The sheikh's chosen wife (25 page)

Which suddenly reminded
her of something she still had to do that might not be as pain free. Her heart
began thudding as Hassan came to take her hand and walk her towards the stairs.
She could feel his tension, knew that his mind had switched onto the same
wavelength as her own. Hand in hand they trod the wide staircase to the floor above.
The door to the private apartments closed behind them.

'Did Evie bring—'

'Yes,' she interrupted,
and moved right away from him. Now the moment of truth had arrived Leona found
she was absolutely terrified. 'I don't want to know,' she admitted.

'Then leave it for now,'
Hassan answered simply.

She turned to look
anxiously at him. 'But that's just being silly.'

'Yes,' he agreed. 'But
tomorrow the answer will still be the same, and the next day and the next.'

Maybe it was a good thing
that the telephone began to ring. Hassan moved away from her to go and answer
it. Thirty seconds later he was sending her a rueful smile. 'My father is
restless,' he explained. 'Over-excited and in need of talk. Will you mind if I
go to him, or shall I get Rafiq

'No,' she said quickly.
'You go.' She really was a pathetic coward.

'You won't...do anything
without me with you?' he murmured huskily.

She shook her head.
'Tomorrow,' she promised. 'W-when I am feeling less tired and able to cope
with...' The wrong answer, were the words she couldn't say.

Coming back to her,
Hassan gave her a kiss of understanding. 'Go to bed,' he advised, 'Try to
sleep. I will come back just as soon as I can.'

He was striding towards
the door when she remembered. 'Hassan... My father and Ethan were invited here
for a specific purpose, weren't they?'

He paused at the door,
sighed and turned to look at her. 'Damage limitation,' he confirmed. 'We may
not like it. We may object to finding such a demeaning act necessary. But the
problem was there, and had to be addressed. Inshallah.'

He shrugged, turned and
left.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Inshallah
—as Allah wills. It was,
she thought, the perfect throwaway answer to an uncomfortable subject. On a dissatisfied
sigh she moved across the room to begin to prepare for bed.

Already tucked out of
sight in the drawer of her bedside cabinet lay the offerings Evie had brought
with her from Behran. Just glancing at the drawer was enough to make her
shudder a little, because the pregnancy testing kit had too much power for her
comfort. So she turned away to pull on her pyjamas, slid into bed and switched
off the light without glancing at the cabinet again. Sleep came surprisingly
quickly, but then it had been a long day.

When she woke up, perhaps
an hour later, she thought for a few moments that Hassan must have come back
and disturbed her when he'd got into the bed. But there was no warm body lying
beside her. No sign of life in evidence through the half-open bathroom door.

Then she knew. She didn't
know how she knew, but suddenly she was up and pulling on a robe, frantically
trying the belt as she hurried for the door. It was as if every light in the
palace was burning. Her heart dropped to her stomach as she began racing down
the stairs.

It was the sheikh.
Instinct, premonition, call it what you wanted; she just knew there was
something badly wrong.

On bare feet she ran down
the corridor and arrived at his door to find it open. She stepped inside, saw
nothing untoward except that neither the sheikh nor Hassan was there. Then she
heard a noise coming from the room beyond, and with a sickening thud her heart
hit her stomach as she made her way across the room to that other door.

On the other side was a
fully equipped hospital room that had been constructed for use in the event of
emergencies like the one Leona found herself faced with now.

She could not see the old
sheikh because the doctors and nurses were gathered around him. But she could
see Hassan and Rafiq standing like two statues at the end of the bed. They were
gripping the rail in front of them with a power to crush metal, and their faces
were as white as the gutrahs that still covered their heads.

Anguish lurked in every
corner, the wretched sound of the heart monitor pulsing out its frighteningly
erratic story like a cold, ruthless taunt. It was dreadful, like viewing a
scene from a horror movie. Someone held up a hypodermic needle, clear liquid
sprayed into the air. The lights were bright and the room bare of everything
but clinical-white efficiency.

No, she thought, no, they
cannot do this to him. He needs his room, with his books and his divan and his
favourite pile of cushions. He needed to be surrounded by love, his sons,
gentle music, not that terrible beep that felt to her as if it was draining the
very life out of him.

'Switch it off,' she said
thickly, walking forward on legs that did not seem to belong to her. 'Switch if
off!' she repeated. 'He doesn't want to hear that.'

'Leona...' Hassan spoke
her name in a hoarse whisper.

She looked at him. He
looked at her. Agony screamed in the space between them. 'Tell them to switch
it off,' she pleaded with him.

His face caved in on a
moment's loss of composure. Rafiq didn't even seem to know that she was there.
'Don't...' he said huskily.

He wanted her to accept
it. Her throat became a ball of tears as she took those final few steps then
looked, really looked down at the ghost-like figure lying so still in the bed.

No, she thought again,
no, they can't do this to him. Not here, not now. Her hand reached out to catch
hold of one of his, almost knocking the nurse who was trying to treat him.

He felt so cold he might
have been dead already. The tears moved to her mouth and spilled over her
trembling lips. 'Sheikh,' she sobbed out, 'you just can't do this!'

'Leona...'

The thin, frail fingers
she held in her hand tried to move. Oh, dear God, she thought painfully. He
knows what is happening to him! 'Switch that noise off—switch it off!'

The fingers tried their
very best to move yet again. Panic erupted. Fear took charge of her mind.
'Don't you dare bail on us now, old man!' she told him forcefully.

'Leona!' Hassan warning
voice came stronger this time. He was shocked. They were all shocked. She
didn't care.

'Listen to me,' she
urged, lifting that frighteningly cold hand up to her cheek. The fingers moved
again. He was listening. He could hear her. She moved closer, pushing her way
past the doctor—a nurse—someone. She leaned over the bed, taking that precious
hand with her. Her hair streamed over the white piDows as she came as close to
him as she could. 'Listen,' she repeated, ‘I am going to have a baby, Sheikh.
Your very first grandchild. Tell me that you understand!'

The fingers moved. She
laughed, then sobbed and kissed those fingers. Hassan came to grasp her
shoulder. 'What do you think you are doing?' he rasped.

He was furious. She
couldn't speak, couldn't answer, because she didn't know what she was doing.
It had all just come out as if it was meant to. Inshallah, she thought.

'He can hear.' She found
her voice. 'He knows what I am telling him.' Tremulously she offered Hassan his
father's hand. 'Talk to him,' she pleaded. 'Tell him about our baby.' Tears
were running down her cheeks and Hassan had never looked so angry. 'Tell him.
He needs to hear it from you. Tell him, Hassan, please...'

That was the point when
the monitor suddenly went haywire. Medics lunged at the sheikh. Hassan dropped
his father's hand so he could grab hold of Leona and forcibly drag her aside.
As the medical team went down in a huddle Hassan was no longer just white, he
was a colour that had never been given a name. 'You had better be telling him
the truth or I will never forgive you for doing this,' he sliced at her.

Leona looked at the
monitor, listened to its wild, palpitating sound. She looked at Rafiq, at what
felt like a wall of horrified and disbelieving faces, and on a choked sob she
broke free from Hassan and ran from the room.

Back down the corridor,
up the stairs, barely aware that she was passing by lines of waiting, anxious
servants. Gaining entrance to their apartments, she sped across the floor to
the bedside cabinet. Snatching up Evie's testing kit, trembling and shaking,
she dropped the packet twice in her attempt to remove the Cellophane wrapping
to get the packet inside. She was sobbing by the time she had reached the
contents. Then she unfolded the instruction leaflet and tried to read through a
bank of hot tears, what it was she was supposed to do.

She was right; she was
sure she was right. Nothing—nothing in her whole life had ever felt as right
as this! Five minutes later she was racing downstairs again, running down the
corridor in between the two lines of anxious faces, through doors and into the
sheikh's room and over to her husband.

'See!' she said. 'See!'
There were tears and triumph and sheer, shrill agony in her voice as she held
out the narrow bit of plastic towards Hassan. 'Now tell him! Please....'' she
begged him.

'Leona...' Hassan
murmured very gently.

Then she heard it. The
silence. The dreadful, agonising, empty silence. She spun around to look at the
monitor. The screen was blank.

The screen was blank.
'No,' she breathed shakily. 'No.' Then she sank in a deep faint to the ground.

Hassan could not believe
that any of this was really happening. He looked blankly at his father, then
at his wife, then at the sea of frozen faces, and for a moment he actually
thought he was going to join Leona and sink into a faint.

'Look after my son's
wife.' A frail voice woke everyone up from their surprise. 'I think she has
earned some attention."

Before Hassan could move
a team of experts had gone down over Leona and he was left standing there
staring down at the bit of white plastic she had placed in his hand.

She was pregnant. She had
just told him that this red mark in the window meant that she was pregnant. In
the bed a mere step away his father was no longer fading away before his eyes.

Leona had done it. She'd
brought him back from the brink, had put herself through the trauma of facing
the answer on this small contraption, and she'd done both without his support.

'Courage,' he murmured.
He had always known she possessed courage. 'And where was I when she needed my
courage?'

'Here,' a level voice
said. 'Sit down.' It was Rafiq, offering him a chair to sit upon. The room was
beginning to look like a war zone.

He declined the chair.
Leave me with some semblance of dignity, he thought. 'Excuse me,' he said, and
stepped through the kneeling shapes round Leona, and bent and picked her up in
his arms. 'But, sir, we should check she

'Leave him be,' the old
sheikh instructed. 'He is all she needs and he knows it.'

He did not take her far,
only to his father's divan, where he laid her down, then sat beside her. She
looked pale and delicate, and just too lovely for him to think straight. So he
did what she had done with his father and took hold of her hand, then told her,
'Don't you dare bail out on us now, you little tyrant, even if you believe we
deserve it."

'We?' she mumbled.

'Okay, me,' he conceded.
'My father is alive and well, by the way. I thought it best to tell you this
before you begin to recall exactly why you fainted.'

'He's all right?' Her
gold-tipped lashes flickered upwards, revealing eyes the colour of a sleepy
lagoon.

I feel very poetic,
Hassan thought whimsically. 'Whether due to the drugs or your bullying, no one
is entirely certain. But he opened his eyes and asked me what you were talking
about just a second after you flew out of the room."

'He's all right.' Relief
shivered through her, sending her eyes closed again. Feeling the shiver, Hassan
reached out to draw one of his father's rugs over her reclining frame.

'Where am I?' she asked
after a moment.

'You are lying on my
father's divan, ' he informed her. 'With me, in all but effect, at your feet.'

She opened her eyes again,
looked directly at him, and sent those major parts that kept him functioning
into a steep decline.

'What made you do it?'

She frowned at the
question, but only for a short moment, then she sighed, tried to sit up but was
still too dizzy and had to relax back again. 'I didn't want him to go,' she explained
simply. 'Or, if he had to go, I wanted him to do it knowing that he was leaving
everything as he always wanted to leave it.'

'So you lied.'

It was a truth she merely
grimaced at.

'If he had survived this
latest attack, and you had been wrong about what you told him, would that have
been a fair way to tug a man back from his destiny?'

'I'm pregnant,' she
announced. 'Don't upset me with lie’. He laughed. What else was he supposed to
do? 'I apologise for shouting at you,' he said soberly.