Prince Nadir's Secret Heir

Shaking off the rush of memories, she headed straight for a set of plush sofas and laid Nadeena on one. Glancing back at Nadir, she asked him to hand her the baby bag he’d carried up and checked Nadeena’s nappy while he stood beside her.

Of course Nadeena went quiet in that moment. Her big, curious eyes riveted to Nadir, as most other females were when they first clapped eyes on him. She blinked as if trying to clear her vision and a small frown formed between her round silvery-blue eyes.

‘She has my eyes,’ he said hoarsely.

The sense of awe in his voice was hard to miss and an unexpected swell of emotions surged inside Imogen’s chest. Emotions that were so twisted together they were too difficult to define.

‘Here you go, little one.’ She lifted Nadeena into her arms and settled her back in the crook of her shoulder, silently willing her not to complain. Then she glanced at Nadir. ‘I need to feed her.’

Nadir waved his hand negligently. ‘Go ahead.’

Imogen moistened her lips. ‘I’d like some privacy.’

He paused and Imogen was sure her cheeks turned scarlet.

‘You breastfeed?’

Even though she had breastfed in cafés and parks and not blinked an eye before, this moment, in a quiet living room with a man she had once believed she had fallen in love with felt far too intimate. His continued perusal sent another frisson of unwelcome awareness zipping through her. ‘Yes.’

She knew her voice sounded husky and when her eyes met his she couldn’t hold his stare. What was she doing here in this room with him? More importantly, what was he doing in this room with her and Nadeena? She felt self-conscious and it was all too easy to remember how it felt to have him at her breast, drawing her aching nipple deep into his mouth. All too easy to recall the pleasure that had turned her into an incoherent puppet for him to master at his will.

When she continued to hesitate and Nadeena grew restless Nadir pivoted on his foot and stalked to the long windows overlooking some sort of dense green park that most likely belonged to him as well. Imogen quickly arranged her T-shirt and Nadeena latched on like a baby that had never fed before.

‘When were you going to tell me I had fathered a child, Imogen?’ His quiet question held a wealth of judgement and loathing behind it and Imogen felt as if someone had just dropped an icy blanket around her shoulders.

She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t because all of a sudden she felt horribly guilty about the fact that she had never intended to tell him. And hot on the heels of her unexpected guilt rode anger. Anger she welcomed with open arms. He was the one who had run away when he’d learned she was pregnant, not her. He was the one who had made it clear that he didn’t want a baby in his life when she had felt such a rush of elation at the time she had almost grinned at him like a loon. Then she’d seen his stricken face and her world had fallen apart.

A sound like a low growl came from deep in Nadir’s throat and he towered over her. ‘Never? Is that the word that is at this moment stuck in your throat, habibi?’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Imogen growled back, unable to contain her rioting emotions.

‘It’s preferable to what I want to call you, believe me.’

Imogen had never seen Nadir angry before and he was magnificent with it. Fierce and proud and so powerful.

She swallowed, hating that she still found him so utterly attractive. ‘How dare you come over like the injured party in this scenario?’ she snapped. She was the one who had been as sick as a dog carrying Nadeena. She was the one who had been all alone in the birthing suite as Nadeena had come into the world. She was the one who struggled day to day with the demands of motherhood and putting food in their mouths. And she had asked for nothing from him. Absolutely nothing. ‘I have done very well for myself since you left my life,’ she said, her body vibrating with tension. ‘I have survived very well on my own. I’ve eked out a life for myself and Nadeena is healthy. She’s happy and—’

‘Nadeena?’

Imogen’s eyes squeezed shut and her temper deflated when he repeated the baby’s name. His irreverent tone somehow made her remember how lonely she had felt when Nadir had walked away from her. She’d felt lonely before, of course, but with Nadir she had felt as if she had got a glimpse—a taste—of paradise, only to have it snatched away when she was least prepared.

Powerful memories surged again and she couldn’t look at him. ‘Why am I here, Nadir?’

He didn’t say anything, his eyes troubled as they made contact with her own. He leant against the cherry wood dining table, his gaze riveted to Nadeena, kneading her T-shirt like a contented cat, his silence drawing out the moment. Drawing out her nerves until they lay just beneath the fine layer of her skin like freshly tuned guitar strings. ‘Why is there no public record of her birth?’

Bewildered by both the flat tenor of his voice and the unexpected question, Imogen frowned. ‘There is.’

His gaze sharpened and she could see his agile mind turning. ‘Under what name?’

Imogen stared at him. At the time of Nadeena’s birth she had only put her own name down on the birth certificate. She hadn’t known what to put in place of the father’s and a kindly registrar had told her that it wasn’t essential information. That she could fill that part out later. So far, that section was still blank because she’d been so busy and so tired learning how to care for an infant she hadn’t even thought about putting Nadir’s name on it. Sensing that this was a loaded question, she raised her chin. ‘Mine.’

‘Imogen Reid.’

His earlier words—‘I have not searched for you for the past fourteen months to be given the runaround now’—and his personal bodyguard waiting for his arrival came back to her and clicked into place in her mind and confused her even more. ‘Benson.’

There was only the briefest of pauses before he roared, ‘You gave me a false name!’

Imogen pressed back against the seat of the sofa. ‘No.’ Well, not intentionally. ‘Reid was my mother’s maiden name and...’ She swallowed, hating herself for explaining but compelled to do so by the fury she read in his eyes. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. The girls suggested that I use a stage name because they sometimes had trouble with the clientele and you only asked me my name one time.’ She took a quick breath. ‘At the beginning.’

He stabbed a hand through his hair and paced across the room like an animal trapped in a too-narrow cage. ‘And your mobile phone number?’

‘What about it?’

‘You changed it.’

‘I lost it...well, it was stolen my first day in London. I just use a pay-as-you-go now.’

He swore under his breath, a ferocious sound.

‘What’s this about, Nadir? As I recall you were the one who left town the morning after you found out I was pregnant. Are you now saying you tried to contact me?’ She tried to stifle a small thrill inside, wondering if perhaps he had been worried about her. That perhaps he had cared for her after all... Another more skeptical voice reminded her of the horrible text he’d sent her but still some deeply buried hope wriggled its way to the surface.

‘I had an emergency in New York and by the time I got back to Paris you had disappeared as if you’d never existed,’ Nadir grated. ‘The Ottoman Empire would have benefited from your stealth.’

Resenting his sarcasm, she stiffened. ‘I did not disappear. I left.’

‘Without a trace. No one had any idea where you had gone.’

That was most likely because the only person who knew had been Minh’s sister, Caro, and she had been leaving to go travelling at the same time. Imogen had meant to keep in touch with some of the other girls but she hadn’t counted on feeling sick and sorry for herself during her pregnancy and she hadn’t had time since then.

‘Nor did you give your employer a forwarding address or email.’

‘I didn’t?’ She blinked. ‘I wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the time.’ And since her pay went directly into her bank account, she hadn’t even realised. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t check my bank records.’

His look said that he had. ‘False names tend to hinder that kind of search.’

‘I told you that wasn’t deliberate.’ She took a deep breath and tried to keep a lid on her emotions so she could think rationally. ‘Why were you looking for me, anyway?’

‘Because before you ran you were supposedly pregnant with my child.’

‘I did not run,’ she bit out tensely. ‘Why would I when you had made it abundantly clear you didn’t want anything to do with me any more?’

She heard the challenge in her voice and knew it was because some part of her was hoping he would refute her statement.

‘I texted you from New York.’

Her top lip curled with distaste. That horrible text was still etched into her brain as if it had been carved there. ‘Oh, please,’ she scoffed, ‘let’s not talk about your lovely text.’

‘Or your response,’ he grated. ‘Telling me that you had taken care of everything.’

Imogen tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, careful not to awaken Nadeena, who had dropped into another exhausted sleep. ‘I did take care of it,’ she said softly, her arms tightening around Nadeena.

‘Yes, but not in the way I expected.’

Hoped, his tone seemed to imply. And there was the reason he’d been looking for her. He’d wanted to make sure she’d done what he expected.

Imogen felt that small spark of hope that she’d been wrong about him completely wither and die and she felt angry with herself for succumbing to it in the first place. Had she not learned anything from his treatment of her in the past?

Caro’s words of warning came back to her. ‘Be careful, Imogen. Any man who takes off like that without a word and accuses you of sleeping around is likely to insist on an abortion if he ever comes back.’ At the time Imogen had thought her friend had been overreacting. Now she knew that she hadn’t been and she felt physically ill.

‘And now you’ll have to deal with the consequences,’ he grated, staring at her as if she was somehow to blame for everything that was wrong in the world.

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