SHEIKH'S SURPRISE BABY: A Sheikh Romance (113 page)

Alex shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She had been aware that Malik Faisal had been there specifically to see her, but had not really had much time to think about it, or to wonder what impression she had made on him as she had handled vomit and heart attacks. Now, though, she looked keenly at him as he typed on his tablet, and as though he felt her eyes on him, he looked up and smiled. It was as charming and beautiful as he had been all day, and she wondered how she was ever to survive with two such beautiful men around all the time. She found herself wishing that the prince’s father was a wizened old man. She needed some plainness as an antidote to the beautiful faces of the men sitting across from her. Getting her mind focused was essential, and drooling over handsome men would not help there.

“What exactly is wrong with your father, Your Highness?” she asked, striving to be a business-like as he was being.

“He has Alzheimer’s disease,” he replied, his face neutral.

Alex’s heart seized up in her chest. Her own grandmother had been taken by that illness, and in her last years, Alex had been her primary caregiver, watching her slowly decline until one day her body gave out. She had died in her sleep, not knowing who Alex was, being bitter and angry or confused and hopeless by turn. She kept control of her reaction by a sheer act of will, but he must have noticed something in her demeanor, because the prince said,

“Is something wrong, Ms. Downing?” His eyes were concerned.

She swallowed, and nodded, then spoke up, determined to be adult. The last thing she needed to do was break down in front of strangers.

“No, everything is fine,” she said, but her rusty tone still gave her away.

Malik Faisal stood without a word and went to the table, returning with a glass of water, which she gratefully accepted.

“Thank you, Mr. Faisal,” she said, sipping slowly.

He resumed his seat, smiling his acknowledgment of her thanks. The prince waited another minute, and then asked,

“Is there any reason why you could not be ready to travel on Sunday?”

Alex’s eyes shot to his face, and she registered two things. First, the color had deepened from gunmetal gray to almost black, and he had just offered her the job in so many words.

“Where would I be traveling to, Your Highness?” she asked in her turn, as though she were really thinking about refusing.

She had no one who would care whether she stayed or left. She had been an only child, and with no significant other of close friend, and as of a couple of hours ago, no job, she was a free agent, a single parent who needed a job to look after herself and her child to avoid becoming homeless as well as penniless. There was no way she would say no to the job. But she still wanted to know where she was going.

Malik Faisal stood up and walked over to her, holding out his tablet for her to see. There was a map on it.

“Mubaira is here, Miss Downing,” he said, and pointed to a small state in a part of the Middle East that she did not recognize..

Alex had never heard of the place, but what had her shaking even more was that she had not even considered that the travel would have been outside the continental United States. This was huge, more so than she had imagined it would be.

“I don’t even have a passport,” she said. “At least not one that is current. And I never got one for Simone.”

“As the prince’s employee, you do not need clearance to enter Mubaira,” he explained, “and we would take immediate steps to see that you are cleared to return to the States once your work is concluded there.”

She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to giggle hysterically as she thought about how her work would be concluded when the king of the little nation died. She swallowed, and inhaled deeply a few times to steady her nerves. Losing it now would not endear her to these men, who had been very kind to her, but who would probably not be pussycats if the need arose to be dragons. Gathering her control, she looked the prince in the eye and said,

“What time on Sunday do you want me to be ready?”

“We are eight hours ahead of you here, and the flight will take fourteen hours,” the prince said. “To give you time to prepare the little one for a long flight, we can be there to collect you at noon. Will that suit you?”

She looked at him as though he had two heads. Which employer in history ever asked a potential employee if something they wanted to do suited her? She smiled and said,

“Sunday at noon is fine.” Then, just to be sure, she added, “I take it that I am being offered the job?”

In yet another surprising move, the prince laughed. It was a rich, round, mellow sound, and it struck chords deep inside her, unfurling something that had been slowly loosening since they had sat at dinner and he had had someone cut up her daughter’s food so she could eat without help.

“Ah, Ms. Downing, forgive me. One needs to ask the question, no?” He smiled at her and continued, “I am offering you the job as my father’s nurse, if you are willing to move to Mubaira. Will you accept it, Ms. Downing?”

Now it was Alex’s turn to smile. “Yes, Your Highness, I will.”

Saying the words left an odd thrill swirling around inside her, as though he had asked a much more significant and life-changing question, and she wondered suddenly if he had a wife or fiancee or girlfriend. The thought made her uneasy. Somehow she knew any woman who had this man’s attention, or better, his heart, would not take kindly to his easy manner with the hired help. She knew she wouldn’t care, as long as she was sure of his feelings for her, but then, she was most likely in a whole different class from the women he would be seen with. Men like Prince Amir didn’t fall for penniless single mothers trying to make a living as nurses.

“Ms. Downing?”

Malik Faisal’s voice brought her out of her daydream, and she blushed faintly.

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

Malik Faisal smiled at her yet again and said, “Dessert has arrived.”

“Mommy,” Simone interrupted, “I need to pee!”

Before she could utter a word, the prince’s assistant said, “The ladies’ room is right through there.” He escorted her to the door of the room, and pointed down the hall to her left.

“Thank you,” Alex murmured, taking her daughter’s hand and hurrying her to the bathroom.

Alexandra Downing set her daughter in the seat next to hers, the dark material of her stretch jeans curving enticingly over her ass. The woman was enchanting. Amir watched her surreptitiously as she adjusted her little one’s seatbelt. The jet was powering up its engines, and the little girl was already searching the toy box on the seat next to her. He had enjoyed watching her with the child all the way from her little home to the airport, and when she had seen the aircraft, with the emblem of his country emblazoned on its side, her eyes had widened, even as her daughter said,

“Mommy, are we going in the plane?”

He had listened to her answer her daughter’s question, and all the other ones that the little girl had had. She was patient to a fault, and it was obvious to him that she loved her baby more than life. He thought the man who had married her had been a lucky man, who, had he not died, would no doubt have made it impossible for Amir to have hired her. No man in his right mind would let a woman like her leave him to live in a foreign land without him there. He found himself thankful that she was no longer tied to any man, and was free to choose another.

Amir didn’t question the feeling. He had been attracted to her from the moment she had walked into the restaurant, her expression apprehensive, and then awestruck when she had turned and seen him. The way she had looked him over, the admiration he had seen in her eyes, had made him feel happy to have inherited his father’s size and his mother’s beauty. He knew he was attractive to women, and was more than glad that she was not immune to his good looks. She had been restrained, as a prospective employee should be, but he knew that an attraction had simmered between them, though he knew he would have a hard time getting her to admit it.

After their dinner interview on Friday, he had not seen her again. But by the time he had picked her up earlier, she had been in full professional mode. His smiles went unreturned, and her focus had been on her child, mostly, he thought, as a way of keeping her distance from him. He understood her actions, and respected her for them, but he would not deny the effect she had had on him when she had appeared at her door dressed in body-hugging jeans and a long overblouse that covered her to her hips. She wore high heels and had her hair up in a high ponytail. She carried herself with unconscious grace and poise, and it was clear to him that she was entirely unaware of how stunning she was.

Now she put her own seatbelt on and gripped the arms of her seat. It had not even occurred to him that she might be afraid of flying, and the sight of her white knuckles as the jet gathered speed and began its ascent made him wish he was sitting closer to her. Though what he thought he could do he wasn’t sure. He didn’t know her, but felt very protective of her. Her daughter was taking the whole experience in her stride, like all children would, unafraid no doubt because she was unaware of the dangers. He knew telling her mother that more people died on the road than in the air would not set her mind at ease. He offered her a drink, instead, but she refused it.

“I took some medication,” she said, “and I can’t have alcohol with it.”

He refrained from smiling, knowing she had probably taken some prescription drug for anxiety but was unwilling to let him know her weakness. She was a strong-minded, independent woman, and for her to show weakness must be a sign of failure. He respected her more each moment he was in her company. She would be a worthy partner for a lucky man. His family was known for marrying strong women. At the thought of marriage, he sobered. When his father died, which looked to be sooner rather than later, he would be thrust into leading his country, and the expectations that went with that were burdensome to him. He did not like to think of his father dying, not just because he was his only living parent, but because his death would mean Amir had to marry within a year, and produce an heir within two more.

He had never liked to be coerced into doing anything, but the laws of his country regarding accession to the throne were set in stone. Amir understood the reason for them, but that did not mean he had to like them. And so far, the closest he had come to choosing a woman to pursue had been the two dinner parties at her parents’ mansion, and the four evenings he had spent alone with Princess Amina Mohammed, whose father was seeking to use her as the way to sealing closer ties with Mubaira. She was not without charm, and was in fact quite beautiful. But there was something about her that made Amir recoil, and he had always been one to trust his gut. He was grateful that at least his parents had not subscribed to the widely-held practice in their culture of choosing marriage partners for their children at birth. He would rather give up the throne than marry someone he did not love. And he knew he would never love Amina, despite her best efforts to show her pleasing side.

Alexandra Downing was an entirely different matter, though. A woman like her would be easy to love. She had a spark that never went out, and that seemed to have lit an answering one in him, one that he had no desire to put out. Certainly not for Amina, for whom he felt nothing, despite their having known each other for three months, and despite his attempts to engage with her on a more personal level. If he were asked to compare the two women, Alexandra would win hands down, and he had only met her two days ago. He knew there was something more to her by the very way his body reacted around her. Amina did not even raise his temperature, but Alexandra made his body hard, and his breathing heavy, and he thought those physical signs of his interest in her were as important as all the other things he had been discovering since he first met her.

The jet was still climbing, and he decided that engaging her in conversation would help to ease her further.

“Malik tells me you had an interesting day on Friday. Was it always that…frantic?”

Her smile filled something empty inside him. “No, Your Highness. Most days, I just needed to find where Mr. Maloney had gotten to…he liked to play hide and seek with us, though I’m sure he would deny it if we accused him of it.”

She spoke with great affection for the elderly man whom Malik had informed him had slipped away almost as soon as she had finished helping him dress and escorted him to the common room. He liked that she seemed to enjoy her job, and while he wasn’t happy that she had lost it, he was pleased that he was the one fortunate enough to have got her before someone else snapped her up. He watched the smile that curved up her lips, and could only smile in return.

“You don’t seem to be bothered by it,” he remarked. “You must have a great deal of patience. That is admirable.”

She smiled absently, her thoughts clearly on the old man. “He was alone,” she said. “No one ever came to visit him, at least not while I was there. So I tried to make him feel…”

“Loved?” Amir supplied. “Cared for? Special?”

The look she threw his way seemed to say she was shocked that a prince would understand such things. Little did she know how important he thought those things were for everyone, but especially for the elderly. His mother had died when he was still very young, and after so many years without her, he had learned how age can isolate a person, especially one who has lost the light of his being. He dreaded his father’s death, not just because of all the the responsibilities that it would drop onto his shoulders, but also because he feared he would never be able to fill the void he knew existed in his heart that no one had yet filled. And that was why he resisted the idea of a marriage of convenience, because he knew that that void would widen and freeze over if he married someone he didn’t love. At least he still had his father to love and care for, and that would have to be enough.

Shaking the somber thoughts away, he listened as she tried to explain her reaction to her patient.