitted. She wasn’t armed for it, or protected against it.

The villa was ahead of them. It was too late for her to announce that she had changed her mind, or to demand that she be taken to the centre of the city where she could book into a hotel! The car was sweeping in through the gates.

Hazily Mariella noticed that the red geraniums she remembered tumbling from the urns in the outer courtyard had been changed to a rich vibrant pink to match the colour of the flowers of the ornamental vine softening the walls of the courtyard.

‘Leave your luggage for Ali,’ Tanya instructed her.

Where was the trepidation she should be feeling? Mariella wondered as, completely contrary to any kind of logic, the moment she stepped into the villa she immediately experienced a sense of well being, a sense of welcome familiarity, as though...as though she had come home?

‘We’d better go straight in to see Tante Cecille!’ Tanya pulled a face. ‘I’ll never hear the end of it if we don’t. She’s even told them in the kitchen to bake some madeleines for you!’

Mariella had to bite down hard on her bottom lip to subdue the threatening weakness of her own emotional response. The last thing she wanted or needed right now was to be reminded in any way of the fact that she was so very much alone, so very bereft of family, unlike Xavier, who was not merely part of a large extended family group, but who also actively shared a large part of his life with them.

Treacherously Mariella found herself thinking about how a child might feel growing up in a household with so many caring adults, with aunts, uncles and cousins to play with...

‘Ella, I’m so thrilled that you’re here,’ Tanya was telling her. ‘I’ve really missed you! You’re in the same room you had before. Xavier has given us our own suite of rooms whilst we’re living here. Khalid says there’s no way that he would agree to us living like they used to with separate men’s and women’s quarters, which is just as well because there’s no way I would agree to it either!

‘I couldn’t do what Xavier does and go into the desert with the tribe.’ Tanya gave a small shudder. ‘The very thought appalls me. All that sand...and heat! And as for the camels! Ugh!’ She pulled a distasteful face. ‘Luckily Khalid feels exactly the same way! He can’t understand why Xavier lets his life be dominated by a few promises his grandfather made, and neither can I. If Khalid was head of the family things would be very different...’

‘Then perhaps it’s as well that he isn’t,’ Mariella responded protectively, before she could stop herself.

She could see the way Tanya was looking at her, and she felt obliged to explain, ‘Xavier is the guardian of some irreplaceable traditions, Tanya, and if he abandoned that responsibility a way of life that could never be resurrected could be totally lost...’

‘A way of life? Spending weeks living in the desert, and having to do it every year! No, I can’t think of anything worse. It might be traditional, but I still wouldn’t do it! Well, there’s no way it could ever be my way of life, anyway. I mean, can you imagine any woman wanting to live like that? Could you?’

Mariella didn’t even have to pause to think about it.

‘Not permanently, no, but in order to preserve something so important, and to support the man I loved, to be with him and share a very, very important part of his life, yes, I could and would.’ Mariella hesitated, recognising that there was little point in trying to explain to her sister how much such a return to traditions, to the simplicity of such a lifestyle could do to rejuvenate a person in a very special and intensely personal, almost spiritual sense, to bring them back in touch with certain important realities of life. Tanya simply wouldn’t understand.

‘Yes?’ Tanya stared at her. ‘You’re mad,’ she told her, shaking her head. ‘Just like Xavier. In fact...Tante Cecille is quite right. You and Xavier are two of a kind.’

Before Mariella could demand an explanation from Tanya of just how and when their similarities had been discussed, they were in the salon.

‘Mariella, how lovely to see you again,’ Madame Flavel exclaimed affectionately. Automatically as she embraced her Mariella held in her stomach, just as she had done when she and Tanya had hugged earlier. An automatic reflex, but one that wasn’t going to conceal her growing bump for very much longer, Mariella acknowledged ruefully.

* * *

H
ALF
AN
HOUR
later, holding Fleur whilst her niece beamed happily up at her, Mariella began to feel a little bit more relaxed. Xavier, after all, would be as keen to avoid spending time with her as she was with him—albeit for very different reasons! She might even not actually see him at all!

Totally involved in making delicious eye contact with Fleur, Mariella was oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the room until she heard Madame Flavel exclaiming happily, ‘Ah, there you are, Xavier.’

Xavier! Automatically Mariella spun round, holding tightly onto Fleur more for her own protection than for the baby’s, she recognised dizzily as she felt her whole body begin to tremble.

The sensation, the need slicing white-hot through her threw her into shocked panic. She couldn’t be feeling like this.
Should
not be feeling like this. Should not be feeling this all-absorbing need to feed hungrily on the sight of every familiar feature, every slight nuance of expression, too greedy for them to savour them with luxurious slowness, aching for them; aching for him so intensely that the pain was sharply physical.

As the girl she had been before, she had fantasised naively about that wanting and about him, imagining, exploring in the privacy of her thoughts the potential of her secret yearnings for Xavier—she had never guessed where those feelings could lead.

But as she was now sharply aware she was not that girl any more. She was now a woman, a woman looking at the man who had been her lover, knowing just how his flesh lay against his bones, how it felt, how it tasted...how he touched and loved. And as that woman she was overwhelmed by the sheer force of her need to go to him, to be with him, to be part of him. Her knowledge of him, instead of slaking her desire, was actually increasing it, tormenting her with intensely intimate memories. She was no longer seeing him as a powerful distant figure, but as a man...
her
man!

But that wasn’t possible. What did that mean about her feelings for Xavier?

‘Xavier, I was just telling Ella how alike you and she are,’ she heard Tanya commenting.

‘Alike?’

Mariella could feel his gaze burning into her as he focused on her.

‘In your attitudes to things,’ Tanya explained. ‘Ella, you really ought to have children of your own,’ Tanya added ruefully. ‘You are a natural mother.’

‘I totally agree with you, Tanya.’ Madame Flavel nodded.

Mariella could feel her face and then her whole body burning as they all turned to look at her, but it was Xavier’s grim scrutiny that affected her the most as his glance skimmed her body, resting on the baby she was holding in her arms. The unbearable poignancy of knowing that in six months’ time she would be holding his child as she was holding Fleur right now made her eyes burn with dangerous tears. What on earth was wrong with her? She was behaving as though...reacting as though...as though she were a woman in love. Totally, hopelessly, helplessly in love. But she wasn’t! She wasn’t going to let herself be!