‘Here…’ He offered her the stick of white plastic. Taking it back, she stared at it for a long time without saying a single word.
‘It doesn’t seem so important now,’ she murmured eventually.
‘The proof or the baby?’
She shrugged then pouted. ‘Both, I suppose.’
In other words the delight she should be experiencing had been robbed from the moment. On a sigh, he scooped her up in his arms again and stood up.
‘Where are you taking me now?’ she questioned.
‘Bed,’ he answered bluntly. ‘Preferably naked, so that I can hold you and our child so close to me you will never, ever manage to prise yourself free.’
‘But your father—’
‘Has Rafiq,’ he inserted. ‘And you have me.’
With that he pushed open the door to the main corridor, then stopped dead when he saw the sea of anxious faces waiting for news.
‘My father has recovered,’ he announced. ‘And my wife is pregnant.’
There, he thought as he watched every single one fall to their knees and give thanks to Allah, that has killed two birds with one single stone. Now the phones could start buzzing and the news would go out to all corners of the state. By the time they arose in the morning there would not be a person who did not know what had taken place here tonight.
‘You could have given me a chance to break the news to my own father.’ Leona showed that her own thoughts were as usual not far from his own.
‘He knows—or suspects. For I told him when I asked him to come here tonight. That was while we were still sailing the Red Sea, by the way,’ he added as he walked them through the two lines of kneeling bodies. ‘Raschid alerted me at Evie’s instigation. And I am telling you all of this because I wish to get all my guilty machinations out of the way before we hit the bed.’
‘You mean that Evie knew you suspected when I called her up yesterday and she didn’t drop a hint of it to me?’
‘They are sneaky, those Al-Kadahs,’ he confided as he trod the stairs. ‘Where do you think I get it from?’
‘And your arrogance?’
‘Al-Qadim through and through,’ he answered. ‘Our child will have it too, I must warn you. Plenty of it, since you have your own kind of arrogance too.’
‘Maybe that’s why I love you.’
He stopped halfway up the stairs to slash her a wide, white rakish grin. ‘And maybe,’ he said lazily, ‘that is why I love you.’
She smiled, lifted herself up to touch his mouth with her own. He continued on his way while they were still kissing—with an audience of fifty watching them from the floor below.
Why not let them look? Sheikh Hassan thought. This was his woman, his wife, the mother of his coming child. He would kiss her wherever and whenever. It was his right. Inshallah.
Ethan’s Temptress Bride
By Michelle Reid
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON
AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG
STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID
PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND
CHAPTER ONE
PARADISE was a sleepy island floating in the Caribbean. It had a bar on the beach, rum on tap and the unique sound of island music, which did seductive things to the hot and humid late afternoon air, while beyond the bar’s open rough-wood construction the silky blue ocean lapped lazily against a white-sand shore.