The Sheikh's Secret Son

“What do you want me to do, Jim? Threaten to tackle him? Besides, I saw Klinger out there, right?” Eden protested, feeling the urge to bolt sliding over her again. This was too much. Too much information, too many memories, too many fears. They were all crowding in on her, bearing her down, crushing her.

She could barely think. “Surely Klinger can handle this. We’re just here for decoration at this point, Jim, and you know that. As I said, a few comments, a lot of ego-kissing, some signing on the dotted line, and we’re outta here.”

“How interesting, Ms. Fortune. And who will be kissing my…ego?”

Eden closed her eyes, wishing the action could make her disappear. The way he’d disappeared so many years ago.

“Oh, God,” she breathed almost soundlessly, looking at Jim Morris, whose thin features had turned the color of putty. Then she squared her shoulders, turned around, and looked straight into Ben Ramsey’s eyes. Into Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir’s dark, mocking eyes.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” she said quickly. “As you can imagine, you weren’t supposed to overhear my associate and me talking. I apologize.”

Ben kept looking at her. Staring at her. Staring straight through her. With Sawyer’s eyes, damn him.

“You may go now,” he said rather imperiously. “Closing the door behind you as you leave—something you might have considered earlier.”

Jim Morris knew he’d been the one addressed, even though the “Ramir fellow” was still looking at Eden. He didn’t hesitate in escaping the small room. Rats deserting a sinking ship moved slower than he did as he left Eden alone to face the insulted Sheikh of Kharmistan.

Ben took two steps in Eden’s direction.

She backed up an equal two paces, until she could feel the edge of the table against her hips. She placed her hands on either side of her, holding on to that edge, her posture definitely one of defense rather than offense.

Which was stupid. The last thing she wanted to do was to look in the least vulnerable.

“You are looking well, Eden,” Ben said, touching a hand to the soft, snow-white material that made up his headdress. He should have looked silly, or pretentious, dressed in his gray Armani suit, the headpiece held in place by two coils of something that looked very much like gold-wrapped silk, the edges of the material flowing over his shoulders.

But he didn’t look silly. He looked wonderful. Dark, and mysterious, and somehow larger than life. Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, but photographed in sepia tones. His eyes as dark as any Arabian night. His features chiseled from desert rock weathered by desert winds. His tall form muscular but not musclebound. His movements measured, graceful.

His hands…well, she already knew about his hands.

“And you. You’re…um…you’re looking well,” she answered at last, then cleared her throat. Maybe the action would help her to breathe. But she doubted it. “You knew I’d be here today?”

“Yes, Eden, I did. A knowledge you obviously did not share.”

Eden’s temper hit her then, like a sharp slap on the back meant to dislodge a bit of stuck fish bone, or pride. “You’re right, Your Highness. I had no knowledge that you’d be here today. That Ben Ramsey would be here today.”

He bowed slightly, from the waist. A regal inclination, certainly no gesture that her words had impacted him, no sign of any reaction that had even a nodding acquaintance with the word “embarrassed.”

She longed to clobber him with something hard and heavy.

And then he really blew her mind…

“Very well,” he said coldly. “If you wish to play the ignorant, Eden, I suppose I am willing to listen as you tangle your tongue in knots, trying to deny that you did not know who I was—who I am. Or is your memory truly that faulty, that you forgot my letters, my explanations. That you forgot to answer those letters, just as you chose to forget me, forget Paris.”

“Letters? What letters? The only letter I ever received from you was the note you left on the bed. Let’s see, I think I still remember it. ‘Eden, darling. I have been called home. Stay where you are, I shall contact you, explain everything as I should have at the beginning.’ You signed it with love, as I recall.”

She knew very well how he had signed the note, because she had kept it, for all of these years. It was all she could ever give Sawyer of his father.

The anger was back, cold and hard. “Did I know you were really a sheikh, Ben? How in hell was I supposed to know that? By reading between the lines of that note?”

When he said nothing, she stepped away from the table, picking up her attaché case as she headed past him toward the door. “I waited, Ben. I waited for nearly two weeks, long past the time I’d planned to return home, nearly too late to begin my next law school term. I waited, and I worried, and I finally realized that I knew nothing about you. Nothing important—like where you lived, if you had a family. If you had a wife. Finally, I woke up, realized I’d just had myself a Paris fling, and chalked you up to experience. And that’s how I’d like to keep it, Ben. An experience in my past, one I’m in no mood to repeat.”

He took hold of her elbow. Lightly, not really holding her in place, although she couldn’t move. She was too shocked by the sensation his slight touch set off in her body, a warmth spreading throughout her, betraying her.

“I do not believe you have been asked to repeat it, Eden,” he said quietly, his deep tones a seductive rumble low in his throat even as his words cut her, made her bleed. “But we are going to talk. Not here, not at this moment, but later. You will be at my hotel at six this evening, if you please. The Palace Lights here in San Antonio. Do you know it?”

“Oh, sure, like that’s going to happen!” Eden shook herself loose from his grip, using much more force than was strictly necessary. “I wouldn’t cross the street to see you, Your Highness. Put that in your…oh, hell, just stuff that in your headpiece, okay!”

She started for the door—when had the room grown so large?—but Ben spoke again, once more halting her in her tracks. “You will please tell Attorney Klinger and the others that His Highness has decided not to open Kharmistan to foreign investors. You might call them foreign devils, or infidels, if you think it will help prove that this ignorant Arab has no business sense, no concept of the fortune he is turning down.”

Eden whirled back to face him, her blue eyes narrowed as her entire face pinched and blanched at the same time. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, her heart pounding so loud she could barely hear herself speak.

He turned to her slowly, his dark eyes cold, his face a mask of handsome, deeply tanned, unreadable flesh. “If you have done your research, Eden, and I am convinced you have, you will know that I currently hold the position of twenty-third richest man in the world. I do not have much time for such lists, but they do seem to impress Westerners. So you see, Eden, I do not need your clients. I never did. I would not be here today if I had not seen your name on one of the status reports the faithful Nadim placed on my desk six months ago. He did not remember your name. I, however, have it branded on my heart.”

Eden refused to comment on his last statement. “Six…six months ago? You’ve been planning all of this? Negotiating with our clients for six long months? Putting us all through hoops, acting as if you wanted this deal—all so you could come here today to insult me? Embarrass me? Why? Do you plan to have me lose my job? Is that it? Are you that petty? You’ve ignored me for more than five years. How does that end up being my fault?”

“Six o’clock, Eden.” He walked past her and put his hand on the doorknob. “Now, if you will excuse me? I have a meeting to postpone until tomorrow. It will only be postponed, will it not, Eden?”

Eden chewed on the inside of her cheek, longing to tell him to go to hell, longing to tell him she didn’t give two snaps for the deal her firm had been working on for six long months. “Yes, that’s right. Only postponed, Your Highness,” she ground out at last, then exited the room ahead of him as he held open the door and graciously gestured that she should precede him.

Mary Ellen Fortune poured two cups of tea in the large kitchen of the contemporary Colonial house she and her late husband had built on Fortune land several years earlier.

The house was only two miles from the original homestead that had been expanded to three or more times its size over the years. Not that Cameron had felt the huge, rambling house hadn’t been large enough for he and Mary Ellen to raise their family there, alongside the family of his brother, Ryan.

Cameron had liked elegance, and size, and this house reflected his need for the overtly flamboyant and Mary Ellen’s equal need to make a comfortable and cozy home within the parameters her husband had set up. Now, with the children grown and gone, with Cameron gone, the house she loved was too big, too empty.

“You and Sawyer could come here for a while, darling,” Mary Ellen said as she carried the teacups to the wide butcher-block-topped kitchen table, placing one cup in front of Eden. “Security on the ranch is excellent, as you know. He couldn’t touch Sawyer here.”

Eden ran a hand through her hair, pushing the thick, wavy mass back from her face. She’d driven directly to the ranch as soon as the meeting had broken up, which it had done rapidly once Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir had regally begged the kind indulgence of those gathered and then departed the room without so much as a word of excuse, surrounded by his phalanx of guards.

Eden had been so distracted that she couldn’t even remember what her boss had said to her, what he had asked her. She’d just sicced him on Jim Morris, and been the first person on the elevator when it returned to the twenty-sixth floor.

Her memory of locating her car in the underground parking lot, the drive to the Double Crown Ranch, to her mother’s house, was equally vague. All she’d known was that she’d had to get to her mother, and she had to stay away from her own home on Edgewood Drive. Just in case she was followed…

“I can’t stay here, Mom,” Eden said, shaking her head. “Thanks to Ben—to the sheikh, that is—we’re all meeting again tomorrow in San Antonio. I’d have to get up before dawn to make it into the city on time. But Sawyer could come here, couldn’t he? He and Mrs. Betts.”

“He could,” Mary Ellen agreed, just as if she hadn’t been the one to suggest the visit from her grandson. “And Mrs. Betts could watch him while I’m working. I have to get the quarterly reports in order soon, you know.”

Eden nodded. Her mother had always been just that. A mother first and foremost, a loyal wife. But she also had a great business head that she’d employed to clean up after her husband’s financial messes over the years.

With Cameron’s death, she had stepped reluctantly into the limelight, and her business acumen had quickly landed her with new responsibilities and a reason to face life once more after her husband had gone.

“He wouldn’t be a bother, Mom. He’s got his pony up at the stables, but Mrs. Betts can drive him there whenever he wants…” Eden began, apologizing before the fact, but her mother waved off her weak words.

“I’m not saying I’m agreeing with you on this, Eden,” Mary Ellen said, a hint of motherly sternness creeping into her voice. “But I know you’ve had a shock. The first thing you need to do is talk with this Ben Ramsey…this Sheikh Ramir. Straighten out what happened between you before Sawyer was born, learn more about these letters he swore he wrote to you, make your peace between you. Only then can you decide if you want to tell him of Sawyer’s existence.”

“You think I should, though, don’t you?” Eden asked, grimacing as she looked at the clock on the wall, knowing she had to begin her drive back to San Antonio in the next fifteen minutes or she’d never be able to meet Ben at six o’clock, as he had ordered.

“He is the boy’s father,” Mary Ellen said, raising her teacup to her lips, then setting it down again. “I don’t know that he deserves Sawyer, or that Sawyer deserves him, but I do know that Sawyer deserves some answers.”

Eden slumped against the back of the large wooden chair. “Oh, God.” She lowered her head, rubbed at her forehead. “I’ll send Mrs. Betts and Sawyer here directly after dinner tonight. That’ll give me some time, and some distance. Unless he already knows…” she said, her voice drifting off even as her head shot up and she looked at her mother.

“He could know, couldn’t he? Once he’d seen my name he probably had someone make inquiries, check up on me, make sure I was the same Eden Fortune. Oh, God, Mom, why didn’t I think of this before—he might already know!”

Two

Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir entered the Palace Lights penthouse suite with the slow and measured step that reflected his life of patience, of waiting, of watching for the most opportune moment and then seizing that moment with both hands.

That was life in Kharmistan, the life of a prince, a sheikh. It was the life his late father had lived, and his father before him, for all of the sheikhs of Kharmistan who had known the feint and jab of politics, of intrigue, while these Americans were still learning how to build log cabins.

The sheikh had been raised at his father’s knee, then sent off to be educated; first in England, later in America. He had not needed the education found in books, for there were books and teachers in Kharmistan. At the age of twelve he had been sent away to learn the ways of the world, of the men who were outside his father’s small but strategically important kingdom.

Having an English mother had helped him, but nothing she had taught him could have prepared him for the lack of respect, mingled with hatred and misunderstanding, that had greeted him when he’d taken his first steps out of Kharmistan and into the world beyond his father’s kingdom. In Kharmistan his family name was revered, honored, even feared. In England he was the outsider, the alien being, the oddity. His clothing was ridiculed, his speech pattern mocked.

That was when the young prince had learned the value of conformity, at least an outward conformity that seemed to put his classmates at ease.

He had forsaken his comfortable tobe and kibr for the short pants and blazer of his classmates, even though his father had gained permission for him to avoid the school uniform.

He had answered insults with a smile until he had found sticks big enough to beat them all down. Those sticks had been his brilliant horsemanship, his skill on the playing fields, his excellence in the classroom.

Within a year he had become the most popular student in the school, as well as its top student. He was invited to large country estates over term breaks, introduced to the sisters of his classmates, both welcomed and welcome wherever he went. His friends were legion, and they believed they knew him well.

They never knew him at all. But he knew them. He knew them very well.

What had begun so encouragingly in England had been equaled and then outdone by the success he had found in America during his years at Yale. He assimilated. He blended. He fit in. He became one of “them,” even though he was not one of them.

He could never be one of them, one of those he met, roomed with, ate with, laughed with over the years.

Because he was Barakah Karif Ramir, only son of the sheikh, heir to the throne of Kharmistan.

All his English and American friends knew him as Ben, the nickname his Yale roommate had given him when he could not remember how to pronounce Barakah.

And being Ben was easier, simpler. Nobody groveled, nobody harassed, nobody bothered to try to impress him or beleaguer him or ask anything of him.

It had been as Ben that he had traveled to Paris in an attempt, years after his return to Kharmistan, to recapture some of that simplicity that had been lost to him in the halls of his father’s palace.

It had been as Ben that he had met Eden Fortune, the beautiful Texan he’d foolishly introduced himself to as Ben Ramsey. And why not? He’d anticipated an innocent flirtation, a Parisian romance, perhaps a mutually pleasurable dalliance.

Most women fawned all over him once they learned he was a prince. They fawned, and they preened, and they asked inane questions, and they got mercenary gleams in their beautiful eyes when they looked at him.

He had not wanted to see that acquisitional gleam in Eden Fortune’s lovely blue eyes. And he had not. He had seen interest, yes. In time, he had seen love, a love he returned in full measure.

Even as he deceived her.

The summons back to Kharmistan had come too soon, before he could confess that deception, before he could ask her to marry him, share her life with him. A hurried note left on a pillowcase, and he was gone, flying back to Kharmistan on his private jet, racing to the bedside of his seriously ill father.

But he had written. He had written several times, little more than hurried notes scribbled between taking care of state business and sitting at his father’s bedside. He had ordered those notes hand-delivered to Paris, with her replies placed directly into his hands.

Nothing.

There had been nothing.

No answer. No response.

And then she’d been gone. By the time he could assure himself of his father’s recovery and jet back to Paris, Eden had returned to America.

He may have let her believe he had never gotten a letter from her, but he had. The concierge at the hotel had handed him a small envelope when he had inquired about Eden at the front desk. It’s better this way. Eden. He had taken that to mean that she’d wanted nothing to do with him once he had told her, in his letters, of his true identity, of the privilege and the burden that he carried as heir to the throne of Kharmistan.

For nearly six years he had believed he had done the right thing to walk away, to not look back. To forget. His father had never fully recovered from his stroke, and Ben had been forced to work night and day to try to fill his shoes, to keep their subjects calm, to eventually step into those shoes completely when his father died.

There had been no time for romance, for fond memories, for much of anything except the work of ruling his country.

He had married Nadim’s daughter because it had been a politically advantageous move that had solidified the populace. But neither Leila nor Ben had been in love. Her death three years later had saddened him greatly, but he had barely noticed a difference in his always busy days. For he was the sheikh, and the sheikh lived for the state, not for personal happiness.

And then he had seen the memo from one Eden Fortune that Nadim had placed on his desk….

“Nadim?” he called out now as he went to the small bar in the corner of the living room of the suite, helping himself to an ice-cold bottle of spring water. “Nadim, are you there?”

A servant dressed in the traditional white linen tobe, his kaffiyeh secured to his head with an agal fashioned of thick woolen cords, appeared in the doorway, bowed to him. “His Excellency will be with you momentarily, Your Highness, and begs your pardon for inconveniencing you by even a moment’s absence,” he said, then bowed himself out of the room.

“Yeah, right,” Ben muttered under his breath as he pulled the kaffiyeh from his own head, suddenly impatient with the formality with which he was treated as the Sheikh of Kharmistan. It was as if he lived inside a bubble, and no one was allowed to approach too closely, speak too plainly, say what the devil was on his or her mind.

He had a sudden longing for that long-ago summer in Paris, for the days and nights he had spent with Eden. That was probably because she had looked today as she had looked then, only even more beautiful, more assured, more amazingly intelligent and independent.

Although not so independent that she could refuse his request—his ultimatum—to come here tonight, to meet with him again. She had been angry with him, certainly, but she had also seemed frightened. Frightened for her job? No. It had been more than that, he was sure of it.

But what? What?

“Your Highness requested my presence? I ask forgiveness for being unprepared for your seemingly precipitate return. Things did not go so well at the meeting?”

Ben turned to look at his closest advisor. Yusuf Nadim was a tall, extraordinarily handsome man in his mid-sixties. Dark skin, dark hair without a strand of gray, a thin mustache over his full upper lip. Nadim wore Western clothing well, but seldom, and looked quite impressive now in his sheer white silk kibr ornamented with a gold neckband and tasseled cord. He wore the flowing kibr over a fine linen tobe. His kaffiyeh was constructed of the same sheer material as his kibr, and anchored in place with an elaborate agal wrapped in gold thread.

He bowed to Ben, but his dignity did not bow with him.

My third cousin, the man who would be sheikh, Ben thought idly, then dismissed the reflection as it did not give him pleasure. Neither did the subject at hand.

“You would like me to say yes, it did not go well. Would you not, Nadim?” Ben asked, smiling quite deliberately. “That way you could remind me of how very indispensable you are to the Sheikhs of Kharmistan, both to the father before him and now to the son. You could tell me how foolish I was to think I could negotiate a simple business deal without you by my side.”

“On the contrary, Your Highness. I would never presume such a thing. I only ask, as advisor and father-in-law and friend, to humbly serve Your Highness with all of my feeble, unworthy self, in any way I can.”

Nadim bowed again, but not before Ben saw the quick gleam of satisfaction—mingled with dislike?—in Nadim’s dark eyes. He recalled his father’s words on the subject of enemies. It is best to keep them close, where you can watch them.

Ben took another long drink of water, to cleanse his palate after Nadim’s too sweet apology—or whatever the hell the man thought he had been offering. “I postponed the meeting until tomorrow, as something came up. Something unexpected,” he told Nadim, effortlessly massaging the truth, “and unexpectedly personal.”

“Your Highness?” Nadim asked, waiting to seat himself until Ben had lowered himself onto one of the two striped couches in the living room area of the immense suite. The suite had six rooms, not counting those for the servants. Texans, it seemed, took great pleasure in living up to their reputation of “everything is bigger in Texas.”

Ben pushed a hand through his coal-dark hair. Choosing his words carefully, he said, “Do you by chance remember an American woman by the name of Fortune, Nadim? Miss Eden Fortune?”

“A woman?” Clearly, Nadim was puzzled. “You postponed a meeting we have been planning for six months—for a woman? I know our beloved Leila is gone these past three years, Your Highness, but surely if you had need of a woman, there is no dearth of them at home in Kharmistan. If you had but asked, I—”

“There is a saying here in America, Nadim—‘Get your mind out of the gutter.’” There was an edge of steel in Ben’s voice as he interrupted the man. “You would do well to remember it.”

Nadim inclined his head. “My profound apologies, Your Highness.”

“Not that I am not honored by your offer to…um…pimp for your sheikh,” Ben said, unable to hide his smile. “I had no idea that procuring willing females was part of your duties as my advisor.”

Ben now saw the anger in Nadim’s eyes, the fullness of it, the depth of it, even as the man answered with a smile of his own. “Your Highness is being droll.”

“I try,” Ben said, his own humor evaporating. “Now, to get back to Miss Eden Fortune, if I might. Do you recall the name?”

“I do not, Highness. I am sorry. Have I met the woman?”

Ben stood, walked over to stand in front of his advisor, looked down at him as he sat at his ease. “No, Nadim, you have not. Perhaps you remember my father’s illness of some years ago, the time of his first cerebral accident?”