The Sheikh's Secret Babies(17)

CHAPTER FOUR

SOMEONE KNOCKED ON the door and Jaul froze, literally froze as if someone had hit an alarm bell. He pushed her back from him, dark eyes glittering tiger gold and a ferocious frown on his lean, darkly handsome face.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said flatly. ‘That was a mistake.’

Chrissie was unable to pull herself together quite so quickly and as he released her she pivoted away from him towards the windows. As she raised trembling hands to press to her suddenly clammy cheeks, she was sick with self-loathing and shock and only dimly aware that someone was speaking to Jaul in his own language at the door. Feeling shaky, she sat down on a horrendous carved wooden sofa without even a cushion to soften its hard, unyielding seat.

A mistake? How demeaning to be told that! Only a kiss, only a stupid kiss, she was reasoning with herself in a daze of shame and denial. But how could she have let that happen, particularly when she had visited him to discuss the infinitely more important reality of the twins’ very existence? It was as though something had momentarily stolen her wits, overpowering all memory and rationality in the same moment. Well, what was done was done and he had been equally guilty of inappropriate behaviour, she reminded herself in consolation. Of course, she had once been accustomed to Jaul’s distinctly carnal can’t-keep-my-hands-off-you nature, had indeed at one stage gloried in her apparent power to attract him, innocently assuming that it meant more than it did. It seemed in that line though he hadn’t changed a bit.

Jaul was receiving a lengthy message from his PA. He was taken aback to be invited to a legal meeting the following morning between the legal firm chosen by Bandar and the lawyers who would apparently be arriving to represent Chrissie’s interests. After her attitude to the divorce issue the night before he was disconcerted but less surprised by her unexpected visit. Had she already thought better of her behaviour? Evidently she could muster a crack divorce team virtually overnight. Perhaps she had also mulled over the financial advantages of giving him the divorce he wanted, he reasoned sardonically. When had money come to mean so much to her?#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#

It was a question he had asked himself repeatedly two years earlier when she had accepted his father’s pay-off to turn her back on their relationship and walk away. How had he missed out on that devious, greedy streak in her make-up? At the time he would have described her as the least mercenary woman he had ever met. Had she cunningly concealed her avaricious side from him in an effort to impress him? When they had been together she had gone to great lengths to prove that his wealth meant little to her. And if he was honest, he had been impressed because by that stage he had become bored with women who valued him for what he was worth rather than for the man he was.

Yet the woman he had valued beyond all others had proved to be the greediest of all. That was a lowering truth he hated to recall for it exposed his poor judgement when he was at the mercy of his libido. A reminder he evidently needed, he conceded darkly, acknowledging without much surprise that one look at Chrissie’s beautiful face and slender but shapely proportions could still arouse him.

Chrissie was finally wondering how on earth she could broach the subject of Jaul being a father and increasingly it was sinking in for her that it would come as an enormous shock to him. Her fingers dug into the clutch bag Lizzie had pressed on her and in a sudden movement she bent her pale head and snapped it open to withdraw the birth certificates. Those documents were self-explanatory and there was really no need at all for her to start stumbling into an awkward announcement.

Chrissie extended the certificates. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I came here.’ Not to kiss you and dream about ripping off your clothes again, she completed inwardly while her face burned with mortification. ‘I had to see you because I thought you should see these first...’

Another frown drawing together his fine ebony brows, Jaul grasped the documents with an unhidden air of incomprehension. She hadn’t mentioned the kiss and he was grateful for that, well aware of Chrissie’s ability to throw a three-act drama over what he viewed as trivia. Time had shot them both back briefly into the past and that was all. Nothing more need be said, he was thinking while he grasped the fact that for some peculiar reason his estranged wife had given him a pair of birth certificates.

‘What are these?’ Jaul scanned the name of the mother and went cold. ‘You have children?’

‘And so do you,’ Chrissie advised thinly. ‘You got me pregnant, Jaul.’