‘I don’t think he’s going to leave here until you do see him,’ the nurse added. ‘He arrived late last night, and hasn’t left the waiting room since except to wash and change his clothes in one of the spare rooms along the corridor. Your mother has pleaded with him, his companion has pleaded with him and we have pleaded with him. He doesn’t even acknowledge that we’ve spoken! I have never come up against such intransigence in all my life!’
Watch this space, Evie thought coldly, and went on with her soup without making a single comment. After a while the nurse sighed and left her to it. A little while later Evie curled up on her side, folded her arms protectively over her stomach, and went to sleep thinking about Raschid sitting there in the waiting room.
The next time she came awake, a grey dawn was just beginning to lighten the bedroom—and there was a man standing at the bottom of her bed, reading her medical chart.
He glanced up when she moved. ‘Good morning, Miss Delahaye.’ He smiled before returning his attention to whatever he was reading. ‘Your child is most determined to stay exactly where he is,’ he remarked lightly. ‘I suspect a mixing of two sets of very stubborn genes must give him his tenacity.’
‘Asim,’ Evie breathed. ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘I am Sheikh Raschid’s personal physician,’ he reminded her. ‘Which now means I am his child’s personal physician.’
‘Is that a joke?’ she demanded, using her hands to slide herself up the pillows and into a sitting position.
‘No joke,’ Asim blandly denied. ‘Where Sheikh Raschid’s child goes, I go from now on—Oh, come,’ he said when he saw her expression. ‘We are good friends now, are we not? You do not find me too overbearing. We will get along very well together, I am certain of it.’
‘And where does Raschid fit into all of this?’ Evie enquired acidly.
‘At this precise moment he sits exactly where he has been sitting since he arrived here two evenings ago,’ Asim replied. ‘Where he now awaits my report on his child’s state of health.’
‘But not the mother’s,’ Evie bitterly assumed from all of that.
‘At this stage in the proceedings, the child’s health depends entirely on the mother’s health so of course she matters. But as for the woman,’ Asim continued smoothly, ‘he accepts now that he is beyond her forgiveness. Which matters little when it is clear that he will never learn to forgive himself.’
‘If you’re trying to play on my sympathies, Asim,’ Evie sighed, reaching out for the flask of water sitting on her bedside cabinet, ‘it isn’t working.’
‘Here,’ Asim offered instantly. ‘Let me do that for you.’
Taking the flask from her, he unscrewed the cap and poured some of the chilled water into a glass before handing it to her. In silence he stood beside her and watched her drink the water, took the glass from her when she had finished and smoothly replaced both glass and flask back on the cabinet.
Then he pleaded soberly, ‘See him, madam. For two nights and a day he has neither slept nor eaten and I am seriously worried about him.’
‘He kept me waiting for two weeks before his henchmen came to evict me.’
‘They were not his henchmen.’ Asim denied the charge. ‘And if you force him to he will wait two weeks in that waiting room just down the corridor, I promise you.’
Evie could believe that, knowing the man as well as she did.
‘Okay,’ she wearily conceded, deciding that she might as well get it over with. ‘I’ll see him.’
‘Thank you.’ Asim sent her one of those bows that reminded her of Crown Prince Hashim’s messengers, and she shuddered.
‘He can have five minutes then you make him leave,’ she added on the back of that shuddering reminder.
‘As you wish.’
What Evie wished for was to never set eyes on Raschid again, but she kept that thought to herself as Asim quickly left the room now he had what he had come for.
The door opened again in seconds, and what she saw as Raschid strode into the room almost—almost caused the shell she was hiding behind to crack.
Not with sympathy but with anger, because if this man hadn’t eaten or slept in two nights and a day, he was looking disgustingly well for it!
Evie felt conned.
Conned by the pristine neatness of the clothes he was wearing, by the clean-shaven smoothness of his face and the arrogance with which he stood there by the closed door studying her with absolutely no hint of remorse written anywhere on his lean dark face.
‘How are you?’ he enquired.