The Sheikh's Secret Babies

There was a distance, a reserve in Jaul that had not been there before, and he had not made love to her since their wedding night. Of course, he had been forced to sit up late with his visitors, she acknowledged ruefully. He had come to bed in the early hours and had still risen at the crack of dawn as he always did. But since that first night, he hadn’t touched her at all, indeed had suddenly become very restrained in his behaviour in a way that was totally unfamiliar and confusing to Chrissie because Jaul was such a naturally physical person. Last night, for instance, she had shifted over to his side of the bed and he had lain there as rigid as an icicle being threatened by the heat of a fire. Chrissie had intended to make encouraging moves herself but the polite goodnight he had murmured had made her pull back from that idea.

Maybe, she thought anxiously, now that she was available all the time, as it were, she didn’t have quite the same appeal. Or more probably, common sense suggested gently, he was simply exhausted by early starts, late nights and the need for constant courteous diplomacy while he worked with the different factions involved in the talks that were lasting, on average, eighteen hours a day. The very last thing she should be doing with Jaul, she told herself urgently, was allowing her imagination or her insecurities to conjure up seeming problems in what was probably perfectly ordinary behaviour. Their marriage was working, wasn’t it? She thought it was working but the renewed closeness she had fancied she saw during their second wedding night seemed to have evaporated again.

When they arrived back at the palace, Bandar greeted them in the entrance porch to speak urgently to Jaul. Jaul pokered up and a flush mantled his exotic cheekbones, his response to his aide clipped and cool in tone.

‘What’s happened?’ Chrissie asked worriedly.

A tiny muscle pulled tight at the corner of Jaul’s unsmiling mouth. ‘My grandmother has arrived in Marwan and has asked to see me. She’s staying at an hotel in the city.’

‘My goodness, she must be quite an age now,’ Chrissie remarked.

‘I understand that she is travelling with her daughter, Rose. Obviously at some stage she remarried...my grandfather did not,’ Jaul could not resist reminding her.

‘I suppose, taking into account how he and your father felt about her, it would be an awkward and uncomfortable meeting for you but—’

Jaul froze and fell still.’ I have no intention of agreeing to a meeting with the ladies. I have instructed Bandar to send my apologies and an appropriate gift.’

Chrissie closed a dismayed hand over his arm and tugged him into one of the many cluttered reception rooms off the ground-floor hall of the palace. ‘You can’t mean that?’

Jaul frowned down at her, his stunning bone structure rigid. ‘Please try to understand, Chrissie. I have never heard any good of Lady Sophie, only that she is a terrible troublemaker and I have quite enough to deal with at the moment without encouraging that sort of personality into my life.’

Chrissie was disconcerted by the force and strength of his comprehensive rejection of his grandmother and his aunt and had to resist an urge to risk changing the subject by asking him what else he was struggling to deal with that was so onerous that he could not spare an elderly woman a fifteen-minute hearing even when she had come so far to see him.

‘You have to change your mind about this, Jaul.’

‘Although I have every respect for your opinion, I will stand firm on this,’ Jaul grated, temper licking along the edges of his roughened voice. ‘This is not your business.’

‘Lady Sophie is the twins’ great-grandmother and that makes her my business as well.’

Jaul shot her an impatient glittering golden glance and compressed his wide, shapely mouth as he took an impatient step closer to the door. ‘I refuse to discuss this any further. I have told you how I feel and why.’

‘I’ll go and see her in your stead.’

Jaul swung back lightning fast from the exit he had been making. ‘No, you will not. I forbid it.’

‘You forbid it?’ Chrissie repeated in an almost whispered undertone, wondering when and where her husband had developed the belief that he had the right to forbid her from doing anything.