Darker Side of Desire & the Sheikh's Pregnant Prisoner(30)

He left then, while she was still trying to come to grips with the enormous pain. Because of her weakness after her ordeal, Raoul had not shared her room as they had planned, but had slept in another on a separate floor. He was so distant and aloof these days that there seemed no way Claire could reach him. Why had he changed his mind about continuing their marriage? Because of Nadia? But what about their child?

Anxiety and pain made it impossible for her to eat, and telling Zenaide that she no longer needed her Claire made up her mind what she must do. Raoul seemed to be at pains to avoid seeing her alone, but how could she talk to him—how could she make him see that he owed it to their child to allow her to stay? She wasn’t going to give in easily. Now, when she was faced with the reality of leaving him, Claire knew that she would fight to be allowed to stay.

She entered his room without knocking and found it empty. For a moment she thought he must still be working downstairs, but then she heard the sound of running water from his bathroom and she curled up on the divan beneath the window, knowing that if she remained standing she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from pacing nervously about the room.

When he walked in from the bathroom he didn’t see her at first. His hair was damp from his shower, his body gleaming beneath the soft Moorish lamps whose diffused light Claire had come to love during her stay. And then as though some sixth sense alerted him to her presence he wheeled round, his body tensing almost as if in expectation of a blow.

‘Raoul, I had to see you,’ Claire told him before he could speak, ‘and this seemed the only way. Do you… do you really want me to go back to England with Teddy?’ she asked him before her courage could desert her.

‘It seems the wisest course.’ He wasn’t looking at her, reaching instead for the towel he had dropped on the bed. Against the brief one he had fastened round his hips, his body glowed the colour of warm honey, the muscles in his back as fluid as ripples of water on the surface of the gulf as he started to dry himself.

‘But our child,’ protested, refusing to heed the dismissal in his voice. ‘You said…’

‘Forget what I said.’ Suddenly his voice was harsh, his eyes darkening to jade as he turned to her. ‘Do you know how close you came to losing your life?’ He looked so bitter, so caught up in whatever emotion it was that brought the deep-carved lines bracketing his mouth and the emptiness to his eyes, that for a moment Claire was lost for words.

‘But I didn’t lose it,’ she reminded him. ‘I’m safe and so is Saud. Oh Raoul, do you honestly want your son to be brought up as a stranger to you, as you were to your father?’

For a second Claire thought her impassioned speech had burst through the wall he had built around himself, but then he smiled with a return of the old mockery she remembered. ‘My son? You are so sure then that this child you carry will be a boy?’

‘Son—daughter—both have a right to your love, your presence in their lives,’ Claire told him, wondering if he was aware of how much she was gambling, of how fast her heart was racing.

‘You make a very convincing advocate, Claire,’ she heard him say at last. His voice changed suddenly, full of bitter yearning as he added roughly, ‘Do you really think you need to persuade me that I want both you and my child here with me? Do you have any conception of how hard it is for me even to contemplate letting you go? And that is even when I take into consideration how close you came to death, and all through my fault. If I had seen through Nadia earlier…’

‘How could you when you loved her so much?’ Claire said softly, wanting to take the look of burning pain from his eyes.

‘Loved her?’ He stared at her. ‘Loved Nadia? What game are you playing now, Claire?’ he demanded curtly. ‘Nadia was once to have been my wife and would have been had I changed my religion. But I was too proud to do so, and for a while I told myself I was bitter because my religion set us apart, blaming my father because he had insisted that I was brought up as a Christian. But I tell you this, Claire, were religion all that stood between me and gaining your love I would gladly change it ten thousand times over. My father was right when he warned me against pride,’ he continued, before Claire could draw breath. ‘I thought I could compel you to remain here with me. I knew, you see, that you could never bring yourself to desert your child, not when you could hardly bear to be parted from Saud, and…’

‘And yet now you want me to leave,’ Claire stormed at him. ‘You say you want my love and yet you want to send me away; and I don’t even know why you should want it, you have never once…’ She broke off in confusion when she saw the way he was looking at her. Never before had she seen such a look of burning intensity in his eyes, a look that was a complex blend of tenderness and intense desire.

‘Never once have I what?’ he asked her. ‘Told you that I love you?’ Self-mockery darkened the already deep colour of his eyes. ‘I have not perhaps mouthed the words, but there are other ways, Claire, ways that rely on a touch… a look. Many, many times I have looked at you with all the love I feel for you, but you have never noticed it, and every time I touch you it is the touch of a man deeply in love. Why else do you think I want to send you away? I cannot expect you to stay here after what happened. No matter how much I personally want and need you by my side. Even if your love for me was as great as mine for you. Are you so blind, Claire?’ he asked whimsically. ‘Do you truly believe, knowing what you do about my past, that I would even contemplate you bearing my child if I had not fallen so deeply in love with that merely being in the same room, breathing the same air, is the most acute pain. I think I loved you from the very first, although I managed to hide my feelings even from myself. I told myself that you were greedy, avaricious; that you could not be the warm, loving person you seemed, that your love for Saud must be faked, that your responsiveness in my arms was only hunger…’

‘If it was, then it is a hunger that only you can satisfy,’ Claire managed to get out tremulously, her legs threatening to collapse beneath her as she stumbled towards the bed, swaying slightly so that Raoul was forced, almost against his will it seemed, to catch her in his arms.

‘Oh, Raoul, please let me stay. Please tell me it’s true and that you do love me.’ The hesitant touch of her lips against the naked skin of his shoulder provoked a smothered groan of protest, his fingers biting deep into her slender arms.

‘Do you really know what you are committing yourself to, Claire? Omarah is a very new country, and a great many years separate Saud from the maturity to rule it. Be warned that if you give yourself to me I will never be able to let you go. Already my nights are tortured by the memory of you in my arms, your body against mine. I thought we could build a life here together, until Nadia kidnapped you, and then I knew that no matter how much I loved you I could not risk your safety ever again.’

‘Raoul, all that was at risk was my life,’ Claire told him huskily, ‘and without you in it, it is as arid and worthless as… as the desert without water—a vast expanse of nothing.’

‘As is mine without you,’ Raoul muttered hoarsely, his strong body trembling beneath the teasing kisses she was placing against it. Behind her was the vastness of the Sheikh’s bed, and Claire felt no guilt or restraint about allowing her body to slip down on to it, enticing Raoul’s to follow, her arms outstretched to welcome him. The faint sigh he gave as he did so was half surrender, half impatiently stifled desire, telling her that there would be no departure from Omarah for her, not unless Raoul was at her side.

‘Tell me again that you love me,’ he demanded arrogantly as his lips brushed hers. ‘I want to hear you say it.’

‘Of course I love you,’ Claire responded mischievously. ‘Are you not the Lord Raoul, keeper of my heart, guardian of my virtue… father of my child.’

‘Worshipper of your body,’ Raoul murmured as he feathered warm kisses across her skin. ‘Lover of your heart.’

Beneath her the coverlet of silk shimmered in soft, rich blue waves, the evening breeze stirring hangings which had once graced the bed of the Sultan himself, but Claire was unaware of her surroundings. She had all that mattered safely encompassed within her arms, and the murmured words of love Raoul whispered in her ear were sweeter music by far than the soft desert breeze whispering through the silent courtyard outside.

* * * * *





“You’re not going anywhere, not until you give birth to my child.”

For Zafir Al Masood, the new sheikh of Behraat, abandoning fiery New Yorker Lauren Hamby was the hardest thing he had ever done. Bound by a life of honor, his sizzling whirlwind affair with Lauren was the only freedom Zafir had ever indulged in.

But when he finds out that Lauren is carrying his child and intending to keep it a secret, Zafir imprisons his feisty fling in his palace. Unlike him, his baby will not be the illegitimate heir of a sheikh. And to ensure this, Zafir will make Lauren his wife…!





The Sheikh’s Pregnant Prisoner

TARA PAMMI