Prince Nadir's Secret Heir

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.

CHAPTER FOUR

IMOGEN LAPSED INTO a horrified silence, focusing on her daughter instead of the sick feeling swirling in the pit of her stomach.

Quite honestly she had never expected to see Nadir again and she really wished she hadn’t. But at least he’d well and truly put paid to those times she’d wondered if she shouldn’t contact him and let him know that his child had been born. Put paid to those silly girlish fantasies that he would one day ride in on a big white horse and offer her undying love.

Yeah, right. Probably she’d listened to way too many love songs while she had been incapacitated on Minh’s sofa and possibly watched way too much day time TV.

But at least that whole time hadn’t been a complete waste. She’d used it to plan out her and her baby’s future and decided to follow a long-held dream and teach dance. She’d even taken a short online business course. She had a vision that when she had enough money she and Nadeena would move to a mid-sized town where she could open a studio. Nadeena would rush home after school and if she wanted to she could dance; if not, she could sit and do homework or read. Then they would go home together and chat while Imogen cooked dinner and at night...at night...she hadn’t really thought about the nights. Her imagination had only gone so far as to envision her and Nadeena as a tight-knit unit.

The two of them happy and contented.

And when Nadeena asked about her father, as she surely would one day, Imogen hadn’t quite worked out what she was going to tell her. She didn’t want to lie to her but nor did she want Nadeena to know that her father had never wanted her. She glanced at Nadir standing by the window, his broad back to her as if he couldn’t stand to look at her. Well, that was fine with her. She couldn’t stand to look at him either.

Careful not to waken Nadeena, she eased herself off the sofa, not as easy as it looked since it was one of those squishy ones designed for long afternoons lazing about, and cradled Nadeena in her arms.

Hearing her, Nadir turned towards her and she hastily pulled her T-shirt back into place.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

Imogen raised her chin at his surly tone. ‘Home.’

‘To that buffoon you were with earlier?’

It took her a beat to realise he was referring to Minh but she wasn’t about to get into another lengthy discussion with him and, although it was illogical, her gut warned her that if she answered his question honestly he’d never let her leave. And that was exactly what she was about to do. ‘You have no right to ask me that. But I am curious as to why you brought me up here. It seems like a waste of your time and mine.’

His eyes held hers and he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘Is he your current lover?’

Chilled, Imogen cuddled Nadeena closer. ‘You answer my questions and I’ll answer yours.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Nadir’s voice, his stance—heck, his very demeanour—had turned alert with predatory intent. ‘Did you assume you were in a position to bargain with me?’

Imogen rubbed the space between her eyes, her arms starting to ache from holding Nadeena.

‘What I assumed,’ she said as she laid her daughter on the sofa and fixed cushions around her, ‘was that you weren’t interested in anything about me and what I do, or where I live.’

‘You are the mother of my child,’ he said as if that answered everything.

And then she remembered why she was here and could have laughed at her own stupidity. This wasn’t about some romantic reunion of past lovers. This was about a man with self-preservation on his mind. ‘We’ve already established that you don’t care about that.’

‘I care.’

Imogen curled her lip. What he meant was that he cared about how much cash she was going to hit him up for.

‘I get it,’ she said tonelessly. ‘And while I think it’s incredibly selfish of you not to want to provide for your own flesh and blood you’ll no doubt be relieved to know that I don’t want anything from you and I never will.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Nor do I expect that you will want to see her and that’s more than okay with me as well.’

He started to laugh and she felt even more disgusted with him. ‘I don’t see what’s so amusing. It’s a travesty if you really think about it too much. Which I try not to do.’

‘You’re serious.’

‘I certainly don’t think abandoning your own child is something to laugh about, but maybe that’s just me.’

‘Except I didn’t abandon her—you took her.’

‘Are we back to that again?’

His eyebrow rose. ‘Did we ever leave it?’

‘I want to go home, Nadir.’

‘That’s not possible,’ he said briskly. ‘I should have already left for Bakaan by now.’

His homeland?

‘Please don’t let me stop you.’

One corner of his mouth quirked in a parody of a smile. ‘I don’t intend to. But unfortunately we have run out of time to get things you might need from your house. If you write me a list I’ll make sure you have everything on hand when we arrive. We shouldn’t be gone long. A day at the most.’

Imogen blinked. ‘We?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘You must be mad.’

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and started dialling as if he hadn’t heard her.

‘Nadir, what are you doing?’

He looked up at her. ‘Claiming what is mine.’

Imogen waited a beat before responding. Waited for the punchline. When he stared back with all the confidence of a man used to getting his own way she felt dizzy.

‘I am not yours and I never was!’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I meant Nadeena.’

Sanctimonious bastard.

Embarrassed at her gaffe, Imogen hauled the baby bag over her shoulder. ‘Didn’t you just hear me? I said I don’t want anything from you.’

‘I heard you.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m going.’

Before she had time to reach Nadeena, Nadir abandoned his call and yanked the bag off her shoulder, spinning her around to face him. ‘You’ve stolen the first five months of my daughter’s life from me.’ His voice seemed to harden with every word even though its tenor didn’t change. ‘You won’t be stealing any more.’

Stolen? Imogen’s knees started to shake and the sense of dread from earlier returned with force. ‘I haven’t stolen anything. And how do you know she’s even really yours?’

A grim smile crooked the corner of his mouth. ‘She has my eyes.’

‘Lots of people have silvery-blue eyes,’ she said on a rush. ‘They’re as common as mice.’ Rats.

One dark eyebrow rose. ‘You gave her an Arabic name.’

‘Nadeena was a great-aunt of mine.’

‘And you’re proving to be a terrible liar. Which is in your favour.’

‘I don’t understand this at all.’ She threw her arms up in front of her. ‘You don’t even want children. Why would you want us to go with you?’

He widened his stance and her eyes couldn’t help but notice his strong legs and lean torso. God, did he have to be quite so damned virile?

‘How do you know that?’

Gossip, mainly. She lifted her chin and focused on his hard face, which wasn’t much better. ‘Well, do you?’ she asked coolly.

‘I’d say that’s a moot point now, wouldn’t you?’

‘No, I most definitely would not. I’d say it’s very relevant considering the way you’re behaving.’

‘Sometimes, Imogen, life throws us curve balls but that doesn’t mean we have to drop them. I don’t need a DNA test to confirm that I have a child.’

Frustration made her voice sharper than usual. ‘Of course you need to do a DNA test. What kind of crazy talk is that? No rich man in his right mind would take on a child as his own without doing a DNA test.’

Nadir laughed and this time it rang with genuine amusement. ‘You always were just that little bit different from the pack, habibi.’ His voice, so gentle and deep, brought a rush of memories back into her dizzy brain. ‘But you need not worry. I plan to do my duty by her.’

His duty?

A sense of terror entered her heart. Was that what he meant by saying he’d be claiming what was his? She didn’t want to know. Not right now. ‘I don’t need you to do the right thing by Nadeena.’ She’d been looking out for herself for a long time now and she could look out for her child as well.

Nadir raked an impatient hand through his hair. ‘Nevertheless, I will.’ His striking eyes narrowed. ‘Now quit arguing and give me a list of things you will need for our flight to Bakaan.’

Striving for calm, Imogen tried to slow down her heart that was banging away inside her chest so loudly he must surely be able to hear it. Right now she felt as if she was trying to survive a fierce gale that was corralling her towards the edge of a very high cliff. Then a horrible thought froze the blood inside her veins. ‘I won’t let you take my baby, Nadir.’ She hated that her voice rang with fear. ‘If that’s your plan.’ She’d never even considered it before but now that she had she couldn’t push it from her mind.

He glanced at her impatiently. ‘If I wanted that then you couldn’t stop me.’

‘I could. I’d...’ Panic clawed inside her throat. ‘I’ll...’

‘But I don’t want that.’ He made an impatient gesture with his hands. ‘I am not so callous that I don’t realise that a baby needs its mother. That is why I plan to marry you.’

Marry her!

She shook her head, biting back a rising sense of hysteria. She needed time to make sense of everything that was happening and she couldn’t because her mind didn’t know which way to turn.

‘Breathe, Imogen.’ Nadir went to put his hands on her shoulders and she jerked back, wondering how he had got so close to her without her being aware of it.

Imogen shook her head, fear spiking inside her like a flash of lightning. ‘You’re crazy to think that I’d marry you after the way you treated me.’

Nadir’s mouth thinned and he stepped closer to her, contained anger emanating from every taut line of his body. ‘I can assure you that I’m not. I’ve had a lot of time to review my options while you were in hiding and this is non-negotiable.’

Imogen tried to still the trembling inside her body. ‘I was not hiding.’

‘It’s irrelevant now.’

She laughed. What else could she do? ‘You can’t just come back into my life and think you can do whatever you want.’ Her father had behaved that way. Coming and going as he pleased with little concern for either her or her mother. As if she’d shackle her and her daughter to a man cut from the same cloth. ‘I’ll fight you.’

‘What with?’ She hadn’t realised that her hands had balled into tight white fists until Nadir’s mocking gaze drew hers to them. He reached out and raised them in front of her, enclosing them inside his much larger grip. ‘With these, hmm? I have to confess that, as aggressive as you can be in bed, I didn’t take you for the violent type.’

She wouldn’t have before today either. ‘Nadir, we had an affair,’ she cried, throwing his earlier words back in his face and tugging at his implacable hold. ‘We only had sex a...a...a couple of times.’

He resisted her feeble attempts to break free with embarrassing ease and hauled her closer. ‘Let’s see,’ he said with a snarl. ‘Four weekends, around three times a day, more at night.’ His eyes dropped to her mouth and lingered before returning to hers. ‘You don’t have to be Einstein to know that comes to more than a couple of times, habibi. And it was good sex.’

His words and his tone combined to set off a wildfire reaction inside her body.

‘It meant nothing,’ she choked out, still trying to free her hands from within the prison of his. Wishing that his grip was hurting her to distract her from the riot of sensations being this close to him was setting off inside her. She couldn’t seem to focus her thoughts when she became enshrouded in his earthy male scent, the sensitive tips of her breasts rising against the lace of her bra and the deep achy feeling between her thighs reminding her of how it had once been between them.

‘Nothing?’ His soft question had a lethal undertone that had her raising her eyes to his, but she only reached his mouth, which seemed so close to her own that if she held still long enough she was sure she could feel his breath against her lips. ‘Nothing, Imogen? I don’t think so.’

‘I’ll get a lawyer,’ she said breathlessly, yanking harder on her hands, only to find that they were now trapped against his hard chest.

He laughed. ‘From what I know of your finances, you can’t afford a decent babysitter.’

‘Bastard!’

His eyes bored holes into hers. ‘And what court of law is going to side with a mother who kept a child’s existence from its father? Who leaves her baby with friends while she works?’

‘Lots of mothers do that.’

‘Yes, but lots of mothers do not have a child of royal blood. Nadeena is a Bakaani princess.’

‘I don’t think of her like that.’

‘Right.’

‘I don’t!’ she exclaimed at his cynical tone. ‘She’s just an innocent baby to me, not a commodity. And no court in the world would favour a father who thinks like that.’

Nadir arched a brow. ‘You’re not that naïve, surely.’

‘Nadir, stop this, I beg you.’

‘Do you?’

She flushed, remembering the last time she’d said those words to him. It might as well have been five minutes ago for the response of her body. The feeling of being helpless beneath him, her hands held above her head as he’d nudged her thighs wider with his knees, the feel of his silken hardness at that first moment he pushed himself inside her body, that feeling of her softness giving way to all that male strength in inexorable pleasure.

Her body clenched and mortification filled her. She tried to twist away from him now but somehow that only made her more aware of the press of his hips, forcing the hard ridge of his erection into her belly.

Erection!

Imogen’s eyes flew to his. ‘No.’

He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Oh, yes, Imogen, you still turn me on,’ he said thickly. ‘Despite your treachery.’