The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus (31 page)

Somehow Sam managed to follow the aide, who was already leaving
the room.

She was leaving—just
as he had
wanted her to do. Now there would be no risk, no struggle between the two
opposing forces within him. In severing the link between them he had severed
himself—freed himself from a lifetime of fear that she might ultimately abandon
him.

He was glad she had gone. From his office window he could see
her, getting into the waiting car. She was hesitating, looking over her shoulder
and then up towards where he was. Immediately Vere stepped back from the
glass.

He must go and see Drax. They had important matters to
discuss—matters that involved Dhurahn and its future, matters which he as its
Ruler needed to give his full attention to.

The car would have left the palace now, and would be travelling
down the Royal Highway. It wasn’t very far to the airport, and the plane that
would take Sam to Zuran had been delayed to wait for her. And then she would be
gone—for ever.

‘No!’

The tortured sound of his own denial was thrown back to him by
the walls of his office. Vere reached for the telephone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
HEY
had almost reached the airport.
Soon she would be gone from Dhurahn, never to return.

The driver brought the car to an abrupt halt and then did a
U-turn, and before Sam could so much as knock on the privacy screen separating
them they were speeding back the way they had just come.

Back in the palace courtyard, a servant sprang to open the car
door for her. Two aides were waiting to escort her swiftly inside—aides or
jailers? Sam wondered apprehensively as they walked either side of her, down now
familiar corridors, taking her, she realised, to Vere’s private quarters.

Outside the double doors they stopped and knocked, and then
opened them for her.

She didn’t want to go through them, but somehow she discovered
that she had.

Behind her the doors were closed, and she was left confronting
Vere.

‘Why have you done this?’ she demanded.

Her heart was thudding and thundering out of beat, and the
loud, out-of-control thump was surely totally betraying her.

‘Because I had to,’ said Vere.

She had never seen him looking like this before, his emotions
clearly revealed in his expression—so clearly that Sam felt as though he was
willing her to look at him and see what was there.

She shouldn’t be here with him. It was far too dangerous. She
took a step backwards, but it was too late; she had hesitated for too long. And
now she was in Vere’s arms, and he was kissing her with a raw passion more
intimate than anything he had shown her before.

Sam knew she should resist and object, but shockingly she was
winding her arms round his neck, pressing her body into his and giving herself
up to his kiss.

‘I couldn’t let you go.’

The words, thick, unsteady and wholly honest, tore at her
heart.

Such simple words to elicit so many complex feelings. Simple
words that were very dangerous. Words that were forbidden between them.

Tears filled Sam’s eyes.

‘You shouldn’t have done this. It’s wrong.’

‘I love you,’ Vere told her fiercely, ignoring her protest.

‘You can’t. You mustn’t.’

It was his own words given back to him. How easy it was now to
dismiss them as foolish shadows with no base in reality. Just like his own
adolescent fears.

‘You have a wife and...soon you will have a child...’ A child.
What about her own secret? The one that had begun so recently as a joyous hope
and had now become a guilty fear—because her baby, if there was to be one, would
never know its father or receive his love.

‘No. Sadie is not my wife, Sam. She is married to my brother
Drax.’

Sam’s head swam with the enormity of the message those simple
words carried.

‘That can’t be true.’

‘It is true,’ Vere insisted. ‘And if you won’t believe me then
I shall ask Drax and Sadie to tell you themselves.’

He meant what he was saying. Sam could see that.

‘If you aren’t married, then why did you let me think that you
were?’

Sam couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice and, hearing it,
Vere ache with guilt, and with his own desire to hold her and assure her that he
would never hurt her again. How best could he explain to her the complexity of
the turmoil he had experienced since meeting her?

Whilst he hesitated Sam broke the silence, her voice hesitant
and heavy with sadness. ‘I love you, Vere,’ she told him quietly. ‘You know
that, I know. But I can’t... I’m not emotionally equipped to be in a
relationship with someone who blows hot one moment and cold the next.’

And more importantly, she could not and would not take that
risk for their child—although of course she wasn’t going to tell him that. Just
as she wasn’t going to tell him of her growing suspicions that she might be
pregnant.

Shakily she continued, ‘I accept that originally you believed
you had good reason to be suspicious of me, and that because of that there were
times when you backed off from me. But afterwards, once you knew the
truth...’

Would she understand if he told her his truth? Would she love
him enough to accept his vulnerability and understand it? He had to take the
risk and tell her, Vere knew. He had to make that pledge, give that trust—to her
and to their future. Vere wanted so badly to touch her and hold her, but he
dared not, because he knew that if he did he would never be able to let her
go.

Instead he exhaled and began, ‘Your presence was a reminder
of...something I didn’t want to admit.’

‘What something?’ Sam asked him. Her mouth had gone dry and her
heart was pounding unsteadily and uncomfortably.

‘My...my vulnerability.’

Vere’s voice was terse.

He had never been able to talk about how it had felt to lose
his parents, but his conscience was forcing him to acknowledge that he owed Sam
at least some kind of honesty. And besides...to his own surprise he discovered
that a part of him actually wanted to tell her.

‘Drax and I were in our early teens when our parents were
killed in an accident. We were a very close family. My parents were very much in
love with one another. To lose them so unexpectedly and in such a way was a
terrible shock, but we were their sons—our father’s heirs. We had a duty to our
people and our country that had to come before our grief.’

His pain was tearing at Sam’s heart.

He made a helpless gesture with his hand.

‘It is so hard to say or explain. We had our duty, but we had
our own feelings as well. For me there was...there was fear and anger as well as
loss. We had loved them so dearly. Our mother especially... She was...very
loving...very warm. We were of that age when we were just beginning to think
ourselves too old to be her “boys” any more, and yet at the same time inside we
still needed her comfort. When it was taken from us... The pain of such a loss
goes very deep. I... For me it was easier to shut myself off from the risk of it
happening again. This isn’t easy for me to say, Sam, and I know it won’t be easy
for you to hear, but there are things I have to tell you that need to be said,
so please bear with me?’

Her throat tight with anxiety, Sam nodded her head.

‘I didn’t want to love you,’ Vere admitted. ‘In fact I fought
every way I knew not to. At first I thought it would be enough for me to simply
deny my feelings and to rename them lust.’

Sam winced.

‘But then after your snake bite, when you were so close to
death, that fabrication was ripped from me. All that mattered to me was that you
lived, and that you didn’t leave me. But even that was not enough to keep me
from my path to self-destruction. Even though I knew that I loved you, and I
couldn’t deny those feelings any longer, I still fought against giving in—as I
saw it—to that love.’

‘Why?’ Sam challenged him.

When he didn’t reply, she made her own assumption and said
bleakly, ‘I suppose it was because you felt I wasn’t the right person for...for
a Ruler?’

‘No,’ Vere assured her swiftly, and truthfully. ‘You must never
think that. I knew you were the right person for me, and for Dhurahn. I knew you
were the perfect person for me, Sam, in fact the only person for me. That was
why I fought so hard against loving you. The truth is that the reason I believed
I didn’t dare allow myself to love you lies in my past and in the death of my
parents. I was a young adolescent, just at that stage of being torn between a
desire for manhood and a fear of how swiftly I was moving towards it—especially
in view of the fact that my father was preparing me for the responsibilities of
rulership.

‘My mother understood this. She was the only person I felt able
to admit my feelings to. As the eldest son and the elder brother I felt I had a
duty to be strong. I knew my father loved me, but as with most boys of that age
I felt a need to match him emotionally, man to man, and that meant not allowing
him to see that I sometimes felt vulnerable and fearful of the future. Of course
I realise now that he would have known this, having no doubt come through the
same experience himself—and that that, in fact, was why he was trying to prepare
me.

‘There can never be a good time to lose one’s parents, and to
say that I simply wasn’t prepared to lose mine when I did, that I didn’t have
the resources in place within me to cope, would be an understatement. The loss
of my mother in particular left me feeling abandoned and vulnerable. My feelings
overwhelmed and frightened me. But I was Dhurahn’s Ruler. I had to be
tough.’

Sam made a small sound of loving compassion and told him, ‘You
were a boy...’

‘I was Dhurahn’s new Ruler,’ Vere corrected her gently.

Sam’s tender heart ached with sadness for him.

‘The only way I could cope was to tell myself that what I was
going through was the worst it could ever be—the worst it would ever be. Because
I would never allow myself to be so vulnerable again. I told myself that I must
never love someone so much that losing them could affect me so deeply and
painfully.

‘What happened between us in that hotel corridor in Zuran
breached defences I had believed were indestructible. I told myself to ignore
what I had felt and simply pretend that it and you did not exist. But the memory
of you kept me awake at night, tormenting and mocking me. I told myself what I
felt was merely physical attraction, and I despised myself for wanting you. It
was a relief and an escape route to be able to tell myself that you had an
ulterior motive, and that I must therefore despise you and be suspicious of you.
But love has a mind and an instinct of its own. Something no doubt my mother
would have told me, if she had lived long enough to guide me through the
treacherous currents of adolescence. My love wasn’t so easily dismissed or
forced into accepting convenient lies.

‘I was perched on top of a landslide that would sweep away all
my false beliefs, and that is exactly what did happen when you were bitten. The
thought of losing you demolished all my defences. I was forced to admit that I
loved you.’

‘But as soon as I was well again you backed off from me.’

‘Shedding the protective skin one has worn for so many years
isn’t easy or painfree. Doubts flooded into the space left by my destroyed
defences. Yes, I loved you—but that did not mean that you would never leave me.
My old fear was still there, and if I’m honest perhaps a part of it will always
remain. But what I do know now is that I would rather live with that fear than
without you. That is if you can bring yourself to love and marry a man who is so
very unworthy of you.’

‘You want to marry me?’

‘I want to commit to you in every way there is,’ Vere said
softly.

‘When you came to me and told me you wanted to leave I told
myself that your going was the best thing that could happen to me. But the
minute I visualised you getting on board that plane and leaving me for good I
knew that in truth it was the worst, that my life would be meaningless without
you. You are my joy, Sam, not my fear. You are my future and not my past.’

‘I couldn’t stay, thinking you were married,’ she whispered to
him. ‘Not when I loved you so much myself, and not when I wanted your child so
desperately.’

Sam looked up at him. He had moved closer, so that their bodies
were only a breath apart.

Dared she tell him what she had feared she must keep to
herself?

Sam swallowed painfully.

If they were to have a future together then it had to be built
on trust and honesty.

‘And, most of all, not when I thought that maybe you had
already given me that child,’ she told him simply.

Vere’s reaction was everything she could have hoped for and
more. He reached for her, holding her protectively, his eyes brilliant with
emotion.

‘You are carrying our child?’

‘I think so, and I hope so—although it is too early to be
sure.’

‘My love!’ His voice was hoarse with emotion.

‘Oh, Vere.’

She loved him so much. But right now Sam knew that her greatest
need was to comfort the boy he had been, to take the hand of the man he had
become and help him walk free of the shadows of the past into the healing light
of the sun.

She went to him and gripped his arms, raising herself up on her
toes to kiss him gently, in commitment and in love.

‘You are mine. And I warn you that I shall never let you go,’
Vere whispered against her lips, before taking the initiative from her and
kissing her so intimately that her own passionate response to him left her
clinging weakly to him. ‘We belong together, you and I, Sam.’

‘That’s what I felt the first time we met,’ Sam told him
emotionally. ‘And now we are together, and we always will be.’

‘Always,’ Vere agreed firmly, knowing that it was the truth,
and that he could trust in it and in her.

The journey to self-acceptance that he had begun so long ago
was now finally completed.

* * * * *