The Sheikh's Prize(14)

Staying in the royal palace just outside the city limits, Saffy had been   sentenced to a very boring and hidden existence. As her father-in-law   refused to accept her as part of the family and was determined to keep   the presence of a Western blonde in the palace a secret, she had not   been allowed to go out and about in Maraban and explore freely. Indeed   aside of a few stolen shopping expeditions in the company of her widowed   sister-in-law, Azel, Saffy had barely gone out at all. Zahir had   declared that eventually his father would accept her as his wife but   that she would have to be patient. But twelve months living like the   invisible woman had convinced Saffy that her marriage had been a major   mistake, particularly when things between her and Zahir had gone badly   awry as well.

'You're very unhappy here,' Zahir had acknowledged the very last time   she saw him during their marriage. 'You've been telling me that you   wanted a divorce for the past six months and now I must agree.'

'Just like that you suddenly agree?' Saffy had yelled at him   incredulously, shock at his change of heart winging through her in   sickening waves as she realised he had clearly had enough of her and   their marriage. 'But you swore that you still loved me, that we could   work it out...'

'But now I want you to go home to London as soon as it can be arranged. I   want to divorce you and set you free,' Zahir had countered as stonily   as though she had not spoken.

It was true that for weeks whenever they argued she had hurled the   threat of a divorce at him on a fairly frequent basis. But she had never   really meant it, had simply been dramatising herself and struggling to   make her young husband take her unhappiness seriously. But she had   somehow still expected Zahir to continue to refuse to even consider   divorce as the answer to their problems. Coming at her out of the blue   like that, his volte-face had shocked her and pleading in the face of   his clear determination to get rid of her had been more than she could   bear. For so long, regardless of their difficulties, she had clung to   her conviction that Zahir still loved her no matter what and that what   they had together was still worth fighting for. Deprived of that   consolation and cruelly rejected by the divorce that swiftly followed,   Saffy had been heartbroken and not surprisingly had felt abandoned.                       
       
           



       

Her older sister, Kat, who had raised her from the age of twelve, had   tried to comfort Saffy, pointing out that King Fareed's opposition to   their marriage must finally have worn Zahir down while reminding Saffy   that neither she nor Zahir had foreseen the very real difficulties that   would arise in Saffy's struggle to adapt to life in a different  country,  far from family and friends. Saffy didn't want to remember how   appallingly she had missed Zahir after she left Maraban or how many   months had passed before she could enjoy the freedom she had reclaimed   and stop thinking about Zahir at least once every minute. She had   genuinely loved him and it hurt to appreciate that he had moved on from   her so much more easily than she had moved on from him. Maybe he had   never really loved her, Saffy conceded painfully. Maybe it had always   been about the sex and only the sex. Certainly, given his behaviour in   shipping her out to the desert for seduction, that looked like the most   viable explanation. It was equally agonising to admit that had she been   capable of doing what she had just done with him five years earlier  they  might still have been together. Or would they have been? Was that  just  fantasy land? Perhaps all along she had only been a fling in the  form of  a wife for Zahir.

But didn't she have rather more pressing concerns in the present? What   about that contraceptive accident they had had? Saffy tensed, her   appetite evaporating in front of the beautiful lunch she had been served   as her skin chilled with complete fright at the idea of being faced   with an unplanned pregnancy. Once she had believed she would never have   children because she wasn't able to have sex or even handle the concept   of artificial insemination. Now she knew differently and knew her  future  had opened up another avenue once barred to her. So, if she did  fall  pregnant, what would she do about it? She had friends who would  rush to  request the morning-after pill after such a mishap to ensure  that no  conception took place, but if against all the odds new life did  begin  inside her, Saffy registered that she was totally unwilling to  consider a  termination. In that moment she was suddenly realising with a  heart  that felt full enough to burst that a baby would mean the sun,  the moon  and the stars to her and that there was nothing she would  cherish more.  It might be a disaster as far as her current clients were  concerned, but  it would only be a short-term one and surely her  earning power wouldn't  die overnight. She breathed in deep and slow,  both terrified and  enervated by the risk she was prepared to take with  her own body. If  conception happened, she decided, it would happen and  she would embrace  it without regret.

Having dropped off the film of the shoot with the exceedingly relieved   production company, Saffy caught the tube back to the two-bedroom   apartment she had bought with Cameron. Cameron, a keen cook, was in the   kitchen dicing vegetables, but it was the sight of the small brunette   perched on the counter chatting nineteen to the dozen to him that   startled Saffy.

'Saffy!' Topsy cried, velvety somber eyes full of warmth as she leapt   off the counter like a miniature whirlwind and threw herself exuberantly   into her much taller sister's arms. At slightly less than four feet   eleven inches tall, Topsy was tiny. 'I wish you hadn't been away this   week. I wanted to go out with you to celebrate the end of my exams!'

Saffy's eyes stung as she gratefully accepted her youngest sister's   affectionate hug. Topsy always wore her feelings on her sleeve. At   eighteen years of age, having just finished school, Topsy was much less   damaged by their disturbed childhood and more outgoing than her older   sisters. She was also exceptionally clever and overflowing with an   irrepressible joie de vivre that few could resist. Yet as Saffy studied   the younger woman she saw shadows below her eyes and a tension far   removed from Topsy's usual laid-back vibe and she wondered what was   wrong.

'How did you find out that I was back so quickly?' Saffy prompted.

'She's been phoning here every day...I texted her after you called me   from the airport,' Cameron, a tall attractive man with close-cropped   dark curls, told her from his position by the state-of-the-art cooker.

'I assumed you'd want to stay on at Kat's with Emmie,' Saffy remarked.

'No, Kat and Mikhail are hosting a big dinner tonight and I wasn't in   the mood to play nice with loads of strangers,' Topsy confided with a   slightly guilty wince. 'And Emmie has already gone home again.'

Saffy's heart sank at that news because it was obvious to her that once   again her twin had chosen to dodge meeting her. Her estranged twin was   still avoiding her, Saffy acknowledged unhappily, wounded by Emmie's   reluctance to even be in her company. Was she that bad? Was she truly so   hateful to her twin? Or was it a simple if unpalatable fact that her   past sins were beyond forgiveness?                       
       
           



       

'Emmie's gone back to Birkside?' she checked, referring to Kat's former   home in the Lake District, the farmhouse her elder sister had inherited   from her late father.

Kat was the daughter of their mother Odette's first marriage, the twins   the daughters of her second marital foray while Topsy was the result of   their mother's short-lived liaison with a South American polo player.  By  the time the twins reached twelve years of age they were a handful  and  Odette had placed all three girls in foster care. Kat, then in her   twenties, had made a home at Birkside for all three of her sisters and   Odette had had very little to do with her children since then. In every   way that mattered, Kat had become the loving, caring mother her  sisters  had never really had.

'Should Emmie be on her own up there?' Saffy questioned the younger   woman anxiously. 'I mean, it's a lonely house and now that she's   pregnant...?'