The Sheikh's Secret Babies(38)

‘But I didn’t actually accept the money,’ she whispered almost absently, so deep was her sense of rejection that he had found it impossible to reach out to her even when he was injured.

‘You did.’

‘No, I didn’t. Your father left a bank draft for a ludicrous five million pounds on the table but I never cashed it.’

‘But you said you had plenty of money when I first saw you again and naturally I assumed—’

‘Only I wasn’t referring to your father’s bank draft,’ Chrissie cut in ruefully. ‘Cesare bought the Greek island which my sister and I had inherited from our mother. My share of the purchase price was very generous. I bought my apartment with some of it and put the rest into trust until my twenty-fifth birthday next year. That’s what I meant about having plenty of money. I didn’t touch a penny of your father’s cash. I left that bank draft lying on the table.’

Jaul was transfixed by that claim. His keen gaze lowered, ebony brows drawing together in a frown. Five million pounds had impressed even him as an enormous sum to offer as a bribe to a young woman from an impoverished background. People lied, cheated and killed for far less money than Chrissie had been given. That was the main reason why he had never questioned his father’s story but now he was determined to check out her story for himself. Could it be true that she had not claimed that money?

‘When did my father’s visit take place?’ Jaul asked abruptly.

‘About two months after you left and he was in a rage when I met him. You once told me he spoke English but he didn’t use any within my hearing. His companion had to translate everything he said.’

‘He had someone with him...aside of his bodyguards?’ Jaul shot the question at her in frowning surprise. ‘Describe him.’

‘Small, sixtyish, goatee beard and spectacles.’

Jaul fell very still as soon as he realised that there was a living witness to his father’s meeting with his wife. ‘My father’s adviser, Yusuf,’ he identified without hesitation, reflecting that Yusuf would be receiving a visit from him in the near future. Chrissie’s allegations demanded and deserved closer scrutiny. If she hadn’t taken the money, what had happened to it and why hadn’t he been told? Keeping him unaware of the fact that his wife hadn’t used the bank draft had ensured that he would misjudge her. It wasn’t a thought that Jaul wanted to have but he knew that his father must’ve been informed that that bank draft had not been cashed.

Slowly, Chrissie settled down onto the sofa again, letting the fierce tension leach out of her spine. Her brain felt dazed as though she had gone ten punishing rounds with a boxer. Shock at what she had learned from Jaul was still passing through her in waves. Her bitterness and antagonism had been wrenched from her while she’d listened to the true story of what had separated them two years earlier. Jaul had not ditched her. Jaul had not voluntarily or cruelly chosen to desert her. In fact he had planned to return to her and, had fate not intervened with that accident and the lies his father had told to both of them, Jaul would almost certainly have returned to her.

For a split second she allowed herself to think of how that might have been and she swallowed painfully, struggling to imagine how she would’ve felt if Jaul had come back to her and if he had been with her when she’d discovered that she was pregnant. She realised that she was picturing an entirely different and infinitely happier world and fierce regret filled her, backed by a terrible anguished sense of loss because she was beginning to suspect that Jaul had been as miserable as she was when they were first separated. How could his father have believed he had the right to inflict such suffering on them both?

Hot, burning tears lashed the backs of Chrissie’s eyes in an unsettling surge. She blinked rapidly, intense mortification threatening to engulf her because she only ever cried in the strictest privacy, a discipline learned the hard way after her life had fallen apart following Jaul’s vanishing act two years earlier. She snatched in a deep, audible breath and Jaul swung away from the window, suppressing his uneasy thoughts at the prospect of confronting Yusuf, his late father’s staunchest supporter.

Yusuf would not necessarily be discreet in the aftermath of such a discussion. It was a stark moment of choice for Jaul because he had to choose between his marriage and his respect for his father’s memory. But he knew that that respect was not an excuse to avoid discovering an unpalatable truth. Yet if Chrissie was telling the truth, it would be an appalling truth that he would never be able to live with, he reflected grimly before swiftly suppressing that unproductive thought. As he had been raised to do, he would do what he knew to be his duty and act with honour, regardless of what he found out.