The Sheikh's Prize (10 page)

Saffy was reeling from a dozen different reactions: disbelief, scorn, anger, frustration among them. Zahir was set on taking charge as usual. He wasn’t reacting on a personal level, he was reacting as a public figure, keen to hide an embarrassing mistake within the respectability of marriage.

‘I don’t want to marry you just because I’m pregnant.’

‘And what do you think your child would want?’ Zahir shot that icily controlled demand back at her. ‘If you don’t marry me, you will deprive that child of a father and of the status in life he or she has a right to enjoy. Without marriage, the child will have to remain secret and it will be almost impossible for me to establish a normal relationship with him or her.’

In one cool statement, Zahir had given Saffy a lot to think about, but then faster than the speed of light her child had gone from being a line on a test wand to a living, breathing being, who might well question her decisions at a later date. For the first time she appreciated that she could not continue to put her own wants and needs first because, whatever she chose to do, she would, one day, have to take responsibility for the choices she had made on her child’s behalf.

‘We could get married just to ensure that the baby was legitimate...and then get another divorce,’ she suggested tautly.

Brilliant dark eyes flamed golden as flames. ‘Is that really the very best you can offer? Is the prospect of being my wife again such a sacrifice?’

Saffy studied the floor. She thought of the wicked forbidden delight of his passion, recognising that on that level everything between them had radically changed. She looked up, feeling the instant mesmeric pull of him the moment she saw his lean dark face. Her heart hammered inside her, her mouth running dry.

‘Couldn’t you give our marriage a second chance?’ Zahir asked huskily.

‘It’s too soon to consider that,’ Saffy argued. ‘The first thing I need to do now is see my doctor and confirm that I
am
pregnant. Then we’ll decide what to do. Look at this from my point of view. When you arrived here, you asked me to be your mistress...now suddenly you’re talking marriage, but I don’t want to get married purely because you accidentally got me pregnant.’

Zahir surveyed her with stormy intensity and the atmosphere thickened as though laced with cracked ice. ‘I believe in fate, not accidents. What is meant to be will be.’

Saffy rolled her eyes, compressed her lips and stood up. ‘You shipped me out to the desert for seduction, not fatherhood. You brought this roof down over our ears—you sort it out!’

‘Marriage will sort it out,’ he contended stubbornly.

‘Oh, if only it were that simple.’

‘But it is.’ Before she could even guess his intention, he had closed a hand over hers. His brilliant gaze sought and held hers by sheer force of will. ‘Right now, it’s the best choice you can make. Let go of the past. Trust me to look after you and my child. I will not let you down.’

‘And would you agree to a divorce at a later date?’ Saffy prompted shakily, more impressed than she wanted to be by his promise of good intentions.

‘If that’s what you wanted, if you were unhappy as you were before, yes,’ Zahir agreed grittily, not choosing to add the unpleasant realities that would accompany any such decision on her part. Complete honesty was not possible. What really mattered was getting that ring back on her finger and securing their child’s future. ‘This is not about us, this is about our child, what he or she needs most.’

‘If you really mean that...’ Saffy drew in a ragged breath, terrified of the confusing thoughts teeming through her head. She was trying very hard to put the welfare of her child first and not muddy the waters with the bitterness of the past and the insecurity of the present. He would keep his promise: she knew that. On that level she trusted him and she quite understood that he wanted their child to have the very best start in life possible. They owed their child that chance.

‘I do,’ Zahir confirmed levelly.

‘Then on that basis, I agree.’ So great was the stress of making that announcement that Saffy felt light-headed again as all the little devils in her memory banks began queuing up to remind her of how vulnerable she would be if she put herself in Zahir’s power again.

Zahir released her hand. ‘I’ll organise it.’

He got as far as the door before Saffy called him back to say tautly, ‘I want a
proper
wedding.’

‘Meaning?’ Zahir sought to clarify.

‘No hole-in-the-corner do in the embassy for me this time,’ Saffy spelled out with scorn. ‘I want a bridal gown and a family occasion with my sisters as bridesmaids and all the rest of the wedding hoopla.’

Taken aback by the admission, Zahir literally paled.

‘Those are my terms and I won’t budge on them,’ Saffy completed doggedly.

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘A
RE
YOU
REALLY
sure about doing this?’ Kat looked tense and anxious and Saffy immediately felt guilty.

What had she been thinking of when she dragged her family into all of this? A shotgun wedding, no less. Her sister, Kat, didn’t need the stress but she had insisted on organising the wedding within the space of one incredibly short week and had proven that if sufficient money was thrown at a challenge, it could be done. Saffy studied her reflection in the mirror. Her gorgeous designer wedding dress was a classic, nipped in at the waist for shape and falling in fluid folds to her satin-clad feet. She wasn’t wearing a veil: the hairdresser had piled her hair up and topped it with the magnificent sapphire and diamond tiara Zahir had sent to her. Matching drop earrings sparkled with every movement she made.

‘Saffy?’ the attractive redhead pressed. ‘You know, it may be your wedding day but it’s still not too late to change your mind. You don’t
have
to marry Zahir. You don’t have to do this to please anybody.’

Looking reflective, Saffy breathed in deep. ‘I really do want to give our baby the chance to have two parents. None of us ever had that. My sisters and I had you and you were a brilliant stand-in Mum,’ she told Kat warmly. ‘But I’d like to try it the old-fashioned way before I try to go it alone.’

Kat frowned. ‘You’re not in a very optimistic mood for a new bride.’

‘I’m being realistic. Zahir will commit to being a father—I know that about him and I respect him for it. If marriage works for us, it works, and if it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have tried,’ Saffy muttered ruefully.

‘I just can’t believe you got involved with him again. It’s like fatal attraction without the bunny boiler. I mean, five years ago Zahir broke your heart and I don’t want him doing it again.’ Her sister sighed unhappily. ‘Mikhail has checked him out and he says Maraban is stable now and that Zahir seems to be one of the good guys.’

‘I could’ve told you that,’ Saffy interrupted heatedly.

‘And there’s no sleazy stories about him either,’ Kat added in a suitably quiet undertone. ‘Obviously there’s been women but not in the kind of numbers you need to worry about.’

Saffy ground her teeth together in silence, wishing that her Russian billionaire brother-in-law had minded his own business when it came to Zahir. Even as she thought it she knew she was wronging the man. Undoubtedly Kat’s concerns about her sister’s bridegroom had prompted Mikhail’s investigation into Zahir’s reputation. ‘He would never be sleazy,’ Saffy declared, suppressing her recollection of that invitation to be his mistress.

‘Are you upset about Emmie refusing to come today?’ Kat asked ruefully.

‘No.’ Saffy lied sooner than add additional worry to Kat’s caring heart. ‘I can understand her not wanting to get into a bridesmaid’s frock when she’s so pregnant and I can also understand her saying that she’s not in the mood.’

‘Some day soon, you two need to sit down and talk and sort out the aggro between you.’

‘Easier said than done with Emmie always avoiding me like the plague,’ Saffy countered ruefully. ‘I phoned her and said I understood her not wanting to be a bridesmaid but would love her to come just as a guest and she said she wasn’t feeling well enough to travel.’

‘Well, she has had a pretty tough time being pregnant, so that probably wasn’t a lie,’ Kat conceded. ‘It makes me wonder if I’m wise to be considering IVF in case that kind of sickness and nausea in pregnancy runs in the family.’

‘I’m not feeling sick...not yet, anyway,’ Saffy pointed out bracingly, smiling as Topsy bounced into the room, bubbling with excitement in her glittering green bridesmaid’s dress and quite unaware of the serious chat her older sisters had been involved in. It seemed natural to the three sisters that neither Saffy’s mother nor her father were taking part in the coming ceremony. Saffy had had virtually nothing to do with her mother, Odette, or her father since they had abandoned her to foster care when she was twelve years old. Her parents had divorced when she was much younger and the bitterness of their estrangement had had an inevitable effect on her father’s attitude to his twin daughters. He had left them behind and moved on. Although Kat had encouraged Saffy to foster a forgiving attitude towards their mother, Saffy had too many memories of childhood neglect to do so. Odette simply wasn’t a loving parent and never had been.

The wedding took place at the church only a few doors down from Kat and Mikhail’s London home. The church’s rather gloomy interior had been transformed with an abundance of white and pink flowers and knotted ribbons. Saffy walked down the aisle on Cameron’s arm, her heart banging like a drum at a rock concert when she finally got close enough to see Zahir’s imperious dark head at the altar. How did he feel about this? How did he
really
feel? Throughout the past crazy busy week while she packed up her life in London her only contact with Zahir had been by phone. She had rung him after the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy. He had rung her several times to find out about the wedding schedule. There had been nothing intimate about those exchanges.

She had also ploughed through a half-dozen frustrating meetings with her agent and various clients as the reality of her condition forced the need for urgent rethinks on previously planned shoots. A couple of clients had taken the opportunity to drop her because her pregnancy meant that she was in breach of contract. Desert Ice, however, had retained her services because they were more than halfway through their campaign. She was grateful for that because it was mainly her earnings from the cosmetics company that funded the orphanage she supported.

Zahir’s stunning black-fringed golden eyes met hers as she drew level with him and she felt painfully vulnerable, which she didn’t like at all. Unfortunately wounding memories of their first wedding were assailing her, reminding her of a day when she had not had a doubt in the world about becoming a wife, had indeed innocently overflowed with feelings of love and happiness. The wedding ring slid onto her finger and she breathed in deep, conscious that Zahir retained a hold on her hand. It was done, the die was cast, she told herself soothingly. What was she afraid of happening? What was there to fear now? That he didn’t love her—well, she knew he didn’t love her, didn’t she? Unfortunately the awareness that he was marrying her to give their baby a name and a home was no more welcome to her heart or her pride.

On their passage back down the aisle, Zahir pressed a supportive hand to her spine. ‘You feel very shaky,’ he admitted when she cast him an enquiring glance.

And it was true, she did feel shaky, had ridden roughshod over her misgivings to marry him, trying at every step to put her child’s needs ahead of her own.

Zahir participated in the photographs in silence. Sapphire was pale as death and silent and her family, aside of the little bouncy one in green, who had smiled brightly at him, were clearly hostile and suspicious. No doubt her family had taken their cues from Sapphire. She didn’t want to be married to him again; he could feel it in the tension that gripped her every time he touched her. That made him angry and bitter, roused memories better left buried. But he had royally screwed up by allowing his primal instincts to triumph and there was always a price to be paid for recklessness, he reminded himself darkly. He had got her back. That was, at least, a beginning, and only time would tell whether or not she would continue to hold the threat of a divorce like a gun to his head.

‘You look stunning,’ Zahir told her belatedly as she scrambled into the limo that would whisk them from the church to the embassy to undergo a Muslim marriage ceremony. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m not ill, only pregnant,’ Saffy countered defensively, wishing he hadn’t reminded her of her condition, reluctant to be viewed as in any way in need of special treatment.

The second ceremony was brief, witnessed by embassy officials and a posed photograph was taken afterwards. They returned to Mikhail and Kat’s house where a reception was being held in the ballroom. After the wedding breakfast, they circulated. Surrounded by the familiar faces of the models she often worked with, Saffy began to relax a little, bearing up well to comments about how quiet she had been about her supposed long-term relationship with Zahir and striving to behave more like a normal bride.

‘Of course, I shouldn’t mention it,’ trilled Natasha, a six-foot-tall Ukrainian blonde, well on her way to supermodel status. ‘But Zahir was mine first.’

It was said so quietly and with such a sunny smile that it took several seconds for that spiteful confession to sink in on Saffy. She stared back into Natasha’s very pale blue eyes and murmured, ‘Really?’ as politely as if the other woman had commented on the weather.

‘Yes, a couple of years ago now. A fling at a film festival,’ Natasha confided with a little shrug of a designer-clad shoulder. ‘But he was hard to forget.’

‘Yes,’ Saffy acknowledged, passing on as soon as she could into less aggressive company, anger licking like fire at her composure. Mine first? No, he had been hers, her husband and then her ex-husband before he became anyone else’s. But the truth that he had sought amusement in other beds could still slash like a knife turning in her breast. She glanced back at Natasha, beautiful and reputedly sexually voracious, struggling not to picture Zahir entwined in her arms, and the nausea she had never experienced until that moment turned her stomach into a washing machine and sent sickness hurtling up her throat. Her skin clammy with perspiration, she rushed off to the cloakroom and made it just in time. She was horribly sick and it took a few minutes for her to freshen up and lose the unsteadiness that afflicted her in the aftermath.

When she emerged, Topsy was waiting for her. ‘Are you OK? Zahir saw you leaving and asked me to check.’

Zahir didn’t miss much, Saffy reflected wretchedly. ‘I think I just got bitten by morning sickness.’ And a very tall shrewish blonde.

But Saffy was no fan of ducking reality and she knew she had to deal with life as it was. Zahir had been with other women when he was no longer married to her and that was his business, not hers. His past was his own, just as hers would have been had she lived a little more dangerously since their first marriage. But unfortunately there had not been a cure for the fact that she had still found Zahir and her memory of him far more attractive than other men. What did that say about her? He was like a habit she had never managed to shake, her one and only fantasy, and the men who had pursued her over the years had never managed to cause her a single sleepless night. With the exception of Zahir, she had never pined for a phone call or a smile from a man, had truly never contrived to rouse that much interest, and perhaps that was why she had fallen so easily back into bed with him. Was it a kind of persistent physical infatuation? Had he somehow spoiled her for other men? She stared at him as she crossed the floor of the ballroom.

He was lithe, powerfully built and supremely sophisticated in his light grey morning suit with his luxuriant ebony hair fanning back from his brow; his dark deep-set eyes were riveting in his lean, bronzed face. He was drop-dead gorgeous and always had been a very hard act to follow. But as her body stirred with responses far removed from nausea, her breasts swelling and peaking beneath her bodice and a dull ache expanding in her pelvis, she was furious with herself for being so susceptible to a male who neither loved nor even truly wanted her.

‘What’s wrong?’ Zahir asked softly.

‘Why would anything be wrong?’ she traded tartly, ice in her cool scrutiny and edging her voice. ‘You tell me...film festival two years ago, Ukrainian blonde by the name of Natasha, ring any bells?’ That scornful and provocative question just leapt off Saffy’s tongue before she was even aware she was going to voice it.

The faintest hint of colour edged Zahir’s chiselled cheekbones but his dark golden gaze did not waver from hers. Indeed if anything he stood a little straighter. ‘I will never lie to you.’

Even when you should,
she almost screamed at him, wanting, needing to know and yet fearing what knowing more would do to her.

‘There weren’t many and there was nothing serious,’ Zahir breathed in a harsh undertone. ‘This is not a conversation I want to have on our wedding day.’

‘It’s not something I want to talk about either!’ Saffy launched back at him, her eyes a very bright blue lit with anger.

His stubborn jaw line squared. ‘Before you judge me, ask yourself if you have any idea of what state I was in after our divorce.’

Saffy came over all defensive. ‘How would I know?’

‘When you’re ready to tell me what changed you out of all recognition in the bedroom, I’ll tell you why I did what I did.’ His brilliant dark eyes glittered. It was a challenge, blunt and simple, and it only made Saffy angrier than ever.

He had divorced her.
He
had made that choice. He could not expect her to accept the consequences or feel responsible for a situation that had not been of her making. As for what had changed her into a normal sexually able woman, that was not something she was willing to share with him. It was too private, too personal, might well affect the way he looked at her and that very possible outcome made her cringe.

‘Are you two actually arguing?’ Kat came up to demand in dismay.

‘We always did have a fiery relationship,’ Zahir admitted.

‘Not so different from our own,’ Kat’s husband, Mikhail, teased his wife. ‘It takes time to adjust to living with another person.’

‘Time and buckets of patience,’ Zahir added, an authoritative look stamped on his lean dark face that only made Saffy want to slap him hard.

‘Your guests are waiting for the bride and groom to start the dancing,’ Kat informed them more cheerfully.

Saffy wasn’t in the mood to dance, especially not with Natasha smirking at the side of the floor, but she owed her sister too much to risk upsetting her and she gave way with good grace.

Zahir was a great dancer with a natural sense of rhythm but Saffy felt as if someone had welded an iron bar to her spine and she was stiff in the circle of his arms, holding herself at a distance. Glimpses of Natasha watching them did not improve her mood. Yes, she had known he had made love to other women, but actually having a face to pin to one of those anonymous women was another turn of the torture screw. She had never thought of herself as the jealous type and now she was finding out different. Once Zahir had been hers, entirely hers, and even though things had gone wrong in the bedroom she had rather naively trusted him not to stray. Now she was wondering crazy things, such as how she compared to his other lovers, and she was regretting her lack of experience and her honesty on that score. Yet how could she have lied when her child’s paternity hinged on telling the complete truth? That reminder cooled the fizz in her blood, settled her down and made her seek another topic of conversation.