Wanted: A Baby by the Sheikh(20)

They parked in front of the centuries old, beautiful brick building and Taina looked up at its soaring architecture, complete with extravagantly sized windows through which light streamed. It was beautiful, but Daidan had been right. She was scared of old ghosts. And not just her mother’s.

Daidan stepped to one side and held the door open for her. He’d always been old-fashioned in his manners. It had been one of the things that she’d loved about him. But now it meant she had to enter the building first. She gritted her teeth and stepped in over the worn threshold. The smell of the place got her first. She almost thought she’d faint as the devastating combination of polished wood and lilies of the valley—the kielo—swamped her. Seems the staff of designers still maintained her mother’s tradition of having lilies everywhere.

She looked around. Nothing much had changed which only made it harder. She pretended to be caught up in looking at a painting on the wall. Really she was just buying time. Daidan went up to the group of designers and began talking with them, leaving her to her own devices for a few vital minutes—minutes she needed to settle her nerves. She glanced anxiously at the stairs. She just hoped she’d be able to avoid climbing the polished staircase to her mother’s own studio.





“Taina!” Daidan called. She walked over to him, her boots clicking on the worn parquet floor and greeted the team of designers, all of whom she’d been meeting with in the office tower. “Look.” He showed her some drawings. “We still have these pieces. And Emilia has agreed to construct something similar to the Kielo necklace. And we have the paste replicas we can go with in the meantime.” He nodded to the woman. “Thank you, Emilia.”

He took Taina by the arm. “Come on, let’s go upstairs.”

Taina resisted. There was no way she was going up there. “I’ll stay here. There are a few things I want to discuss with the designers.”

But Taina could see from Daidan’s face that she wasn’t going to get away with it.

“Upstairs, in your mother’s old office. I’d like to talk with you there.”

She didn’t want to be dragged kicking and shouting upstairs by him, in front of everyone, so she did what he wanted. She could do this. So long as the rear door was closed.

He followed her up there and she breathed a sigh of relief. The partition wall was closed and the rear of the office—the part that still remained from the eighteenth-century warehouse that it once was—was sealed off. She immediately went and sat at the window seat that overlooked the wooded park outside. She suddenly realized it was the seat she’d always made a bee-line for as a youngster when she’d been allowed to visit her mother. Old habits died hard it seemed.

“Taina!” She jumped and twisted around. It was as if her father had come back to life.

Daidan was sitting behind her mother’s desk—although in all truth her mother had never used it. It had been something her father had insisted she have. “You’re the director of this company—you should act the part,” he’d barked at her mother. Her nervous, elegant mother had simply shrugged it off and avoided the subject. Her father had got his way in installing the elements of the office, but her mother had never used the desk. And now Daidan sat there, just as her father had.

“It suits you,” she said.

He frowned. “What does?”

“The desk.” She rose and walked over to it, determined not to be undermined by Daidan. “Always wanting to command, eh Daidan?” She leaned against the rough brick wall, the soft wool of her long jacket catching on the rough stone.

“Someone has to, Taina. You’ve been gallivanting about God knows where, with God knows who for over a year.”

“And don’t you wish you knew!”

He shrugged. “I really couldn’t care less.”

“I don’t believe you. I bet you’ve had me followed. I bet even now there are people trying to work out where I was last seen and with whom.”

“Of course,” he said in a bored tone. “But not for any sentimental reasons. I want to know who has the necklace. That’s all.”

“I should have known. Business. That’s all you care about, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. And if you’d tell me where it is, it would make all our lives that much easier.”

She shook her head.

His eyes flashed and he walked over to her and stood too close. “How could you betray your mother like this? Giving away your family heirloom, something your grandfather found, your own mother created? Have you no feeling?”