The Sheikh's Last Gamble Read online

  She glared sharply up at him then, probably the first time she’d looked at him since storming out of his room early this morning, and he knew he’d rubbed her up the wrong way by reverting to her title. Tough. The less personal they kept this, the better for both of them. ‘The deal was to see you safely home.’

  ‘I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

  ‘It’s not up to you,’ he said, tossing his own overnight bag into the trunk alongside her bags, before nodding to the driver to close it. ‘And it’s not up to me. I made an agreement with Zoltan and that agreement stands.’

  ‘There’s no need …’

  He pulled open the back door for her. ‘Get in.’

  ‘But I don’t want you …’

  He leaned in close to her ear, close enough so that anyone sitting at the outdoor tables nearby might even think he was whispering sweet nothings into her ear. ‘You think I want you? You think I want to be here? But this isn’t about what I think of you right now. This isn’t personal. This is duty, princess, pure and simple. I said I’d do this and I’ll damned well do it.’

  He drew back as she stood there in the open door for what seemed like for ever, looking like she might explode, her eyes filled with a white heat, her jaw so rigidly set it could have been wired in place.

  ‘Any time this year would be good, princess. I know how you’re in such a hurry to be reunited with your precious children.’ Not to mention how much of a hurry he was in to be done with her for good.

  Her sorceress’s eyes narrowed then, and something he’d swear looked almost evil skittered across their dark surface while her lips stretched thin and tight across her face. ‘You’re right, this is all about duty,’ she said. ‘I had forgotten that for a moment. Just don’t tell me later that I didn’t warn you.’

  He didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. He didn’t want to know. He slammed the door behind her, and after a few words, giving the driver a day off, took the keys and the wheel. There was no way he was sharing the back seat with her. At least driving along Italy’s frenetic autostradas would give him something relatively sane to think about.

  It sure beat thinking about her.

  He headed the car north towards Genoa and the exit that would take them into the northern Tuscan mountain region where she lived, while she sat glowering behind her dark glasses behind him. Such a different woman than the one who had graced his bed last night.

  What had that been all about? What was her problem? Had that been some perverse kind of pay-back, a kind of getting even for him cutting her off all those years ago?

  Was she still so bitter that she would seek any chance at revenge, including finding any justification that she could to stop him mere moments from plunging into her?

  What other reason? Because she could hardly take umbrage at being thought irresponsible. God, the entire world’s media had used that word in reference to her at one time or another, and with good reason. It could hardly be considered an insult. One didn’t have to look further than not one, but two illegitimate children to prove that.

  The traffic was heavy on the autostrada, but the powerful car made short work of the kilometres through the wide valley to the turn-off onto the narrower road that led towards the mountain region where she lived. Discovering that had been a surprise. He’d figured she’d still be living somewhere close to a city, somewhere she could party long into the night before collapsing long into the day. But she had children now. Perhaps she left them with their nanny while she partied. Maybe she was responsible enough to do that. That would be something.

  The pace slowed considerably after they’d left the autostrada, the road wending its way along a fertile river valley flanked by looming peaks and through picturesque villages, where the corners of buildings intruding on the road, and blind corners that left no idea what was coming towards you, became the norm.

  He dodged yet another slow-moving farm tractor. This was clearly an inconvenient place to live. But maybe she didn’t come home too often.

  He glanced in the rear-view mirror to see her leaning back against the leather upholstery, her eyes still hidden under those dark glasses. But nothing could hide the strain made obvious in the tight set of her mouth.

  So she was tired. Who wasn’t after last night?

  He had no sympathy. None at all. At least she’d enjoyed some measure of relief. Unlike him, who had burned unsatiated all the hours till daylight, and then some just thinking about her spread out on his bed, wanton, lush and, oh, so slick.

  He had been just moments from the place he had longed to be ever since she had appeared like a sorceress on the terrace, gift-wrapped in a transparent layer of silk …

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ she said from the back. ‘You have to turn left here.’ He had to haul the car around or he would have missed the turn completely.

  ‘How far?’ he said as the road narrowed to little more than a one-lane track up the side of a mountain and a snow sign warned of winter hazards.

  ‘A few kilometres. Not far.’ He wanted to snarl at the news, more anxious than ever, the closer they got to her home, for his duty to be done.

  On the autostrada, with the power and engineering excellence of the car at his disposal, those few kilometres would have taken no time at all. On this narrow goat’s track, with its switchback bends and impossibly tight, blind corners, it was impossible to go fast, and the climb seemed to take for ever. Longer than for ever, when all you wanted was for it to be over.

  The tyres squealed their protest as he rounded another tight bend, pulling in close against the mountainside as a four-wheel drive coming the other way spun its wheels just enough to the right that the two vehicles slid past with bare millimetres to spare.

  He took a ragged breath, relieved at the near miss. What the hell was she doing all the way up here? It would be hard to find somewhere more remote, and there was no way he could reconcile the Marina he knew—the high-living girl who was as wilful as she was wild and wanton—with somewhere so rustic.

  Though he could see why anyone not enamoured of the party world would want to live here. For, as they scaled the mountain, the vistas grew more and more impressive, of ridge after ridge, valley after valley framed by even higher peaks to one side of him and a range of grey-green mountains in the distance.

  ‘Just on the next bend,’ she said at last. ‘The driveway on the left.’ And there was the next surprise as he pulled into the gravel driveway—he wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it sure hadn’t been this.

  The stone villa sprawled down the side of a ridge, its windows looking out to what had to be magnificent views in every direction. Climbing bougainvillea up the walls trailed bright vermilion flowers, a brilliant contrast against the painted yellow walls. He stepped out and looked around, feeling the Tuscan sun on his shoulders. Kinder than the desert sun, he registered, even in the early afternoon when it was at its most potent. Or maybe it was always cooler at this height.

  She didn’t wait for him to finish his appraisal and open her door, or maybe she was just as impatient as him for this ordeal to be over.

  ‘This is where you live?’ he asked as he pulled her bags from the trunk.

  She reached for them but he held them firm and her lips tightened again. ‘It’s my home, yes.’ She sighed with the resignation of one who knew he was going to see his duty to the bitter end, and led the way down a set of stairs on one side of the house that led to a crazy-paved terrace and covered pergola. From here the views were even better. Across a valley between the ridges, a small village clung in colourful array against the dense green of orchards and forest, and before them the land slipped away, lush and green, fading through to grey with each successive range.

  Then from the house he heard footsteps, squeals and cries of ‘Mama, Mama!’ before a door flew open and two dark-haired children exploded from the house shrieking and laughing.

  ‘Mama!’ cried the first, a boy that collided full force against her legs,
a tiny girl behind packing no less a punch as she flung herself at her mother.

  He felt a growl form at the back of his throat as she knelt down and wrapped her arms around them, felt his gut twist into knots. So these were her children? It was one thing to know about them—it was another to see them.

  He looked away, waiting for the reunion to be over. He didn’t do families. He certainly didn’t want to think about the implication of hers, of the men she had fallen into bed with so quickly after expressing her undying love to him. So much for that.

  ‘You’re home at last, thank the heavens,’ he heard someone say. And he swung round to see an older woman of forty-something, wiping her hands on a flour-covered apron, standing at the door, not looking at the tableau in front of her, but squarely at him. She raised a quizzical eyebrow at the visitor before turning to Marina. ‘Lunch is almost ready. Shall I set another place?’

  Marina kissed each of her children and rose, taking their hands in hers. ‘Bahir, this is Catriona, my nanny, housekeeper and general lifesaver. And these,’ she said, looking down, ‘are my children, Chakir and Hana. Bahir was nice enough to make sure I got home safely,’ she said to them. ‘Say ciao to our visitor, children.’

  Nice enough to see her home safely? Not really. But this time he had no choice but to look down at them—such a long way down, it seemed. Neither child said anything. The girl clung to her mother’s skirts, her eyes wide in a pixie face, her thumb firmly wedged in her mouth and clearly not impressed.

  But it was the boy who bothered him the most. He was looking up at him suspiciously, eyes openly defiant, as if protective of his mother and prepared to show it; eyes that looked uncannily familiar …

  ‘I’m not staying,’ he said suddenly, feeling a fool when he realised he was still holding her luggage like some stunned-mullet bellboy. He set the cases down by the door and took a step back. She could no doubt manage them from here herself.

  ‘You—should stay,’ Marina said, her words sounding strangely forced, as if she was having to force them through her teeth. ‘Stay for lunch.’

  ‘No, I …’ He looked longingly up the stairs to where he knew the car was parked.

  ‘You should …’ she said tightly, trailing off. There was no welcome in her words, but rather an insistence that tugged on some primal survival instinct. Some warning bell deep inside him told him to run and keep right on running.

  But he couldn’t run.

  The nanny-cum-housekeeper was watching him. Marina stood there, looking suddenly brittle and fragile, and as though at any moment she could blow away, except that she was anchored to the ground by the two sullen-looking children at her hands—the wide-eyed girl and the boy who looked up at him with those damned eyes …

  And with a sizzle down his spine he realised.

  His eyes.

  The high, clear mountain air seemed to thicken and churn with poison around him, until it was hard to breathe in the toxic morass. ‘No,’ he uttered. ‘Not that.’

  And he was only vaguely aware of Catriona ushering the children inside and closing the door, leaving Marina standing as still as a pillar of salt, her beautiful features gaunt and bleached almost to white.

  ‘It’s true,’ she whispered. ‘Chakir is your son.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘NO!’ The word exploded from his lips like a missile, intended to be just as deadly, just as decisive, before he wheeled away, his purposeful strides bearing him to the end of the wide terrace, taking him away from that house—but it was nowhere near far away enough from this nightmare. ‘No. It cannot be!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said behind him. ‘I know it must be a shock.’

  He spun back. ‘A shock? Is that what you call it? To be told that you have a child who is, what, two years old? The first you have heard of his existence, and you call that a shock?

  ‘Chakir turned three two months ago.’

  He didn’t want to hear anything of the sort. His brain scrambled over dates and calendars and what he knew of pregnancy timetables. Three years and two months—plus another nine months or so for the pregnancy, if she was speaking the truth. It was dangerously close to the time since they had last seen each other. But the boy could not be his. It could not be possible.

  Except how to explain those eyes …?

  He sucked in air as he strode backwards and forwards along the edge of the terrace, fingers clawing through his hair, searching for answers, finding none, only that it was impossible. Just as it was impossible to go back, to unhear what she’d told him and erase those words from his mind, even though it was what he wanted more than anything in the world.

  How could it be true? He’d supposedly had a child this past three years and she’d never bothered to inform him of that fact. Why now? Unless …

  ‘So what do you want, Marina?’ he said, rounding on her. ‘What are you after? Money? Is that it? You need money to fund this house and your lifestyle, and the boy’s real father let you down so you saw the opportunity to lumber me with your mistake in an effort to get child support?’

  Her hands fisted at her sides. ‘Chakir is not a mistake! Don’t you ever call our child a mistake!’

  He pointed towards the house. ‘That child is not mine. It is not possible.’

  ‘Why, because the great and infallible Bahir says so?’

  ‘Because I used protection! I always used protection.’

  ‘And unplanned pregnancies only happen to people who are irresponsible, is that right? People like me? Oh, you should hear yourself, Bahir.’

  ‘I never wanted a child!’

  ‘No, I wasn’t planning on it either—and yet this baby happened along in spite of everything we did, in spite of every precaution we took, like babies sometimes do. Maybe your gambler’s brain might better understand if I put it a different way—we gambled on contraception and we lost. The baby number came up instead.’

  He snorted. What did she know of gambling? Of winning and of losing? Nothing, compared to him. ‘So you have a child. What I don’t understand is why you are so desperate to pin it on me? You, who flitted from one man to another the moment I was out of your life.’

  She flinched, almost as if he’d physically struck her, stung, no doubt, by the truth in his words. Yet still that defiant chin lifted and she came back fighting.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Bahir. How can you begin to doubt that he’s yours? You know it’s true. You saw yourself in his face when you looked at him. I know you did. I saw the moment you recognised it.’

  ‘So there’s a resemblance.’ He shrugged, his mind scrabbling for an explanation. ‘A coincidence. Nothing more. You can’t be sure it’s mine.’

  ‘I can be sure, Bahir,’ she said. ‘Because I had just found out I was pregnant that very day I came to you, the day you chose to cut me out of your life for ever.’

  ‘You were pregnant then?’

  ‘I had just found out. I was nervous. Afraid. But excited too. And I thought—I’d dared to hope—that you might be a little excited too.’

  ‘Yet you said nothing about being pregnant.’

  ‘Because there was no point! Not once you’d told me that you weren’t interested in my love and to get out of your life for ever. Not once you’d told me you didn’t do family and you never wanted children, never wanted a child. Why the hell would I tell you then, when it was already too late?’

  He dropped his head onto his fists, his chest heaving with the weight of today’s discovery, already buckling under the weight of the memories of the past and of a day so dreadful he had tried to block it from his mind. ‘So this is all my fault, is it? You neglect to pass on the fact we have a child, and somehow it’s all my fault.’

  She took her own sweet time to answer, standing there, looking like some wronged angel when, damn it all, she was not the wronged party here!

  Then she sighed. ‘No. This is not about finding fault. I’m just trying to explain why I didn’t tell you, in words you might understand.
You would hardly have thanked me that day if I had told you I was pregnant. You were so vehemently opposed to the idea of children, I could not share that with you. On top of everything else, I could not risk it. I could not risk you telling me what to do …’

  He blinked with the realisation of her meaning. She thought he’d have insisted on a termination—was that what she’d been about to say?

  He cast his mind back to that day, a day that had always been going to be bleak but a day that had grown progressively worse with the arrival of the mail, a poisoned day that had turned more toxic when she had appeared unexpected and looking like sunshine in a smile. He’d damned well near hated her in that moment. And then she’d asked him if he’d ever wanted a family and the bottom had fallen out of his world.

  He’d thought he’d known her. He’d thought they understood each other. Live for the day. Take your pleasure while you could. Party on and then move on.

  And it had been good. Better than good.

  But then she’d surprised him by turning as needy and grasping as all the others. ‘Have you ever thought about having children?’ she’d asked. ‘I love you,’ she’d said. And his mind had turned as fetid and as poisoned as his memories.

  She’d known she was pregnant even while she’d been uttering those words.

  And if she’d told him that day, if he’d known, would he have insisted on a termination? God. He didn’t know. He’d never considered the possibility. It had never been an issue. All he’d known was he’d never wanted a child. But seeing that boy and thinking …

  He cursed. Sometimes it was better not to think.

  ‘So, why tell me now, if you couldn’t tell me then?’ he asked, feeling sick with it all, the deceit, the lies, the shock of discovery. ‘Why wait until now, nearly four years after the event, to drop this bombshell?’

  She shook her head and he tried not to notice the way the ends of the layers in her long hair bobbed around her face when she moved. He hated the way the ends danced and played and caught the sunlight, as if none of this mattered. He hated that he even noticed. ‘I didn’t want to tell you at all,’ she said. ‘Not ever. I was happy for you never to know. And you’d told me you never wanted to see me again, so why would I complicate things with news you wouldn’t want to hear? That’s how I reasoned. But things have happened lately, and—’