Ruling Sheikh, Unruly Mistress

‘You should have realised what, Lucy?’ Razi pressed fiercely. ‘That I’m not going to be easily drawn in—or fobbed off? What should you have realised? Why are you here?’

‘Let me go—’

‘Not until you tell me the real reason for your surprise visit. After—what is it? Almost twelve weeks?’

‘You make it sound so—’

‘Suspicious?’ Razi rapped, all semblance of civilised behaviour stripped from his face. ‘How would you feel in my place? Suspicious would just be a start, I’m guessing—’

‘Please let me go.’

‘Not until you tell me the truth—’

‘I can’t…’

‘Why not?’

Her voice might be broken, but from some primal depth the fire of being a new mother rushed out of her in a shout. ‘I just can’t! Okay?’

‘Don’t ask me to believe you’ve come halfway round the world on the off chance I’d be free to speak to you about some plan you have to open a restaurant. Even if you didn’t email those plans through first, you’d make an appointment—’

‘I tried to.’

Razi called every bluff she’d had and had never seemed more the desert King than he did in that moment. He was so darkly forbidding, she was shivering with fright, but that was no use to her here. She had to think of her baby and for the sake of that child she would fight. She wasn’t ashamed of herself or her baby and Razi was right on all counts. If she had wanted to put a business proposition in front of him a face-to-face meeting would have been unnecessary at this stage. Only a child would bring her here to face him. And now that child’s father was waiting for her to prove herself unworthy of being a mother. She had to tell him.

‘Are you pregnant?’ Razi demanded, stealing the initiative.

His instinct shocked her to the point where she couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘Yes, I’m pregnant.’ She would never deny the existence of her child.

‘You’re pregnant?’ Razi’s voice had taken on a new and frightening tone as if he had hit her with the most extreme reason he could think of for her coming to Isla de Sinnebar and had only just realised it might be true.

Lucy’s hands flew to protect her womb as Razi stared at her and for one glittering moment the prospect of having Razi al Maktabi as her protector and the hands-on father of her child was a heady prospect, but then she accepted reality. He would never acknowledge a foreigner who was virtually a member of his kitchen staff as an equal and a royal child would never be allowed to leave the country. She had told him the truth and was damned. If she hadn’t told him she would have been equally damned, for then she would never have been able to look her child in the eyes and tell that child the truth about her father.

‘So that’s why you fell into a faint at my feet—and why you looked so pale when we arrived in the desert.’ Razi’s expression darkened. ‘Have you no sense of responsibility? No concern for anyone but yourself? Don’t you care about your child? Or—’

‘You?’ Lucy interrupted. She had paled beneath Razi’s onslaught, but rallied to defend the truth. ‘I care about you more than you know.’

Even as he exclaimed with disbelief she saw a look in his eyes she’d never seen before. It spoke of a fierce pain—a pain from the past that still had the power to hurt him. ‘I’m pregnant, Razi,’ she said quietly, ‘and that’s a fact as well as a cause for rejoicing. I’m afraid you’ll just have to get used to it—I have.’

Get used to it? He was already changing. A baby? He was ice. He was fire. He didn’t dare to hope. ‘A baby or our baby?’ he demanded, fuelled by unbearable suspicion.

‘My baby.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question, Lucy,’ he told her coldly. But he could tell it was a baby she had loved from the first moment she had realised she was pregnant. He didn’t question Lucy’s maternal instinct. She would defend her child to her last breath. He envied her that depth of feeling. But all Lucy’s thoughts were centred on the baby and on her duties as th

at baby’s mother and this passionate new love had blinded her to reality and to the world outside her own cosmos. She could have no idea of the repercussions inside a country like Isla de Sinnebar if the news leaked out. ‘How do you know it’s our child?’ he said, feeling calmer now his mind had cleared to make way for this most crucial of tests.

‘Because there hasn’t been anyone else,’ she said, appearing more vulnerable than ever as she made this innocent admission.

He closed his heart to her. ‘How do I know that? How do I know I can trust you?’

Her steady gaze shamed him, but still he drove on to seek the truth. ‘How do I know that I’m not one of many guests you…entertained?’

He stopped the flat of her hand before it reached his face, holding her wrist in a non-negotiable grip.

‘Let go of me!’ she insisted, struggling to break free.

His answer was to bring her closer so he could stare into her wounded eyes. ‘I’ll release you when you calm down and tell me the truth—and I mean all of it.’