The Sheikh's Baby. Penny Jordan
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her, grimly checking and rechecking the compass as she drove up and down what felt like an interminable series of the sand dunes until eventually, in the distance through the sand blowing against her windscreen, she could just about see the looming mass of the mountain range.
It was already four o’clock and the light seemed to be fading, a fact that panicked Mariella into driving a little faster. She had never dreamed that her journey would prove so hazardous and she was very much regretting having set out on it, but now at last its end was in sight.
It took her almost another hour of zigzagging across the sand dunes to reach the rocky thrust of the beginnings of the mountain range. The oasis was situated in a deep ravine, its escarpment so high that Mariella shuddered a little as she drove into its shadows. This was the last kind of place she had expected to appeal to the man who had been her sister’s faithless lover.
Would his villa here be as palatial as his home in Zuran? Mariella frowned and checked as the ravine opened out and she saw the oasis ahead of her. Remote and beautiful in its own way, it was very obviously a place of deep solitude, the oasis itself enclosed with a fringing of palms illuminated by the eerie glow of the final rays of the setting sun. Shielding her eyes, Mariella stopped the vehicle to look around. Where was the villa? All she could see was one solitary pavilion tent! A good-sized pavilion, to be sure, but most definitely not a villa! Had she somehow got lost—again?
Fleur had started to cry, a cross, tired, hungry noise that alerted Mariella to the fact that for Fleur’s sake if nothing else she needed to stop.
Carefully she drove the vehicle forward over the treacherously boulder-rutted track, which seemed more like a dry riverbed than a roadway! Sand blowing in from the desert was covering the boulders and the thin sparse grass of the oasis.
There was a vehicle parked several yards from the pavilion and Mariella stopped next to it.
A man was emerging from the pavilion, alerted to her arrival by the sound of her vehicle.
As he strode towards her, his robe caught by the strong wind and flattened against his body revealing a torso muscle structure that caused her to suck in her own stomach in a sharply dangerous womanly response to its maleness.
And then he turned his head and looked at her, and the earth halted on its axis before swinging perilously in a sickening movement as Mariella recognised him.
It was the man from the airport. The man from her dream!
CHAPTER TWO
HIS HAND WAS on the door handle of the four-wheel drive. Wrenching it open, he demanded angrily, ‘Who the devil are you?’
He was looking at her eyes again, with that same look of biting contempt glittering in his own as he raked her with a gritty gaze.
‘I’m looking for Sheikh Xavier Al Agir,’ Mariella responded, returning his look with one of her own—plus interest!
‘What? What do you want with him?’
He was curt to the point of rudeness, but then, given what she had already seen—and dreamed—of him, she wouldn’t have expected anything else.
‘What I want with him is no business of yours!’ she told him angrily.
In her seat Fleur’s cries grew louder.
Peering into the vehicle, he demanded in disbelief, ‘You’ve brought a baby out in this?’
The disgust and anger in his voice made her face sting even more than the pieces of sand blown against it by the wind.
‘What the hell possessed you? Didn’t you hear the weather warning earlier? This area was reported as being strictly out of bounds to tourists because of the threat of sandstorms.’
Hot-faced, Mariella remembered how she had switched off the radio to play Fleur’s tapes.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve arrived at an inconvenient time,’ she responded sarcastically to cover her own discomfort, ‘but if you could just give me directions for the Oasis Istafan, then—’
‘This is the Oasis Istafan,’ came back the immediate and cold response.
It was? Then?
‘I want to see Sheikh Xavier Al Agir,’ Mariella told him again, gathering her composure together. ‘I presume he is here?’
‘What do you want to see him for?’
Mariella had had enough. ‘That is no business of yours,’ she said angrily. Inwardly she was worrying how on earth she was going to get back to the city and the comfort of her Beach Club bungalow and what on earth a man as wealthy as the sheikh was reputed to be was doing out here with this…this…this arrogant predator of a man!
‘Oh, I think you’ll find that anything concerning Xavier is very much my business,’ came the gritted reply.
Something—Mariella wasn’t sure what—must have alerted her to the truth. But she was too shocked by it to voice it, looking from his eyes to his mouth and then back again as she swallowed—hard—against the tight ball of shock tightening like ice around her heart. ‘You…you…can’t be the sheikh,’ she told him defiantly, but her voice was trembling lightly, betraying her lack of confidence in her own denial.
Was this man her sister’s lover…and Fleur’s father? What was that sharp, bitter, dangerous feeling settling over her like a black cloud?
‘You are the sheikh, aren’t you?’ she acknowledged bleakly.
A brief, sardonic inclination of his head was his only response but it was enough.
Turning away from him, she reached into the baby carrier and tenderly removed Fleur. Her whole face softened and illuminated with love as she hugged her and then kissed her before looking him straight in the eyes and saying fiercely to him, ‘This is Fleur, the baby you have refused to both acknowledge and support.’
She had shocked him, Mariella realised, even though he had concealed his reaction very quickly.
As he stepped back from the vehicle for a second Mariella thought he was going to tell her to leave—and cravenly she wanted to do so! The man, the location, the situation were so not what she had been anticipating and prepared herself for. Each one of them in their different ways shattered not just her preconceptions but also her precious self-containment.
The man—try as she might she could just not envisage him in the club where Tanya had performed. The location made her ache for her painting equipment and brought her artistic senses to quick hunger. And her situation! Oh, no…Definitely no! This man had been her sister’s lover, and was Fleur’s father—
The shadowy fear that had stalked her adult years suddenly loomed terrifyingly sharply in front of her. She would not be like her mother; she would not ever allow herself to be vulnerable in any way to a man who could only damage her emotionally. The ability to fall in love with the wrong man might be learned, but it was not, to the best of Mariella’s knowledge, inherited!
‘Get out!’
Get out? With pleasure! Gripping the steering wheel, Mariella reached for the door, slamming it closed and then switching on the ignition at the same time, then she threw the vehicle into a furious spurt of reverse speed.
The tyres spun; sand filled the air. She could hear a thunderous banging on her driver’s door as the car refused to budge. Looking out of the window, she saw Xavier looking at her in icy, furious disbelief.
Realising that she was bogged down in the swirling sand, Mariella switched off the engine. If he wanted her to leave he would have to move the vehicle for her, she recognised in angry humiliation.
As the engine died he was yanking the door open, demanding, ‘What the hell do you think you are trying to do?’
‘You told me to get out!’ Mariella reminded him, equally angry.