‘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.’
‘You think it’s never been done before?’ he scorned.
‘Not by me,’ she defended fiercely, closing her eyes as a wave of terrible sadness washed over her. ‘Now, please go, Tariq. Get out of here before either of us says anything more we might regret.’
His impulse was to resist—for he was used to calling the shots. Until he realised that this wasn’t the first time Izzy had called the shots. It had been her, after all, who’d had the courage to end the relationship. And, yes, he had been arrogant enough to think that she might just be playing a very sophisticated game to bring him to heel.
But Izzy didn’t do game-playing, he realised. She hadn’t told him she thought she was pregnant because she’d feared his reaction—and hadn’t he just proved those fears a thousand times over? He looked at the haunted expression on her whitened face and suddenly felt a savage jerk of guilt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said suddenly.
Her eyes swimming with unshed tears, she looked at him. ‘What? Sorry for the things you said? Or sorry that you ever got involved with me in the first place?’
He flinched as her accusations hit home. ‘Sit down, Izzy.’
She ignored the placatory note in his voice. He thought he could spew out all that stuff and that now she’d instantly become malleable? How dared he tell her to sit down in her own home? ‘I’ll sit down once you’ve gone.’