Sheikh's Woman

“What sort of a job?”

“He has a seventeenth-century place in the Dordogne area…they want murals in the dining room. They want—wanted a Greek temple effect. I’ve designed—” She broke off and gazed at him in the darkness while the limousine purred through the wet, empty streets. Traffic was light; it must be two or three in the morning.

“I can remember making the designs, but I can’t remember doing the actual work.” Panic rose up in her. “Why can’t I remember?”

“This state is not permanent. You will remember everything in time.”

The baby stirred and murmured and she watched as he shifted her a little.

“Let me hold her,” she said hungrily.

For a second he looked as if he was going to refuse, but she held out her arms, and he slipped the tiny bundle into her embrace. A smile seemed to start deep within her and flow outwards all through her body and spirit to reach her lips. Her arms tightened. Oh, how lovely to have a living baby to hold against her heart in place of that horrible, hurting memory!

“Oh, you’re so beautiful!” she whispered. She shifted her gaze to Ishaq Ahmadi. He was watching her. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

A muscle seemed to tense in his jaw. “Yes,” he said.

The chauffeur spoke through an intercom, and as her husband replied, Anna silently watched fleeting expressions wander over the baby’s face, felt the perfection of the little body against her breast. Time seemed to disappear in the now. She lost the urgency of wanting to know how she had got to this moment, and was happy just to be in it.

When he spoke to her again, she came to with a little start and realized she had been almost asleep. “Can you remember how you came to be in the taxi with the baby?”

Nothing. Not even vague shadows. She shook her head. “No.”

Then there was no sound except for rain and the flick of tires on the wet road. Anna was lost in contemplation again. She stroked the tiny fist. “Have we chosen a name for her?”

A passing headlight highlighted one side of his face, the side with the pirate patch over his eye.

“Her name is Safiyah.”

“Sophia?”

“Yes, it is a name that will not seem strange to English ears. Safi is not so far from Sophy.”

“Did we know it was going to be a girl?” she whispered, coughing as feeling closed her throat.

He glanced at her, the sleeping baby nestled so trustingly against her. “You are almost asleep,” he said. “Let me take her.”

He leaned over to lift the child from her arms. He was gentle and tender with her, but at the same time firm and confident, making Anna feel how safe the baby was with him.

Jonathan. “Oh!” she whispered.

“What is it?” Ishaq Ahmadi said, in a voice of quiet command. “What have you remembered?”

“Oh, just when you took the baby from me…I…” She pressed her hands to her eyes. Not when he took the baby, but the sight of him holding the infant as if he loved her and was prepared to protect and defend the innocent.

“Tell me!”

She lifted her head to see him watching her with a look of such intensity she gasped. Suddenly she wondered how much of her past she had confided to her husband. Was he a tolerant man? Or had he wanted her to lie about her life before him?

She stammered, “Did—did—?” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Did I tell you about…Jonathan? Jonathan Ryder?”

But even before the words were out she knew the answer was no.

Three

“Tell me now,” Ishaq Ahmadi commanded softly.

She wanted to lean against him, wanted to feel his arm around her, protecting her, holding her. She must have that right, she told herself, but somehow she lacked the courage to ask him to hold her.

She had always wanted to pat the tigers at the zoo, too. Now it seemed as if she had finally found her very own personal tiger…but she had forgotten how she’d tamed him. And until she remembered that, something told her it would be wise to treat him with caution.

“Tell me about Jonathan Ryder.”

Nervously she clasped her hands together, and suddenly a detail that had been nagging at her in the distance leapt into awareness.

“Why aren’t I wearing a wedding ring?” she demanded, holding both hands spread out before her and staring at them. On her fingers were several silver rings of varied design. But none was a wedding band.

There was a long, pregnant pause. Through the glass panel separating them from the driver, she heard a phone ring. The driver answered and spoke into it, giving instructions, it seemed.

Still he only looked at her.

“Did I…have we split up?”

“No.”

Just the bare syllable. His jaw seemed to tense, and she thought he threw her a look almost of contempt.

“About Jonathan,” he prompted again.

If they were having trouble in the marriage, was it because he was jealous? Or because she had not told him things, shared her troubles?

She thought, If I never told him about Jonathan, I should have.

“Jonathan—Jonathan and I were going together for about a year. We were talking about moving in together, but it wasn’t going to be simple, because we both owned a flat, and…well, it was taking us time to decide whether to sell his, or mine, or sell both and find somewhere new.”

Her heart began to beat with anxiety. “It is really more than two years ago?”

“How long does it seem to you?”

“It feels as if we split up about six months ago. And then…”

“Why did you split up?”

“Because…did I not tell you any of this?”

“Tell me again,” he repeated softly. “Perhaps the recital will help your memory recover.”

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to share it with him, to make him her soul mate. Surely she must have told him, and he had understood? She couldn’t have married a man who didn’t understand, whom she couldn’t share her deepest feelings with?

“I got pregnant unexpectedly.” She looked at him and remembered that, sophisticated as he looked, he was from a different culture. “Does that shock you?”

“I am sure that birth control methods fail every day,” he said.

That was not what she meant, but she lacked the courage to be more explicit.

“Having kids wasn’t part of deciding to live together or anything, but once it happened I just—knew it was what I wanted. It was crazy, but it made me so happy! Jonathan didn’t see it that way. He didn’t want…”

Her head drooped, and the sound of suddenly increasing rain against the windows filled the gap.

“Didn’t want the child?”

“He wanted me to have an abortion. He said we weren’t ready yet. His career hadn’t got off the ground, neither had mine. He—oh, he had a hundred reasons why it would be right one day but wasn’t now. In a lot of ways he was right. But…” Anna shrugged. “I couldn’t do it. We argued and argued. I understood him, but he never understood me. Never tried to. I kept saying, there’s more to it than you want to believe. He wouldn’t listen.”

“And did he convince you?”

“He booked an appointment for me, drove me down to the women’s clinic…. On the way, he stopped the carat a red light, and—I got out,” she murmured, staring at nothing. “And just kept walking. I didn’t look back, and Jonathan didn’t come after me. He never called again. Well, once,” she amended. “A couple of months later he phoned to ask if I planned to name him as the father on the birth certificate.”

She paused, but Ishaq Ahmadi simply waited for her to continue. “He said…he said he had no intention of being saddled with child support for the next twenty years. He had a job offer from Australia, and he was trying to decide whether to accept or not. And that was one of the criteria. If I was going to put his name down, he’d go to Australia.”

His hair glinted in the beam of a streetlight. They were on a highway. “And what did you say?”

She shook her head. “I hung up. We’ve never spoken since.”

“Did he go to Australia?”

“I never found out. I didn’t want to know.” She amended that. “Didn’t care.” She glanced out the window.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where is the hospital?”

“North of London, in the country. Tell me what happened then.”

Her eyes burned. “My friends were really, really great about it—do you know Cecile and Lisbet?”

“How could your husband not know your friends?”

“Are Cecile and Philip married?”

He gazed at her. “Tell me about the baby, Anna.”

There was something in his attitude that made her uncomfortable. She murmured, “I’m sorry if you didn’t know before this. But maybe if you didn’t, you should have.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Did you know?”

He paused. “No.”

Anna bit her lip. She wondered if it was perhaps because she hadn’t told him that she had reverted to this memory tonight. Had it weighed on her throughout the new pregnancy? Had fears for her new baby surfaced and found no outlet?

“Everything was fine. I was pretty stressed in some ways, but I didn’t really have doubts about what I was doing. At the very end something went wrong. I was in labour for hours and hours, and then it was too late for a Caesarean…they used the Ventouse cap.”

She swallowed, and her voice was suddenly expressionless. “It caused a brain haemorrhage. My baby died. They let me hold him, and he was…but there was a terrible bruise on his head…as if he was wearing a purple cap.”

No tears came to moisten the heat of her eyes or ease the pain in her heart. Her perfect baby, paper white and too still, but looking as if he was thinking very hard and would open his eyes any moment…

She wondered if that was how she had ended up giving birth in the back of a cab. Perhaps it was fear of a repetition that had made her leave it too late to get to the hospital.

“Why weren’t you there?” she asked, surfacing from her thoughts to look at him. “Why didn’t you take me to the hospital?”

“I flew in from abroad this evening. And this was six weeks ago?”

“That’s how it feels to me. I feel as though it’s the weekend I’m supposed to be going on that job to France, and that was about six weeks after the baby died. How long ago is that, really?”

“Did you ever feel, Anna, that you would like to—adopt a child? A baby to fill the void created by the death of your own baby?”

“It wouldn’t have done me any good if I had. Why are you asking me these questions now? Didn’t we—”

“Did you think of it—applying for adoption? Trying to find a baby?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Sometimes in the street, you know, you pass a woman with a baby, or even a woman who’s pregnant, and you just want to scream It’s not fair, but—no, I just…I got pretty depressed, I wasn’t doing much of anything till Lisbet conjured up this actor friend who wanted a mural in his place in France.”

She leaned over to caress the baby with a tender hand, then bent to kiss the perfectly formed little head. “Oh, you are so beautiful!” she whispered. She looked up, smiling. “I hope I remember soon. I can’t bear not knowing everything about her!”

He started to speak, and just then the car drew to a stop. Heavy rain was now thundering down on the roof, and all she could see were streaks of light from tall spotlights in the distance, as if they had entered some compound.

“Are we here?”

“Yes,” he said, as the door beside her opened. The dark-skinned chauffeur stood in the rain with a large black umbrella, and Anna quickly slipped out onto a pavement that was leaping with water. She heard the swooping crack of another umbrella behind her. Then she was being ushered up a curiously narrow flight of steps and through a doorway.

She glanced around her as Ishaq, with the baby, came in the door behind her.

It was very curious for a hospital reception. A low-ceilinged room, softly lighted, lushly decorated in natural wood and rich tapestries. A row of matching little curtains seemed to be covering several small windows at intervals along the wall. There was a bar at one end, by a small dining table with chairs. In front of her she saw a cluster of plush armchairs around a coffee table. Anna frowned, trying to piece together a coherent interpretation of the scene, but her mind was very slow to function. She could almost hear her own wheels grinding.

A woman in an Eastern outfit that didn’t look at all like a medical uniform appeared in the doorway behind the bar and came towards them. She spoke something in a foreign language, smiling and gesturing towards the sofa cluster. She moved to the entrance door behind them, dragged it fully shut and turned a handle. Still the pieces refused to fall into place.

Anna obediently sank down into an armchair. A second woman appeared. Dressed in another softly flowing outfit, with warm brown eyes and a very demure smile, she nodded and then descended upon the baby in Ishaq Ahmadi’s arms. She laughed and admired and then exchanged a few sentences of question and answer with Ishaq before taking the infant in her own arms and, with another smile all around, disappeared whence she had come.

“What’s going on?” Anna demanded, as alarm began to shrill behind the drowsy numbness in her head.

“Your bed is ready,” Ishaq murmured, bending over her and slipping his hands against her hips. At the touch of his strong hands she involuntarily smiled. “In a few minutes you can lie down and get some sleep.”

His hands lifted and she blinked stupidly while he drew two straps up and snapped them together over her hips. Under her feet she felt the throb of engines, and at last the pieces fell together.

“This isn’t a hospital, this is a plane!” Anna cried wildly.

Four

“Let me out,” Anna said, her hands snapping to the seat belt.

Ishaq Ahmadi fastened his own seat belt and moved one casual hand to still hers as she struggled with the mechanism. “We have been cleared for immediate takeoff,” he said.

“Stop the plane and let me off. Tell them to turn back,” she cried, pushing at his hand, which was no longer casual. “Where are you taking us? I want my baby!”

“The woman you saw is a children’s nurse. She is taking care of the baby, and no harm will come to her. Try and relax. You are ill, you have been in an accident.”

Her stomach churned sickly, her head pounded with pain, but she had to ignore that. She stared at him and showed her teeth. “Why are you doing this?” A sudden wrench released her seat belt, and Anna thrust herself to her feet.

Ishaq Ahmadi’s eyes flashed with irritation. “You know very well you have no right to such a display. You know you are in the wrong, deeply in the wrong.” He stabbed a forefinger at the chair she had just vacated. “Sit down before you fall down!”

With a little jerk, the plane started taxiing. “No!” Anna cried. She staggered and clutched the chair back, and with an oath Ishaq Ahmadi snapped a hand up and clasped her wrist in an unbreakable hold.

“Help me!” she screamed. “Help, help!”

A babble of concerned female voices arose from behind a bulkhead, and in another moment the hostess appeared in the doorway behind the bar.

“Sit down, Anna!”

The hostess cried a question in Arabic, and Ishaq Ahmadi answered in the same language. “Laa, laa, madame,” the woman said, gently urgent, and approached Anna with a soothing smile, then tried what her little English would do.

“Seat, madame, very dingerous. Pliz, seat.”

“I want to get off!” Anna shouted at the uncomprehending woman. “Stop the plane! Tell the captain it’s a mistake!”

The woman turned to Ishaq Ahmadi with a question, and he shook his head on a calm reply. Of course he had the upper hand if the cabin crew spoke only Arabic. Anna had a dim idea that all pilots had to speak English, but what were her chances of making it to the cockpit?

And if it was a private jet, the captain would be on Ishaq Ahmadi’s payroll. No doubt they all knew he was kidnapping his own wife.

Ahmadi got to his feet, holding Anna’s wrist in a grip that felt like steel cables, and forced her to move towards him.

The plane slowed, and they all stiffened as the captain’s voice came over the intercom—but it was only with the obvious Arabic equivalent of “Cabin staff, prepare for takeoff.” Ishaq Ahmadi barked something at the hostess and, with a consoling smile at Anna, she returned to her seat behind the bulkhead.

Ishaq Ahmadi sank into his seat again, dragging Anna inexorably down onto his lap. “You are being a fool,” he said. “No one is going to hurt you if you do not hurt yourself.”

She was sitting on him now as if he were the chair, and his arms were firmly locked around her waist, a human seat belt. The heat of his body seeped into hers, all down her spine and the backs of her thighs, his arms resting across her upper thighs, hands clasped against her abdomen.

Wherever her body met his, there was nothing but muscle. There was no give, no ounce of fat. It was like sitting on hot poured metal fresh from the forge, hardened, but the surface still slightly malleable. The stage when a sculptor removes the last, tiny blemishes, puts on the finishing touches. She had taken a course in metal sculpture at art college, and she had always loved the metal at this stage, Anna remembered dreamily. The heat, the slight surface give in something so innately strong, had a powerful sensual pull.

She realized she was half tranced. She felt very slow and stupid, and as the adrenaline in her body ebbed, her headache caught up with her again. She twisted to try to look over her shoulder into his face.

“Why are you doing this?” she pleaded.

His voice, close to her ear, said, “So that you and the baby will be safe.”

She was deeply, desperately tired, she was sick and hurt, and she wanted to believe she was safe with him. The alternative was too confusing and too terrible.

The engines roared up and the jet leapt forward down the runway. In a very short time, compared to the lumbering commercial aircraft she was used to, they had left the ground.

As his hold slackened but still kept her on his lap, she turned to Ishaq Ahmadi. Her face was only inches from his, her mouth just above his own wide, well-shaped lips. She swallowed, feeling the pull.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Home.” His gaze was steady. “You are tired. You will want to lie down,” he murmured, and when the jet levelled out, he helped her to her feet and stood up. He took her arm and led her through a doorway.

They entered a large, beautifully appointed stateroom, with a king-size bed luxuriously made with snowy-white and deep blue linens that were turned down invitingly. There were huge, fluffy white pillows.

It was like a fantasy. Except for the little windows and the ever-present hum you would never know you were on a plane. A top hotel, maybe. Beautiful natural woods, luscious fabrics, mirrors, soft lighting, and, through an open door, a marble bathroom.

“I guess I married a millionaire,” Anna murmured. “Or is this just some bauble a friend has loaned you?”

“Here are night things for you,” he said, indicating pyjamas and a bathrobe, white with blue trim, that were lying across the foot of the sapphire-blue coverlet. “Do you need help to undress?”

Anna looked at the bed longingly and realized she was dead on her feet. And that was no surprise, after what she had apparently been through in the past few hours.

“No,” she said.

She began fumbling with a button, but her fingers didn’t seem to work. Even the effort of holding her elbow bent seemed too much, so she dropped her arm and stood there a moment, gazing at nothing.

“I will call the hostess,” Ishaq Ahmadi said. And that, perversely, made her frown.

“Why?” she demanded. “You’re my husband, aren’t you?”

His eyes probed her, and she shrugged uncomfortably. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why don’t you want to touch me?”

She wanted him to touch her. Wanted his heat on her body again, because when he touched her, even in anger, she felt safe.

He made no reply, merely lifted his hands, brushed aside her own feeble fingers which were again fumbling with the top button, and began to undo her shirt.

“Have you stopped wanting me?” she wondered aloud.

His head bent over his task, only his eyes shifted to connect with hers. “You are overplaying your hand,” he advised softly, and she felt another little thrill of danger whisper down her spine. Her brain evaded the discomfort.

“Did you commission work from me or something? Is that how we met?” she asked. She specialized in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern designs, painting entire rooms to give the impression that you were standing on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Corinth, or in the Alhambra palace. But what were the chances that a wealthy Arab would want a Western woman to paint trompe l’oeil fifteenth-century mosaic arches on his palace walls when he probably had the real thing?

“We met by accident.”

“Oh.” She wanted him to clarify, but couldn’t concentrate. Not when his hands were grazing the skin of her breasts, revealed as he unbuttoned her shirt. She looked into his face, bent close over hers, but his eyes remained on his task. His aftershave was spicy and exotic.

“It seems strange that you have the right to do this when you feel like a total stranger,” she observed.

“You insisted on it,” he reminded her dryly. He seemed cynically amused by her. He still didn’t believe that she had forgotten, and she had no idea why. What reason could she have for pretending amnesia? It seemed very crazy, unless…unless she had been running away from him.

Perhaps it was fear that had caused her to lose her memory. Psychologists did say you sometimes forgot when remembering was too painful.

“Was I running away from you, Ishaq?”

“You tell me the answer.”

She shook her head. “They say the unconscious remembers everything, but…”

“I am very sure that yours does,” Ishaq Ahmadi replied, pulling the front of her shirt open to reveal her small breasts in a lacy black bra.

She knew by the involuntary intake of his breath that he was not unaffected. His jaw clenched and he stripped the shirt from her, his breathing irregular.

She wasn’t one for casual sex, and she had never been undressed by a stranger, which was what this felt like. The sudden blush of desire that suffused her was disconcerting. So her body remembered, even if her conscious mind did not. Anna bit her lip. What would it be like, love with a man who seemed like a total stranger? Would her body instinctively recognize his touch?

She realized that she wanted him to make the demand on her. The thought was sending spirals of heat all through her. But instead of drawing her into his arms, he turned his back to toss her shirt onto a chair.

“What will I remember about loving you, Ishaq?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer, and she turned away, dejected, overcome with fatigue and reluctant to think, and lifted her arms behind her to the clasp of her bra. She winced as a bruised elbow prevented her.

Her breath hissed with the pain. “You’ll have to undo this.”

She felt his hands at work on the hook of her bra, that strange, half electrifying, half comforting heat that made her yearn for something she could not remember. She wondered if they had been sexually estranged. She said, “Is there a problem between us, Ishaq?”

“You well know what the problem between us is. But it is not worth discussing now,” he said, his voice tight.

She thought, It’s serious. Her heart pinched painfully with regret. To think that she had had the luck to marry a man like this and then had not been able to make it work made her desperately sad. He was like a dream come to life, but…she had obviously got her dream and then not been able to live in it.

If they made up now, when she could not remember any of the grievances she might have, would that make it easier when she regained her full memory?