The Sheikh's Secret Babies

The strained silence smouldered.

‘A divorce is the only sensible option and I don’t object to paying for the privilege,’ Jaul grated between clenched teeth, out of all patience with her reluctance to discuss the issue. ‘As my wife, estranged or otherwise, you’re naturally entitled to my financial support—’

‘I want nothing from you,’ Chrissie repeated doggedly. ‘Please leave.’

Long bronzed fingers bit into the edge of the door as Jaul fought a powerful impulse to say something, anything, that would stir her into a more natural reaction. What had happened to his bright and fearless Chrissie? He glanced at her in frustration. Her eyes were blank, her delicately pointed features empty of expression. Her entire attitude spelt out the message that he was the enemy and not to be trusted.

Without another word, Jaul walked out of the building, determined that he would not see her again. He had told her what he had to tell her. And now he would step back and let the lawyers handle the rest of it.

* * *

Chrissie got dressed in a feverish surge of activity. She flung clothes into a small case, carrying it and other pieces of baby paraphernalia out to the car. Her home had always been her sanctuary but now it felt violated by Jaul’s visit and she no longer felt safe there. What if he had walked in and the twins had been present? Why did she imagine that he would have instantly recognised his own children when he had no reason to even suspect their existence? She was being hysterical and foolish, she told herself shamefacedly, but even so she could barely wait to get Tarif and Soraya strapped into their car seats and drive away from the apartment.

As she drove through the busy mid-morning traffic she had too much time to look back into the past. Memories she didn’t want bombarded her. Indeed she could never think about her years at university without thinking of Jaul because he had always been there on the outskirts of her life, long unacknowledged but always noticed and never forgotten.

She had shared a tiny flat with another girl when in her second year at university. Nessa had been just a little man-mad, to the extent that Chrissie had tended to switch off when Nessa began talking about her latest lover. But even Nessa had gone into thrilled overdrive when she’d first met a prince. Chrissie had been less impressed, well aware that in some Eastern countries princes were ten a penny and not much more important. Jaul, however, had proved somewhat harder to overlook. He had flown Nessa to Paris in his private jet just for dinner and Nessa had been incoherent with excitement at the luxury of the experience.

Jaul had brought Nessa home the next day and had been in the flat when Chrissie had come home from the classes that her roommate had skipped. Chrissie still remembered her first glimpse of Jaul, his gypsy-dark skin and eyes brilliant as newly minted gold in sunlight, his lean, breathtakingly handsome face intent. He had stared at Chrissie for the longest time and she hadn’t been able to breathe or look away while Nessa gabbled incoherently about Paris and limousines. Jaul had taken his leave quickly.

‘He was amazing in bed,’ Nessa had confided as soon as he was gone, languorously rolling her eyes and quite uninhibited about admitting that she had slept with Jaul on the first date. ‘Absolutely freakin’ amazing!’

But for all that it had still been a one-night stand. Jaul had followed up by having flowers and a very pretty pair of diamond earrings delivered to Nessa, but he hadn’t phoned again. Nessa had been disappointed but accepting, pointing out that, with all Jaul had to offer, he was sure to want to make the most of his freedom.

The next time Chrissie had seen Jaul she had been in the student union. She had noticed Jaul, naturally. She could scarcely have failed to notice his presence when he was surrounded by a quartet of suited sunglasses-wearing bodyguards and a crowd of giggling flirtatious blondes who, as she soon learnt, seemed to appear out of nowhere to engulf him wherever he went.

He had startled her by springing upright as she was passing his table and had insisted on acknowledging her when she would’ve passed on by without a word. Stiff with discomfiture, Chrissie had been cool, inordinately aware of the heat in his dark gaze and the jealous scrutiny of his female companions.

Back then Chrissie had been working two part-time jobs to survive at university because her family could not afford to help her out. One of Chrissie’s jobs during term time had been stacking shelves in the library, the other waitressing at a local restaurant, but she had still found it a major challenge to meet her bills. Her father had still been a tenant farmer, whose ill-health had forced him into retirement while her older sister, Lizzie, had worked night and day to keep the farm going, while Chrissie continued her studies, but the knowledge that, without her, her family was having an even tougher struggle to survive had filled her with guilt.

But even as a child Chrissie had recognised that her late mother Francesca’s chaotic life might have been less dysfunctional had she had a career to fall back on when her affairs with unsuitable men fell apart. A woman needed more than a basic education to survive and Chrissie had always been determined to build her life round a career rather than a man. Her mother’s marriage to her father had been short-lived and the relationships that Francesca had got involved in afterwards had been destructive ones in which alcohol, infidelity, physical violence and other evils had prevailed. Shorn of her innocence at a very young age, Chrissie knew just how low a woman could be forced to sink to keep food on the table and it was a lesson she would never forget. No, Chrissie would never willingly put herself in a position where she had to depend on a man to keep her.

When Jaul had approached her in the library where she was stacking shelves one day a few weeks after their first meeting to ask for her help in finding a book, she had been polite and helpful as befitted a humble employee keen to keep her job.

‘I’d like to take you out to dinner some evening,’ he had murmured after she’d slotted the book into his lean brown hand.

He had the most stunning dark eyes, pure lustrous jet enticement in his lean, darkly handsome face. In his presence her mouth had run dry and her breathing had fractured while she’d marvelled at the weird way she’d kept on wanting to look at him, an urge so powerful it had almost qualified as a need. Infuriated by the dizzy way she was reacting, she’d thought instead of how he had treated Nessa. Jaul had chased sexual conquest, nothing more complex. Once the chase was over and he had got what he wanted he’d lost interest and casual sex with young women as uninhibited and adventurous as Nessa had suited him perfectly. He hadn’t been looking for a relationship with all the limits that would have involved. He hadn’t been offering friendship or caring or fidelity.

‘I’m sorry, no,’ Chrissie had said woodenly.

‘Why not?’ Jaul had asked without hesitation.

‘Between my studies and my two part-time jobs, I have very little free time,’ Chrissie had told him. ‘And when I do have it, I tend to go home and visit my family.’

‘Lunch, then,’ Jaul had suggested smoothly. ‘Surely you could lunch with me some day?’

‘But I don’t want to,’ Chrissie had confessed abruptly, backing off a step, feeling cornered and slightly intimidated by the sheer height and size of him in the narrow space between the book stacks.

A fine ebony brow had quirked. ‘I have offended you in some way?’

‘We just wouldn’t suit,’ Chrissie had countered between gritted teeth, her irritation rising at his refusal to simply accept her negative response.

‘In what way?’

‘You’re everything I don’t like,’ Chrissie had framed in a sudden burst of frustration. ‘You don’t study, you party. You run around with a lot of different women. I’m not your type. I don’t want to go to Paris for dinner! I don’t want diamonds! I haven’t the slightest intention of going to bed with you!’

‘And if I didn’t offer you Paris, diamonds or sex?’

‘I’d probably end up trying to kill you because you’re so blasted full of yourself!’ Chrissie had shot at him in a rage. ‘Why can’t you just take no for an answer?’

Jaul had suddenly grinned, a shockingly charismatic grin that had made her tummy somersault. ‘I wasn’t brought up to take no for an answer.’

‘With me, no means no!’ Chrissie had told him angrily. ‘Persistence only annoys me—’

‘And I am very persistent as well as full of myself,’ Jaul had acknowledged softly. ‘It seems we are at an impasse—’

Chrissie had stabbed a finger to indicate the directional arrow pointing down to the nearest study area. ‘You have your book—go study.’

And without another word she had walked away with her trolley, heading for the lift that would let her escape to the floor above.

CHAPTER THREE

CARRYING A TWIN in each arm, Chrissie was greeted by Sally at the front door of Cesare and Lizzie’s home. Her nephew and niece, Max and Giana, clustered round the two women eager to see their cousins. Tarif whooped with excitement when he saw Max and opened his arms to the older boy.

‘He knows me!’ Max carolled in amazement.

‘Once Tarif’s walking, he’ll plague the life out of you,’ Chrissie quipped, passing over Tarif while Sally took charge of Soraya because Giana was too young to manage her.

An elegant and visibly pregnant blonde with green eyes and a ready smile came out of one of the rooms leading off the spacious hall. ‘Chrissie...lovely. I wasn’t expecting you until later,’ Lizzie confided warmly.

The tears still burning behind Chrissie’s eyes suddenly spilled over without warning. As she saw her big sister look at her in astonishment Chrissie swallowed back a sob and blundered into her sibling’s outspread arms. ‘Sorry.’

‘You don’t need to apologise if something’s upset you,’ Lizzie insisted. ‘What on earth has happened? You never cry—’

Fortunately Lizzie had not been exposed to Chrissie’s grief two years earlier once it had finally dawned on her that Jaul was not returning to the UK. It had been a matter of pride to Chrissie that she should not distress her otherwise happy sister with the sad tale of how she had screwed up her own life. She had put a brave face on her abandonment and subsequent pregnancy, talking lightly and always unemotionally of a relationship that had broken down and a young man unwilling to acknowledge responsibility for the babies she’d carried.

‘You don’t need the creep...you don’t need anyone but Cesare and me!’ Lizzie had told her comfortingly and she had asked no further questions.

Now as Chrissie bit back the sobs clogging her throat she was faced with the reality that as she had never told her sister about Jaul, she had to do it now. Emotional turmoil had been building up inside her from the very moment Jaul had appeared at her front door. Her past had pierced the present and most painfully, for all the gloriously happy and agonisingly sad memories of Jaul she had packed away were now flooding through the gap in her defences and hurting her all over again.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ Lizzie exclaimed, banding an arm round her taller sister to urge her into the drawing room with its comfortable blue sofas and sleek pale contemporary furniture.

Cesare was talking on his mobile by the window and he concluded the call, frowning with concern when he registered the tear-stained distress stamped on his sister-in-law’s face.

‘I was just about to tell you that my sisters are arriving this evening and expecting you to go out clubbing with them tomorrow night—’

Chrissie tried to force a smile because she got on like a house on fire with Cesare’s younger sisters, Sofia and Maurizia, and the three women always went out together when they visited London. ‘I might not be good company—’

Lizzie pressed her gently down onto a sofa. ‘Tell me what’s wrong—’

Chrissie groaned. ‘I can’t. I’ve been such an idiot otherwise I would’ve told you years ago. You won’t believe how stupid I’ve been and now I don’t know what to do—’

‘Starting at the beginning usually helps,’ Cesare incised.

‘The twins’ father has turned up,’ Chrissie revealed tautly. ‘And he says we need a divorce, which doesn’t make sense after what his father—’

Cesare stopped dead to skim her an incredulous glance. ‘You were married to the twins’ father?’

‘My goodness, I certainly didn’t see that coming! Married!’ Lizzie admitted in shock, sinking down on an ottoman near her sister. Chrissie felt guiltier than ever, looking back over the years to acknowledge that Lizzie had been a better mother to her than their own mother, even though Lizzie was only five years older than Chrissie.

‘Right, the beginning,’ Chrissie reminded herself in receipt of a wry appraisal from Cesare. ‘Or you won’t know what I’m talking about.’

And Chrissie tried with some difficulty to put into words how long she had known Jaul without ever getting to know him properly.

‘But you never ever mentioned him,’ Lizzie commented in a continuing tone of disbelief. ‘You knew him all the time you were at uni and yet you never told me about him!’

Chrissie reddened fiercely, quite unable to describe how much of a silent role Jaul had played in her life long before she’d ever actually got involved with him. She had seen him on campus most days, occasionally speaking to him, occasionally avoiding him if he had been more than usually keen to press his interest in her. What she had never ever contrived to be with Jaul was indifferent. When he wasn’t there, she had found herself looking for him. If a couple of days had gone by without a glimpse of him, she would be like someone starved of food and craving it and when he had reappeared she would study him with helpless intensity as if looking alone could revive her energies.

In many ways Jaul had been her most secret and private fantasy. She could never ever have explained their relationship to her sister without feeling mortified and she had been even more grateful that she had kept him quiet when, instead of getting to bring Jaul home to show him off along with her wedding ring, she had ended up coming home dumped and pregnant. Lizzie had been very hurt on Chrissie’s behalf when their father had said he didn’t want his unmarried pregnant daughter to visit, but Chrissie had felt much guiltier about upsetting and disappointing the sister she had always idolised, the big sister who had made so many sacrifices on her behalf. Having left school at sixteen to work on their father’s farm, Lizzie had never got a further education or the chance to be young and carefree for even a few years.

‘There was no need to mention Jaul. It was only during our last year at uni that we actually got involved,’ Chrissie pointed out ruefully.

‘And yet you still didn’t mention him,’ Cesare reminded her drily.

‘I honestly assumed we wouldn’t last. I thought we would be over and done again in five minutes. It was all so unexpected. I didn’t think Jaul did serious and then everything somehow changed and I changed too...that’s the only way I can describe it,’ she mumbled uncomfortably.

‘You fell in love with him,’ Lizzie interpreted.

‘Truly, madly and deeply and all that,’ Chrissie joked heavily. ‘We got married at the Marwani Embassy here and we had a civil ceremony as well.’

‘But why such secrecy?’ Cesare enquired.

‘Jaul didn’t want anyone knowing we had got married until he had had the chance to tell his father about us...which I don’t think he was in any hurry to do.’ Chrissie hesitated and then mentioned the argument that had taken place when a few weeks after the wedding Jaul had announced his intention of returning to Marwan alone without any reference to when he planned to return. ‘I felt rejected.’

‘Of course you did,’ Lizzie said warmly, squeezing Chrissie’s hand gently.

Chrissie told them about her fruitless visits to the Marwani Embassy and then the visit from Jaul’s father, King Lut, that had followed. When she then repeated what the older man had told her, Cesare became undeniably angry.

‘That was when you should’ve come to us for support and advice!’

‘I still thought Jaul would come back to me. I didn’t instantly accept everything that his father told me and I hadn’t given up hope.’

‘And then you discovered that you were pregnant,’ Lizzie guessed.

‘A couple of months had passed by then and I couldn’t excuse Jaul’s silence any longer. I realised that his father must have been telling me the truth.’

‘But evidently he wasn’t,’ Cesare cut in, already thinking ahead. ‘Does Jaul know about the twins?’

‘No. I didn’t tell him. And I told him I wouldn’t give him a divorce just to annoy him,’ Chrissie confided uncomfortably. ‘That was pretty childish of me, wasn’t it?’

‘I’ll put my lawyers on this,’ Cesare informed her, compressing his well-shaped mouth. ‘Jaul needs to be told about the twins asap. A man has the right to know his own children—’

‘Even if he deserts his wife and never gets back in touch?’ Lizzie protested emotively.

‘Sì, even then,’ Cesare murmured ruefully.

Chrissie told Cesare and Lizzie about her repeated visits to the Marwani Embassy and her continued and equally fruitless attempts to contact Jaul by phone. ‘So, you see, I did try very hard to track him down.’

‘But you still need to take a long-term view of this situation, Chrissie. Set aside the hostility. Concentrate on the children and the future and you won’t go far wrong.’

‘And you do owe Jaul one favour,’ Lizzie said ruefully, startling Chrissie, who was dabbing her face dry and grateful the tear overflow had run its course. ‘You have to go and see him and tell him about the twins before you bring in the lawyers—’

‘For goodness’ sake, I don’t even know where he’s staying!’ Chrissie parried, aghast at that suggestion. ‘In fact he might only have been passing through London.’

‘Why does Chrissie owe Jaul another meeting?’ Cesare enquired of his wife, equally in the dark on that score.

‘He at least had the decency to tell her that they were still married himself, rather than from his lawyers,’ Lizzie pointed out.’ I don’t think you owe him anything more, Chrissie, but I do think he deserves the chance to learn that he’s a father from you and nobody else and in private.’

‘I don’t want to see him...don’t even know if he’s still here in London... I’ve got nothing to wear either!’ Chrissie argued in an unashamed surge of protest, but behind it she knew she was caught because, like her older sister, she also had a sense of fair play.

Jaul had not been comfortable visiting her but, even so, he had done it because he knew it was the right thing to do. How could she be seen to do less?

* * *

Chrissie climbed out of the taxi that Lizzie had insisted she needed, pointing out that searching for a parking space while trying to identify the correct house was the last thing her sister needed in the mood she was in.

Not that finding the house where Jaul was staying had proved a problem, Chrissie acknowledged ruefully, shooting the vast monolith of a building in the most exclusive part of London a wry glance. Cesare’s staff had come up with all the required information. With the kind of high-powered connections her brother-in-law enjoyed, tracking down Jaul had not proved that big a challenge while it had also provided her with extraneous information she had not required. For instance, the huge town house had formerly been an entire crescent of smaller dwellings and it had been purchased in the nineteen thirties and turned into a single dwelling by Jaul’s grandfather to house the Marwani royal family and their numerous staff whenever they came to visit London. Apparently the family had made ridiculously few visits in the many years that had passed since then.

It had been an education for Chrissie to discover that this was one more fact she hadn’t known about the man she had loved and married. Although they had visited London together, he had never once mentioned that his family owned a house there. In much the same way he had never mentioned that he was an only child destined to become a king. His Marwani background had always been a closed book to her from which he had offered her a glimpse of very few pages. In short she knew he had grown up without a mother, had attended a military school and had trained as a soldier in Saudi Arabia. When he’d signed up to study politics at Oxford University it had been his very first visit to the UK.

It shook Chrissie now to accept that Jaul was the sole ruler of his immensely rich country in the Arabian Gulf. She finally understood the arrogance and the authority that had often set her teeth on edge. Jaul had never been in any doubt of who he was and where he was going to end up. No doubt his marriage to Chrissie had just been a brief fun stop on his upwardly mobile royal life curve and had never ever been intended to last.

‘Proceed with great caution,’ Cesare had warned Chrissie once he had established the exact identity of the man whom she had married in such secrecy two years earlier.

That recollection had made Chrissie’s skin turn clammy beneath the sleek turquoise shift dress she had borrowed from her sister’s pre-pregnancy wardrobe. Her shrewd brother-in-law had pointed out that Jaul would have diplomatic immunity, that he was firm friends with several influential members of the British government and that he would have much greater power than most foreign non-resident husbands and fathers might have if it came to a custody battle. Custody battle—the very phrase struck terror into Chrissie’s bones. Cesare assumed that Tarif—all adorable fourteen plump and energetic months of him—would now be heir to the throne of Marwan, which would make him a hugely important child on his father’s terms. As Chrissie’s fear grew in direct proportion to her anxious thoughts, her spine stiffened and her skin grew even chillier. On some craven, very basic level she didn’t want to even try to be civilised; she simply wanted to snatch her kids from Lizzie’s luxurious nursery and flee somewhere where Jaul couldn’t ever find them again.

Instead, however, Chrissie reminded herself that she was supposed to be an adult and able to handle life’s more difficult challenges. She mounted the front steps of the monstrous building with its imposing columns, portico and innumerable windows and pressed the doorbell.

Jaul was lunching in a dining room decorated in high ‘desert’ style circa nineteen thirty by his English grandmother and marvelling at her sheer lack of good taste. He didn’t want to pretend he was in the desert and sit cross-legged like a sheep herder in front of a fake fire; he wanted a table and a chair. Mercifully his personal chef and other staff had travelled with him and the service and the food were exemplary. It didn’t quite make up though for having to sleep in a bedroom decorated like a tent on a ginormous bed made of rough bamboo poles literally lashed together with ropes. Of course, he conceded wryly, the distractions of the extraordinary décor of the royal home in London served to keep his thoughts away from how Chrissie had looked in shorts with those impossibly long and perfect legs on full display.

Ghaffar, Jaul’s PA, appeared in the doorway and bowed. ‘A visitor has arrived to see you without an appointment—’

Jaul suppressed a groan and waved a dismissive hand. He was in London on a private visit and had no desire to make it anything else. ‘Please make my apologies. I will see no one.’

‘The woman’s name is Whitaker—’

Jaul sprang upright with amazing alacrity. ‘She is the single exception to the rule,’ he incised.

Chrissie tapped her heels on the marble floor of the giant echoing hall full of what looked like a display of actual mummy cases from an Egyptian tomb. It was creepy and the lack of light made it even creepier. Staring at a two-headed god statue did nothing for her nervous tension, only ratcheting it up a degree or two and making the events of the past twenty-four hours all the more challenging to bear, never mind accept.