The Sheikh's Secret Babies(14)

‘And then you discovered that you were pregnant,’ Lizzie guessed.

‘A couple of months had passed by then and I couldn’t excuse Jaul’s silence any longer. I realised that his father must have been telling me the truth.’

‘But evidently he wasn’t,’ Cesare cut in, already thinking ahead. ‘Does Jaul know about the twins?’

‘No. I didn’t tell him. And I told him I wouldn’t give him a divorce just to annoy him,’ Chrissie confided uncomfortably. ‘That was pretty childish of me, wasn’t it?’

‘I’ll put my lawyers on this,’ Cesare informed her, compressing his well-shaped mouth. ‘Jaul needs to be told about the twins asap. A man has the right to know his own children—’

‘Even if he deserts his wife and never gets back in touch?’ Lizzie protested emotively.

‘Sì, even then,’ Cesare murmured ruefully.

Chrissie told Cesare and Lizzie about her repeated visits to the Marwani Embassy and her continued and equally fruitless attempts to contact Jaul by phone. ‘So, you see, I did try very hard to track him down.’

‘But you still need to take a long-term view of this situation, Chrissie. Set aside the hostility. Concentrate on the children and the future and you won’t go far wrong.’

‘And you do owe Jaul one favour,’ Lizzie said ruefully, startling Chrissie, who was dabbing her face dry and grateful the tear overflow had run its course. ‘You have to go and see him and tell him about the twins before you bring in the lawyers—’

‘For goodness’ sake, I don’t even know where he’s staying!’ Chrissie parried, aghast at that suggestion. ‘In fact he might only have been passing through London.’

‘Why does Chrissie owe Jaul another meeting?’ Cesare enquired of his wife, equally in the dark on that score.

‘He at least had the decency to tell her that they were still married himself, rather than from his lawyers,’ Lizzie pointed out.’ I don’t think you owe him anything more, Chrissie, but I do think he deserves the chance to learn that he’s a father from you and nobody else and in private.’

‘I don’t want to see him...don’t even know if he’s still here in London... I’ve got nothing to wear either!’ Chrissie argued in an unashamed surge of protest, but behind it she knew she was caught because, like her older sister, she also had a sense of fair play.

Jaul had not been comfortable visiting her but, even so, he had done it because he knew it was the right thing to do. How could she be seen to do less?



Chrissie climbed out of the taxi that Lizzie had insisted she needed, pointing out that searching for a parking space while trying to identify the correct house was the last thing her sister needed in the mood she was in.

Not that finding the house where Jaul was staying had proved a problem, Chrissie acknowledged ruefully, shooting the vast monolith of a building in the most exclusive part of London a wry glance. Cesare’s staff had come up with all the required information. With the kind of high-powered connections her brother-in-law enjoyed, tracking down Jaul had not proved that big a challenge while it had also provided her with extraneous information she had not required. For instance, the huge town house had formerly been an entire crescent of smaller dwellings and it had been purchased in the nineteen thirties and turned into a single dwelling by Jaul’s grandfather to house the Marwani royal family and their numerous staff whenever they came to visit London. Apparently the family had made ridiculously few visits in the many years that had passed since then.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#

It had been an education for Chrissie to discover that this was one more fact she hadn’t known about the man she had loved and married. Although they had visited London together, he had never once mentioned that his family owned a house there. In much the same way he had never mentioned that he was an only child destined to become a king. His Marwani background had always been a closed book to her from which he had offered her a glimpse of very few pages. In short she knew he had grown up without a mother, had attended a military school and had trained as a soldier in Saudi Arabia. When he’d signed up to study politics at Oxford University it had been his very first visit to the UK.

It shook Chrissie now to accept that Jaul was the sole ruler of his immensely rich country in the Arabian Gulf. She finally understood the arrogance and the authority that had often set her teeth on edge. Jaul had never been in any doubt of who he was and where he was going to end up. No doubt his marriage to Chrissie had just been a brief fun stop on his upwardly mobile royal life curve and had never ever been intended to last.