Zarif's Convenient Queen

‘I honestly did think it was safe. When I began taking that pill, it wasn’t for contraception and I probably didn’t pay a lot of heed to any warnings that were in the instructions. That first day...we were together,’ she framed awkwardly, ‘I assumed it would be safe because I’ve been taking it for a couple of years and one’s always reading about how very long it can take for a woman to fall pregnant. I mean, I really didn’t think it could be that easy.’

‘Obviously you’re very fertile,’ Zarif pointed out flatly.

‘I couldn’t help the fact that I was sick the night before we slept together!’ Ella argued, feeling that she had to defend herself. ‘It didn’t occur to me that I was probably no longer protected because of that. I was convinced that I was telling you the truth when I said it was safe.’

‘Were you really?’ Zarif queried in a tone she had never heard him use before, a tone of doubt and mistrust. ‘Or did you work out for yourself that this is the one development that will ensure I do not divorce you and set you aside after a year?’

Ella dealt him an appalled appraisal, shaken that he could think her capable of such manipulative behaviour. ‘That’s a filthy thing to say. How can you even suspect that?’

‘Naturally I’m suspicious...particularly after you threw yourself at me last night. Presumably you didn’t yet realise that you were already pregnant and we had not been having sex. Obviously you had to ensure sex took place to have any hope of conceiving.’

‘I did not throw myself at you!’ Ella launched, rearing up in the bed in a positive fury.

Zarif knew he was burning boats but he couldn’t stop himself from working up a firestorm in which resentment, incredulity and suspicion dominated. Just at that moment it was too deeply painful for him to think about the baby on the way and the savage irony that for him and Ella conception had happened so very easily. All that he would allow himself to think was that once again he was being forced into a path he had not freely chosen. There were very few things in his life that he was free to choose for himself but this time around, at least, he had had the freedom to choose his own wife. And now that was gone and his little piece of self-indulgence had become a life sentence.

His stormy departure left a terrible silence stretching in its wake. Slowly, carefully, Ella got up, standing only when she was convinced that the sick dizziness had faded. She sat down at the breakfast table and sipped at the special ginger tea Dr Mansour had said he would order from the kitchens for her. She supposed she would have to start thinking of all sorts of things that she had never had to consider before. In fact her every action would have to be tailored to whatever would best suit the baby she carried. A baby, Ella thought, splaying a hand across her flat tummy with quiet and loving satisfaction. Zarif’s baby. Yet how could she want the child of a man she hated?

Of course hatred was a little over the top as a description of her feelings, she conceded. Events had suddenly got wildly out of control and Zarif was a dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ man, who liked to plan everything. The conception of a child with the wrong woman was a shockingly unexpected development and he hadn’t reacted well. Had she supposed he would? Presumably being male he was not being bombarded by the warm, positively fluffy pictures of a cuddly baby currently consuming her thoughts.

CHAPTER TEN

ZARIF SHARED THE news with Halim and Halim was overjoyed and hailed Ella as the most wonderful woman ever. ‘So soon...already a little mother-to-be,’ he kept on saying, patting his nephew’s arm in fond emphasis. ‘A gift is in order, a gift to express my great joy and gratitude.’

‘It could be a girl,’ Zarif pointed out, disconcerted by his uncle’s gushing effusions and suddenly painfully aware that his own reaction should have been similar.

‘Then the next will be a male.’ Halim would not allow anyone to rain on his parade. ‘Are you happy, my boy? Or does all this only bring back unhappy memories?’

‘A little of both,’ Zarif admitted truthfully. ‘You will forgive me if I return to Ella now?’

‘This is a new beginning for you and our family, Zarif,’ the old man told him quietly. ‘Don’t allow the sadness of the past to shadow the present.’

But the past had made Zarif who he wa

s, honing him down to the essentials of duty and honour and making him a very tough judge of his own behaviour. And now without the smallest warning he was aware of all the many things that he had not said to Ella and, desert robes swishing in accompaniment to his long, forceful stride, he sped back to the quarters he shared with his wife.

When Zarif strode into the dining room, Ella spared him a careless glance of acknowledgement. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said in the same voice with which she might have greeted an unappetising serving of cold porridge.

‘I said some things I should not have said,’ Zarif announced.

‘How’s that new?’ Ella asked waspishly, watching his long, beautifully shaped fingers flex across the chair back in angry response and getting a mean kick from that tiny display of human frailty. ‘Apparently you think I am calculating and mercenary, and someone who wants to stay a queen and spend loads and loads of your money.’

‘Instead of which you are the heartbreak of the Qurzah shopkeepers because you browse and never buy. I know that material things are not important to you,’ Zarif told her tautly, ‘but from this moment on we are truly man and wife with all that that entails and it is permanent.’

Ella stared stonily at the jug of hot chocolate whose fumes now made her tummy roll as though she were on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. ‘Permanent?’ she queried half an octave higher. ‘No, thanks. I still want the divorce I was promised.’

Zarif stared back at her in stark disbelief, darkly fringed tawny eyes full of condemnation. ‘You can’t have a divorce now...you’re pregnant.’

‘And yet you are not a happy camper about that,’ Ella slotted in drily, ramming back her sense of pained rejection as she made that observation. ‘So, please don’t think for one moment that I intend to ruin both our lives, and our child’s for that matter, by staying with you as your wife for ever. On those terms for ever sounds like a death sentence.’

Zarif straightened to his full imposing height. ‘Even if I have to lock you up and throw away the key, understand one thing now...’ he advised harshly. ‘I will not lose another child.’

Jolted out of self-pitying sarcasm by that very real statement of loss, Ella pushed herself up out of her seat with a troubled frown. ‘Zarif?’

‘My son died as a stranger to me,’ Zarif bit out not quite steadily, shocking her where she stood from the pain he made no attempt to hide, lean, dark features stamped with lines of grief and regret he had never allowed her to see before. ‘I held him only once and briefly after his birth. Then he was kept away from me because men were not welcome in the nursery. It wasn’t thought proper or normal for me to take too much of an interest in him while he was still a baby. I was told I could get to know my son later when he was older...but there was no later and he never did get any older...’

And Ella’s heart cracked right down the middle inside her, tears on his behalf stinging her eyes and clogging her throat. She hurt so much for him at that moment that she almost crossed the room to wrap her arms round him in a desperate effort to comfort him. ‘I’m so sorry, Zarif,’ she said weakly instead.

‘That is why I will not let you leave me or take my child away from me. Boy or girl, it is immaterial. I will be here for this child at every stage of his or her life,’ he completed hoarsely.