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At that moment she would have given just about anything to get just five minutes alone with him. Having waited too long to broach the thorny topic of her supposed dishonesty, she had gone overboard and attacked when she should have reasoned and explained. With a sinking heart she realised that in her distress she had been downright offensive. But unhappily, Jahan was urging her to follow her, and there was no way that Kirsten could have any private speech with Shahir.
‘This evening you are to have a surprise,’ Jahan announced with satisfaction as they crossed a huge echoing stone hall floored with worn marble and entered a passage that appeared to lead into a more modern part of the palace. ‘A happy surprise, I hope. Shahir has been very busy on your behalf.’
Kirsten had no idea what Shahir’s sister was talking about. Although she kept a polite smile of interest on her face she was still too upset by the argument she had had with Shahir to concentrate. ‘A surprise?’
‘To tell you about it would spoil it.’ Jahan paused outside a door. ‘Would you like to wait in here for Tazeem to be brought back to you?’
Surprised that she was being left to her own devices, Kirsten opened the door. ‘Will he be long?’
‘Half an hour at most….’
Jahan seemed to be waiti
ng for something to happen. Her brow indenting, Kirsten entered the room, and then came to a surprised halt when she saw the tall broad male standing by the window. His hair was the same unusual shade of pale blond as her own. He too looked anxious. Her throat tightened and she stared, almost afraid to credit the powerful sense of recognition she was experiencing, for his features had been familiar to her from childhood on.
‘Daniel…?’ she whispered uncertainly, for when her brother had left home he had been a painfully thin teenager and this was a man.
‘Yeah…it’s me.’ Her brother’s voice was gruff with restrained emotion.
It was the telling glimmer of moisture in his eyes that convinced her that he was real, and she raced across the room and flung herself at him with a sob of happiness and welcome.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS some time before either Kirsten or Daniel paused long enough between questions to draw breath. After all, brother and sister had five years of news to catch up on. But, first and foremost, Kirsten could not be persuaded to talk about her own life until Daniel had explained how Shahir had managed to trace him.
‘I haven’t yet met your husband, but we’ve talked on the phone. Shahir hired investigators to go and ask questions of just about everybody who ever knew me. That helped to build up a profile of me, and one of my schoolteachers mentioned that at one stage I’d been hoping to go to university to do marine biology—’
‘Until Dad said you had to work on the farm,’ Kirsten recalled heavily.
‘Maybe he was right about me just wanting to be a lazy student,’ Daniel teased. ‘I’m studying for a doctorate now. The detective agency found me by checking out the universities. I’ve been working abroad on a research project, so they only caught up with me the day before yesterday, and this is as soon as I could get here.’
Slowly Kristin shook her head, fighting back tears. ‘I just can’t quite believe you are here.’
He compressed his mouth ruefully. ‘I should have come home to see that you were OK a long time ago.’
‘Dad wouldn’t have let you into the house.’
‘He wouldn’t even let me speak to you on the phone, so I gave up ringing.’
‘I didn’t know you’d phoned,’ Kirsten muttered with a painful sense of loss. ‘I wish I had.’
‘I heard about Mum’s death a year after it happened through an old school mate,’ he confided heavily. ‘I just couldn’t handle the fact that I would never see her again because I hadn’t been man enough to confront Dad. I felt so guilty.’
‘No…you mustn’t feel that way. Mum missed you, but she wanted you to have a life of your own. If you had got into a real fight with Dad it would have destroyed her.’
Daniel nodded, too choked up by grief for his late mother to respond.
It was at that point that a knock on the door heralded Tazeem’s return. Now enjoying the well-sprung comfort of a magnificent pram wheeled by an English nanny accompanied by two nurses, Tazeem was fast asleep and amusingly unconcerned by the amount of attention he was receiving.
Talk of the promise of the future took over from the hurts and disappointments that Kirsten and Daniel had shared in the past, and Daniel cradled his nephew and grinned. ‘I’m actually holding a future king…’
Refreshing mint tea and tiny sweet cakes were brought in and served, and an hour later Kirsten shared an evening meal with her brother in the luxurious suite of rooms allotted for her use. Squeak was waiting there to greet her, and enjoyed a most enthusiastic reunion with his former playmate, Daniel. The little dog would not settle with them, though. He kept on going to the door, sitting down there and sighing heavily.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ her brother asked.
‘He’s nuts about Shahir,’ Kirsten confided with a rueful grin. ‘He must know he’s around somewhere.’
After the meal, Daniel went off to meet Shahir and join the male wedding party while Kirsten was taken to meet a whole array of Shahir’s female relatives. There was one more sister, an array of great-aunts, aunts, and innumerable cousins—and that was not counting those who were related only by marriage to her husband. Tazeem was hugely admired, and Kirsten listened without success for any spoken reference to a woman with the name of Faria.
