Defiant in the Desert (25 page)

He smiled. ‘I thought I’d just demonstrated that—to our mutual satisfaction.’

Her own smile was tight. So that had been a
demonstration,
had it? In the midst of her post-orgasmic glow, it was all too easy to forget his arrogance. ‘For sex?’ she queried. ‘Was that why you came?’

‘Yes. No. Oh, Izzy—I don’t know.’ He shook his head and gave a reluctant sigh, not wanting to analyse the powerful impulse which had brought him to her door today. Couldn’t she just enjoy the here and now and be satisfied with that? ‘Whatever it is, I’ve missed it.’

‘If it’s just sex you can get that from plenty of other women,’ she pointed out.

‘Then maybe it isn’t just sex,’ he said slowly. He lifted her chin with the tips of his fingers and she was caught in the brilliant ebony blaze of his eyes. ‘Maybe what I should have said is that I’ve missed
you
.’

Isobel’s heart missed a beat, and all the wistful longings she had suppressed as a matter of survival now came bubbling to the surface. ‘You’ve said that before,’ she whispered. ‘When you’ve come back from a trip.’

‘Yes, I know. But it was different this time— knowing that you weren’t going to be here. Telling me that it was over made me realise that I could lose you—and I don’t want to.’

Her heart crashed against her ribcage. ‘You don’t?’

‘No.’ He brushed his lips over hers. Back and forth and back and forth—until he could feel her shivering response. ‘What we have together is better than anything I’ve had with anyone else. I’m not promising you for ever, Izzy, because I don’t think I can do that. And I haven’t changed my mind about children. But if you think you can be content with what we’ve got.... Well, then, let’s go for it.’

His words mocked her. Taunted her. They filled her with horror at what she must now do.
Let’s go for it.
That was the kind of thing a football coach said during the half-time pep talk—not a man who was telling you that you meant something really special to him. And Isobel realised what a mess she had made of everything. Despite her determination not to follow in her mother’s footsteps, she had ended up doing exactly that. She had hitched her star to a man who was unavailable. In Tariq’s case it wasn’t because he was married but because he was emotionally unavailable. And in a roundabout way he’d just told her that he always would be.

I haven’t changed my mind about children.

So now what did she do?

Feeling sick with nerves, she sat up, her unruly curls falling over her shoulders and providing some welcome cover for her aching breasts.

‘Before you say any more, there’s something I have to tell you, Tariq.’ She sucked in a shuddering breath, more nervous than she’d ever been as he suddenly tensed. She met the narrowed question in his ebony eyes. ‘You see...I’m going to have a baby.’

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HE
SILENCE
IN
THE
room emphasised the sounds outside, which floated through the open window. The faint roar of traffic a long way below. The occasional toot of a car. A low plane flying overhead.

Isobel stared down at Tariq’s still figure, lying on the bed, and ironically she was reminded of the time when he’d lain in hospital. When he’d looked so lost and so vulnerable and her feelings for him had undergone a complete change.

But he wasn’t looking vulnerable now.

Far from it. She watched the expressions which shifted across his face like shadows. Shock morphing into disbelief and then quickly settling itself into a look which she’d been expecting all along.

Anger.

Still he did not move. Only his eyes did—hard and impenetrable as two pieces of polished jet as they fixed themselves on her. ‘Please tell me that this is some kind of sick joke, Izzy.’

Izzy trembled at all the negative implications behind his response. ‘It’s not a joke—why would I joke about something like that? I’m...I’m going to have a baby. Your baby.’

‘No!’ He moved then, fast as a panther, reaching down to grab his jeans before getting off the bed to roughly pull them on, knowing he couldn’t face having such a conversation with her when he was completely naked. Because what if his traitorous body began to harden with desire, even as an impotent kind of rage began to spiral up inside him as he realised the full extent of her betrayal?

He zipped up his jeans and tugged on his shirt. And only then did he advance towards her with such a look of dark fury contorting his features that Isobel shrank back against the pillows.

‘Tell me it isn’t true,’ he said, in a voice of pure venom.

‘I can’t. Because it is,’ she whispered.

Tariq stared at her. She had known that he never wanted to be a father. She’d
known
because he’d told her! He’d even told her just now. After they’d...they’d... ‘How the hell can you be pregnant when you’re on the pill?’

‘Because accidents sometimes happen—’

‘What? You
accidentally
forgot to take it, did you?’

‘No!’

‘How, then?’ he demanded hotly.
‘How,
Izzy?’

Distractedly she held up her hands, as if she was surrendering. ‘I had a mild touch of food poisoning after I ate some fish! It must have been then.’

‘Must it?’

Abruptly he turned his back on her and went over to stand beside the window, staring down at the busy London street. When he turned back his face was a mask. She had never seen him look quite like that before—all cold and empty—and suddenly Isobel realised that whatever feelings he might have had for her, they had just died.

‘Or was it “accidentally on purpose”?’ he said slowly. ‘When did it happen?’

‘It was...’ She swallowed. ‘It was around the time when I met Zahid and Francesca.’

‘You mean the
King
and
Queen?
’ he corrected imperiously, unknown emotions making him retreat behind protocol—despite his conflicting feelings towards it. He remembered the way she’d held Omar that night. The way she’d looked at him over the mop of ebony curls with that soppy soft look that women sometimes assumed whenever there was a baby around.

‘What? Did you look at Francesca?’ he questioned. ‘See another ordinary Englishwoman very much like yourself? Did you look around you and see all the wealth and status at her fingertips and think:
I wouldn’t mind some of that for myself?
After all, you also had a royal lover—just as Francesca had once done. The only difference is that she didn’t get herself pregnant in order to secure her future!’

If she hadn’t been naked she would have lunged at him. As it was, Isobel got off the bed and grabbed at her dress to hide her vulnerability—the outward kind, anyway. For her heart was vulnerable, too—and she felt as if he had crushed it in his fist.

‘I can’t b-believe you could think that!’ she stuttered as she started doing up the buttons, her shaking fingers making the task almost impossible.

‘I suppose I can’t really blame you,’ he mused, almost as if she hadn’t objected, a slow tide of rage still building inside him. ‘Most women seem hell-bent on marriage—and the more prestigious the marriage, the better. And you can’t do much better than a prince, can you?’

‘You must be joking,’ she hissed back. ‘You might be a prince, but you also happen to be an arrogant and overbearing piece of—’

‘Let’s skip the insults, shall we?’ he snapped, as he tried to get his head around the fact that in her belly his child grew.
His child!
A child he’d never asked for nor wanted. A child he would never be able to love...that he didn’t know
how
to love. ‘I thought you were into honesty, Izzy? Except now I come to think about it you haven’t been very honest all the way along, have you?’

She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just how long have you known about this pregnancy?’

She met the accusation which blazed from his face. ‘For a couple of weeks,’ she admitted.

A strange light entered his eyes. He looked like someone who had been trying to solve a puzzle and had just found the last missing piece stuffed down the back of the sofa. ‘When we were in bed—the morning I got the phone call from Khayarzah about Leila—you knew you were pregnant then, didn’t you?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t
know.
I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t sure.’

‘But you didn’t bother to tell me? Even today you kept quiet. You let me come here and...’ She’d let him lose himself in the refuge of her arms. Lulling him into sweet compliance with the erotic promise of her body.

‘We had
sex,
Tariq!’ she declared brutally. ‘Let’s not make it into something it wasn’t!’

She could see the faint shock which had dilated his eyes, but his reaction was breathing resolve into her and Isobel felt something of her old spirit return. Was she going to allow him to speak to her as if she was some worthless piece of nothing he’d found on the bottom of his shoe? As if she counted for nothing?

‘I didn’t tell you because I knew how you would react,’ she raged. ‘Because I knew that you’d be arrogant enough to think it was all some giant conspiracy theory instead of the kind of slip-up that’s been happening to men and women ever since they started fornicating!’

His eyes bored into her. ‘I’m assuming that marriage
is
what you want?’

Isobel’s eyes widened. Hadn’t he been listening to a word she’d been saying? ‘You must be
mad,
’ she whispered. ‘Completely certifiable if you think that I’d ever want to sign up for life with a man like
you.
A man so full of ego that he thinks a woman will get herself deliberately pregnant in order to trap him.’

‘You think it’s never been done before?’ he scorned.

‘Not by me,’ she defended fiercely, closing her eyes as a wave of terrible sadness washed over her. ‘Now, please go, Tariq. Get out of here before either of us says anything more we might regret.’

His impulse was to resist—for he was used to calling the shots. Until he realised that this wasn’t the first time Izzy had called the shots. It had been her, after all, who’d had the courage to end the relationship. And, yes, he had been arrogant enough to think that she might just be playing a very sophisticated game to bring him to heel.

But Izzy didn’t do game-playing, he realised. She hadn’t told him she thought she was pregnant because she’d feared his reaction—and hadn’t he just proved those fears a thousand times over? He looked at the haunted expression on her whitened face and suddenly felt a savage jerk of guilt.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said suddenly.

Her eyes swimming with unshed tears, she looked at him. ‘What? Sorry for the things you said? Or sorry that you ever got involved with me in the first place?’

He flinched as her accusations hit home. ‘Sit down, Izzy.’

She ignored the placatory note in his voice. He thought he could spew out all that
stuff
and that now she’d instantly become malleable? How dared he tell her to sit down in her own home? ‘I’ll sit down once you’ve gone.’

‘I’m not going anywhere until you do. Because there are things we need to discuss.’

She wanted to tell him that he had forfeited all rights to any discussion with his cruel comments. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. Because Tariq was her baby’s father. And didn’t she know better than anyone how great and gaping the hole could be in a child’s life if it didn’t have one?

‘And we will,’ she said, sucking in another deep breath, her hand instinctively fluttering to her still-flat belly. ‘Just not now, when emotions are running so high.’

Tariq watched the unfamiliar maternal movement and something tugged at his heart. To his astonishment, he found that he wanted to ask her a million questions. He wanted to ask whether she’d eaten that day, whether she had been sleeping properly at night. He’d never asked for this baby, and he didn’t particularly want it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel empathy for the woman who carried that baby, did it?

He looked at her with a detachment he’d never used before. She
did
look different, he decided. More delicate than usual, yes—but there was a kind of strength about her, too. It radiated off her like the sunlight which caught the pale fire of her hair.

He should have been gathering her in his arms now and congratulating her. Laying a proprietorial hand over her belly and looking with pride into her shining eyes. If he had been a normal man—like other men—then he would have been able to do all those things. But he knew that all he had was a piece of ice where his heart should be, and that was why they were just gazing at each other suspiciously across a small bedroom.

But this was no time for reflection. Whatever his own feelings, this had to be all about Izzy. He had to think practically. To help her in any way that he could.

‘You obviously won’t be coming back to work,’ he said.

Impatiently, she shook her head. ‘I hadn’t even thought about work.’

‘Well, you don’t have to. I want you to know that you don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll make sure you’re financially secure.’

Now she observed him with a kind of fury. What? Buy her off? Did he think that she’d be satisfied with that as compensation for the lack of the marriage she’d supposedly been angling for? She thought of her own mother—how she had always gone out to work and supported herself. And hadn’t Isobel been grateful for that role model? To see a woman survive and thrive and not be beaten down because her hopes of love had not materialised?

‘Actually, I’ve decided that I want to carry on working,’ she said. ‘And besides, what on earth would I do all day—sit around knitting bootees? Plenty of women work right up until the final weeks. I’ll...I’ll look for another job, obviously.’

But she was filled with dread at the thought of going from agency to agency and having to hide her pregnancy. Who would want to take on a woman in her condition and offer her any kind of security for the future?

‘You don’t need to look for another job,’ he said harshly. ‘You could come back to work for me in an instant. Or I could arrange to have you work for one of the partners, if you don’t think you could tolerate being in the same office as me.’

Isobel swallowed. She thought of starting work for someone new, with her pregnancy growing all the time. She wasn’t aware of how much other people at the Al Hakam corporation knew about their affair. After all, it wasn’t the most likely of partnerships, and Tariq hadn’t exactly been squiring her around town. Would people put two and two together and come up with the right answer? Would her position be compromised once any new boss knew who the father of her baby was?

She stared at him, wondering what kind of foolish instinct it was which made her realise that she actually wanted to work for
him.
For there was a certain kind of security in the familiar—especially when there was so much happening in her life. At least with Tariq she wouldn’t have to hide anything, or pretend. Tariq would protect her. Because, despite his angry words of earlier, she sensed that he would make sure that nothing and nobody ever harmed her, or her baby.

‘I think I could just about tolerate it,’ she said slowly.

She met his eyes, knowing that she needed to believe in the words she was about to speak—because otherwise there could be no way forward. She had thought that if she quietly loved him then he might learn how to love her back—even if it was only a little bit. She had thought that maybe she could change him. But she had been wrong. Because you couldn’t change somebody else—you could only change yourself. And Tariq didn’t want love—not in any form, it seemed. He didn’t want to receive it, and he didn’t want to give it either. Not to her—and not to their baby.

‘We must agree to give each other the personal space we need,’ she continued steadily. ‘The relationship is over, Tariq—we both know that. But there’s no reason why we can’t behave civilly towards each other.’

He was aware of an overwhelming sense of relief that she wasn’t going to be launching out on her own. But something in the quiet dignity of her statement made his heart grow heavy with a gloomy realisation. As if somehow there had been something wonderful hovering on the periphery of his life.

And he had just let it go.