The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum (20 page)

Turn to me, he longed to say, but though he might not have known her long, he knew she would have to work her own way out of her confusion. All he could do was be there for her.

For her and the baby…

CHAPTER ELEVEN

L
IZ
returned to her room and, working out the time difference between Al Tinine and home, phoned Gillian to ask how Oliver was.

There had been no change. This information didn’t help. Although she chatted to her friend for a few minutes, asking after the cat and the hospital, she didn’t mention she’d given birth to Oliver’s baby. If thinking about the baby made her teary, talking about her to Gill would have brought on an emotional tsunami!

‘So, now what?’ she said aloud in the empty room, but when she tried to think she realised her brain had turned to jelly and refused to cooperate.

Maybe if she slept…

She was a sand sprite, coming to life only at night. The darkness all around her told her it was night, so she moved, tentatively at first, feeling for limbs instead of whirling grains of sand, finding legs and arms and toes and fingers, realising she was alive
.

Because it was night? Or because she’d made love to a human and been forced to stay alive for ever?

Wasn’t that a good thing?

Yes, most definitely, when her body remembered the shivery excitement of their kisses, the languorous pleasure of the human’s touch, the smoothness of the couch beneath them, the heat of his body curled into hers, his tenderness, the gasping pleasure as they climaxed, lying with him afterwards, held safely in his arms
.

A prince. He was a prince, and beautiful, and staying alive meant she could love him for ever and he would love her, and so she’d have no regrets, would she…?

She woke with a start, the dream so vivid her body could feel the physical pleasure she and Khalifa had shared.

But he
was
a prince, and him loving her for ever was no more than a dream.

Restless now, she glanced at her watch. Past midnight—her body clock was all out of kilter again. But past midnight meant there’d be few people in the nursery. She could safely go and look—just look—at the baby. Oliver’s baby.

She pulled on a gown and started down the corridors, past the windows to the outside verandas where the families of patients slept, and quietly into the nursery, moving unerringly towards the baby’s crib, stopping when she realised the man asleep in the chair beside it was Khalifa.

Khalifa?

She backed away into a shadowy corner because the baby was stirring, and although the little one hadn’t made a sound Khalifa must have sensed she was awake, for he straightened up and peered into the crib, then, smiling, lifted the little bundle into his arms, talking to her, rocking her, smiling all the time. The baby lay still, yet Khalifa didn’t return her to the crib but held her in his arms, sitting down again, speaking so quietly Liz couldn’t tell if it was in Arabic or English.

Liz crept away, more confused than ever.

Was the baby a replacement to him—for the daughter he had lost? If not, why was he doing this, sitting with her, holding her, talking to her?

Bonding!

She should go and ask him, but in truth she was glad the baby had someone holding her and talking to her, especially a male so she’d know the man smell of him.

But thinking of the man smell of Khalifa was dangerous when she was in this muddled state of mind, so she returned to bed and forced herself to count camels until she fell asleep. Although, she thought muzzily as she drifted off, she couldn’t recall actually seeing a camel since she’d been here.

She spent the next day avoiding Khalifa, avoiding the nursery when she saw him there, spending time with Phil as they worked out costings for the new unit, and checking equipment that was already coming in. But it was hard to avoid him when she returned to her room to find not only Khalifa in it, but a crib, complete with baby, presumably the one she’d carried, though not hers, never hers.

Her eyes filled with tears and she cursed her own weakness, but Khalifa’s attention was on the baby, so maybe be hadn’t noticed.

She dashed them away with her hand and hardened her voice.

‘What’s this?’

He turned abruptly, as if caught out in wrongdoing, then smiled the smile that touched her heart every time she saw it.

Coming towards her, he took both her hands in his, guiding her to the bed and settling her on it, sitting beside her and curling his arm around her shoulders.

‘Liz, there’s been news and I had to tell you personally. But I didn’t want to leave the baby so I brought her along as well.’

The words made so little sense Liz shook her head, but her eyes were darting towards the crib, towards the little pink and white bundle with a shock of dark hair lying, swaddled, in it.

Khalifa’s arm tightened and his voice was deep and grave.

‘Oliver is dead,’ he said.

Shock held her silent but only for a moment.

‘He can’t be. I spoke to Gill last night.’

‘I’m sorry, my love, but he is,’ Khalifa responded. ‘His parents decided to turn off the life support this morning.’

Although a little bit of her had grabbed those two words—
my love
—and clung to them, Liz knew she had to understand the real message,
and
the implications of it.

Implications that had started panic in her chest.

‘But the baby? What about the baby?’

‘We don’t have to decide that right now,’ Khalifa told her gently, ‘but I rather hoped she might be ours.’

Confusion joined the panic.

‘Ours?’

‘Yours and mine, but we’ll work that out later. Right now, do you want to hold her, nurse her, talk to her, think about a name?’

‘But…’

Had he sensed her total confusion? For he left her sitting on the bed and went to the crib, lifting the baby, murmuring to it in a foreign language, the voice deep and soothing, switching to English as he took a step towards Liz.

‘See,
farida
, precious pearl, this is your mother. I was telling you about her, and now she really can be your mother and hold you, just as I told you.’

Liz could only stare at him, but she held out shaking arms and took the infant, no longer concerned about the tears that flooded from her eyes and fell to dampen the tiny bundle’s wrappings.

Khalifa stood and watched her, seeing the happiness behind the tears, understanding the welter of emotion Liz must be going through. The loss of her friend, but the confirmation that the baby she’d carried so generously for her brother and his partner would now be hers.

If only he could take the pain away from her, carry it for her, help her through it.

If only he had the right.

He sat and held them both, a million thoughts flashing through his head, but paramount among them was the need to make this woman his—so that he and she and the baby would make a family and he
could
help her through her grief.

‘She’s eating well and sleeping well and needs no special care,’ he told her. ‘If we take Laya to help you look after her while you regain your strength, can we take her home?’

‘Home?’ Liz queried, turning to look at him, dampness from her tears still lingering on her cheeks so he had to touch her to brush it away.

He took a deep breath and plunged into what he later realised was a
most
prosaic and loveless proposal. But he had to get it said before his courage failed completely. The thought of losing this woman was so overwhelming he had to know where he stood.

‘This is not the most romantic spot for what I want to say, but I don’t know when there’ll be another time for us to be together—just the three of us.’

He was frowning and Liz realised that his voice, for the first time since she’d met him, was slightly hesitant. Then he smiled, and while her body went into its usual reaction of delight, her brain told her that something important was coming up.

Tension built to snapping point as Liz waited.

And waited.

Now he tried for a smile, tightened his grip on her shoulders, and said, with a pathetic smile, ‘How would you feel about marrying a bloke with more money than sense?’

Khalifa knew he was making a complete hash of this. The moment the words had come out he’d known they were wrong, but apart from yelling ‘Marry me’, which was what he’d most wanted to do, he’d not had a clue of how to propose.

No wonder Liz looked confused.

‘M-m-marry you?’ she stuttered. ‘Why?’

‘Because we like each other and we’ve got the baby. I’ve been bonding with her, like you said, and I can give you both a comfortable life, and you can still work if you want to, and you seem to like the country and the people you’ve met, and there’s no one left for you at home—you told me that—and, besides, I’d like it.’

He had a vague feeling he’d made things worse but was still surprised by her reaction.

‘Is this to do with guilt?’ she demanded. ‘Guilt about your wife and child dying, guilt about taking me out into the desert? I might not have known you long, Khlaifa, but I know how you treasure your guilt, piling it up inside you like the nomads pile their belongings on their camels.’

His turn to be stunned!

He tried to protest but she was speaking again.

‘And would a replacement wife and child, no matter how well you’ve bonded with the child, ease that guilt?’

‘Liz, no, believe me, that’s not true.’

She eyed him with suspicion written clearly on her face, but when she spoke it was to comfort him. She took his hand and used both of hers to hold it.

‘It wasn’t your fault your first wife died,’ she said gently. ‘You know that. As for me, the scorpion stung me because I was there and I was careless. I knew about scorpions and should have shaken out my clothes before putting them on, so you don’t have to marry me out of guilt, okay?’

‘I didn’t offer out of guilt,’ he muttered at her, annoyed now that something he’d thought would be so easy was turning into a nightmare.

‘Then why did you offer?’ she demanded, her blue eyes behind the horror glasses so huge he could have drowned in them.

‘I told you,’ he said desperately. ‘We’re good together, I already love the baby, you like my country, there are plenty of reasons for us to marry.’

For a moment he thought those eyes had filled with tears but she turned away from him before he could be sure, looking out the window, her shoulders lifting with a sigh that seemed to echo around the desert beyond the car.

‘No!’ she said, just
no
, nothing more, sitting there, not even looking at him.

He stood up and began to pace the room, trying to work out how things had gone so disastrously wrong.

Would asking why help?

Not if her answer was she didn’t love him.

In fact, that would make things worse.

Then he asked anyway, because he had to know.

Just one word—why?

Liz beckoned him back to sit beside her before she began to speak.

‘You gave a lot of reasons for wanting to marry me,’ she said, thinking through each word because she knew she had to get it right. ‘But not the one I wanted to hear—the one I needed to hear.’

She moved and touched her hands to his face, cupping it and looking into his eyes.

‘I know it will probably sound stupid to you, Khalifa, but all my adult life I’ve known the one thing I wanted out of marriage, and that wasn’t money, or a job, or even a palace. Just love. I wanted love like my parents had, like Oliver and Bill’s. Mutual love that transcends all else, that distracts you at the most inconvenient time, that maddens and annoys and makes you ache when your loved one isn’t near. You told me of the sand sprite and somehow made it sound as if she regretted making love to her human lover. But if she loved him there’d have been no regrets. There
are
no regrets with love.’

He put his hands on hers where they still rested on his face, his heart so full he doubted he could speak.

But speak he must.

‘You don’t love me?’ he asked, and to his surprise she laughed.

‘Oh, Khalifa,’ she whispered. ‘If you only knew how much! I love you to distraction and probably have since soon after we first met. But that’s not enough. It has to be returned, or our life would be like a see-saw with one of us always up and the other always down, never balanced.’

‘And you think it’s not returned?’ he murmured, and now he took her face in hers and kissed her lips, claimed them, consuming her with kisses.

‘You say I’ve driven you to distraction since we first met, but you…!’ he murmured against the soft skin of her neck. ‘You’ve blown my mind, you’ve turned my life upside down, you’ve got me in such a state the whole country could have fallen apart, so absorbed I’ve been in you. Then when you went into labour, I panicked that something would go wrong and I would lose you. Yes, I did feel guilt—but most of all I felt pain. Then I delivered your baby and it was as if heaven had given me a gift. I thought if I offered you a wonderful life for you and the baby you might stay here, but I should have known you better. Love? Of course I love you. More than I can ever say, more than you could ever know, always and for ever.’

‘But you didn’t think to mention it in your proposal?’ she teased.

He rested his hands on hers and tried to explain.

‘I was—I suppose scared sounds stupid, but that’s what I was. Terrified more like—because after all it’s just a word but…’

He couldn’t do it, not sitting here so close, so he stood again and paced.

‘I’d never realised quite how powerful a word it was, but even thinking about saying it made me feel vulnerable, and I doubt I’d ever felt that way before. Even when I was a child in the desert, or at boarding school. I’m a sheikh, with a long line of tough warriors behind me. We cannot be vulnerable. What if you hadn’t loved me back—how much more vulnerable would that have made me? I know this must sound strange to you, but when I told you I loved you just now, that’s the first time I’ve ever used the word—in English or in Arabic.’