Sheikh′s Woman
Sheikh's Woman
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
She' d awakened in a hospital, confused, to discover she was mother to a newborn…and wife to a steely- eyed stranger. Mere hours after gazing on Ishaq Ahmadi in London, Anna found herself at their desert home, which seemed both hauntingly familiar and oddly foreign. No evidence of a happy marriage existed in the palatial residence. No photographs. No clothes that fit Anna' s slender build. No trust, given Ishaq' s endless questions. There was simply the primal, passionate connection between them…and, of course, the baby.But Anna soon learned that nothing about her marriage was to be believed….
“You’re Awake,” The Nurse Murmured.
A man turned and looked at her, too, his gaze piercing. He was strongly charismatic. Handsome as a pirate captain, exotically dark and obviously foreign. Masculine, strong. Anna blinked. There was a mark on his eye just like her baby’s. A dark irregular smudge that enhanced both his resemblance to a pirate and his exotic maleness.
“Anna!” he exclaimed. A slight accent furred his words attractively. “Thank God you and the baby were not hurt! What on earth happened?”
“Are you the doctor?” she stammered.
His dark eyes snapped into an expression of even greater concern, and he made a sound that was half laughter, half worry. He bent down and clasped her hand. She felt his fingers tighten on hers in unmistakable silent warning.
“Darling!” he exclaimed. “The nurse says you don’t remember the accident, but I hope you have not forgotten your own husband!”
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year from Silhouette Desire, where we offer you six passionate, powerful and provocative romances every month of the year! Here’s what you can indulge yourself with this January….
Begin the new year with a seductive MAN OF THE MONTH, Tall, Dark & Western by Anne Marie Winston. A rancher seeking a marriage of convenience places a personals ad for a wife, only to fall—hard—for the single mom who responds!
Silhouette Desire proudly presents a sequel to the wildly successful in-line continuity series THE TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB. This exciting new series about alpha men on a mission is called TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB: LONE STAR JEWELS. Jennifer Greene’s launch book, Millionaire M.D., features a wealthy surgeon who helps out his childhood crush when she finds a baby on her doorstep—by marrying her!
Alexandra Sellers continues her exotic miniseries SONS OF THE DESERT with one more irresistible sheikh in Sheikh’s Woman. THE BARONS OF TEXAS miniseries by Fayrene Preston returns with another feisty Baron heroine in The Barons of Texas: Kit. In Kathryn Jensen’s The Earl’s Secret, a British aristocrat romances a U.S. commoner while wrestling with a secret. And Shirley Rogers offers A Cowboy, a Bride & a Wedding Vow, in which a cowboy discovers his secret child.
So ring in the new year with lots of cheer and plenty of red-hot romance, by reading all six of these enticing love stories.
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Sheikh’s Woman
Alexandra Sellers
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, U.K., England.
For my sister Joy,
who held it all together in the bad times
and makes things even better in the good
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Prologue
She crouched in the darkness, whimpering as the pain gripped her. He had made her wait too long. She had warned him, but he’d pretended not to believe her “lies.” And now, in an empty, dirty alley, nowhere to go, no time to get there, her time was upon her.
Pain stabbed her again, and she cried out involuntarily. She pressed a hand over her mouth and looked behind her down the alley. Of course by now he had discovered her flight. He was already after her. If he had heard that cry…
She staggered to her feet again, picked up the bag, began a shuffling run. Her heart was beating so hard! The drumming in her head seemed to drown out thought. She ran a few paces and then doubled over again as the pain came. Oh, Lord, not here! Please, please, not in an alley, like an animal, to be found when she was most helpless, when the baby would be at his mercy.
He would have no mercy. The pain ebbed and she ran on, weeping, praying. “Ya Allah!” Forgive me, protect me.
Suddenly, as if in answer, she sensed a deeper darkness in the shadows. She turned towards it without questioning, and found herself in a narrower passage. The darkness was more intense here, and she stared blindly until her eyes grew accustomed.
There was a row of garages on either side of a short strip of paving. Then she saw what had drawn her, what her subconscious mind—or her guardian angel—had already seen: one door was ajar. She bit her lip. Was there someone inside, a fugitive like herself? But another clutch of pain almost knocked her to her knees. As she bent double, stifling her cry, she heard a shout. A long way distant, but she feared what was behind her more than what might be ahead.
Sobbing with mingled pain and terror, she stumbled towards the open door and pushed her way inside.
One
“Can you hear me? Anna, can you hear my voice?”
It was like being dragged through long, empty rooms. Anna groaned protestingly. What did they want from her? Why didn’t they let her sleep?
“Move your hand if you can hear my voice, Anna. Can you move your hand?”
It took huge effort, as if she had to fight through thick syrup.
“That’s excellent! Now, can you open your eyes?”
Abruptly something heavy seemed to smash down inside her skull, driving pain through every cell. She moaned.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have a pretty bad headache,” said the voice, remorselessly cheerful, determinedly invasive. “Come now, Anna! Open your eyes!”
She opened her eyes. The light was too bright. It hurt. A woman in a navy shirt with white piping was gazing at her. “Good, there you are!” she said, in a brisk Scots accent. “What’s your name?”
“Anna,” said Anna. “Anna Lamb.”
The woman nodded. “Good, Anna.”
“What happened? Where am I?” Anna whispered. She was lying in a grey cubicle on a narrow hospital trolley, fully dressed except for shoes. “Why am I in hospital?” The hammer slammed down again. “My head!”
“You’ve been in an accident, but you’re going to be fine. Just a wee bit concussed. Your baby’s fine.”
Your baby. A different kind of pain smote her then, and she lay motionless as cold enveloped her heart.
“My baby died,” she said, her voice flat as the old, familiar lifelessness seeped through her.
The nurse was taking Anna’s blood pressure, but at this she looked up. “She’s absolutely fine! The doctor’s just checking her over now,” she said firmly. “I don’t know why you wanted to give birth in a taxicab, but it seems you made a very neat job of it.”
She leaned forward and pulled back one of Anna’s eyelids, shone light from a tiny flashlight into her eye.
“In a taxicab?” Anna repeated. “But—”
Confused memories seemed to pulsate in her head, just out of reach.
“You’re a very lucky girl!” said the cheerful nurse, moving down to press her abdomen with searching fingers. She paused, frowning, and pressed again.
Anna was silent, her eyes squeezed tight, trying to think through the pain and confusion in her head. Meanwhile the nurse poked and prodded, frowned a little, made notes, poked again. “Lift up, please?” she murmured, and with competent hands carried on the examination.
When it was over, she stood looking down at Anna, sliding her pen into the pocket of her uniform trousers. A little frown had gathered between her eyebrows.
“Do you remember giving birth, Anna?”
Pain rushed in at her. The room suddenly filling with people, all huddled around her precious newborn baby, while she cried, “Let me see him, why can’t I hold him?” and then…Anna, I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry. We couldn’t save your baby.
“Yes,” she said lifelessly, gazing at the nurse with dry, stretched eyes, her heart a lump of stone. “I remember.”
A male head came around the cubicle’s curtain. “Staff, can you come, please?”
The Staff Nurse gathered up her instruments. “Maternity Sister will be down as soon as she can get away, but it may be a while, Anna. They’ve got staff shortages there, too, tonight, and a Caes—”
A light tap against the partition wall preceded the entrance of a young nurse, looking desperately tired but smiling as she rolled a wheeled bassinet into the room.
“Oh, nurse, there you are! How’s the bairn?” said the Staff Nurse, sounding not altogether pleased.
The bairn was crying with frustrated fury, and neither of the nurses heard the gasp that choked Anna. A storm of emotion seemed to seize her as she lifted herself on her elbows and, ignoring the punishment this provoked from the person in her head who was beating her nerve endings, struggled to sit up.
“Baby?” Anna cried. “Is that my baby?”
Meanwhile, the young nurse wheeled the baby up beside the trolley, assuring Anna, “Yes, she is. A lovely little girl.” Anna looked into the bassinet, closed her eyes, looked again.
The baby stopped crying suddenly. She was well wrapped up in hospital linen, huge eyes open, silent now but frowning questioningly at the world.
“Oh, dear God!” Anna exclaimed, choking on the emotion that surged up inside. “Oh, my baby! Was it just a nightmare, then? Oh, my darling!”
“It’s not unusual for things to get mixed up after a bang on the head like yours, but everything will sort itself out,” said the Staff Nurse. “We’ll keep you in for observation for a day or two, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
Anna hardly heard. “I want to hold her!” she whispered, convulsively reaching towards the bassinet. The young nurse obligingly picked the baby up and bent over Anna. Her hungry arms wrapping the infant, Anna sank back against the pillows.
Her heart trembled with a joy so fierce it hurt, obliterating for a few moments even the pain in her head. She drew the little bundle tight against her breast, and gazed hungrily into the flower face.
She was beautiful. Huge questioning eyes, dark hair that lay on her forehead in feathery curls, wide, full mouth which was suddenly, adorably, stretched by a yawn.
All around one eye there was a mocha-hued shadow that added an inexplicably piquant charm to her face. She gazed at Anna, serenely curious.
“She looks like a bud that’s just opened,” Anna marvelled. “She’s so fresh, so new!”
“She’s lovely,” agreed the junior nurse, while the Staff Nurse hooked the clipboard of Anna’s medical notes onto the foot of the bed.
“Good, then,” she said, nodding. “Now you’ll be all right here till Maternity Sister comes. Nurse, I’ll see you for a moment, please.”
The sense of unreality returned when she was left alone with the baby. Anna gazed down into the sweet face from behind a cloud of pain and confusion. She couldn’t seem to think.
The baby fell asleep, just like that. Anna bent to examine her. The birthmark on her eye was very clear now that the baby’s eyes were closed. Delicate, dark, a soft smudging all around the eye. Anna was moved by it. She supposed such a mark could be considered a blemish, but somehow it managed to be just the opposite.
“You’ll set the fashion, my darling,” Anna whispered with a smile, cuddling the baby closer. “All the girls will be painting their eyes with makeup like that in the hopes of making themselves as beautiful as you.”
It made the little face even more vulnerable, drew her, touched her heart. She couldn’t remember ever having seen such a mark before. Was this kind of thing inherited? No one in her family had anything like it.
Was it a dream, that memory of another child? Tiny, perfect, a beautiful, beautiful son…but so white. They had allowed her to hold him, just for a few moments, to say goodbye. Her heart had died then. She had felt it go cold, turn to ice and then stone. They had encouraged her to weep, but she did not weep. Grief required a heart.
Was that a dream?
She was terribly tired. She bent to lay the sleeping infant back in the bassinet. Then she leaned down over the tiny, fragile body, searching her face for clues.
“Who is your father?” she whispered. “Where am I? What’s happening to me?”
Her head ached violently. She lay back against the pillows and wished the lights weren’t so bright.
“My daughter, you must prepare yourself for some excellent news.”
She smiled trustingly at her mother. “Is it the embassy from the prince?” she asked, for the exciting information had of course seeped into the harem.
“The prince’s emissaries and I have discussed the matter of your marriage with the prince. Now I have spoken with your father, whose care is all for you. Such a union will please him very much, my daughter, for he desires peace with the prince and his people.”
She bowed. “I am happy to be the means of pleasing my father…. And the prince? What manner of man do they say he is?”
“Ah, my daughter, he is a young man to please any woman. Handsome, strong, capable in all the manly arts. He has distinguished himself in battle, too, and stories are told of his bravery.”
She sighed her happiness. “Oh, mother, I feel I love him already!” she said.
Anna awoke, not knowing what had disturbed her. A tall, dark man was standing at the foot of her trolley, reading her chart. There was something about him… She frowned, trying to concentrate. But sleep dragged her eyes shut.
“They’re both fine,” she heard when she opened them next, not sure whether it was seconds or minutes later. The man was talking to a young woman who looked familiar. After a second Anna’s jumbled brain recognized the junior nurse.
The man drew her eyes. He was strongly charismatic. Handsome as a pirate captain, exotically dark and obviously foreign. Masculine, strong, handsome—and impossibly clean for London, as if he had come straight from a massage and shave at his club without moving through the dust and dirt of city traffic.
He was wearing a grey silk lounge suit which looked impeccably Savile Row. A round diamond glowed with dark fire from a heavy, square gold setting on his ring finger. Heavy cuff links on the French cuffs of his cream silk shirt matched it. On his other hand she saw the flash of an emerald.
He didn’t look at all overdressed or showy. It sat on him naturally. He was like an aristocrat in a period film. Dreamily she imagined him in heavy brocade, with a fall of lace at wrist and throat.
She blinked, coming drowsily more awake. The junior nurse was glowing, as if the man’s male energy had stirred and ignited something in her, in spite of her exhaustion. She was mesmerized.
“Because he’s mesmerizing,” Anna muttered.
Suddenly recalled to her duties, the nurse glanced at her patient. “You’re awake!” she murmured.
The man turned and looked at her, too, his eyes dark and his gaze piercing. Anna blinked. There was a mark on his eye just like her baby’s. A dark irregular smudge that enhanced both his resemblance to a pirate and his exotic maleness.
“Anna!” he exclaimed. A slight accent furred his words attractively. “Thank God you and the baby were not hurt! What on earth happened?”
She felt very, very stupid. “Are you the doctor?” she stammered.
His dark eyes snapped into an expression of even greater concern, and he made a sound that was half laughter, half worry. He bent down and clasped her hand. She felt his fingers tighten on her, in unmistakable silent warning.
“Darling!” he exclaimed. “The nurse says you don’t remember the accident, but I hope you have not forgotten your own husband!”
Two
Husband? Anna stared. Her mouth opened. “I’m not—” she began. He pressed her hand again, and she broke off. Was he really her husband? How could she be married and not remember? Her heart kicked. Had a man like him fallen in love with her, chosen her?
“Are we married?” she asked.
He laughed again, with a thread of warning in his tone that she was at a loss to figure. “Look at our baby! Does she not tell you the truth?”
The birthmark was unmistakable. But how could such a thing be? “I can’t remember things,” she told him in a voice which trembled, trying to hold down the panic that suddenly swept her. “I can’t remember anything.”
A husband—how could she have forgotten? Why? She squeezed her eyes shut, and stared into the inner blackness. She knew who she was, but everything else eluded her.
She opened her eyes. He was smiling down at her in deep concern. He was so attractive! The air around him seemed to crackle with vitality. Suddenly she wanted it to be true. She wanted him to be her husband, wanted the right to lean on him. She felt so weak, and he looked so strong. He looked like a man used to handling things.
Someone was screaming somewhere. “Nurse, nurse!” It was a hoarse, harsh cry. She put her hand to her pounding head. “It’s so noisy,” she whispered.
“We’ll soon have her somewhere quieter,” said the junior nurse, hastily reassuring. “I’ll just go and check with Maternity again.” She slipped away, leaving Anna alone with the baby and the man who was her husband.
“Come, I want to get you out of here,” he said.
There was something odd about his tone. She tried to focus, but her head ached desperately, and she seemed to be behind a thick curtain separating her from the world.
“But where?” she asked weakly. “This is a hospital.”
“You are booked into a private hospital. They are waiting to admit you. It is far more pleasant there—they are not short-staffed and overworked. I want a specialist to see and reassure you.”
He had already drawn Anna’s shoes from under the bed. Anna, her head pounding, obediently sat up on the edge of the trolley bed and slipped her feet into them. Meanwhile, he neatly removed the pages from the clipboard at the foot of her bed, folded and slipped them into his jacket pocket.
“Why are you taking those?” she asked stupidly.
He flicked her an inscrutable look, then picked up the baby with atypical male confidence. “Where is your bag, Anna? Did you have a bag?”
“Oh—!” She put her hand to her forehead, remembering the case she had packed so carefully…and then had carried out of the hospital when it was all over. That long, slow walk with empty arms. Her death march.
“My bag,” she muttered, but her brain would not engage with the problem, with the contradiction.
“Never mind, we can get it later.” He pulled aside the curtain of the cubicle, glanced out, and then turned to her. “Come!”
Her head ached with ten times the ferocity as she obediently stood. He wrapped his free arm around her back and drew her out of the cubicle, and she instinctively obeyed his masculine authority.
The casualty ward was like an overcrowded bad dream. They passed a young man lying on a trolley, his face smashed and bloody. Another trolley held an old woman, white as her hair, her veins showing blue, eyes wild with fear. She was muttering something incomprehensible and stared at Anna with helpless fixity as they passed. Somewhere someone was half moaning, half screaming. That other voice still called for a nurse. A child’s cry, high and broken, betrayed mingled pain and panic.
“My God, do you think it’s like this all the time?” Anna murmured.
“It is Friday night.”
They walked through the waiting room, where every seat was filled, and a moment later stepped out into the autumn night. Rain was falling, but softly, and she found the cold air a relief.
“Oh, that’s better!” Anna exclaimed, shivering a little in her thin shirt.
A long black limousine parked a few yards away purred into life and eased up beside them. Her husband opened the back door for her.
Anna drew back suddenly, without knowing why. “What about my coat? Don’t I have a coat?”
“The car is warm. Come, get in. You are tired.”
His voice soothed her fears, and the combination of obvious wealth and his commanding air calmed her. If he was her husband, she must be safe.
In addition to everything else, being upright was making her queasy. Anna gave in and slipped inside the luxurious passenger compartment, sinking gratefully down onto deep, superbly comfortable upholstery. He locked and shut the door.
She leaned back and her eyes closed. He spoke to the driver in a foreign language through the window, and a moment later the other passenger door opened, and her husband got inside with the baby. The limo began rolling forward immediately. Absently she clocked the driver picking up a mobile phone.
“Are we leaving, just like that? Don’t I have to be signed out by a doctor or something?”
He shrugged. “Believe me, the medical staff are terminally overworked here. When they discover the empty cubicle, the Casualty staff will assume you have been moved to a ward.”
Her head ached too much.
The darkness of the car was relieved at intervals by the filtered glow of passing lights. She watched him for a moment in light and shadow, light and shadow, as he settled the baby more comfortably.
“What’s your name?” she asked abruptly.
“I am Ishaq Ahmadi.”
“That doesn’t even ring a faint bell!” Anna exclaimed. “Oh, my head! Do you—how long have we been married?”
There was a disturbing flick of his black gaze in darkness. It was as if he touched her, and a little electric shock was the result.
“There is no need to go on with this now, Anna,” he said.
She jumped. “What? What do you mean?”
His gaze remained compellingly on her.
“I remember my—who I am,” she babbled, oddly made to feel guilty by his silent judgement, “but I can’t really remember my life. I certainly don’t remember you. Or—or the baby, or anything. How long have we been married?”
He smiled and shrugged. “Shall we say, two years?”
“Two years!” She recoiled in horror.
“What of your life do you remember? Your mind is obviously not a complete blank. You must have something in there…you remember giving birth?”
“Yes, but…but what I remember is that my baby died.”
“Ah,” he breathed, so softly she wasn’t even sure she had heard it.
“They told me just now that wasn’t true, but…” She reached out to touch the baby in his arms. “Oh, she’s so sweet! Isn’t she perfect? But I remember…” Her eyes clenched against the spasm of pain. “I remember holding my baby after he died.”
Her eyes searched his desperately in the darkness. “Maybe that was a long time ago?” she whispered.
“How long ago does it seem to you?”
The question seemed to trigger activity in her head. “Six weeks, I think….”
You’re going to have six wonderful weeks, Anna.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, as a large piece of her life suddenly fell into place. “I just remembered— I was on my way to a job in France. And Lisbet and Cecile were going to take me out for a really lovely dinner. It seems to me I’m…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Aren’t I supposed to be leaving on the Paris train tomorrow…Saturday? Alan Mitching’s house in France.” She opened her eyes. “Are you saying that was more than two years in the past?”
“What sort of a job?”
“He has a seventeenth-century place in the Dordogne area…they want murals in the dining room. They want—wanted a Greek temple effect. I’ve designed—” She broke off and gazed at him in the darkness while the limousine purred through the wet, empty streets. Traffic was light; it must be two or three in the morning.
“I can remember making the designs, but I can’t remember doing the actual work.” Panic rose up in her. “Why can’t I remember?”
“This state is not permanent. You will remember everything in time.”
The baby stirred and murmured and she watched as he shifted her a little.
“Let me hold her,” she said hungrily.
For a second he looked as if he was going to refuse, but she held out her arms, and he slipped the tiny bundle into her embrace. A smile seemed to start deep within her and flow outwards all through her body and spirit to reach her lips. Her arms tightened. Oh, how lovely to have a living baby to hold against her heart in place of that horrible, hurting memory!
“Oh, you’re so beautiful!” she whispered. She shifted her gaze to Ishaq Ahmadi. He was watching her. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
A muscle seemed to tense in his jaw. “Yes,” he said.
The chauffeur spoke through an intercom, and as her husband replied, Anna silently watched fleeting expressions wander over the baby’s face, felt the perfection of the little body against her breast. Time seemed to disappear in the now. She lost the urgency of wanting to know how she had got to this moment, and was happy just to be in it.
When he spoke to her again, she came to with a little start and realized she had been almost asleep. “Can you remember how you came to be in the taxi with the baby?”
Nothing. Not even vague shadows. She shook her head. “No.”
Then there was no sound except for rain and the flick of tires on the wet road. Anna was lost in contemplation again. She stroked the tiny fist. “Have we chosen a name for her?”
A passing headlight highlighted one side of his face, the side with the pirate patch over his eye.
“Her name is Safiyah.”
“Sophia?”
“Yes, it is a name that will not seem strange to English ears. Safi is not so far from Sophy.”
“Did we know it was going to be a girl?” she whispered, coughing as feeling closed her throat.
He glanced at her, the sleeping baby nestled so trustingly against her. “You are almost asleep,” he said. “Let me take her.”
He leaned over to lift the child from her arms. He was gentle and tender with her, but at the same time firm and confident, making Anna feel how safe the baby was with him.
Jonathan. “Oh!” she whispered.
“What is it?” Ishaq Ahmadi said, in a voice of quiet command. “What have you remembered?”
“Oh, just when you took the baby from me…I…” She pressed her hands to her eyes. Not when he took the baby, but the sight of him holding the infant as if he loved her and was prepared to protect and defend the innocent.
“Tell me!”
She lifted her head to see him watching her with a look of such intensity she gasped. Suddenly she wondered how much of her past she had confided to her husband. Was he a tolerant man? Or had he wanted her to lie about her life before him?
She stammered, “Did—did—?” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Did I tell you about…Jonathan? Jonathan Ryder?”
But even before the words were out she knew the answer was no.
Three
“Tell me now,” Ishaq Ahmadi commanded softly.
She wanted to lean against him, wanted to feel his arm around her, protecting her, holding her. She must have that right, she told herself, but somehow she lacked the courage to ask him to hold her.
She had always wanted to pat the tigers at the zoo, too. Now it seemed as if she had finally found her very own personal tiger…but she had forgotten how she’d tamed him. And until she remembered that, something told her it would be wise to treat him with caution.
“Tell me about Jonathan Ryder.”
Nervously she clasped her hands together, and suddenly a detail that had been nagging at her in the distance leapt into awareness.
“Why aren’t I wearing a wedding ring?” she demanded, holding both hands spread out before her and staring at them. On her fingers were several silver rings of varied design. But none was a wedding band.
There was a long, pregnant pause. Through the glass panel separating them from the driver, she heard a phone ring. The driver answered and spoke into it, giving instructions, it seemed.
Still he only looked at her.
“Did I…have we split up?”
“No.”
Just the bare syllable. His jaw seemed to tense, and she thought he threw her a look almost of contempt.
“About Jonathan,” he prompted again.
If they were having trouble in the marriage, was it because he was jealous? Or because she had not told him things, shared her troubles?
She thought, If I never told him about Jonathan, I should have.
“Jonathan—Jonathan and I were going together for about a year. We were talking about moving in together, but it wasn’t going to be simple, because we both owned a flat, and…well, it was taking us time to decide whether to sell his, or mine, or sell both and find somewhere new.”
Her heart began to beat with anxiety. “It is really more than two years ago?”
“How long does it seem to you?”
“It feels as if we split up about six months ago. And then…”
“Why did you split up?”
“Because…did I not tell you any of this?”
“Tell me again,” he repeated softly. “Perhaps the recital will help your memory recover.”
She wanted to tell him. She wanted to share it with him, to make him her soul mate. Surely she must have told him, and he had understood? She couldn’t have married a man who didn’t understand, whom she couldn’t share her deepest feelings with?
“I got pregnant unexpectedly.” She looked at him and remembered that, sophisticated as he looked, he was from a different culture. “Does that shock you?”
“I am sure that birth control methods fail every day,” he said.
That was not what she meant, but she lacked the courage to be more explicit.
“Having kids wasn’t part of deciding to live together or anything, but once it happened I just—knew it was what I wanted. It was crazy, but it made me so happy! Jonathan didn’t see it that way. He didn’t want…”
Her head drooped, and the sound of suddenly increasing rain against the windows filled the gap.
“Didn’t want the child?”
“He wanted me to have an abortion. He said we weren’t ready yet. His career hadn’t got off the ground, neither had mine. He—oh, he had a hundred reasons why it would be right one day but wasn’t now. In a lot of ways he was right. But…” Anna shrugged. “I couldn’t do it. We argued and argued. I understood him, but he never understood me. Never tried to. I kept saying, there’s more to it than you want to believe. He wouldn’t listen.”
“And did he convince you?”
“He booked an appointment for me, drove me down to the women’s clinic…. On the way, he stopped the carat a red light, and—I got out,” she murmured, staring at nothing. “And just kept walking. I didn’t look back, and Jonathan didn’t come after me. He never called again. Well, once,” she amended. “A couple of months later he phoned to ask if I planned to name him as the father on the birth certificate.”
She paused, but Ishaq Ahmadi simply waited for her to continue. “He said…he said he had no intention of being saddled with child support for the next twenty years. He had a job offer from Australia, and he was trying to decide whether to accept or not. And that was one of the criteria. If I was going to put his name down, he’d go to Australia.”
His hair glinted in the beam of a streetlight. They were on a highway. “And what did you say?”
She shook her head. “I hung up. We’ve never spoken since.”
“Did he go to Australia?”
“I never found out. I didn’t want to know.” She amended that. “Didn’t care.” She glanced out the window.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where is the hospital?”
“North of London, in the country. Tell me what happened then.”
Her eyes burned. “My friends were really, really great about it—do you know Cecile and Lisbet?”
“How could your husband not know your friends?”
“Are Cecile and Philip married?”
He gazed at her. “Tell me about the baby, Anna.”
There was something in his attitude that made her uncomfortable. She murmured, “I’m sorry if you didn’t know before this. But maybe if you didn’t, you should have.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Did you know?”
He paused. “No.”
Anna bit her lip. She wondered if it was perhaps because she hadn’t told him that she had reverted to this memory tonight. Had it weighed on her throughout the new pregnancy? Had fears for her new baby surfaced and found no outlet?
“Everything was fine. I was pretty stressed in some ways, but I didn’t really have doubts about what I was doing. At the very end something went wrong. I was in labour for hours and hours, and then it was too late for a Caesarean…they used the Ventouse cap.”
She swallowed, and her voice was suddenly expressionless. “It caused a brain haemorrhage. My baby died. They let me hold him, and he was…but there was a terrible bruise on his head…as if he was wearing a purple cap.”
No tears came to moisten the heat of her eyes or ease the pain in her heart. Her perfect baby, paper white and too still, but looking as if he was thinking very hard and would open his eyes any moment…
She wondered if that was how she had ended up giving birth in the back of a cab. Perhaps it was fear of a repetition that had made her leave it too late to get to the hospital.
“Why weren’t you there?” she asked, surfacing from her thoughts to look at him. “Why didn’t you take me to the hospital?”
“I flew in from abroad this evening. And this was six weeks ago?”
“That’s how it feels to me. I feel as though it’s the weekend I’m supposed to be going on that job to France, and that was about six weeks after the baby died. How long ago is that, really?”
“Did you ever feel, Anna, that you would like to—adopt a child? A baby to fill the void created by the death of your own baby?”
“It wouldn’t have done me any good if I had. Why are you asking me these questions now? Didn’t we—”
“Did you think of it—applying for adoption? Trying to find a baby?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Sometimes in the street, you know, you pass a woman with a baby, or even a woman who’s pregnant, and you just want to scream It’s not fair, but—no, I just…I got pretty depressed, I wasn’t doing much of anything till Lisbet conjured up this actor friend who wanted a mural in his place in France.”
She leaned over to caress the baby with a tender hand, then bent to kiss the perfectly formed little head. “Oh, you are so beautiful!” she whispered. She looked up, smiling. “I hope I remember soon. I can’t bear not knowing everything about her!”
He started to speak, and just then the car drew to a stop. Heavy rain was now thundering down on the roof, and all she could see were streaks of light from tall spotlights in the distance, as if they had entered some compound.
“Are we here?”
“Yes,” he said, as the door beside her opened. The dark-skinned chauffeur stood in the rain with a large black umbrella, and Anna quickly slipped out onto a pavement that was leaping with water. She heard the swooping crack of another umbrella behind her. Then she was being ushered up a curiously narrow flight of steps and through a doorway.
She glanced around her as Ishaq, with the baby, came in the door behind her.
It was very curious for a hospital reception. A low-ceilinged room, softly lighted, lushly decorated in natural wood and rich tapestries. A row of matching little curtains seemed to be covering several small windows at intervals along the wall. There was a bar at one end, by a small dining table with chairs. In front of her she saw a cluster of plush armchairs around a coffee table. Anna frowned, trying to piece together a coherent interpretation of the scene, but her mind was very slow to function. She could almost hear her own wheels grinding.
A woman in an Eastern outfit that didn’t look at all like a medical uniform appeared in the doorway behind the bar and came towards them. She spoke something in a foreign language, smiling and gesturing towards the sofa cluster. She moved to the entrance door behind them, dragged it fully shut and turned a handle. Still the pieces refused to fall into place.
Anna obediently sank down into an armchair. A second woman appeared. Dressed in another softly flowing outfit, with warm brown eyes and a very demure smile, she nodded and then descended upon the baby in Ishaq Ahmadi’s arms. She laughed and admired and then exchanged a few sentences of question and answer with Ishaq before taking the infant in her own arms and, with another smile all around, disappeared whence she had come.
“What’s going on?” Anna demanded, as alarm began to shrill behind the drowsy numbness in her head.
“Your bed is ready,” Ishaq murmured, bending over her and slipping his hands against her hips. At the touch of his strong hands she involuntarily smiled. “In a few minutes you can lie down and get some sleep.”
His hands lifted and she blinked stupidly while he drew two straps up and snapped them together over her hips. Under her feet she felt the throb of engines, and at last the pieces fell together.
“This isn’t a hospital, this is a plane!” Anna cried wildly.
Four
“Let me out,” Anna said, her hands snapping to the seat belt.
Ishaq Ahmadi fastened his own seat belt and moved one casual hand to still hers as she struggled with the mechanism. “We have been cleared for immediate takeoff,” he said.
“Stop the plane and let me off. Tell them to turn back,” she cried, pushing at his hand, which was no longer casual. “Where are you taking us? I want my baby!”
“The woman you saw is a children’s nurse. She is taking care of the baby, and no harm will come to her. Try and relax. You are ill, you have been in an accident.”
Her stomach churned sickly, her head pounded with pain, but she had to ignore that. She stared at him and showed her teeth. “Why are you doing this?” A sudden wrench released her seat belt, and Anna thrust herself to her feet.
Ishaq Ahmadi’s eyes flashed with irritation. “You know very well you have no right to such a display. You know you are in the wrong, deeply in the wrong.” He stabbed a forefinger at the chair she had just vacated. “Sit down before you fall down!”
With a little jerk, the plane started taxiing. “No!” Anna cried. She staggered and clutched the chair back, and with an oath Ishaq Ahmadi snapped a hand up and clasped her wrist in an unbreakable hold.
“Help me!” she screamed. “Help, help!”
A babble of concerned female voices arose from behind a bulkhead, and in another moment the hostess appeared in the doorway behind the bar.
“Sit down, Anna!”
The hostess cried a question in Arabic, and Ishaq Ahmadi answered in the same language. “Laa, laa, madame,” the woman said, gently urgent, and approached Anna with a soothing smile, then tried what her little English would do.
“Seat, madame, very dingerous. Pliz, seat.”
“I want to get off!” Anna shouted at the uncomprehending woman. “Stop the plane! Tell the captain it’s a mistake!”
The woman turned to Ishaq Ahmadi with a question, and he shook his head on a calm reply. Of course he had the upper hand if the cabin crew spoke only Arabic. Anna had a dim idea that all pilots had to speak English, but what were her chances of making it to the cockpit?
And if it was a private jet, the captain would be on Ishaq Ahmadi’s payroll. No doubt they all knew he was kidnapping his own wife.
Ahmadi got to his feet, holding Anna’s wrist in a grip that felt like steel cables, and forced her to move towards him.
The plane slowed, and they all stiffened as the captain’s voice came over the intercom—but it was only with the obvious Arabic equivalent of “Cabin staff, prepare for takeoff.” Ishaq Ahmadi barked something at the hostess and, with a consoling smile at Anna, she returned to her seat behind the bulkhead.
Ishaq Ahmadi sank into his seat again, dragging Anna inexorably down onto his lap. “You are being a fool,” he said. “No one is going to hurt you if you do not hurt yourself.”
She was sitting on him now as if he were the chair, and his arms were firmly locked around her waist, a human seat belt. The heat of his body seeped into hers, all down her spine and the backs of her thighs, his arms resting across her upper thighs, hands clasped against her abdomen.
Wherever her body met his, there was nothing but muscle. There was no give, no ounce of fat. It was like sitting on hot poured metal fresh from the forge, hardened, but the surface still slightly malleable. The stage when a sculptor removes the last, tiny blemishes, puts on the finishing touches. She had taken a course in metal sculpture at art college, and she had always loved the metal at this stage, Anna remembered dreamily. The heat, the slight surface give in something so innately strong, had a powerful sensual pull.
She realized she was half tranced. She felt very slow and stupid, and as the adrenaline in her body ebbed, her headache caught up with her again. She twisted to try to look over her shoulder into his face.
“Why are you doing this?” she pleaded.
His voice, close to her ear, said, “So that you and the baby will be safe.”
She was deeply, desperately tired, she was sick and hurt, and she wanted to believe she was safe with him. The alternative was too confusing and too terrible.
The engines roared up and the jet leapt forward down the runway. In a very short time, compared to the lumbering commercial aircraft she was used to, they had left the ground.
As his hold slackened but still kept her on his lap, she turned to Ishaq Ahmadi. Her face was only inches from his, her mouth just above his own wide, well-shaped lips. She swallowed, feeling the pull.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home.” His gaze was steady. “You are tired. You will want to lie down,” he murmured, and when the jet levelled out, he helped her to her feet and stood up. He took her arm and led her through a doorway.
They entered a large, beautifully appointed stateroom, with a king-size bed luxuriously made with snowy-white and deep blue linens that were turned down invitingly. There were huge, fluffy white pillows.
It was like a fantasy. Except for the little windows and the ever-present hum you would never know you were on a plane. A top hotel, maybe. Beautiful natural woods, luscious fabrics, mirrors, soft lighting, and, through an open door, a marble bathroom.
“I guess I married a millionaire,” Anna murmured. “Or is this just some bauble a friend has loaned you?”
“Here are night things for you,” he said, indicating pyjamas and a bathrobe, white with blue trim, that were lying across the foot of the sapphire-blue coverlet. “Do you need help to undress?”
Anna looked at the bed longingly and realized she was dead on her feet. And that was no surprise, after what she had apparently been through in the past few hours.
“No,” she said.
She began fumbling with a button, but her fingers didn’t seem to work. Even the effort of holding her elbow bent seemed too much, so she dropped her arm and stood there a moment, gazing at nothing.
“I will call the hostess,” Ishaq Ahmadi said. And that, perversely, made her frown.
“Why?” she demanded. “You’re my husband, aren’t you?”
His eyes probed her, and she shrugged uncomfortably. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why don’t you want to touch me?”
She wanted him to touch her. Wanted his heat on her body again, because when he touched her, even in anger, she felt safe.
He made no reply, merely lifted his hands, brushed aside her own feeble fingers which were again fumbling with the top button, and began to undo her shirt.
“Have you stopped wanting me?” she wondered aloud.
His head bent over his task, only his eyes shifted to connect with hers. “You are overplaying your hand,” he advised softly, and she felt another little thrill of danger whisper down her spine. Her brain evaded the discomfort.
“Did you commission work from me or something? Is that how we met?” she asked. She specialized in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern designs, painting entire rooms to give the impression that you were standing on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Corinth, or in the Alhambra palace. But what were the chances that a wealthy Arab would want a Western woman to paint trompe l’oeil fifteenth-century mosaic arches on his palace walls when he probably had the real thing?
“We met by accident.”
“Oh.” She wanted him to clarify, but couldn’t concentrate. Not when his hands were grazing the skin of her breasts, revealed as he unbuttoned her shirt. She looked into his face, bent close over hers, but his eyes remained on his task. His aftershave was spicy and exotic.
“It seems strange that you have the right to do this when you feel like a total stranger,” she observed.
“You insisted on it,” he reminded her dryly. He seemed cynically amused by her. He still didn’t believe that she had forgotten, and she had no idea why. What reason could she have for pretending amnesia? It seemed very crazy, unless…unless she had been running away from him.
Perhaps it was fear that had caused her to lose her memory. Psychologists did say you sometimes forgot when remembering was too painful.
“Was I running away from you, Ishaq?”
“You tell me the answer.”
She shook her head. “They say the unconscious remembers everything, but…”
“I am very sure that yours does,” Ishaq Ahmadi replied, pulling the front of her shirt open to reveal her small breasts in a lacy black bra.
She knew by the involuntary intake of his breath that he was not unaffected. His jaw clenched and he stripped the shirt from her, his breathing irregular.
She wasn’t one for casual sex, and she had never been undressed by a stranger, which was what this felt like. The sudden blush of desire that suffused her was disconcerting. So her body remembered, even if her conscious mind did not. Anna bit her lip. What would it be like, love with a man who seemed like a total stranger? Would her body instinctively recognize his touch?
She realized that she wanted him to make the demand on her. The thought was sending spirals of heat all through her. But instead of drawing her into his arms, he turned his back to toss her shirt onto a chair.
“What will I remember about loving you, Ishaq?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer, and she turned away, dejected, overcome with fatigue and reluctant to think, and lifted her arms behind her to the clasp of her bra. She winced as a bruised elbow prevented her.
Her breath hissed with the pain. “You’ll have to undo this.”
She felt his hands at work on the hook of her bra, that strange, half electrifying, half comforting heat that made her yearn for something she could not remember. She wondered if they had been sexually estranged. She said, “Is there a problem between us, Ishaq?”
“You well know what the problem between us is. But it is not worth discussing now,” he said, his voice tight.
She thought, It’s serious. Her heart pinched painfully with regret. To think that she had had the luck to marry a man like this and then had not been able to make it work made her desperately sad. He was like a dream come to life, but…she had obviously got her dream and then not been able to live in it.
If they made up now, when she could not remember any of the grievances she might have, would that make it easier when she regained her full memory?
As the bra slipped away from her breasts, Anna let it fall onto the bed, then turned to face him, lifting her arms to his shoulders.
“Do you still love me?” she whispered.
His arms closed around her, his hands warm on her bare skin. Her breasts pressed against his silk shirt as her arms cupped his head. He looked down into her upturned face with a completely unreadable expression in his eyes.
“Do you want me, Ishaq?” she begged, wishing he would kiss her. Why was he so remote? She felt the warmth of his body curl into hers and it was so right.
A corner of that hard, full mouth went up and his eyes became sardonic. “Believe me, I want you, or you would not be here.”
“What have I done?” she begged. “I don’t remember anything. Tell me what I’ve done to make you so angry with me.”
His mouth turned up with angry contempt. “What do you hope to gain with this?” he demanded with subdued ferocity, and then, as if it were completely against his will, his grip tightened painfully on her, and with a stifled curse he crushed his mouth against her own.
He was neither gentle nor tender. His kiss and his hands were punishing, and a part of her revelled in the knowing that, whatever his intentions, he could not resist her. She opened her mouth under his, accepting the violent thrust of his hungry, angry tongue, and felt the rasp of its stroking run through her with unutterable thrill, as if it were elsewhere on her body that he kissed her.
Just for a moment she was frightened, for if one kiss could do this to her, how would she sustain his full, passionate lovemaking? She would explode off the face of the earth. His hand dropped to force her against him, while his hardened body leapt against her. She tore her mouth away from his, gasping for the oxygen to feed the fire that wrapped her in its hot, licking fingers.
“Ishaq!” she cried, wild with a passion that seemed to her totally new, as the heat of his hands burned her back, her hips, clenched against the back of her neck with a firm possessiveness that thrilled her. “Oh, my love!”
Then suddenly he was standing away from her, his hands on her wrists pulling her arms down, his eyes burning into hers with a cold, hard, suspicious fury that froze the hot rivers of need coursing through her.
“What is it?” she pleaded. “Ishaq, what have I done?”
He smiled and shook his head, a curl of admiring contempt lifting his lip. “You are unbelievable,” he said. “Where have you learned such arts, I wonder?”
Anna gasped. He suspected her of having a lover? Could it be true? She shook her head. It wasn’t possible. Whatever he might suspect, whatever he might have done, whatever disagreement was between them, she knew that she was simply not capable of taking a lover while pregnant with her husband’s child.
“From you, I suppose,” she tried, but he brushed that aside with a snort of such contemptuous disbelief she could go no further.
“Tell me why you won’t love me,” she challenged softly, but nothing was going to crack his angry scorn now.
“But you have just given birth, Anna. We must resign ourselves to no lovemaking for several weeks, isn’t it so?”
She drew back with a little shock. “Oh! Yes, I—” She shook her head. He could still kiss her, she thought. He could hold her. Maybe that was the problem, she thought. A man who would only touch his wife if he wanted sex. She would certainly hate that.
“I wish I could remember!”
He reached down and lifted up the silky white pyjama top, holding it while she obediently slipped her arms inside. He had himself well under control now, he was as impersonal as a nurse, and she tasted tears in her throat for the waste of such wild passion.
Funny how small her breasts were. Last time, they had been so swollen with the pregnancy…hadn’t they? She remembered the ache of heavy breasts with a pang of misery, and then reminded herself, But that’s all in the past. I have a baby now.
“Do you think I’ll remember?” she whispered, gazing into his face as he buttoned the large pyjama shirt. It seemed almost unbearable that she should feel such pain for a baby who had died two years ago and not remember the birth of the beautiful creature who was so alive, and whose cry she could suddenly hear over the subdued roar of the engines.
“I am convinced of it.”
“She has inherited your birthmark,” she murmured with a smile, touching his eye with a feather caress and feeling her heart contract with tenderness. “Is that usual?”
He finished the last button and lifted his eyes to hers. “What is it you hope to discover?” he asked, his hands pulling at her belt with cool impersonality. “The… Ahmadi mark,” he said. “It proves beyond a doubt that Safiyah and I come of the same blood. Does that make you wary?”
“Did you think I had a lover?” she asked. “Did you think it was someone else’s child?”
His eyes darkened with the deepest suspicion she had yet seen in them, and she knew she had struck a deep chord. “You know that much, do you?”
Somewhere inside her an answering anger was born. “You’re making it pretty obvious! Does the fact that you’ve now been proven wrong make you think twice about things, Ishaq?”
“Wrong?” he began, then broke off, stripped the suede pants down her legs and off, and knelt to hold the pyjama bottoms for her. His hair was cut over the top in a thick cluster of black curls whose vibrant health reflected the lampglow. Anna steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder and stifled the whispering desire that melted through her thighs at the nearness of him.
They were too big. In fact, they were men’s pyjamas.
“Why don’t I have a pair of pyjamas on the plane?” she asked.
“Perhaps you never wear them.”
He spoke softly, but the words zinged to her heart. She shivered at the thought that she slept naked next to Ishaq Ahmadi. She wondered what past delights were lurking, waiting to be remembered.
“And you do?”
“I often fly alone,” he said.
It suddenly occurred to her that he had told her absolutely nothing all night. Every single question had somehow been parried. But when she tried to formulate words to point this out, her brain refused.
Even at its tightest the drawstring was too big for her slim waist, and the bunched fabric rested precariously on the slight swell of her hips. Ishaq turned away and lifted the feathery covers of the bed to invite her to slip into the white, fluffy nest.
She moved obediently, groaning as her muscles protested at even this minimal effort. Once flat on her back, however, she sighed with relief. “Oh, that feels good!”
Ishaq bent to flick out the bedside lamp, but her hand stopped him. “Bring me the baby,” she said.
“You are tired and the baby is asleep.”
“But she was crying. She may be hungry.”
“I am sure the nurse has seen to that.”
“But I want to breast-feed her!” Anna said in alarm.
He blinked as if she had surprised him, but before she could be sure of what she saw in his face his eyelids hooded his expression.
“Tomorrow will not be too late for that, Anna. Sleep now. You need sleep more than anything.”
On the last word he put out the light, and it was impossible to resist the drag of her eyelids in the semi-darkness. “Kiss her for me,” she murmured, as Lethe beckoned.
“Yes,” he said, straightening.
She frowned. “Don’t we kiss good-night?”
A heartbeat, two, and then she felt the touch of his lips against her own. Her arms reached to embrace him, but he avoided them and was standing upright again. She felt deprived, her heart yearning towards him. She tried once more.
“I wish you’d stay with me.”
“Good night, Anna.” Then the last light went out, a door opened and closed, and she was alone with the dark and the deep drone of the engines.
Five
“Hurry, hurry!”
The voices and laughter of the women mirrored the bubble of excitement in her heart, and she felt the corners of her mouth twitch up in anticipation.
“I’m coming!” she cried.
But they were impatient. Already they were spilling out onto the balcony, whose arching canopy shaded it from the harsh midday sun. Babble arose from the courtyard below: the slamming of doors, the dance of hooves, the shouts of men. Somewhere indoors, musicians tuned their instruments.
“He is here! He arrives!” the women cried, and she heard the telltale scraping of the locks and bars and the rumble of massive hinges in the distance as the gates opened wide. A cry went up and the faint sound of horses’ hooves thudded on the hot, still air.
“They are here already! Hurry, hurry!” cried the women.
She rose to her feet at last, all in white except for the tinkling, delicate gold at her forehead, wrists, and ankles, a white rose in her hand. Out on the balcony the women were clustered against the carved wooden arabesques of the screen that hid them from the admiring, longing male eyes below.
She approached the screen. Through it the women had a view of the entire courtyard running down to the great gates. These were now open in welcome, with magnificently uniformed sentinels on each side, and the mounted escort approached and cantered between them, flags fluttering, armour sending blinding flashes of intense sunlight into unwary eyes.
They rode in pairs, rank upon rank, leading the long entourage, their horses’ caparisons increasing in splendour with the riders’ rank. Then at last came riders in the handsomest array, mounted on spirited, prancing horses.
“There he is!” a voice cried, and a cheer began in several throats and swelled.
Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to him. He was sternly handsome, his flowing hair a mass of black curls, his beard neat and pointed, his face grave but his eyes alight with humour. His jacket was rich blue, the sleeves ruched with silver thread; his silver breastplate glowed almost white. Across it, from shoulder to hip, a deep blue sash lay against the polished metal.
The sword at his hip was thickly encrusted with jewels. His fingers also sparkled, but no stone was brighter than his dark eyes as he glanced up towards the balcony as if he knew she was there. His eyes met hers, challenged and conquered in one piercingly sweet moment.
Her heart sprang in one leap from her breast and into his keeping.
As he rode past below, the white rose fell from her helpless hand. A strong dark hand plucked it from the air and drew it to his lips, and she cried softly, as though the rose were her own white throat.
He did not glance up again, but thrust the rose carefully inside the sash, knowing she watched. She clung to the carved wooden arabesques, her strength deserting her.
“So fierce, so handsome!” she murmured. “As strong and powerful as his own black destrier, I dare swear!”
The laughter of the women chimed around her ears. “Ah, truly, and love is blind and sees white as black!” they cried in teasing voices. “Black? But the prince’s horse is white! Look again, mistress!”
She looked in the direction of their gesturing, as the entourage still came on. In the centre of the men on black horses rode one more richly garbed than all. His armour glowed with beaten gold, his richly jewelled turban was cloth of gold, ropes of pearls draped his chest, rubies and emeralds adorned his fingers and ears. His eyebrows were strong and black, his jaw square, his beard thick and curling. He lifted a hand in acknowledgement as those riders nearest him tossed gold and silver coins to the cheering crowd.
Her women were right. Her bridegroom was mounted on a prancing stallion as white as the snows of Shir.
“Saba’ul khair, madame.”
Anna rolled over drowsily and blinked while intense sunlight poured into the cabin from the little portholes as, whick whick whick whick, the air hostess pulled aside the curtains.
Her eyes frowned a protest. “Is it morning already?”
The woman turned from her completed task and smiled. “We here, madame.”
Anna leapt out of the bed, wincing with the protest from her bruised muscles, and craned to peer out the porthole. They were flying over water, deep sparkling blue water dotted with one or two little boats, and were headed towards land. She saw a long line of creamy beach, lush green forest, a stretch of mixed golden and grey desert behind, and, in the distance, snow-topped mountains casting a spell at once dangerous and thrilling.
“Where on earth are we?”
“Shower, madame?”
“Oh, yes!”
The hostess smiled with the pleasure of someone who had recently memorized the word but had produced it without any real conviction and was now delighted to see that the sounds did carry meaning, and led her into the adjoining bathroom.
Anna waved away her offer of help, stripped and got into the shower stall, then stood gratefully under the firm spray of water, first hot, then cool. This morning her body was sore all over, but her headache was much less severe.
Her memory wasn’t in much better shape, though. It still stopped dead on the night before she had been due to leave for France. Now, however, she could remember a shopping expedition with Lisbet during the afternoon, going home to dress, meeting Cecile and Lisbet at the Riverfront Restaurant. Now she could remember leaving the restaurant, and almost immediately seeing a cab pull up across the street. “You take that one, Anna, it’s facing your direction,” Lisbet had commanded, and she had dashed across the street…
She could remember that as if it were yesterday.
Of the two years that had followed that night there was still absolutely nothing in her memory. Not one image had surfaced overnight to flesh out the bare outline Ishaq Ahmadi had given of her life since.
When she tried to make sense of it all, her head pounded unmercifully. The whole thing made her feel eerie, creepy.
Last night’s dream surfaced cloudily in her mind. She had the feeling that the man on the black horse was Ishaq Ahmadi.
She wondered if that held some clue about her first meeting with him. Had she seen him from a distance and fallen in love with him?
That she could believe. If ever there was a man you could take one look at and know you’d met your destiny, Ishaq Ahmadi was it. But he was definitely keeping something from her. If once they had loved each other, and she certainly accepted that, there was a problem now. It was in his eyes every time he looked at her. His look said she was a criminal—attractive and desirable, perhaps, but not in the least to be trusted.
Anna winced as she absently scrubbed a sore spot. The accident must have been real enough. Her body seemed to be one massive bruise now, and she ached as if she had been beaten with a bat.
That thought stilled her for a moment. Panic whispered along her nerves. Suppose a man had beaten his pregnant, runaway wife and wanted to avoid the consequences…
Anna reminded herself suddenly that they would be landing soon and turned off the water. In the bedroom mirror she stared at herself. She was still too thin, just as she had been after losing her baby two years ago. There were dark circles under her eyes to match the bruising on her body.
She had a tendency to lose weight with unhappiness. Anna sighed. By the look of her, she had been deeply unhappy recently, as unhappy as when she had lost Jonathan’s baby. But the question was—had she lost the weight before she left Ishaq, or after?
Her clothes were lying on the neatly made bed. The shirt had been mended, the suede pants neatly brushed. Anna’s breath hissed between her teeth. It’s terrific, Anna. Stop dithering and buy it!
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ALEXANDRA SELLERS
She' d awakened in a hospital, confused, to discover she was mother to a newborn…and wife to a steely- eyed stranger. Mere hours after gazing on Ishaq Ahmadi in London, Anna found herself at their desert home, which seemed both hauntingly familiar and oddly foreign. No evidence of a happy marriage existed in the palatial residence. No photographs. No clothes that fit Anna' s slender build. No trust, given Ishaq' s endless questions. There was simply the primal, passionate connection between them…and, of course, the baby.But Anna soon learned that nothing about her marriage was to be believed….
“You’re Awake,” The Nurse Murmured.
A man turned and looked at her, too, his gaze piercing. He was strongly charismatic. Handsome as a pirate captain, exotically dark and obviously foreign. Masculine, strong. Anna blinked. There was a mark on his eye just like her baby’s. A dark irregular smudge that enhanced both his resemblance to a pirate and his exotic maleness.
“Anna!” he exclaimed. A slight accent furred his words attractively. “Thank God you and the baby were not hurt! What on earth happened?”
“Are you the doctor?” she stammered.
His dark eyes snapped into an expression of even greater concern, and he made a sound that was half laughter, half worry. He bent down and clasped her hand. She felt his fingers tighten on hers in unmistakable silent warning.
“Darling!” he exclaimed. “The nurse says you don’t remember the accident, but I hope you have not forgotten your own husband!”
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year from Silhouette Desire, where we offer you six passionate, powerful and provocative romances every month of the year! Here’s what you can indulge yourself with this January….
Begin the new year with a seductive MAN OF THE MONTH, Tall, Dark & Western by Anne Marie Winston. A rancher seeking a marriage of convenience places a personals ad for a wife, only to fall—hard—for the single mom who responds!
Silhouette Desire proudly presents a sequel to the wildly successful in-line continuity series THE TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB. This exciting new series about alpha men on a mission is called TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB: LONE STAR JEWELS. Jennifer Greene’s launch book, Millionaire M.D., features a wealthy surgeon who helps out his childhood crush when she finds a baby on her doorstep—by marrying her!
Alexandra Sellers continues her exotic miniseries SONS OF THE DESERT with one more irresistible sheikh in Sheikh’s Woman. THE BARONS OF TEXAS miniseries by Fayrene Preston returns with another feisty Baron heroine in The Barons of Texas: Kit. In Kathryn Jensen’s The Earl’s Secret, a British aristocrat romances a U.S. commoner while wrestling with a secret. And Shirley Rogers offers A Cowboy, a Bride & a Wedding Vow, in which a cowboy discovers his secret child.
So ring in the new year with lots of cheer and plenty of red-hot romance, by reading all six of these enticing love stories.
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Sheikh’s Woman
Alexandra Sellers
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, U.K., England.
For my sister Joy,
who held it all together in the bad times
and makes things even better in the good
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Prologue
She crouched in the darkness, whimpering as the pain gripped her. He had made her wait too long. She had warned him, but he’d pretended not to believe her “lies.” And now, in an empty, dirty alley, nowhere to go, no time to get there, her time was upon her.
Pain stabbed her again, and she cried out involuntarily. She pressed a hand over her mouth and looked behind her down the alley. Of course by now he had discovered her flight. He was already after her. If he had heard that cry…
She staggered to her feet again, picked up the bag, began a shuffling run. Her heart was beating so hard! The drumming in her head seemed to drown out thought. She ran a few paces and then doubled over again as the pain came. Oh, Lord, not here! Please, please, not in an alley, like an animal, to be found when she was most helpless, when the baby would be at his mercy.
He would have no mercy. The pain ebbed and she ran on, weeping, praying. “Ya Allah!” Forgive me, protect me.
Suddenly, as if in answer, she sensed a deeper darkness in the shadows. She turned towards it without questioning, and found herself in a narrower passage. The darkness was more intense here, and she stared blindly until her eyes grew accustomed.
There was a row of garages on either side of a short strip of paving. Then she saw what had drawn her, what her subconscious mind—or her guardian angel—had already seen: one door was ajar. She bit her lip. Was there someone inside, a fugitive like herself? But another clutch of pain almost knocked her to her knees. As she bent double, stifling her cry, she heard a shout. A long way distant, but she feared what was behind her more than what might be ahead.
Sobbing with mingled pain and terror, she stumbled towards the open door and pushed her way inside.
One
“Can you hear me? Anna, can you hear my voice?”
It was like being dragged through long, empty rooms. Anna groaned protestingly. What did they want from her? Why didn’t they let her sleep?
“Move your hand if you can hear my voice, Anna. Can you move your hand?”
It took huge effort, as if she had to fight through thick syrup.
“That’s excellent! Now, can you open your eyes?”
Abruptly something heavy seemed to smash down inside her skull, driving pain through every cell. She moaned.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have a pretty bad headache,” said the voice, remorselessly cheerful, determinedly invasive. “Come now, Anna! Open your eyes!”
She opened her eyes. The light was too bright. It hurt. A woman in a navy shirt with white piping was gazing at her. “Good, there you are!” she said, in a brisk Scots accent. “What’s your name?”
“Anna,” said Anna. “Anna Lamb.”
The woman nodded. “Good, Anna.”
“What happened? Where am I?” Anna whispered. She was lying in a grey cubicle on a narrow hospital trolley, fully dressed except for shoes. “Why am I in hospital?” The hammer slammed down again. “My head!”
“You’ve been in an accident, but you’re going to be fine. Just a wee bit concussed. Your baby’s fine.”
Your baby. A different kind of pain smote her then, and she lay motionless as cold enveloped her heart.
“My baby died,” she said, her voice flat as the old, familiar lifelessness seeped through her.
The nurse was taking Anna’s blood pressure, but at this she looked up. “She’s absolutely fine! The doctor’s just checking her over now,” she said firmly. “I don’t know why you wanted to give birth in a taxicab, but it seems you made a very neat job of it.”
She leaned forward and pulled back one of Anna’s eyelids, shone light from a tiny flashlight into her eye.
“In a taxicab?” Anna repeated. “But—”
Confused memories seemed to pulsate in her head, just out of reach.
“You’re a very lucky girl!” said the cheerful nurse, moving down to press her abdomen with searching fingers. She paused, frowning, and pressed again.
Anna was silent, her eyes squeezed tight, trying to think through the pain and confusion in her head. Meanwhile the nurse poked and prodded, frowned a little, made notes, poked again. “Lift up, please?” she murmured, and with competent hands carried on the examination.
When it was over, she stood looking down at Anna, sliding her pen into the pocket of her uniform trousers. A little frown had gathered between her eyebrows.
“Do you remember giving birth, Anna?”
Pain rushed in at her. The room suddenly filling with people, all huddled around her precious newborn baby, while she cried, “Let me see him, why can’t I hold him?” and then…Anna, I’m sorry, I’m so very sorry. We couldn’t save your baby.
“Yes,” she said lifelessly, gazing at the nurse with dry, stretched eyes, her heart a lump of stone. “I remember.”
A male head came around the cubicle’s curtain. “Staff, can you come, please?”
The Staff Nurse gathered up her instruments. “Maternity Sister will be down as soon as she can get away, but it may be a while, Anna. They’ve got staff shortages there, too, tonight, and a Caes—”
A light tap against the partition wall preceded the entrance of a young nurse, looking desperately tired but smiling as she rolled a wheeled bassinet into the room.
“Oh, nurse, there you are! How’s the bairn?” said the Staff Nurse, sounding not altogether pleased.
The bairn was crying with frustrated fury, and neither of the nurses heard the gasp that choked Anna. A storm of emotion seemed to seize her as she lifted herself on her elbows and, ignoring the punishment this provoked from the person in her head who was beating her nerve endings, struggled to sit up.
“Baby?” Anna cried. “Is that my baby?”
Meanwhile, the young nurse wheeled the baby up beside the trolley, assuring Anna, “Yes, she is. A lovely little girl.” Anna looked into the bassinet, closed her eyes, looked again.
The baby stopped crying suddenly. She was well wrapped up in hospital linen, huge eyes open, silent now but frowning questioningly at the world.
“Oh, dear God!” Anna exclaimed, choking on the emotion that surged up inside. “Oh, my baby! Was it just a nightmare, then? Oh, my darling!”
“It’s not unusual for things to get mixed up after a bang on the head like yours, but everything will sort itself out,” said the Staff Nurse. “We’ll keep you in for observation for a day or two, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
Anna hardly heard. “I want to hold her!” she whispered, convulsively reaching towards the bassinet. The young nurse obligingly picked the baby up and bent over Anna. Her hungry arms wrapping the infant, Anna sank back against the pillows.
Her heart trembled with a joy so fierce it hurt, obliterating for a few moments even the pain in her head. She drew the little bundle tight against her breast, and gazed hungrily into the flower face.
She was beautiful. Huge questioning eyes, dark hair that lay on her forehead in feathery curls, wide, full mouth which was suddenly, adorably, stretched by a yawn.
All around one eye there was a mocha-hued shadow that added an inexplicably piquant charm to her face. She gazed at Anna, serenely curious.
“She looks like a bud that’s just opened,” Anna marvelled. “She’s so fresh, so new!”
“She’s lovely,” agreed the junior nurse, while the Staff Nurse hooked the clipboard of Anna’s medical notes onto the foot of the bed.
“Good, then,” she said, nodding. “Now you’ll be all right here till Maternity Sister comes. Nurse, I’ll see you for a moment, please.”
The sense of unreality returned when she was left alone with the baby. Anna gazed down into the sweet face from behind a cloud of pain and confusion. She couldn’t seem to think.
The baby fell asleep, just like that. Anna bent to examine her. The birthmark on her eye was very clear now that the baby’s eyes were closed. Delicate, dark, a soft smudging all around the eye. Anna was moved by it. She supposed such a mark could be considered a blemish, but somehow it managed to be just the opposite.
“You’ll set the fashion, my darling,” Anna whispered with a smile, cuddling the baby closer. “All the girls will be painting their eyes with makeup like that in the hopes of making themselves as beautiful as you.”
It made the little face even more vulnerable, drew her, touched her heart. She couldn’t remember ever having seen such a mark before. Was this kind of thing inherited? No one in her family had anything like it.
Was it a dream, that memory of another child? Tiny, perfect, a beautiful, beautiful son…but so white. They had allowed her to hold him, just for a few moments, to say goodbye. Her heart had died then. She had felt it go cold, turn to ice and then stone. They had encouraged her to weep, but she did not weep. Grief required a heart.
Was that a dream?
She was terribly tired. She bent to lay the sleeping infant back in the bassinet. Then she leaned down over the tiny, fragile body, searching her face for clues.
“Who is your father?” she whispered. “Where am I? What’s happening to me?”
Her head ached violently. She lay back against the pillows and wished the lights weren’t so bright.
“My daughter, you must prepare yourself for some excellent news.”
She smiled trustingly at her mother. “Is it the embassy from the prince?” she asked, for the exciting information had of course seeped into the harem.
“The prince’s emissaries and I have discussed the matter of your marriage with the prince. Now I have spoken with your father, whose care is all for you. Such a union will please him very much, my daughter, for he desires peace with the prince and his people.”
She bowed. “I am happy to be the means of pleasing my father…. And the prince? What manner of man do they say he is?”
“Ah, my daughter, he is a young man to please any woman. Handsome, strong, capable in all the manly arts. He has distinguished himself in battle, too, and stories are told of his bravery.”
She sighed her happiness. “Oh, mother, I feel I love him already!” she said.
Anna awoke, not knowing what had disturbed her. A tall, dark man was standing at the foot of her trolley, reading her chart. There was something about him… She frowned, trying to concentrate. But sleep dragged her eyes shut.
“They’re both fine,” she heard when she opened them next, not sure whether it was seconds or minutes later. The man was talking to a young woman who looked familiar. After a second Anna’s jumbled brain recognized the junior nurse.
The man drew her eyes. He was strongly charismatic. Handsome as a pirate captain, exotically dark and obviously foreign. Masculine, strong, handsome—and impossibly clean for London, as if he had come straight from a massage and shave at his club without moving through the dust and dirt of city traffic.
He was wearing a grey silk lounge suit which looked impeccably Savile Row. A round diamond glowed with dark fire from a heavy, square gold setting on his ring finger. Heavy cuff links on the French cuffs of his cream silk shirt matched it. On his other hand she saw the flash of an emerald.
He didn’t look at all overdressed or showy. It sat on him naturally. He was like an aristocrat in a period film. Dreamily she imagined him in heavy brocade, with a fall of lace at wrist and throat.
She blinked, coming drowsily more awake. The junior nurse was glowing, as if the man’s male energy had stirred and ignited something in her, in spite of her exhaustion. She was mesmerized.
“Because he’s mesmerizing,” Anna muttered.
Suddenly recalled to her duties, the nurse glanced at her patient. “You’re awake!” she murmured.
The man turned and looked at her, too, his eyes dark and his gaze piercing. Anna blinked. There was a mark on his eye just like her baby’s. A dark irregular smudge that enhanced both his resemblance to a pirate and his exotic maleness.
“Anna!” he exclaimed. A slight accent furred his words attractively. “Thank God you and the baby were not hurt! What on earth happened?”
She felt very, very stupid. “Are you the doctor?” she stammered.
His dark eyes snapped into an expression of even greater concern, and he made a sound that was half laughter, half worry. He bent down and clasped her hand. She felt his fingers tighten on her, in unmistakable silent warning.
“Darling!” he exclaimed. “The nurse says you don’t remember the accident, but I hope you have not forgotten your own husband!”
Two
Husband? Anna stared. Her mouth opened. “I’m not—” she began. He pressed her hand again, and she broke off. Was he really her husband? How could she be married and not remember? Her heart kicked. Had a man like him fallen in love with her, chosen her?
“Are we married?” she asked.
He laughed again, with a thread of warning in his tone that she was at a loss to figure. “Look at our baby! Does she not tell you the truth?”
The birthmark was unmistakable. But how could such a thing be? “I can’t remember things,” she told him in a voice which trembled, trying to hold down the panic that suddenly swept her. “I can’t remember anything.”
A husband—how could she have forgotten? Why? She squeezed her eyes shut, and stared into the inner blackness. She knew who she was, but everything else eluded her.
She opened her eyes. He was smiling down at her in deep concern. He was so attractive! The air around him seemed to crackle with vitality. Suddenly she wanted it to be true. She wanted him to be her husband, wanted the right to lean on him. She felt so weak, and he looked so strong. He looked like a man used to handling things.
Someone was screaming somewhere. “Nurse, nurse!” It was a hoarse, harsh cry. She put her hand to her pounding head. “It’s so noisy,” she whispered.
“We’ll soon have her somewhere quieter,” said the junior nurse, hastily reassuring. “I’ll just go and check with Maternity again.” She slipped away, leaving Anna alone with the baby and the man who was her husband.
“Come, I want to get you out of here,” he said.
There was something odd about his tone. She tried to focus, but her head ached desperately, and she seemed to be behind a thick curtain separating her from the world.
“But where?” she asked weakly. “This is a hospital.”
“You are booked into a private hospital. They are waiting to admit you. It is far more pleasant there—they are not short-staffed and overworked. I want a specialist to see and reassure you.”
He had already drawn Anna’s shoes from under the bed. Anna, her head pounding, obediently sat up on the edge of the trolley bed and slipped her feet into them. Meanwhile, he neatly removed the pages from the clipboard at the foot of her bed, folded and slipped them into his jacket pocket.
“Why are you taking those?” she asked stupidly.
He flicked her an inscrutable look, then picked up the baby with atypical male confidence. “Where is your bag, Anna? Did you have a bag?”
“Oh—!” She put her hand to her forehead, remembering the case she had packed so carefully…and then had carried out of the hospital when it was all over. That long, slow walk with empty arms. Her death march.
“My bag,” she muttered, but her brain would not engage with the problem, with the contradiction.
“Never mind, we can get it later.” He pulled aside the curtain of the cubicle, glanced out, and then turned to her. “Come!”
Her head ached with ten times the ferocity as she obediently stood. He wrapped his free arm around her back and drew her out of the cubicle, and she instinctively obeyed his masculine authority.
The casualty ward was like an overcrowded bad dream. They passed a young man lying on a trolley, his face smashed and bloody. Another trolley held an old woman, white as her hair, her veins showing blue, eyes wild with fear. She was muttering something incomprehensible and stared at Anna with helpless fixity as they passed. Somewhere someone was half moaning, half screaming. That other voice still called for a nurse. A child’s cry, high and broken, betrayed mingled pain and panic.
“My God, do you think it’s like this all the time?” Anna murmured.
“It is Friday night.”
They walked through the waiting room, where every seat was filled, and a moment later stepped out into the autumn night. Rain was falling, but softly, and she found the cold air a relief.
“Oh, that’s better!” Anna exclaimed, shivering a little in her thin shirt.
A long black limousine parked a few yards away purred into life and eased up beside them. Her husband opened the back door for her.
Anna drew back suddenly, without knowing why. “What about my coat? Don’t I have a coat?”
“The car is warm. Come, get in. You are tired.”
His voice soothed her fears, and the combination of obvious wealth and his commanding air calmed her. If he was her husband, she must be safe.
In addition to everything else, being upright was making her queasy. Anna gave in and slipped inside the luxurious passenger compartment, sinking gratefully down onto deep, superbly comfortable upholstery. He locked and shut the door.
She leaned back and her eyes closed. He spoke to the driver in a foreign language through the window, and a moment later the other passenger door opened, and her husband got inside with the baby. The limo began rolling forward immediately. Absently she clocked the driver picking up a mobile phone.
“Are we leaving, just like that? Don’t I have to be signed out by a doctor or something?”
He shrugged. “Believe me, the medical staff are terminally overworked here. When they discover the empty cubicle, the Casualty staff will assume you have been moved to a ward.”
Her head ached too much.
The darkness of the car was relieved at intervals by the filtered glow of passing lights. She watched him for a moment in light and shadow, light and shadow, as he settled the baby more comfortably.
“What’s your name?” she asked abruptly.
“I am Ishaq Ahmadi.”
“That doesn’t even ring a faint bell!” Anna exclaimed. “Oh, my head! Do you—how long have we been married?”
There was a disturbing flick of his black gaze in darkness. It was as if he touched her, and a little electric shock was the result.
“There is no need to go on with this now, Anna,” he said.
She jumped. “What? What do you mean?”
His gaze remained compellingly on her.
“I remember my—who I am,” she babbled, oddly made to feel guilty by his silent judgement, “but I can’t really remember my life. I certainly don’t remember you. Or—or the baby, or anything. How long have we been married?”
He smiled and shrugged. “Shall we say, two years?”
“Two years!” She recoiled in horror.
“What of your life do you remember? Your mind is obviously not a complete blank. You must have something in there…you remember giving birth?”
“Yes, but…but what I remember is that my baby died.”
“Ah,” he breathed, so softly she wasn’t even sure she had heard it.
“They told me just now that wasn’t true, but…” She reached out to touch the baby in his arms. “Oh, she’s so sweet! Isn’t she perfect? But I remember…” Her eyes clenched against the spasm of pain. “I remember holding my baby after he died.”
Her eyes searched his desperately in the darkness. “Maybe that was a long time ago?” she whispered.
“How long ago does it seem to you?”
The question seemed to trigger activity in her head. “Six weeks, I think….”
You’re going to have six wonderful weeks, Anna.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, as a large piece of her life suddenly fell into place. “I just remembered— I was on my way to a job in France. And Lisbet and Cecile were going to take me out for a really lovely dinner. It seems to me I’m…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Aren’t I supposed to be leaving on the Paris train tomorrow…Saturday? Alan Mitching’s house in France.” She opened her eyes. “Are you saying that was more than two years in the past?”
“What sort of a job?”
“He has a seventeenth-century place in the Dordogne area…they want murals in the dining room. They want—wanted a Greek temple effect. I’ve designed—” She broke off and gazed at him in the darkness while the limousine purred through the wet, empty streets. Traffic was light; it must be two or three in the morning.
“I can remember making the designs, but I can’t remember doing the actual work.” Panic rose up in her. “Why can’t I remember?”
“This state is not permanent. You will remember everything in time.”
The baby stirred and murmured and she watched as he shifted her a little.
“Let me hold her,” she said hungrily.
For a second he looked as if he was going to refuse, but she held out her arms, and he slipped the tiny bundle into her embrace. A smile seemed to start deep within her and flow outwards all through her body and spirit to reach her lips. Her arms tightened. Oh, how lovely to have a living baby to hold against her heart in place of that horrible, hurting memory!
“Oh, you’re so beautiful!” she whispered. She shifted her gaze to Ishaq Ahmadi. He was watching her. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
A muscle seemed to tense in his jaw. “Yes,” he said.
The chauffeur spoke through an intercom, and as her husband replied, Anna silently watched fleeting expressions wander over the baby’s face, felt the perfection of the little body against her breast. Time seemed to disappear in the now. She lost the urgency of wanting to know how she had got to this moment, and was happy just to be in it.
When he spoke to her again, she came to with a little start and realized she had been almost asleep. “Can you remember how you came to be in the taxi with the baby?”
Nothing. Not even vague shadows. She shook her head. “No.”
Then there was no sound except for rain and the flick of tires on the wet road. Anna was lost in contemplation again. She stroked the tiny fist. “Have we chosen a name for her?”
A passing headlight highlighted one side of his face, the side with the pirate patch over his eye.
“Her name is Safiyah.”
“Sophia?”
“Yes, it is a name that will not seem strange to English ears. Safi is not so far from Sophy.”
“Did we know it was going to be a girl?” she whispered, coughing as feeling closed her throat.
He glanced at her, the sleeping baby nestled so trustingly against her. “You are almost asleep,” he said. “Let me take her.”
He leaned over to lift the child from her arms. He was gentle and tender with her, but at the same time firm and confident, making Anna feel how safe the baby was with him.
Jonathan. “Oh!” she whispered.
“What is it?” Ishaq Ahmadi said, in a voice of quiet command. “What have you remembered?”
“Oh, just when you took the baby from me…I…” She pressed her hands to her eyes. Not when he took the baby, but the sight of him holding the infant as if he loved her and was prepared to protect and defend the innocent.
“Tell me!”
She lifted her head to see him watching her with a look of such intensity she gasped. Suddenly she wondered how much of her past she had confided to her husband. Was he a tolerant man? Or had he wanted her to lie about her life before him?
She stammered, “Did—did—?” She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Did I tell you about…Jonathan? Jonathan Ryder?”
But even before the words were out she knew the answer was no.
Three
“Tell me now,” Ishaq Ahmadi commanded softly.
She wanted to lean against him, wanted to feel his arm around her, protecting her, holding her. She must have that right, she told herself, but somehow she lacked the courage to ask him to hold her.
She had always wanted to pat the tigers at the zoo, too. Now it seemed as if she had finally found her very own personal tiger…but she had forgotten how she’d tamed him. And until she remembered that, something told her it would be wise to treat him with caution.
“Tell me about Jonathan Ryder.”
Nervously she clasped her hands together, and suddenly a detail that had been nagging at her in the distance leapt into awareness.
“Why aren’t I wearing a wedding ring?” she demanded, holding both hands spread out before her and staring at them. On her fingers were several silver rings of varied design. But none was a wedding band.
There was a long, pregnant pause. Through the glass panel separating them from the driver, she heard a phone ring. The driver answered and spoke into it, giving instructions, it seemed.
Still he only looked at her.
“Did I…have we split up?”
“No.”
Just the bare syllable. His jaw seemed to tense, and she thought he threw her a look almost of contempt.
“About Jonathan,” he prompted again.
If they were having trouble in the marriage, was it because he was jealous? Or because she had not told him things, shared her troubles?
She thought, If I never told him about Jonathan, I should have.
“Jonathan—Jonathan and I were going together for about a year. We were talking about moving in together, but it wasn’t going to be simple, because we both owned a flat, and…well, it was taking us time to decide whether to sell his, or mine, or sell both and find somewhere new.”
Her heart began to beat with anxiety. “It is really more than two years ago?”
“How long does it seem to you?”
“It feels as if we split up about six months ago. And then…”
“Why did you split up?”
“Because…did I not tell you any of this?”
“Tell me again,” he repeated softly. “Perhaps the recital will help your memory recover.”
She wanted to tell him. She wanted to share it with him, to make him her soul mate. Surely she must have told him, and he had understood? She couldn’t have married a man who didn’t understand, whom she couldn’t share her deepest feelings with?
“I got pregnant unexpectedly.” She looked at him and remembered that, sophisticated as he looked, he was from a different culture. “Does that shock you?”
“I am sure that birth control methods fail every day,” he said.
That was not what she meant, but she lacked the courage to be more explicit.
“Having kids wasn’t part of deciding to live together or anything, but once it happened I just—knew it was what I wanted. It was crazy, but it made me so happy! Jonathan didn’t see it that way. He didn’t want…”
Her head drooped, and the sound of suddenly increasing rain against the windows filled the gap.
“Didn’t want the child?”
“He wanted me to have an abortion. He said we weren’t ready yet. His career hadn’t got off the ground, neither had mine. He—oh, he had a hundred reasons why it would be right one day but wasn’t now. In a lot of ways he was right. But…” Anna shrugged. “I couldn’t do it. We argued and argued. I understood him, but he never understood me. Never tried to. I kept saying, there’s more to it than you want to believe. He wouldn’t listen.”
“And did he convince you?”
“He booked an appointment for me, drove me down to the women’s clinic…. On the way, he stopped the carat a red light, and—I got out,” she murmured, staring at nothing. “And just kept walking. I didn’t look back, and Jonathan didn’t come after me. He never called again. Well, once,” she amended. “A couple of months later he phoned to ask if I planned to name him as the father on the birth certificate.”
She paused, but Ishaq Ahmadi simply waited for her to continue. “He said…he said he had no intention of being saddled with child support for the next twenty years. He had a job offer from Australia, and he was trying to decide whether to accept or not. And that was one of the criteria. If I was going to put his name down, he’d go to Australia.”
His hair glinted in the beam of a streetlight. They were on a highway. “And what did you say?”
She shook her head. “I hung up. We’ve never spoken since.”
“Did he go to Australia?”
“I never found out. I didn’t want to know.” She amended that. “Didn’t care.” She glanced out the window.
“Where are we going?” she asked. “Where is the hospital?”
“North of London, in the country. Tell me what happened then.”
Her eyes burned. “My friends were really, really great about it—do you know Cecile and Lisbet?”
“How could your husband not know your friends?”
“Are Cecile and Philip married?”
He gazed at her. “Tell me about the baby, Anna.”
There was something in his attitude that made her uncomfortable. She murmured, “I’m sorry if you didn’t know before this. But maybe if you didn’t, you should have.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Did you know?”
He paused. “No.”
Anna bit her lip. She wondered if it was perhaps because she hadn’t told him that she had reverted to this memory tonight. Had it weighed on her throughout the new pregnancy? Had fears for her new baby surfaced and found no outlet?
“Everything was fine. I was pretty stressed in some ways, but I didn’t really have doubts about what I was doing. At the very end something went wrong. I was in labour for hours and hours, and then it was too late for a Caesarean…they used the Ventouse cap.”
She swallowed, and her voice was suddenly expressionless. “It caused a brain haemorrhage. My baby died. They let me hold him, and he was…but there was a terrible bruise on his head…as if he was wearing a purple cap.”
No tears came to moisten the heat of her eyes or ease the pain in her heart. Her perfect baby, paper white and too still, but looking as if he was thinking very hard and would open his eyes any moment…
She wondered if that was how she had ended up giving birth in the back of a cab. Perhaps it was fear of a repetition that had made her leave it too late to get to the hospital.
“Why weren’t you there?” she asked, surfacing from her thoughts to look at him. “Why didn’t you take me to the hospital?”
“I flew in from abroad this evening. And this was six weeks ago?”
“That’s how it feels to me. I feel as though it’s the weekend I’m supposed to be going on that job to France, and that was about six weeks after the baby died. How long ago is that, really?”
“Did you ever feel, Anna, that you would like to—adopt a child? A baby to fill the void created by the death of your own baby?”
“It wouldn’t have done me any good if I had. Why are you asking me these questions now? Didn’t we—”
“Did you think of it—applying for adoption? Trying to find a baby?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Sometimes in the street, you know, you pass a woman with a baby, or even a woman who’s pregnant, and you just want to scream It’s not fair, but—no, I just…I got pretty depressed, I wasn’t doing much of anything till Lisbet conjured up this actor friend who wanted a mural in his place in France.”
She leaned over to caress the baby with a tender hand, then bent to kiss the perfectly formed little head. “Oh, you are so beautiful!” she whispered. She looked up, smiling. “I hope I remember soon. I can’t bear not knowing everything about her!”
He started to speak, and just then the car drew to a stop. Heavy rain was now thundering down on the roof, and all she could see were streaks of light from tall spotlights in the distance, as if they had entered some compound.
“Are we here?”
“Yes,” he said, as the door beside her opened. The dark-skinned chauffeur stood in the rain with a large black umbrella, and Anna quickly slipped out onto a pavement that was leaping with water. She heard the swooping crack of another umbrella behind her. Then she was being ushered up a curiously narrow flight of steps and through a doorway.
She glanced around her as Ishaq, with the baby, came in the door behind her.
It was very curious for a hospital reception. A low-ceilinged room, softly lighted, lushly decorated in natural wood and rich tapestries. A row of matching little curtains seemed to be covering several small windows at intervals along the wall. There was a bar at one end, by a small dining table with chairs. In front of her she saw a cluster of plush armchairs around a coffee table. Anna frowned, trying to piece together a coherent interpretation of the scene, but her mind was very slow to function. She could almost hear her own wheels grinding.
A woman in an Eastern outfit that didn’t look at all like a medical uniform appeared in the doorway behind the bar and came towards them. She spoke something in a foreign language, smiling and gesturing towards the sofa cluster. She moved to the entrance door behind them, dragged it fully shut and turned a handle. Still the pieces refused to fall into place.
Anna obediently sank down into an armchair. A second woman appeared. Dressed in another softly flowing outfit, with warm brown eyes and a very demure smile, she nodded and then descended upon the baby in Ishaq Ahmadi’s arms. She laughed and admired and then exchanged a few sentences of question and answer with Ishaq before taking the infant in her own arms and, with another smile all around, disappeared whence she had come.
“What’s going on?” Anna demanded, as alarm began to shrill behind the drowsy numbness in her head.
“Your bed is ready,” Ishaq murmured, bending over her and slipping his hands against her hips. At the touch of his strong hands she involuntarily smiled. “In a few minutes you can lie down and get some sleep.”
His hands lifted and she blinked stupidly while he drew two straps up and snapped them together over her hips. Under her feet she felt the throb of engines, and at last the pieces fell together.
“This isn’t a hospital, this is a plane!” Anna cried wildly.
Four
“Let me out,” Anna said, her hands snapping to the seat belt.
Ishaq Ahmadi fastened his own seat belt and moved one casual hand to still hers as she struggled with the mechanism. “We have been cleared for immediate takeoff,” he said.
“Stop the plane and let me off. Tell them to turn back,” she cried, pushing at his hand, which was no longer casual. “Where are you taking us? I want my baby!”
“The woman you saw is a children’s nurse. She is taking care of the baby, and no harm will come to her. Try and relax. You are ill, you have been in an accident.”
Her stomach churned sickly, her head pounded with pain, but she had to ignore that. She stared at him and showed her teeth. “Why are you doing this?” A sudden wrench released her seat belt, and Anna thrust herself to her feet.
Ishaq Ahmadi’s eyes flashed with irritation. “You know very well you have no right to such a display. You know you are in the wrong, deeply in the wrong.” He stabbed a forefinger at the chair she had just vacated. “Sit down before you fall down!”
With a little jerk, the plane started taxiing. “No!” Anna cried. She staggered and clutched the chair back, and with an oath Ishaq Ahmadi snapped a hand up and clasped her wrist in an unbreakable hold.
“Help me!” she screamed. “Help, help!”
A babble of concerned female voices arose from behind a bulkhead, and in another moment the hostess appeared in the doorway behind the bar.
“Sit down, Anna!”
The hostess cried a question in Arabic, and Ishaq Ahmadi answered in the same language. “Laa, laa, madame,” the woman said, gently urgent, and approached Anna with a soothing smile, then tried what her little English would do.
“Seat, madame, very dingerous. Pliz, seat.”
“I want to get off!” Anna shouted at the uncomprehending woman. “Stop the plane! Tell the captain it’s a mistake!”
The woman turned to Ishaq Ahmadi with a question, and he shook his head on a calm reply. Of course he had the upper hand if the cabin crew spoke only Arabic. Anna had a dim idea that all pilots had to speak English, but what were her chances of making it to the cockpit?
And if it was a private jet, the captain would be on Ishaq Ahmadi’s payroll. No doubt they all knew he was kidnapping his own wife.
Ahmadi got to his feet, holding Anna’s wrist in a grip that felt like steel cables, and forced her to move towards him.
The plane slowed, and they all stiffened as the captain’s voice came over the intercom—but it was only with the obvious Arabic equivalent of “Cabin staff, prepare for takeoff.” Ishaq Ahmadi barked something at the hostess and, with a consoling smile at Anna, she returned to her seat behind the bulkhead.
Ishaq Ahmadi sank into his seat again, dragging Anna inexorably down onto his lap. “You are being a fool,” he said. “No one is going to hurt you if you do not hurt yourself.”
She was sitting on him now as if he were the chair, and his arms were firmly locked around her waist, a human seat belt. The heat of his body seeped into hers, all down her spine and the backs of her thighs, his arms resting across her upper thighs, hands clasped against her abdomen.
Wherever her body met his, there was nothing but muscle. There was no give, no ounce of fat. It was like sitting on hot poured metal fresh from the forge, hardened, but the surface still slightly malleable. The stage when a sculptor removes the last, tiny blemishes, puts on the finishing touches. She had taken a course in metal sculpture at art college, and she had always loved the metal at this stage, Anna remembered dreamily. The heat, the slight surface give in something so innately strong, had a powerful sensual pull.
She realized she was half tranced. She felt very slow and stupid, and as the adrenaline in her body ebbed, her headache caught up with her again. She twisted to try to look over her shoulder into his face.
“Why are you doing this?” she pleaded.
His voice, close to her ear, said, “So that you and the baby will be safe.”
She was deeply, desperately tired, she was sick and hurt, and she wanted to believe she was safe with him. The alternative was too confusing and too terrible.
The engines roared up and the jet leapt forward down the runway. In a very short time, compared to the lumbering commercial aircraft she was used to, they had left the ground.
As his hold slackened but still kept her on his lap, she turned to Ishaq Ahmadi. Her face was only inches from his, her mouth just above his own wide, well-shaped lips. She swallowed, feeling the pull.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home.” His gaze was steady. “You are tired. You will want to lie down,” he murmured, and when the jet levelled out, he helped her to her feet and stood up. He took her arm and led her through a doorway.
They entered a large, beautifully appointed stateroom, with a king-size bed luxuriously made with snowy-white and deep blue linens that were turned down invitingly. There were huge, fluffy white pillows.
It was like a fantasy. Except for the little windows and the ever-present hum you would never know you were on a plane. A top hotel, maybe. Beautiful natural woods, luscious fabrics, mirrors, soft lighting, and, through an open door, a marble bathroom.
“I guess I married a millionaire,” Anna murmured. “Or is this just some bauble a friend has loaned you?”
“Here are night things for you,” he said, indicating pyjamas and a bathrobe, white with blue trim, that were lying across the foot of the sapphire-blue coverlet. “Do you need help to undress?”
Anna looked at the bed longingly and realized she was dead on her feet. And that was no surprise, after what she had apparently been through in the past few hours.
“No,” she said.
She began fumbling with a button, but her fingers didn’t seem to work. Even the effort of holding her elbow bent seemed too much, so she dropped her arm and stood there a moment, gazing at nothing.
“I will call the hostess,” Ishaq Ahmadi said. And that, perversely, made her frown.
“Why?” she demanded. “You’re my husband, aren’t you?”
His eyes probed her, and she shrugged uncomfortably. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why don’t you want to touch me?”
She wanted him to touch her. Wanted his heat on her body again, because when he touched her, even in anger, she felt safe.
He made no reply, merely lifted his hands, brushed aside her own feeble fingers which were again fumbling with the top button, and began to undo her shirt.
“Have you stopped wanting me?” she wondered aloud.
His head bent over his task, only his eyes shifted to connect with hers. “You are overplaying your hand,” he advised softly, and she felt another little thrill of danger whisper down her spine. Her brain evaded the discomfort.
“Did you commission work from me or something? Is that how we met?” she asked. She specialized in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern designs, painting entire rooms to give the impression that you were standing on a balcony overlooking the Gulf of Corinth, or in the Alhambra palace. But what were the chances that a wealthy Arab would want a Western woman to paint trompe l’oeil fifteenth-century mosaic arches on his palace walls when he probably had the real thing?
“We met by accident.”
“Oh.” She wanted him to clarify, but couldn’t concentrate. Not when his hands were grazing the skin of her breasts, revealed as he unbuttoned her shirt. She looked into his face, bent close over hers, but his eyes remained on his task. His aftershave was spicy and exotic.
“It seems strange that you have the right to do this when you feel like a total stranger,” she observed.
“You insisted on it,” he reminded her dryly. He seemed cynically amused by her. He still didn’t believe that she had forgotten, and she had no idea why. What reason could she have for pretending amnesia? It seemed very crazy, unless…unless she had been running away from him.
Perhaps it was fear that had caused her to lose her memory. Psychologists did say you sometimes forgot when remembering was too painful.
“Was I running away from you, Ishaq?”
“You tell me the answer.”
She shook her head. “They say the unconscious remembers everything, but…”
“I am very sure that yours does,” Ishaq Ahmadi replied, pulling the front of her shirt open to reveal her small breasts in a lacy black bra.
She knew by the involuntary intake of his breath that he was not unaffected. His jaw clenched and he stripped the shirt from her, his breathing irregular.
She wasn’t one for casual sex, and she had never been undressed by a stranger, which was what this felt like. The sudden blush of desire that suffused her was disconcerting. So her body remembered, even if her conscious mind did not. Anna bit her lip. What would it be like, love with a man who seemed like a total stranger? Would her body instinctively recognize his touch?
She realized that she wanted him to make the demand on her. The thought was sending spirals of heat all through her. But instead of drawing her into his arms, he turned his back to toss her shirt onto a chair.
“What will I remember about loving you, Ishaq?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer, and she turned away, dejected, overcome with fatigue and reluctant to think, and lifted her arms behind her to the clasp of her bra. She winced as a bruised elbow prevented her.
Her breath hissed with the pain. “You’ll have to undo this.”
She felt his hands at work on the hook of her bra, that strange, half electrifying, half comforting heat that made her yearn for something she could not remember. She wondered if they had been sexually estranged. She said, “Is there a problem between us, Ishaq?”
“You well know what the problem between us is. But it is not worth discussing now,” he said, his voice tight.
She thought, It’s serious. Her heart pinched painfully with regret. To think that she had had the luck to marry a man like this and then had not been able to make it work made her desperately sad. He was like a dream come to life, but…she had obviously got her dream and then not been able to live in it.
If they made up now, when she could not remember any of the grievances she might have, would that make it easier when she regained her full memory?
As the bra slipped away from her breasts, Anna let it fall onto the bed, then turned to face him, lifting her arms to his shoulders.
“Do you still love me?” she whispered.
His arms closed around her, his hands warm on her bare skin. Her breasts pressed against his silk shirt as her arms cupped his head. He looked down into her upturned face with a completely unreadable expression in his eyes.
“Do you want me, Ishaq?” she begged, wishing he would kiss her. Why was he so remote? She felt the warmth of his body curl into hers and it was so right.
A corner of that hard, full mouth went up and his eyes became sardonic. “Believe me, I want you, or you would not be here.”
“What have I done?” she begged. “I don’t remember anything. Tell me what I’ve done to make you so angry with me.”
His mouth turned up with angry contempt. “What do you hope to gain with this?” he demanded with subdued ferocity, and then, as if it were completely against his will, his grip tightened painfully on her, and with a stifled curse he crushed his mouth against her own.
He was neither gentle nor tender. His kiss and his hands were punishing, and a part of her revelled in the knowing that, whatever his intentions, he could not resist her. She opened her mouth under his, accepting the violent thrust of his hungry, angry tongue, and felt the rasp of its stroking run through her with unutterable thrill, as if it were elsewhere on her body that he kissed her.
Just for a moment she was frightened, for if one kiss could do this to her, how would she sustain his full, passionate lovemaking? She would explode off the face of the earth. His hand dropped to force her against him, while his hardened body leapt against her. She tore her mouth away from his, gasping for the oxygen to feed the fire that wrapped her in its hot, licking fingers.
“Ishaq!” she cried, wild with a passion that seemed to her totally new, as the heat of his hands burned her back, her hips, clenched against the back of her neck with a firm possessiveness that thrilled her. “Oh, my love!”
Then suddenly he was standing away from her, his hands on her wrists pulling her arms down, his eyes burning into hers with a cold, hard, suspicious fury that froze the hot rivers of need coursing through her.
“What is it?” she pleaded. “Ishaq, what have I done?”
He smiled and shook his head, a curl of admiring contempt lifting his lip. “You are unbelievable,” he said. “Where have you learned such arts, I wonder?”
Anna gasped. He suspected her of having a lover? Could it be true? She shook her head. It wasn’t possible. Whatever he might suspect, whatever he might have done, whatever disagreement was between them, she knew that she was simply not capable of taking a lover while pregnant with her husband’s child.
“From you, I suppose,” she tried, but he brushed that aside with a snort of such contemptuous disbelief she could go no further.
“Tell me why you won’t love me,” she challenged softly, but nothing was going to crack his angry scorn now.
“But you have just given birth, Anna. We must resign ourselves to no lovemaking for several weeks, isn’t it so?”
She drew back with a little shock. “Oh! Yes, I—” She shook her head. He could still kiss her, she thought. He could hold her. Maybe that was the problem, she thought. A man who would only touch his wife if he wanted sex. She would certainly hate that.
“I wish I could remember!”
He reached down and lifted up the silky white pyjama top, holding it while she obediently slipped her arms inside. He had himself well under control now, he was as impersonal as a nurse, and she tasted tears in her throat for the waste of such wild passion.
Funny how small her breasts were. Last time, they had been so swollen with the pregnancy…hadn’t they? She remembered the ache of heavy breasts with a pang of misery, and then reminded herself, But that’s all in the past. I have a baby now.
“Do you think I’ll remember?” she whispered, gazing into his face as he buttoned the large pyjama shirt. It seemed almost unbearable that she should feel such pain for a baby who had died two years ago and not remember the birth of the beautiful creature who was so alive, and whose cry she could suddenly hear over the subdued roar of the engines.
“I am convinced of it.”
“She has inherited your birthmark,” she murmured with a smile, touching his eye with a feather caress and feeling her heart contract with tenderness. “Is that usual?”
He finished the last button and lifted his eyes to hers. “What is it you hope to discover?” he asked, his hands pulling at her belt with cool impersonality. “The… Ahmadi mark,” he said. “It proves beyond a doubt that Safiyah and I come of the same blood. Does that make you wary?”
“Did you think I had a lover?” she asked. “Did you think it was someone else’s child?”
His eyes darkened with the deepest suspicion she had yet seen in them, and she knew she had struck a deep chord. “You know that much, do you?”
Somewhere inside her an answering anger was born. “You’re making it pretty obvious! Does the fact that you’ve now been proven wrong make you think twice about things, Ishaq?”
“Wrong?” he began, then broke off, stripped the suede pants down her legs and off, and knelt to hold the pyjama bottoms for her. His hair was cut over the top in a thick cluster of black curls whose vibrant health reflected the lampglow. Anna steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder and stifled the whispering desire that melted through her thighs at the nearness of him.
They were too big. In fact, they were men’s pyjamas.
“Why don’t I have a pair of pyjamas on the plane?” she asked.
“Perhaps you never wear them.”
He spoke softly, but the words zinged to her heart. She shivered at the thought that she slept naked next to Ishaq Ahmadi. She wondered what past delights were lurking, waiting to be remembered.
“And you do?”
“I often fly alone,” he said.
It suddenly occurred to her that he had told her absolutely nothing all night. Every single question had somehow been parried. But when she tried to formulate words to point this out, her brain refused.
Even at its tightest the drawstring was too big for her slim waist, and the bunched fabric rested precariously on the slight swell of her hips. Ishaq turned away and lifted the feathery covers of the bed to invite her to slip into the white, fluffy nest.
She moved obediently, groaning as her muscles protested at even this minimal effort. Once flat on her back, however, she sighed with relief. “Oh, that feels good!”
Ishaq bent to flick out the bedside lamp, but her hand stopped him. “Bring me the baby,” she said.
“You are tired and the baby is asleep.”
“But she was crying. She may be hungry.”
“I am sure the nurse has seen to that.”
“But I want to breast-feed her!” Anna said in alarm.
He blinked as if she had surprised him, but before she could be sure of what she saw in his face his eyelids hooded his expression.
“Tomorrow will not be too late for that, Anna. Sleep now. You need sleep more than anything.”
On the last word he put out the light, and it was impossible to resist the drag of her eyelids in the semi-darkness. “Kiss her for me,” she murmured, as Lethe beckoned.
“Yes,” he said, straightening.
She frowned. “Don’t we kiss good-night?”
A heartbeat, two, and then she felt the touch of his lips against her own. Her arms reached to embrace him, but he avoided them and was standing upright again. She felt deprived, her heart yearning towards him. She tried once more.
“I wish you’d stay with me.”
“Good night, Anna.” Then the last light went out, a door opened and closed, and she was alone with the dark and the deep drone of the engines.
Five
“Hurry, hurry!”
The voices and laughter of the women mirrored the bubble of excitement in her heart, and she felt the corners of her mouth twitch up in anticipation.
“I’m coming!” she cried.
But they were impatient. Already they were spilling out onto the balcony, whose arching canopy shaded it from the harsh midday sun. Babble arose from the courtyard below: the slamming of doors, the dance of hooves, the shouts of men. Somewhere indoors, musicians tuned their instruments.
“He is here! He arrives!” the women cried, and she heard the telltale scraping of the locks and bars and the rumble of massive hinges in the distance as the gates opened wide. A cry went up and the faint sound of horses’ hooves thudded on the hot, still air.
“They are here already! Hurry, hurry!” cried the women.
She rose to her feet at last, all in white except for the tinkling, delicate gold at her forehead, wrists, and ankles, a white rose in her hand. Out on the balcony the women were clustered against the carved wooden arabesques of the screen that hid them from the admiring, longing male eyes below.
She approached the screen. Through it the women had a view of the entire courtyard running down to the great gates. These were now open in welcome, with magnificently uniformed sentinels on each side, and the mounted escort approached and cantered between them, flags fluttering, armour sending blinding flashes of intense sunlight into unwary eyes.
They rode in pairs, rank upon rank, leading the long entourage, their horses’ caparisons increasing in splendour with the riders’ rank. Then at last came riders in the handsomest array, mounted on spirited, prancing horses.
“There he is!” a voice cried, and a cheer began in several throats and swelled.
Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to him. He was sternly handsome, his flowing hair a mass of black curls, his beard neat and pointed, his face grave but his eyes alight with humour. His jacket was rich blue, the sleeves ruched with silver thread; his silver breastplate glowed almost white. Across it, from shoulder to hip, a deep blue sash lay against the polished metal.
The sword at his hip was thickly encrusted with jewels. His fingers also sparkled, but no stone was brighter than his dark eyes as he glanced up towards the balcony as if he knew she was there. His eyes met hers, challenged and conquered in one piercingly sweet moment.
Her heart sprang in one leap from her breast and into his keeping.
As he rode past below, the white rose fell from her helpless hand. A strong dark hand plucked it from the air and drew it to his lips, and she cried softly, as though the rose were her own white throat.
He did not glance up again, but thrust the rose carefully inside the sash, knowing she watched. She clung to the carved wooden arabesques, her strength deserting her.
“So fierce, so handsome!” she murmured. “As strong and powerful as his own black destrier, I dare swear!”
The laughter of the women chimed around her ears. “Ah, truly, and love is blind and sees white as black!” they cried in teasing voices. “Black? But the prince’s horse is white! Look again, mistress!”
She looked in the direction of their gesturing, as the entourage still came on. In the centre of the men on black horses rode one more richly garbed than all. His armour glowed with beaten gold, his richly jewelled turban was cloth of gold, ropes of pearls draped his chest, rubies and emeralds adorned his fingers and ears. His eyebrows were strong and black, his jaw square, his beard thick and curling. He lifted a hand in acknowledgement as those riders nearest him tossed gold and silver coins to the cheering crowd.
Her women were right. Her bridegroom was mounted on a prancing stallion as white as the snows of Shir.
“Saba’ul khair, madame.”
Anna rolled over drowsily and blinked while intense sunlight poured into the cabin from the little portholes as, whick whick whick whick, the air hostess pulled aside the curtains.
Her eyes frowned a protest. “Is it morning already?”
The woman turned from her completed task and smiled. “We here, madame.”
Anna leapt out of the bed, wincing with the protest from her bruised muscles, and craned to peer out the porthole. They were flying over water, deep sparkling blue water dotted with one or two little boats, and were headed towards land. She saw a long line of creamy beach, lush green forest, a stretch of mixed golden and grey desert behind, and, in the distance, snow-topped mountains casting a spell at once dangerous and thrilling.
“Where on earth are we?”
“Shower, madame?”
“Oh, yes!”
The hostess smiled with the pleasure of someone who had recently memorized the word but had produced it without any real conviction and was now delighted to see that the sounds did carry meaning, and led her into the adjoining bathroom.
Anna waved away her offer of help, stripped and got into the shower stall, then stood gratefully under the firm spray of water, first hot, then cool. This morning her body was sore all over, but her headache was much less severe.
Her memory wasn’t in much better shape, though. It still stopped dead on the night before she had been due to leave for France. Now, however, she could remember a shopping expedition with Lisbet during the afternoon, going home to dress, meeting Cecile and Lisbet at the Riverfront Restaurant. Now she could remember leaving the restaurant, and almost immediately seeing a cab pull up across the street. “You take that one, Anna, it’s facing your direction,” Lisbet had commanded, and she had dashed across the street…
She could remember that as if it were yesterday.
Of the two years that had followed that night there was still absolutely nothing in her memory. Not one image had surfaced overnight to flesh out the bare outline Ishaq Ahmadi had given of her life since.
When she tried to make sense of it all, her head pounded unmercifully. The whole thing made her feel eerie, creepy.
Last night’s dream surfaced cloudily in her mind. She had the feeling that the man on the black horse was Ishaq Ahmadi.
She wondered if that held some clue about her first meeting with him. Had she seen him from a distance and fallen in love with him?
That she could believe. If ever there was a man you could take one look at and know you’d met your destiny, Ishaq Ahmadi was it. But he was definitely keeping something from her. If once they had loved each other, and she certainly accepted that, there was a problem now. It was in his eyes every time he looked at her. His look said she was a criminal—attractive and desirable, perhaps, but not in the least to be trusted.
Anna winced as she absently scrubbed a sore spot. The accident must have been real enough. Her body seemed to be one massive bruise now, and she ached as if she had been beaten with a bat.
That thought stilled her for a moment. Panic whispered along her nerves. Suppose a man had beaten his pregnant, runaway wife and wanted to avoid the consequences…
Anna reminded herself suddenly that they would be landing soon and turned off the water. In the bedroom mirror she stared at herself. She was still too thin, just as she had been after losing her baby two years ago. There were dark circles under her eyes to match the bruising on her body.
She had a tendency to lose weight with unhappiness. Anna sighed. By the look of her, she had been deeply unhappy recently, as unhappy as when she had lost Jonathan’s baby. But the question was—had she lost the weight before she left Ishaq, or after?
Her clothes were lying on the neatly made bed. The shirt had been mended, the suede pants neatly brushed. Anna’s breath hissed between her teeth. It’s terrific, Anna. Stop dithering and buy it!
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ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: She′ d awakened in a hospital, confused, to discover she was mother to a newborn…and wife to a steely- eyed stranger. Mere hours after gazing on Ishaq Ahmadi in London, Anna found herself at their desert home, which seemed both hauntingly familiar and oddly foreign. No evidence of a happy marriage existed in the palatial residence. No photographs. No clothes that fit Anna′ s slender build. No trust, given Ishaq′ s endless questions. There was simply the primal, passionate connection between them…and, of course, the baby.But Anna soon learned that nothing about her marriage was to be believed….