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‘No!’ He moved then, fast as a panther, reaching down to grab his jeans before getting off the bed to roughly pull them on, knowing he couldn’t face having such a conversation with her when he was completely naked. Because what if his traitorous body began to harden with desire, even as an impotent kind of rage began to spiral up inside him as he realised the full extent of her betrayal?
He zipped up his jeans and tugged on his shirt. And only then did he advance towards her with such a look of dark fury contorting his features that Isobel shrank back against the pillows.
‘Tell me it isn’t true,’ he said, in a voice of pure venom.
‘I can’t. Because it is,’ she whispered.
Tariq stared at her. She had known that he never wanted to be a father. She’d known because he’d told her! He’d even told her just now. After they’d...they’d... ‘How the hell can you be pregnant when you’re on the pill?’
‘Because accidents sometimes happen—’
‘What? You accidentally forgot to take it, did you?’
‘No!’
‘How, then?’ he demanded hotly. ‘How, Izzy?’
Distractedly she held up her hands, as if she was surrendering. ‘I had a mild touch of food poisoning after I ate some fish! It must have been then.’
‘Must it?’
Abruptly he turned his back on her and went over to stand beside the window, staring down at the busy London street. When he turned back his face was a mask. She had never seen him look quite like that before—all cold and empty—and suddenly Isobel realised that whatever feelings he might have had for her, they had just died.
‘Or was it “accidentally on purpose”?’ he said slowly. ‘When did it happen?’
‘It was...’ She swallowed. ‘It was around the time when I met Zahid and Francesca.’
‘You mean the King and Queen?’ he corrected imperiously, unknown emotions making him retreat behind protocol—despite his conflicting feelings towards it. He remembered the way she’d held Omar that night. The way she’d looked at him over the mop of ebony curls with that soppy soft look that women sometimes assumed whenever there was a baby around.
‘What? Did you look at Francesca?’ he questioned. ‘See another ordinary Englishwoman very much like yourself? Did you look around you and see all the wealth and status at her fingertips and think: I wouldn’t mind some of that for myself? After all, you also had a royal lover—just as Francesca had once done. The only difference is that she didn’t get herself pregnant in order to secure her future!’
If she hadn’t been naked she would have lunged at him. As it was, Isobel got off the bed and grabbed at her dress to hide her vulnerability—the outward kind, anyway. For her heart was vulnerable, too—and she felt as if he had crushed it in his fist.
‘I can’t b-believe you could think that!’ she stuttered as she started doing up the buttons, her shaking fingers making the task almost impossible.
‘I suppose I can’t really blame you,’ he mused, almost as if she hadn’t objected, a slow tide of rage still building inside him. ‘Most women seem hell-bent on marriage—and the more prestigious the marriage, the better. And you can’t do much better than a prince, can you?’
‘You must be joking,’ she hissed back. ‘You might be a prince, but you also happen to be an arrogant and overbearing piece of—’
‘Let’s skip the insults, shall we?’ he snapped, as he tried to get his head around the fact that in her belly his child grew. His child! A child he’d never asked for nor wanted. A child he would never be able to love...that he didn’t know how to love. ‘I thought you were into honesty, Izzy? Except now I come to think about it you haven’t been very honest all the way along, have you?’
She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Just how long have you known about this pregnancy?’
She met the accusation which blazed from his face. ‘For a couple of weeks,’ she admitted.
A strange light entered his eyes. He looked like someone who had been trying to solve a puzzle and had just found the last missing piece stuffed down the back of the sofa. ‘When we were in bed—the morning I got the phone call from Khayarzah about Leila—you knew you were pregnant then, didn’t you?’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t know. I had my suspicions, but I wasn’t sure.’
‘But you didn’t bother to tell me? Even today you kept quiet. You let me come here and...’ She’d let him lose himself in the refuge of her arms. Lulling him into sweet compliance with the erotic promise of her body.
‘We had sex, Tariq!’ she declared brutally. ‘Let’s not make it into something it wasn’t!’
She could see the faint shock which had dilated his eyes, but his reaction was breathing resolve into her and Isobel felt something of her old spirit return. Was she going to allow him to speak to her as if she was some worthless piece of nothing he’d found on the bottom of his shoe? As if she counted for nothing?
‘I didn’t tell you because I knew how you would react,’ she raged. ‘Because I knew that you’d be arrogant enough to think it was all some giant conspiracy theory instead of the kind of slip-up that’s been happening to men and women ever since they started fornicating!’
