The Sheikh's Undoing (17 page)

Tell him
. Before this goes any further, you have to
tell him
.

But she ignored the voice of protest in her head as she pointed a trembling finger towards a door. ‘O-over there.’

Effortlessly he picked her up, as he’d done so many times before, pushing open the door with his knee and going straight over to the bed, putting her down in the centre of it. Isobel felt the mattress dip as he straddled her, one knee on either side of her body. With fingers which were not quite steady he began to unbutton her dress, and Isobel held her breath as he pulled it open. But he seemed too full of hunger to study her with his usual searing intensity, and maybe he wouldn’t have noticed even if he had, for his black eyes were almost opaque with lust. Instead, he was unclipping her bra and bending his head to capture one sensitised nipple in his hungry mouth.

‘I feel as if I have been in the desert,’ he moaned against the puckered saltiness of her skin.

‘I th-thought you had?’

‘Not that kind of desert,’ he said grimly.

‘What kind, then?’

‘
This
kind,’ he clarified, his lips on her neck, his fingers hooking inside her little lace panties. ‘The sexual kind. A remote place without the sweet embrace of a woman’s arms or the welcome opening of her milky thighs.’

Even if they lacked emotion, the words were shockingly erotic, and Isobel lifted her head to give him more access to her neck, her fumbling fingers reaching for the buttons of his shirt and beginning to pull them open. He had come back, hadn’t he? And he still wanted her. It was as simple as that. Had he found it more difficult than he’d anticipated to simply let her go?

Hope began to build in time with the growing heat of her body. She helped him wriggle out of his jeans and then the silken boxer shorts, which whispered to the ground in a decadent sigh. His shirt joined her dress on the floor and she looked up at him, strangely shy to see his powerful olive body naked on
her
bed. He seemed larger than life and more magnificent than ever—like a Technicolor character who had just wandered into a black and white film.

He moved over her, and she drew in a deep breath of anticipation. She knew his body so well, and yet she was a stranger to his thoughts. Should she tell him now? When they were physically just about as close as it was possible to be without—

‘Oh!’ she moaned as he entered her. Too late, she thought fleetingly, as sweet sensation shot through her body and the familiar heat began to build. Take this pleasure that you weren’t expecting and give him pleasure in return. Let him see that there can still be sweetness and joy. And then maybe, maybe …

‘God, you’re tight,’ he moaned.

‘It’s because you’re so big,’ she breathed.

‘I’m always big,’ came his mocking boast.

‘Big
ger
, then.’

But words became redundant as he began to move
inside her, his mouth on hers as she met his every powerful thrust with the welcoming tilt of her hips.

It was the most bittersweet experience of her life. Amazing, yes—because sex with Tariq always was—but tinged with a certain poignancy, too. She was aware that things were different between them now, that nothing had been resolved. Aware too of what she still hadn’t told him. And all those facts combined to heighten every one of her senses.

She felt her climax growing. The beckoning warmth which had been tantalisingly out of reach now became a blissful reality. She felt the first powerful spasm just as he gave his own ragged cry, his movements more frantic as her arms closed around his sweat-sheened back. And she was falling, dissolving, melting. Past thinking as the world fell away from her.

Minutes passed, and when she opened her eyes it was to find Tariq leaning on one elbow, his hooded eyes enigmatic as he studied her.

‘Amazing,’ he observed after a moment or two, a finger tracing down the side of her cheek as she sucked in a deep breath of air. ‘As ever.’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t ring me, Izzy.’

‘I could say the same thing about you.’ She looked straight into his eyes. ‘Did you think I would?’

His mouth quirked into an odd kind of smile. He’d thought that her cool evaluation of their relationship having run its course had been a clever kind of bargaining tool. Had she realised that no woman had ever done that to him before? That the tantalising prospect of someone finishing with him was guaranteed to keep him interested? ‘Of course I did,’ he replied truthfully.

Isobel shifted restlessly. The warmth was ebbing away from her body now, and she knew she couldn’t put it off much longer. Yet some instinctive air of preservation made her want to gather together all the facts first. ‘Why did you come here today, Tariq?’

He smiled. ‘I thought I’d just demonstrated that—to our mutual satisfaction.’

Her own smile was tight. So that had been a
demonstration
, had it? In the midst of her post-orgasmic glow, it was all too easy to forget his arrogance. ‘For sex?’ she queried. ‘Was that why you came?’

‘Yes. No. Oh, Izzy—I don’t know.’ He shook his head and gave a reluctant sigh, not wanting to analyse the powerful impulse which had brought him to her door today. Couldn’t she just enjoy the here and now and be satisfied with that? ‘Whatever it is, I’ve missed it.’

‘If it’s just sex you can get that from plenty of other women,’ she pointed out.

‘Then maybe it isn’t just sex,’ he said slowly. He lifted her chin with the tips of his fingers and she was caught in the brilliant ebony blaze of his eyes. ‘Maybe what I should have said is that I’ve missed
you
.’

Isobel’s heart missed a beat, and all the wistful longings she had suppressed as a matter of survival now came bubbling to the surface. ‘You’ve said that before,’ she whispered. ‘When you’ve come back from a trip.’

‘Yes, I know. But it was different this time—knowing that you weren’t going to be here. Telling me that it was over made me realise that I could lose you—and I don’t want to.’

Her heart crashed against her ribcage. ‘You don’t?’

‘No.’ He brushed his lips over hers. Back and forth and back and forth—until he could feel her shivering
response. ‘What we have together is better than anything I’ve had with anyone else. I’m not promising you for ever, Izzy, because I don’t think I can do that. And I haven’t changed my mind about children. But if you think you can be content with what we’ve got …. Well, then, let’s go for it.’

His words mocked her. Taunted her. They filled her with horror at what she must now do.
Let’s go for it
. That was the kind of thing a football coach said during the half-time pep talk—not a man who was telling you that you meant something really special to him. And Isobel realised what a mess she had made of everything. Despite her determination not to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she had ended up doing exactly that. She had hitched her star to a man who was unavailable. In Tariq’s case it wasn’t because he was married but because he was emotionally unavailable. And in a roundabout way he’d just told her that he always would be.

I haven’t changed my mind about children
.

So now what did she do?

Feeling sick with nerves, she sat up, her unruly curls falling over her shoulders and providing some welcome cover for her aching breasts.

‘Before you say any more, there’s something I have to tell you, Tariq.’ She sucked in a shuddering breath, more nervous than she’d ever been as he suddenly tensed. She met the narrowed question in his ebony eyes. ‘You see … I’m going to have a baby.’

T
HE
silence in the room emphasised the sounds outside, which floated through the open window. The faint roar of traffic a long way below. The occasional toot of a car. A low plane flying overhead.

Isobel stared down at Tariq’s still figure, lying on the bed, and ironically she was reminded of the time when he’d lain in hospital. When he’d looked so lost and so vulnerable and her feelings for him had undergone a complete change.

But he wasn’t looking vulnerable now.

Far from it. She watched the expressions which shifted across his face like shadows. Shock morphing into disbelief and then quickly settling itself into a look which she’d been expecting all along.

Anger.

Still he did not move. Only his eyes did—hard and impenetrable as two pieces of polished jet as they fixed themselves on her. ‘Please tell me that this is some kind of sick joke, Izzy.’

Izzy trembled at all the negative implications behind his response. ‘It’s not a joke—why would I joke about something like that? I’m … I’m going to have a baby. Your baby.’

‘No!’ He moved then, fast as a panther, reaching down to grab his jeans before getting off the bed to roughly pull them on, knowing he couldn’t face having such a conversation with her when he was completely naked. Because what if his traitorous body began to harden with desire, even as an impotent kind of rage began to spiral up inside him as he realised the full extent of her betrayal?

He zipped up his jeans and tugged on his shirt. And only then did he advance towards her with such a look of dark fury contorting his features that Isobel shrank back against the pillows.

‘Tell me it isn’t true,’ he said, in a voice of pure venom.

‘I can’t. Because it is,’ she whispered.

Tariq stared at her. She had known that he never wanted to be a father. She’d
known
because he’d told her! He’d even told her just now. After they’d … they’d … ‘How the hell can you be pregnant when you’re on the pill?’

‘Because accidents sometimes happen—’

‘What? You
accidentally
forgot to take it, did you?’

‘No!’

‘How, then?’ he demanded hotly.
‘How
, Izzy?’

Distractedly she held up her hands, as if she was surrendering. ‘I had a mild touch of food poisoning after I ate some fish! It must have been then.’

‘Must it?’

Abruptly he turned his back on her and went over to stand beside the window, staring down at the busy London street. When he turned back his face was a mask. She had never seen him look quite like that before—all cold and empty—and suddenly Isobel realised
that whatever feelings he might have had for her, they had just died.

‘Or was it “accidentally on purpose”?’ he said slowly. ‘When did it happen?’

‘It was …’ She swallowed. ‘It was around the time when I met Zahid and Francesca.’

‘You mean the
King
and
Queen?
’ he corrected imperiously, unknown emotions making him retreat behind protocol—despite his conflicting feelings towards it. He remembered the way she’d held Omar that night. The way she’d looked at him over the mop of ebony curls with that soppy soft look that women sometimes assumed whenever there was a baby around.

‘What? Did you look at Francesca?’ he questioned. ‘See another ordinary Englishwoman very much like yourself? Did you look around you and see all the wealth and status at her fingertips and think:
I wouldn’t mind some of that for myself?
After all, you also had a royal lover—just as Francesca had once done. The only difference is that she didn’t get herself pregnant in order to secure her future!’

If she hadn’t been naked she would have lunged at him. As it was, Isobel got off the bed and grabbed at her dress to hide her vulnerability—the outward kind, anyway. For her heart was vulnerable, too—and she felt as if he had crushed it in his fist.

‘I can’t b-believe you could think that!’ she stuttered as she started doing up the buttons, her shaking fingers making the task almost impossible.

‘I suppose I can’t really blame you,’ he mused, almost as if she hadn’t objected, a slow tide of rage still building inside him. ‘Most women seem hell-bent on marriage—and the more prestigious the marriage, the
better. And you can’t do much better than a prince, can you?’

‘You must be joking,’ she hissed back. ‘You might be a prince, but you also happen to be an arrogant and overbearing piece of—’

‘Let’s skip the insults, shall we?’ he snapped, as he tried to get his head around the fact that in her belly his child grew.
His child!
A child he’d never asked for nor wanted. A child he would never be able to love … that he didn’t know
how
to love. ‘I thought you were into honesty, Izzy? Except now I come to think about it you haven’t been very honest all the way along, have you?’

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just how long have you known about this pregnancy?’

She met the accusation which blazed from his face. ‘For a couple of weeks,’ she admitted.

A strange light entered his eyes. He looked like someone who had been trying to solve a puzzle and had just found the last missing piece stuffed down the back of the sofa. ‘When we were in bed—the morning I got the phone call from Khayarzah about Leila—you knew you were pregnant then, didn’t you?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t
know
. I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t sure.’

‘But you didn’t bother to tell me? Even today you kept quiet. You let me come here and …’ She’d let him lose himself in the refuge of her arms. Lulling him into sweet compliance with the erotic promise of her body.

‘We had
sex
, Tariq!’ she declared brutally. ‘Let’s not make it into something it wasn’t!’

She could see the faint shock which had dilated his
eyes, but his reaction was breathing resolve into her and Isobel felt something of her old spirit return. Was she going to allow him to speak to her as if she was some worthless piece of nothing he’d found on the bottom of his shoe? As if she counted for nothing?

‘I didn’t tell you because I knew how you would react,’ she raged. ‘Because I knew that you’d be arrogant enough to think it was all some giant conspiracy theory instead of the kind of slip-up that’s been happening to men and women ever since they started fornicating!’

His eyes bored into her. ‘I’m assuming that marriage
is
what you want?’

Isobel’s eyes widened. Hadn’t he been listening to a word she’d been saying? ‘You must be
mad
,’ she whispered. ‘Completely certifiable if you think that I’d ever want to sign up for life with a man like
you
. A man so full of ego that he thinks a woman will get herself deliberately pregnant in order to trap him.’