He was furious. She couldn't speak, couldn't answer, because she didn't know what she was doing. It had all just come out as if it was meant to. Inshallah, she thought.
'He can hear.' She found her voice. 'He knows what I am telling him.' Tremulously she offered Hassan his father's hand. 'Talk to him,' she pleaded. 'Tell him about our baby.' Tears were running down her cheeks and Hassan had never looked so angry. 'Tell him. He needs to hear it from you. Tell him, Hassan, please...'
That was the point when the monitor suddenly went haywire. Medics lunged at the sheikh. Hassan dropped his father's hand so he could grab hold of Leona and forcibly drag her aside. As the medical team went down in a huddle Hassan was no longer just white, he was a colour that had never been given a name. 'You had better be telling him the truth or I will never forgive you for doing this,' he sliced at her.
Leona looked at the monitor, listened to its wild, palpitating sound. She looked at Rafiq, at what felt like a wall of horrified and disbelieving faces, and on a choked sob she broke free from Hassan and ran from the room.
Back down the corridor, up the stairs, barely aware that she was passing by lines of waiting, anxious servants. Gaining entrance to their apartments, she sped across the floor to the bedside cabinet. Snatching up Evie's testing kit, trembling and shaking, she dropped the packet twice in her attempt to remove the Cellophane wrapping to get the packet inside. She was sobbing by the time she had reached the contents. Then she unfolded the instruction leaflet and tried to read through a bank of hot tears, what it was she was supposed to do.
She was right; she was sure she was right. Nothing-nothing in her whole life had ever felt as right as this! Five minutes later she was racing downstairs again, running down the corridor in between the two lines of anxious faces, through doors and into the sheikh's room and over to her husband.
'See!' she said. 'See!' There were tears and triumph and sheer, shrill agony in her voice as she held out the narrow bit of plastic towards Hassan. 'Now tell him! Please....'' she begged him.
'Leona...' Hassan murmured very gently.
Then she heard it. The silence. The dreadful, agonising, empty silence. She spun around to look at the monitor. The screen was blank.
The screen was blank. 'No,' she breathed shakily. 'No.' Then she sank in a deep faint to the ground.
Hassan could not believe that any of this was really happening. He looked blankly at his father, then at his wife, then at the sea of frozen faces, and for a moment he actually thought he was going to join Leona and sink into a faint.
'Look after my son's wife.' A frail voice woke everyone up from their surprise. 'I think she has earned some attention."
Before Hassan could move a team of experts had gone down over Leona and he was left standing there staring down at the bit of white plastic she had placed in his hand.
She was pregnant. She had just told him that this red mark in the window meant that she was pregnant. In the bed a mere step away his father was no longer fading away before his eyes.
Leona had done it. She'd brought him back from the brink, had put herself through the trauma of facing the answer on this small contraption, and she'd done both without his support.
'Courage,' he murmured. He had always known she possessed courage. 'And where was I when she needed my courage?'
'Here,' a level voice said. 'Sit down.' It was Rafiq, offering him a chair to sit upon. The room was beginning to look like a war zone.
He declined the chair. Leave me with some semblance of dignity, he thought. 'Excuse me,' he said, and stepped through the kneeling shapes round Leona, and bent and picked her up in his arms. 'But, sir, we should check she
'Leave him be,' the old sheikh instructed. 'He is all she needs and he knows it.'
He did not take her far, only to his father's divan, where he laid her down, then sat beside her. She looked pale and delicate, and just too lovely for him to think straight. So he did what she had done with his father and took hold of her hand, then told her, 'Don't you dare bail out on us now, you little tyrant, even if you believe we deserve it."
'We?' she mumbled.
'Okay, me,' he conceded. 'My father is alive and well, by the way. I thought it best to tell you this before you begin to recall exactly why you fainted.'
'He's all right?' Her gold-tipped lashes flickered upwards, revealing eyes the colour of a sleepy lagoon.
I feel very poetic, Hassan thought whimsically. 'Whether due to the drugs or your bullying, no one is entirely certain. But he opened his eyes and asked me what you were talking about just a second after you flew out of the room."
'He's all right.' Relief shivered through her, sending her eyes closed again. Feeling the shiver, Hassan reached out to draw one of his father's rugs over her reclining frame.
'Where am I?' she asked after a moment.
'You are lying on my father's divan, ' he informed her. 'With me, in all but effect, at your feet.'
She opened her eyes again, looked directly at him, and sent those major parts that kept him functioning into a steep decline.
'What made you do it?'
She frowned at the question, but only for a short moment, then she sighed, tried to sit up but was still too dizzy and had to relax back again. 'I didn't want him to go,' she explained simply. 'Or, if he had to go, I wanted him to do it knowing that he was leaving everything as he always wanted to leave it.'
'So you lied.'
It was a truth she merely grimaced at.
'If he had survived this latest attack, and you had been wrong about what you told him, would that have been a fair way to tug a man back from his destiny?'
'I'm pregnant,' she announced. 'Don't upset me with lie'. He laughed. What else was he supposed to do? 'I apologise for shouting at you,' he said soberly.
She was playing with his fingers where they pleated firmly with hers. 'You were in trauma enough without having a demented woman throwing a fit of hysterics.'
'You were right, though. He did hear you.'
She nodded. 'I know.'
'Here...' He offered her the stick of white plastic. Taking it back, she stared at it for a long time without saying a single word.
'It doesn't seem so important now.' she murmured eventually.
'The proof or the baby?'
She shrugged then pouted. 'Both, I suppose.'
In other words the delight she should be experiencing had been robbed from the moment. On a sigh, he scooped her up in his arms again and stood up.
'Where are you taking me now?' she questioned.
'Bed,' he answered bluntly. 'Preferably naked, so that I can hold you and our child so close to me you will never, ever manage to prise yourself free.'
'But your father-'
'Has Rafiq,' he inserted. 'And you have me.'
With that he pushed open the door to the main corridor, then stopped dead when he saw the sea of anxious faces waiting for news.
'My father has recovered,' he announced. 'And my wife is pregnant.'
There, he thought as he watched every single one fall to their knees and give thanks to Allah, that has killed two birds with one single stone. Now the phones could start buzzing and the news would go out to all comers of the state. By the time they arose in the morning there would not be a person who did not know what had taken place here tonight.
'You could have given me a chance to break the news to my own father.' Leona showed that her own thoughts were as usual not far from his own.
'He knows-or suspects. For I told him when I asked him to come here tonight. That was while we were still sailing the Red Sea, by the way,' he added as he walked them through the two lines of kneeling bodies. 'Raschid alerted me at Evie's instigation. And I am telling you all of this because I wish to get all my guilty machinations out of the way before we hit the bed."
'You mean that Evie knew you suspected when I called her up yesterday and she didn't drop a hint of it to me?'
'They are sneaky, those Al-Kadahs,' he confided as he trod the stairs. 'Where do you think I get it from?'
'And your arrogance?'
'Al-Qadim through and through,' he answered. 'Our child will have it too, I must warn you. Plenty of it, since you have your own kind of arrogance too.'
'Maybe that's why I love you.'
He stopped halfway up the stairs to slash her a wide, white rakish grin. 'And maybe,' he said lazily, 'that is why I love you.'
She smiled, lifted herself up to touch his mouth with her own. He continued on his way while they were still kissing- with an audience of fifty watching them from the floor below.
Why not let them look? Sheikh Hassan thought. This was his woman, his wife, the mother of his coming child. He would kiss her wherever and whenever. It was his right. In-shallah.