CHAPTER SEVEN

      ‘ARE YOU REALLY sure about doing this?’ Kat looked tense and anxious and Saffy immediately felt guilty.

      What had she been thinking of when she dragged her family into all of this? A shotgun wedding, no less. Her sister, Kat, didn’t need the stress but she had insisted on organising the wedding within the space of one incredibly short week and had proven that if sufficient money was thrown at a challenge, it could be done. Saffy studied her reflection in the mirror. Her gorgeous designer wedding dress was a classic, nipped in at the waist for shape and falling in fluid folds to her satin-clad feet. She wasn’t wearing a veil: the hairdresser had piled her hair up and topped it with the magnificent sapphire and diamond tiara Zahir had sent to her. Matching drop earrings sparkled with every movement she made.

      ‘Saffy?’ the attractive redhead pressed. ‘You know, it may be your wedding day but it’s still not too late to change your mind. You don’t have to marry Zahir. You don’t have to do this to please anybody.’

      Looking reflective, Saffy breathed in deep. ‘I really do want to give our baby the chance to have two parents. None of us ever had that. My sisters and I had you and you were a brilliant stand-in Mum,’ she told Kat warmly. ‘But I’d like to try it the old-fashioned way before I try to go it alone.’

      Kat frowned. ‘You’re not in a very optimistic mood for a new bride.’

      ‘I’m being realistic. Zahir will commit to being a father—I know that about him and I respect him for it. If marriage works for us, it works, and if it doesn’t work, at least I’ll have tried,’ Saffy muttered ruefully.

      ‘I just can’t believe you got involved with him again. It’s like fatal attraction without the bunny boiler. I mean, five years ago Zahir broke your heart and I don’t want him doing it again.’ Her sister sighed unhappily. ‘Mikhail has checked him out and he says Maraban is stable now and that Zahir seems to be one of the good guys.’

      ‘I could’ve told you that,’ Saffy interrupted heatedly.

      ‘And there’s no sleazy stories about him either,’ Kat added in a suitably quiet undertone. ‘Obviously there’s been women but not in the kind of numbers you need to worry about.’

      Saffy ground her teeth together in silence, wishing that her Russian billionaire brother-in-law had minded his own business when it came to Zahir. Even as she thought it she knew she was wronging the man. Undoubtedly Kat’s concerns about her sister’s bridegroom had prompted Mikhail’s investigation into Zahir’s reputation. ‘He would never be sleazy,’ Saffy declared, suppressing her recollection of that invitation to be his mistress.

      ‘Are you upset about Emmie refusing to come today?’ Kat asked ruefully.

      ‘No.’ Saffy lied sooner than add additional worry to Kat’s caring heart. ‘I can understand her not wanting to get into a bridesmaid’s frock when she’s so pregnant and I can also understand her saying that she’s not in the mood.’

      ‘Some day soon, you two need to sit down and talk and sort out the aggro between you.’

      ‘Easier said than done with Emmie always avoiding me like the plague,’ Saffy countered ruefully. ‘I phoned her and said I understood her not wanting to be a bridesmaid but would love her to come just as a guest and she said she wasn’t feeling well enough to travel.’

      ‘Well, she has had a pretty tough time being pregnant, so that probably wasn’t a lie,’ Kat conceded. ‘It makes me wonder if I’m wise to be considering IVF in case that kind of sickness and nausea in pregnancy runs in the family.’

      ‘I’m not feeling sick…not yet, anyway,’ Saffy pointed out bracingly, smiling as Topsy bounced into the room, bubbling with excitement in her glittering green bridesmaid’s dress and quite unaware of the serious chat her older sisters had been involved in. It seemed natural to the three sisters that neither Saffy’s mother nor her father were taking part in the coming ceremony. Saffy had had virtually nothing to do with her mother, Odette, or her father since they had abandoned her to foster care when she was twelve years old. Her parents had divorced when she was much younger and the bitterness of their estrangement had had an inevitable effect on her father’s attitude to his twin daughters. He had left them behind and moved on. Although Kat had encouraged Saffy to foster a forgiving attitude towards their mother, Saffy had too many memories of childhood neglect to do so. Odette simply wasn’t a loving parent and never had been.

      The wedding took place at the church only a few doors down from Kat and Mikhail’s London home. The church’s rather gloomy interior had been transformed with an abundance of white and pink flowers and knotted ribbons. Saffy walked down the aisle on Cameron’s arm, her heart banging like a drum at a rock concert when she finally got close enough to see Zahir’s imperious dark head at the altar. How did he feel about this? How did he really feel? Throughout the past crazy busy week while she packed up her life in London her only contact with Zahir had been by phone. She had rung him after the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy. He had rung her several times to find out about the wedding schedule. There had been nothing intimate about those exchanges.

      She had also ploughed through a half-dozen frustrating meetings with her agent and various clients as the reality of her condition forced the need for urgent rethinks on previously planned shoots. A couple of clients had taken the opportunity to drop her because her pregnancy meant that she was in breach of contract. Desert Ice, however, had retained her services because they were more than halfway through their campaign. She was grateful for that because it was mainly her earnings from the cosmetics company that funded the orphanage she supported.

      Zahir’s stunning black-fringed golden eyes met hers as she drew level with him and she felt painfully vulnerable, which she didn’t like at all. Unfortunately wounding memories of their first wedding were assailing her, reminding her of a day when she had not had a doubt in the world about becoming a wife, had indeed innocently overflowed with feelings of love and happiness. The wedding ring slid onto her finger and she breathed in deep, conscious that Zahir retained a hold on her hand. It was done, the die was cast, she told herself soothingly. What was she afraid of happening? What was there to fear now? That he didn’t love her—well, she knew he didn’t love her, didn’t she? Unfortunately the awareness that he was marrying her to give their baby a name and a home was no more welcome to her heart or her pride.

      On their passage back down the aisle, Zahir pressed a supportive hand to her spine. ‘You feel very shaky,’ he admitted when she cast him an enquiring glance.

      And it was true, she did feel shaky, had ridden roughshod over her misgivings to marry him, trying at every step to put her child’s needs ahead of her own.

      Zahir participated in the photographs in silence. Sapphire was pale as death and silent and her family, aside of the little bouncy one in green, who had smiled brightly at him, were clearly hostile and suspicious. No doubt her family had taken their cues from Sapphire. She didn’t want to be married to him again; he could feel it in the tension that gripped her every time he touched her. That made him angry and bitter, roused memories better left buried. But he had royally screwed up by allowing his primal instincts to triumph and there was always a price to be paid for recklessness, he reminded himself darkly. He had got her back.