The sheikh's chosen wife(9)

Hassan stood beneath the pulsing jet of the power shower and wanted to  hit something so badly that he had to brace his hands against the tiles  and lock every muscle to keep the murderous feeling in. His body was  replete but his heart was grinding against his ribcage with a  frustration that nothing could cure.

Silence. He hated that silence. He hated knowing he had nothing worth  saying with which to fill it in. And he still had to go back in there  and face it. Face the dragging sense of his own helplessness  and-worse-he had to face hers.

His wife. His woman. The other half of him. Head lowered so the water  sluiced onto his shoulders and down his back, he tried to predict what  her next move was going to be, and came up with only one grim answer.  She was not going to stay. He could bully her as much as he liked, but  in the end she was still going to walk away from him unless he could  come up with something important enough to make her stay.

Maybe he should have used more of his father's illness, he told himself.  A man she loved, a man she'd used to spend hours of every day with,  talking, playing board games or just quietly reading to him when he was  too weak to enjoy anything else.

But his father had not been enough to make her want to stay the last  time. The old fool had given her his blessing, had missed her terribly,  yet even on the day he'd gone to see him before he left the palace he  had still maintained that Leona had had to do what she'd believed was  right.

So who was in the wrong here? Him for wanting to spend his life with one  particular woman, or Leona for wanting to do what was right?

He hated that phrase, doing what was right. It reeked of duty at the  expense of everything: duty to his family, duty to his country, duty to  produce the next Al-Qadim son and heir.

Well, I don't need a son. I don't need a second wife to produce one for  me like some specially selected brood mare! I need a beautiful  red-haired creature who makes my heart ache each time I look at her. I  don't need to see that glazed look of emptiness she wears after we make  love!

On a sigh he turned round, swapped braced hands for braced shoulders  against the shower wall. The water hit his face and stopped him  breathing. He didn't care if he never breathed again-until instinct took  over from grim stubbornness and forced him to move again.

Coming out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he had to scan the room  before he spotted her sitting curled up in one of the chairs. She had  opened the curtains and was just sitting there staring out, with her  wonderful hair gleaming hot against the pale damask upholstery. She had  wrapped herself in a swathe of white and a glance at the tumbled bed  told him she had dragged free the sheet of Egyptian cotton to wear.

His gaze dropped to the floor by the bed, where their clothes still lay  in an intimate huddle that was a lot more honest than the two of them  were with each other.

'Find out how Ethan is.'

The sound of her voice brought his attention back to her. She hadn't  moved, had not turned to look at him. and the demand spoke volumes as to  what was really being said. Barter and exchange. She had given him more  of herself than she had intended to do: now she wanted something back  by return.

Without a word he crossed to the internal telephone and found out what  she wanted to know, ordered some food to be sent in to them, then strode  across the room to sit down in the chair next to hers. 'He caught an  accidental blow to the jaw which knocked him out for a minute or two,  but he is fine now,' he assured her. 'And is dining with Ranq as we  speak.'

'So he wasn't part of this great plan of abduction you plotted with my father.' It wasn't a question, it was a sign of relief.

'I am devious and underhand on occasion but not quite that devious and underhand,' he countered dryly.

Her chin was resting on her bent knees, but she turned her head to look  at him through dark, dark eyes. Her hair flowed across her white-swathed  shoulders, and her soft mouth looked vulnerable enough to conquer in  one smooth swoop. His body quickened, temptation clawing across flesh  hidden beneath his short robe of sand-coloured silk.

'Convincing my own father to plot against me wasn't devious or underhand?' she questioned.                       
       
           



       

'He was relieved I was ready to break the deadlock,' he informed her.  'He wished me well, then offered me all the help he could give.'

Her lack of comment was one in itself. Her following sigh punctuated it.  She was seeing betrayal from her own father, but it just was not true.  'You knew he worried about you,' he inserted huskily. 'Yet you didn't  tell him why you left me, did you?'

The remark lost him contact with her eyes as she turned them frontward  again, and the way she stared out into the inky blackness beyond the  window closed up his throat, because he knew what she was really seeing  as she looked out.

'Coming to terms with being a failure is not something I wanted to share with anyone,' she murmured dully.

'You are not a failure,' he denied.

'I am infertile!' She flashed out the one word neither of them wanted to hear.

It launched Hassan to his feet on a surge of anger. 'You are not  infertile!' he ground out harshly. 'That is not what the doctors said,  and you know it is not!"

'Will you stop hiding from it?' she cried, scrambling to her feet to  stand facing him, with her face as white as the sheet she clutched  around her and her eyes as black as the darkness outside. 'I have one  defunct ovary and the other one ovulates only when it feels like it!'  She spelt it out for him.

'Which does not add up to infertility,' he countered forcefully.

'After all of these years of nothing, you can still bring yourself to say that?'

She was staring up at him as if he was deliberately trying to hurt her.  And, because he had no answer to that final charge, he had to ask  himself if that had been his subconscious intention. The last year had  been hell to live through and the year preceding only marginally better.  Married life had become a place in which they'd walked with the  darkness of disappointment shadowing their past and future. In the end,  Leona had not been able to take it any more so she'd left him. If she  wanted to know what failure really felt like then she should have  trodden in his shoes as he'd battled with his own failure to relieve  this woman he loved of the heavy burden she was forced to carry.

'We will try other methods of conception,' he stated grimly.

If it was possible her face went even whiter. 'My eggs harvested like  grains of wheat and your son conceived in a test tube? Your people would  never forgive me for putting you through such an indignity, and those  who keep the Al-Qadim family in power will view the whole process with  deep suspicion."

Her voice had begun to wobble. His own throat closed on the need to  swallow, because she was right, though he did not want her to be. For  she was talking about the old ones those tribal leaders of the desert  who really maintained the balance of power in Rahman. They lived by the  old ways and regarded anything remotely modern as necessary evil to be  embraced only if all other sources had been exhausted. Hassan had taken a  big risk when he'd married a western woman. The old ones had surprised  him by deciding to see his decision to do so as a sign of strength. But  that had been the only concession they had offered him with regard to  his choice of wife. For why go to such extremes to father a son he could  conceive as easily by taking a second wife?

Which was why this subject had always been so sensitive, and why Leona  suddenly shook her head and said, 'Oh, why did you have to bring me back  here?" Then she turned and walked quickly away from him, making  unerringly for the bathroom he had so recently used for the same  purpose-to be alone with her pain.



CHAPTER FOUR

Two hours, Leona noticed, as she removed her slender gold watch from her  wrist with badly trembling fingers and laid it on the marble surface  along with the diamonds from her ears and throat. Two hours together and  already they were tearing each other to pieces.

On a sigh she swivelled round to sink down onto the toilet seat and  stare dully at her surroundings. White. Everything was white.  White-tiled walls and floor, white ceramics-even the sheet she had  discarded lay in a soft white heap on the floor. The room needed a bit  of colour to add some-

She stopped herself right there, closing her eyes on the knowledge that  she had slipped into professional mode and knowing she had done it to  escape from what she should really be thinking about.

This situation, this mad, foolish, heart-flaying situation, which was  also so bitter-sweet and special. She didn't know whether to laugh at  Hassan's outrageous method of bringing them together, or sob at the  unnecessary agony he was causing the both of them.

In the end she did both, released a laugh that turned into a sob and  buried the sound in her hands. Each look, each touch, was an act of love  that bound them together. Each word, each thought, was an act of pain  that tore them apart at the seams.