Читать книгу: «Sheikh's Woman»
“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
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.
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