‘You look pale like a ghost,’ the old sheikh remarked.
‘I’m fine,’ Leona assured him.
‘They tell me you fainted the other day.’
‘I still had my sea legs on,’ Leona explained. ‘And how did you find out about it?’ she challenged, because as far as she knew no one but herself and Hassan had been there at the time!
‘My palace walls are equipped with a thousand eyes.’ He smiled. ‘So I also know that when he is not with me my son walks around wearing the face of a man whose father is already dead.’
‘He is a busy man doing busy, important things,’ Leona said with a bite that really should have been resisted.
‘He also has a wife who sleeps in one place while he sleeps in another.’
Getting in practice, Leona thought nastily. ‘Do you want to finish this chapter or not?’ she asked.
‘I would prefer you to confide in me,’ the old sheikh murmured gently. ‘You used to do so all the time, before I became too sick to be of any use to anyone…’
A blatant plucking of her heartstrings though it was, Leona could see the concern in his eyes. On a sigh, she laid the book aside, got up to go and sit down beside him and picked up one of his cool, dry, skeletal hands to press a gentle kiss to it.
‘Don’t fret so, old man,’ s
he pleaded gently. ‘You know I will look after your two sons for you. I have promised, haven’t I?’
‘But you are unhappy. Do you think this does not fret me?’
‘I—struggle with the reasons why I am here,’ she explained, because she wasn’t going to lie. It wasn’t fair to lie to him. ‘You know the problems. They are not going to go away just because Hassan wants them to.’
‘My son wants you above all things, daughter of Victor Frayne,’ he said, using the Arab way of referring to her, because by their laws a woman kept her father’s name after marriage. ‘Don’t make him choose to prove this to you…’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DON’T make him choose…The next day, those words played inside Leona’s head like a mantra, because she had just begun to realise that Hassan might not be forced to choose anything.
Sickness in the morning, sickness in the evening, a certain tenderness in her breasts and other changes in her body that she could no longer ignore were trying to tell her something she was not sure she wanted to know.
Pregnant. She could be pregnant. She might be pregnant. She absolutely refused to say that she was most definitely pregnant. How could she be sure, when her periods had never been anything but sporadic at best? Plus it had to be too soon to tell. It had to be. She was just wishing on rainbows—wasn’t she?
A month. She had been back in Hassan’s life for a tiny month—and not even a full month! Women just didn’t know that quickly if they had conceived, did they? She didn’t know. At this precise moment she didn’t know anything. Her brain was blank, her emotions shot and she was fighting an ever-growing battle with excitement that was threatening to turn her into a puff of smoke!
It was this morning that had really set her suspicions soaring, when she’d climbed out of bed feeling sick and dizzy before her feet had managed to touch the floor. Then, in the shower, she’d seen the changes in her breasts, a new fullness, darkening circles forming round their tips. She’d felt different too—inside, where it was impossible to say how she felt different, only that she did.
Instinct. What did she know about the female instinct in such situations?
Doubt. She had to doubt her own conclusions because the specialists had given her so little hope of it ever happening for them.
But even her skin felt different, her hair, the strange, secret glint she kept on catching in her own eyes whenever she looked in a mirror. She’d stopped looking in the mirror. It was easier not to look than look and then see, then dare—dare to hope.
I want Hassan, she thought on a sudden rocketing rise of anxiety.
I don’t want Hassan! she then changed her mind. Because if he saw her like this he would know something really drastic was worrying her and she couldn’t tell him—didn’t dare tell him, raise his hopes, until she was absolutely sure for herself.
She needed one of those testing kits, she realised. But, if such a thing was obtainable, where could she get one from without alerting half of Rahman? There was not a chemist’s in the country she could walk into and buy such an obvious thing without setting the jungle drums banging from oasis to oasis and back again.
But I need one. I need one! she thought agitatedly.
Ring Hassan, that tiny voice inside her head persisted. Tell him your suspicions, get him to bring a pregnancy testing kit home with him.
Oh, yes, she mocked that idea. I can just see Sheikh Hassan Al-Qadim walking into a chemist’s and buying one of those!