The Sheikh's Prize (A Bride for a Billionaire 2)

Kat frowned. ‘You’re not in a very optimistic mood for a new bride.’

‘I’m being realistic. Zahir will commit to being a father—I know that about him and I respect him for it. If marriage works for us, it works, and if it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have tried,’ Saffy muttered ruefully.

‘I just can’t believe you got involved with him again. It’s like fatal attraction without the bunny boiler. I mean, five years ago Zahir broke your heart and I don’t want him doing it again.’ Her sister sighed unhappily. ‘Mikhail has checked him out and he says Maraban is stable now and that Zahir seems to be one of the good guys.’

‘I could’ve told you that,’ Saffy interrupted heatedly.

‘And there’s no sleazy stories about him either,’ Kat added in a suitably quiet undertone. ‘Obviously there’s been women but not in the kind of numbers you need to worry about.’

Saffy ground her teeth together in silence, wishing that her Russian billionaire brother-in-law had minded his own business when it came to Zahir. Even as she thought it she knew she was wronging the man. Undoubtedly Kat’s concerns about her sister’s bridegroom had prompted Mikhail’s investigation into Zahir’s reputation. ‘He would never be sleazy,’ Saffy declared, suppressing her recollection of that invitation to be his mistress.

‘Are you upset about Emmie refusing to come today?’ Kat asked ruefully.

‘No.’ Saffy lied sooner than add additional worry to Kat’s caring heart. ‘I can understand her not wanting to get into a bridesmaid’s frock when she’s so pregnant and I can also understand her saying that she’s not in the mood.’

‘Some day soon, you two need to sit down and talk and sort out the aggro between you.’

‘Easier said than done with Emmie always avoiding me like the plague,’ Saffy countered ruefully. ‘I phoned her and said I understood her not wanting to be a bridesmaid but would love her to come just as a guest and she said she wasn’t feeling well enough to travel.’

‘Well, she has had a pretty tough time being pregnant, so that probably wasn’t a lie,’ Kat conceded. ‘It makes me wonder if I’m wise to be considering IVF in case that kind of sickness and nausea in pregnancy runs in the family.’

‘I’m not feeling sick…not yet, anyway,’ Saffy pointed out bracingly, smiling as Topsy bounced into the room, bubbling with excitement in her glittering green bridesmaid’s dress and quite unaware of the serious chat her older sisters had been involved in. It seemed natural to the three sisters that neither Saffy’s mother nor her father were taking part in the coming ceremony. Saffy had had virtually nothing to do with her mother, Odette, or her father since they had abandoned her to foster care when she was twelve years old. Her parents had divorced when she was much younger and the bitterness of their estrangement had had an inevitable effect on her father’s attitude to his twin daughters. He had left them behind and moved on. Although Kat had encouraged Saffy to foster a forgiving attitude towards their mother, Saffy had too many memories of childhood neglect to do so. Odette simply wasn’t a loving parent and never had been.

The wedding took place at the church only a few doors down from Kat and Mikhail’s London home. The church’s rather gloomy interior had been transformed with an abundance of white and pink flowers and knotted ribbons. Saffy walked down the aisle on Cameron’s arm, her heart banging like a drum at a rock concert when she finally got close enough to see Zahir’s imperious dark head at the altar. How did he feel about this? How did he really feel? Throughout the past crazy busy week while she packed up her life in London her only contact with Zahir had been by phone. She had rung him after the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy. He had rung her several times to find out about the wedding schedule. There had been nothing intimate about those exchanges.

She had also ploughed through a half-dozen frustrating meetings with her agent and various clients as the reality of her condition forced the need for urgent rethinks on previously planned shoots. A couple of clients had taken the opportunity to drop her because her pregnancy meant that she was in breach of contract. Desert Ice, however, had retained her services because they were more than halfway through their campaign. She was grateful for that because it was mainly her earnings from the cosmetics company that funded the orphanage she supported.

Zahir’s stunning black-fringed golden eyes met hers as she drew level with him and she felt painfully vulnerable, which she didn’t like at all. Unfortunately wounding memories of their first wedding were assailing her, reminding her of a day when she had not had a doubt in the world about becoming a wife, had indeed innocently overflowed with feelings of love and happiness. The wedding ring slid onto her finger and she breathed in deep, conscious that Zahir retained a hold on her hand. It was done, the die was cast, she told herself soothingly. What was she afraid of happening? What was there to fear now? That he didn’t love her—well, she knew he didn’t love her, didn’t she? Unfortunately the awareness that he was marrying her to give their baby a name and a home was no more welcome to her heart or her pride.

On their passage back down the aisle, Zahir pressed a supportive hand to her spine. ‘You feel very shaky,’ he admitted when she cast him an enquiring glance.

And it was true, she did feel shaky, had ridden roughshod over her misgivings to marry him, trying at every step to put her child’s needs ahead of her own.

Zahir participated in the photographs in silence. Sapphire was pale as death and silent and her family, aside of the little bouncy one in green, who had smiled brightly at him, were clearly hostile and suspicious. No doubt her family had taken their cues from Sapphire. She didn’t want to be married to him again; he could feel it in the tension that gripped her every time he touched her. That made him angry and bitter, roused memories better left buried. But he had royally screwed up by allowing his primal instincts to triumph and there was always a price to be paid for recklessness, he reminded himself darkly. He had got her back. That was, at least, a beginning, and only time would tell whether or not she would continue to hold the threat of a divorce like a gun to his head.

‘You look stunning,’ Zahir told her belatedly as she scrambled into the limo that would whisk them from the church to the embassy to undergo a Muslim marriage ceremony. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m not ill, only pregnant,’ Saffy countered defensively, wishing he hadn’t reminded her of her condition, reluctant to be viewed as in any way in need of special treatment.

The second ceremony was brief, witnessed by embassy officials and a posed photograph was taken afterwards. They returned to Mikhail and Kat’s house where a reception was being held in the ballroom. After the wedding breakfast, they circulated. Surrounded by the familiar faces of the models she often worked with, Saffy began to relax a little, bearing up well to comments about how quiet she had been about her supposed long-term relationship with Zahir and striving to behave more like a normal bride.

‘Of course, I shouldn’t mention it,’ trilled Natasha, a six-foot-tall Ukrainian blonde, well on her way to supermodel status. ‘But Zahir was mine first.’

It was said so quietly and with such a sunny smile that it took several seconds for that spiteful confession to sink in on Saffy. She stared back into Natasha’s very pale blue eyes and murmured, ‘Really?’ as politely as if the other woman had commented on the weather.

‘Yes, a couple of years ago now. A fling at a film festival,’ Natasha confided with a little shrug of a designer-clad shoulder. ‘But he was hard to forget.’

‘Yes,’ Saffy acknowledged, passing on as soon as she could into less aggressive company, anger licking like fire at her composure. Mine first? No, he had been hers, her husband and then her ex-husband before he became anyone else’s. But the truth that he had sought amusement in other beds could still slash like a knife turning in her breast. She glanced back at Natasha, beautiful and reputedly sexually voracious, struggling not to picture Zahir entwined in her arms, and the nausea she had never experienced until that m

oment turned her stomach into a washing machine and sent sickness hurtling up her throat. Her skin clammy with perspiration, she rushed off to the cloakroom and made it just in time. She was horribly sick and it took a few minutes for her to freshen up and lose the unsteadiness that afflicted her in the aftermath.

When she emerged, Topsy was waiting for her. ‘Are you OK? Zahir saw you leaving and asked me to check.’

Zahir didn’t miss much, Saffy reflected wretchedly. ‘I think I just got bitten by morning sickness.’ And a very tall shrewish blonde.

But Saffy was no fan of ducking reality and she knew she had to deal with life as it was. Zahir had been with other women when he was no longer married to her and that was his business, not hers. His past was his own, just as hers would have been had she lived a little more dangerously since their first marriage. But unfortunately there had not been a cure for the fact that she had still found Zahir and her memory of him far more attractive than other men. What did that say about her? He was like a habit she had never managed to shake, her one and only fantasy, and the men who had pursued her over the years had never managed to cause her a single sleepless night. With the exception of Zahir, she had never pined for a phone call or a smile from a man, had truly never contrived to rouse that much interest, and perhaps that was why she had fallen so easily back into bed with him. Was it a kind of persistent physical infatuation? Had he somehow spoiled her for other men? She stared at him as she crossed the floor of the ballroom.

He was lithe, powerfully built and supremely sophisticated in his light grey morning suit with his luxuriant ebony hair fanning back from his brow; his dark deep-set eyes were riveting in his lean, bronzed face. He was drop-dead gorgeous and always had been a very hard act to follow. But as her body stirred with responses far removed from nausea, her breasts swelling and peaking beneath her bodice and a dull ache expanding in her pelvis, she was furious with herself for being so susceptible to a male who neither loved nor even truly wanted her.

‘What’s wrong?’ Zahir asked softly.

‘Why would anything be wrong?’ she traded tartly, ice in her cool scrutiny and edging her voice. ‘You tell me…film festival two years ago, Ukrainian blonde by the name of Natasha, ring any bells?’ That scornful and provocative question just leapt off Saffy’s tongue before she was even aware she was going to voice it.

The faintest hint of colour edged Zahir’s chiselled cheekbones but his dark golden gaze did not waver from hers. Indeed if anything he stood a little straighter. ‘I will never lie to you.’

Even when you should, she almost screamed at him, wanting, needing to know and yet fearing what knowing more would do to her.

‘There weren’t many and there was nothing serious,’ Zahir breathed in a harsh undertone. ‘This is not a conversation I want to have on our wedding day.’

‘It’s not something I want to talk about either!’ Saffy launched back at him, her eyes a very bright blue lit with anger.

His stubborn jaw line squared. ‘Before you judge me, ask yourself if you have any idea of what state I was in after our divorce.’

Saffy came over all defensive. ‘How would I know?’

‘When you’re ready to tell me what changed you out of all recognition in the bedroom, I’ll tell you why I did what I did.’ His brilliant dark eyes glittered. It was a challenge, blunt and simple, and it only made Saffy angrier than ever.

He had divorced her. He had made that choice. He could not expect her to accept the consequences or feel responsible for a situation that had not been of her making. As for what had changed her into a normal sexually able woman, that was not something she was willing to share with him. It was too private, too personal, might well affect the way he looked at her and that very possible outcome made her cringe.

‘Are you two actually arguing?’ Kat came up to demand in dismay.

‘We always did have a fiery relationship,’ Zahir admitted.

‘Not so different from our own,’ Kat’s husband, Mikhail, teased his wife. ‘It takes time to adjust to living with another person.’

‘Time and buckets of patience,’ Zahir added, an authoritative look stamped on his lean dark face that only made Saffy want to slap him hard.

‘Your guests are waiting for the bride and groom to start the dancing,’ Kat informed them more cheerfully.

Saffy wasn’t in the mood to dance, especially not with Natasha smirking at the side of the floor, but she owed her sister too much to risk upsetting her and she gave way with good grace.

Zahir was a great dancer with a natural sense of rhythm but Saffy felt as if someone had welded an iron bar to her spine and she was stiff in the circle of his arms, holding herself at a distance. Glimpses of Natasha watching them did not improve her mood. Yes, she had known he had made love to other women, but actually having a face to pin to one of those anonymous women was another turn of the torture screw. She had never thought of herself as the jealous type and now she was finding out different. Once Zahir had been hers, entirely hers, and even though things had gone wrong in the bedroom she had rather naively trusted him not to stray. Now she was wondering crazy things, such as how she compared to his other lovers, and she was regretting her lack of experience and her honesty on that score. Yet how could she have lied when her child’s paternity hinged on telling the complete truth? That reminder cooled the fizz in her blood, settled her down and made her seek another topic of conversation.

‘I thought you might have invited your brother and sister and possibly even Azel to the wedding,’ she remarked gingerly.

‘One of Hayat’s children is in hospital with complications following on from a bout of measles. Akram is standing in for me at an OPEC meeting and my sister-in-law, Azel, no longer lives with us. She remarried last year and now lives in Dubai,’ Zahir explained. ‘You will meet what remains of my family tomorrow.’

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Saffy said politely. ‘Do they know about the baby?’

‘Only my siblings. When we chose to marry in such haste, it made sense to be honest,’ Zahir said wryly.

Hot pink burned like a banner across her cheeks at the thought that his strictly raised siblings might assume that she was a total slut for succumbing so quickly and easily to their brother’s attractions.

‘You know, when you blush, the tip of your nose turns pink as well,’ Zahir husked. ‘It’s cute as hell.’

‘You know what happened in the desert…the baby,’ Saffy said sharply. ‘It’s all your fault.’

A sizzling, utterly unexpected smile played across Zahir’s wide sensual mouth and startled her. ‘I know. But out of it I gained a very beautiful wife and we have a baby in our future and I can’t find it within my heart to regret anything we did.’

Her eyes prickled and she blinked rapidly, knowing that her acid and pointless comment had not deserved so generous a response. Suddenly her tension gave and she rested her head down on his broad shoulder, drinking in and loving the familiar scent of him—warm clean male laced with an evocative hint of sandalwood. She was momentarily weak with the sheer amount of emotion pumping through her and so confused, still so desperately confused about what she felt, what she truly thought. With every passing moment, her feelings seemed to swing to one side and then violently to the other. So much had happened between them in such a short time frame that she was mentally all over the place.

Saffy was half asleep by the time they left for the airport. She had changed into a very elegant shift dress and jacket almost the same colour as her eyes and let her hair down to flow round her shoulders in a golden mane. Relaxation was infiltrating her for the first time that day. Drowsily she studied the platinum ring on her finger. They were married again: she couldn’t quite believe it.

‘I think I’ll sleep all the way to Maraban,’ Saffy told him apologetically as they boarded the private jet.

‘It’s been a long day and it is after midnight,’ Zahir conceded wryly. ‘But first there’s something I’d like to te

ll you.’

Alert to the guarded note in his dark deep drawl, Saffy felt her adrenalin start to pump. The jet took off and drinks were served. She undid her belt, let the stewardess show her into the sleeping compartment where she freshened up, and then she rejoined Zahir, made herself comfortable and sipped her fresh orange juice. ‘So?’ she prompted quietly, proud of her patience and self-discipline while she wondered what he had to unveil. ‘What is it?’

Zahir straightened his broad shoulders and settled hard dark eyes on her without flinching. ‘I’ve bought the Desert Ice cosmetics company.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

SAFFY BLINKED IN astonishment, for of all the many surprises she had thought Zahir might want to disclose that one staggering confession had not figured. She set down her glass and stood up, her mind in a bemused fog. ‘You bought the company? But why? Why the heck would you do that?’

‘It was a good investment.’ Zahir loosed a sardonic laugh that bluntly dismissed that explanation. ‘But I bought it only for your benefit. I knew the company had a cast-iron contract with you and I didn’t want anyone putting pressure on you while you were pregnant.’

Eyes slowly widening, Saffy stared back at him in rampant disbelief, while she wondered what strings he had pulled to learn the contract terms she had been on with the company. ‘I can’t believe that you would interfere in my career to that extent!’ she admitted in stunned disbelief, anger steadily gathering below the surface of that initial reaction. ‘Nobody was putting pressure on me at the meeting I attended with their campaign manager this week.’

Cynicism hardened Zahir’s expressive mouth, making him look inexpressibly tough in a way far different from the younger man she remembered. It was a look that was hard, weathered and unapologetic and she refused to be intimidated by it. ‘Naturally not. By that time, I was the new owner, so of course there was no pressure. They can film your face as much as they like while you’re pregnant but they’ll be doing it in Maraban.’