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Natalia nodded her head. Kadir had said that to the consultant? He couldn’t have meant it though—could he? She stifled a sleepy yawn. The consultant had warned her that she would feel tired for several days after all that she had been through and that her body would compel her to sleep to give both her and her baby a chance to recuperate fully. She looked at the envelope the consultant had left for her and then opened it slowly, studying the three-dimensional images inside it, her tears blurring her gaze as she saw her beautiful baby looking back at her. The baby she could so easily have lost…the baby she could so easily never have conceived in the first place.
Natalia was asleep when Kadir returned to her room and settled himself on the chair beside her bed. He looked down at the smooth bedclothes covering her still-flat body. His father’s emotions as he had held him and reassured himself that he was truly alive had touched a well spring of responsive emotion within himself. He reached out and placed his hand on Natalia’s body. He didn’t need to struggle to recall how he had felt during the long hours of the night fearing with every heartbeat that she might lose the child she was carrying. That memory would remain with him for ever.
‘I have prayed for you, little one,’ he murmured softly, ‘and my prayers have been answered. Be assured that you shall have my love for
always and that I shall be a true father to you, just as you are already a true son to me, the son of my heart, as well as of my body, loved and held in my heart for always. You and your mother shall have the greatest gift I can give you and that is the gift of my love for the whole of your lives.’
‘Kadir.’ Natalia’s voice was thick with tears. She had heard him come in but she had not opened her eyes, not realising that he would think she was still asleep.
‘I mean it,’ he told her, reaching out for her hand and clasping it between his own. ‘I do mean it, Natalia. I love you. You, Natalia Carini, you, the bold, exciting woman who showed me her pride in her sexuality and shamed my own foolish blindness to the real reason I fought so hard against my love for you. Fear is a terrible thing, all the more so when that fear belongs to a man who refuses to accept that he can feel it, and gives it other names instead. Natalia, my wife, my love, my life, you are my love, even if I have refused until now to fully recognise that love.’ He took a deep raw breath of air. ‘When I saw Zahra with that knife and realised what she was going to do, it wasn’t just your life I knew I had to protect, it was the child’s, as well. You need have no fear that this child, this son, who I now freely accept as being my own child, will not suffer as I did. He shall be my son and I shall be his father, my first-born son, I love him as that already.’
‘Your son?’ Natalia asked him softly. She could barely keep the smile back from her lips or out of her voice. Her happiness was welling up inside her like champagne bubbles.
‘Well, I don’t want to disappoint you, Kadir, but actually this son you plan to love is going to be a daughter…’ Still smiling, she handed him the scan pictures.
She might know now that Kadir was prepared to accept that their child was his, but somehow she knew that Kadir would fall totally and besottedly in love with his daughter in a way he would not have done with a son. Later, fate willing she would present him and the people of Niroli with a male heir, but for now to know she carried this precious wonderful gift of a daughter was almost more happiness than she could bear.
‘A daughter…’ Kadir marvelled as he looked at the images, his eyes bright with emotion.
‘I thought we might name her for your mother…’ Natalia suggested hesitantly. ‘I…I thought about her when I was afraid and alone with Zahra and I prayed…’
Kadir’s hand covered hers. ‘I, too,’ he told her thickly. Silently they looked at one another and then Kadir leaned towards her. ‘Oh, my love, my dearest, dearest love. If I should have lost you.’
‘But you didn’t and you won’t,’ Natalia assured him as she lifted her face for his kiss.
A nurse coming to check on Natalia opened the door and then quickly withdrew. Who would have thought that a royal couple could behave like that—just like everyone else, holding one another and kissing so passionately that they were oblivious to her unwitting interruption?
‘You know, I really think that she does have a look of my mother,’ Kadir told Natalia judiciously later as they studied the scans together for the umpteenth time.
‘No, she definitely has your nose,’ Natalia corrected him firmly.
EPILOGUE
‘THE Fierezza genes are astonishingly vigorous,’ Natalia heard Emily Fierezza, the wife of Prince Marco, saying laughingly to the women of the family gathered in the courtyard. They were preparing to leave for the cathedral where Kadir was to be formally crowned and anointed as Niroli’s new King.
‘I’ve lost count of how many new babies have arrived or are about to arrive. You will tell me if you start feeling tired, won’t you?’ Emily pressed Natalia. ‘Only Kadir made me swear that I would watch over you like a hawk.’
‘You and the countess and pretty much the rest of the royal household.’ Natalia laughed as she waited to enter her carriage, one of several that would form the coronation procession that would escort Kadir to the cathedral as Niroli’s Crown Prince and then back again as its new King.
‘I can’t get over the change in King Giorgio. I never thought I’d see him looking so happy and relaxed. Marco says it’s like discovering a grandfather he never knew he had, and it’s all thanks to you and Kadir. Marco says that, between you, you’ve humanised him.’
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Natalia protested. ‘I think it’s more that King Giorgio has come to realise how important a loving family is and that one has to give love in order to receive it.’
‘Kadir will make Niroli a wonderful King, Natalia,’ Emily told her warmly. ‘We all think so.’
Tears pricked at Natalia’s eyes. ‘You know how much it means to Kadir to have so much family support.’
‘He and Marco have such a lot in common. They are both very determined and independent, true Fierezza men.’
They certainly were, and her own Fierezza man had that extra something very special that came to him via his mother’s blood, Natalia acknowledged. A small secret smile curled the corners of her mouth, her gaze hazing with sensual memories. Initially Kadir had insisted on reining in his passionate desire for her because of their baby, but last night he had been swept away by her on the full tide of her own longing for him, and her assurances that it was perfectly safe. He had loved her with tenderness and intimate sensuality, in such a way that her body still ached a little from their shared pleasure. Her skin still remembered the heat of the kisses he had lavished on it, every sensitive place visited and then revisited until she had not been able to stop herself from crying out to him in hot, sweet arousal. He was so very much a man. Her man, and, as she had whispered to him last night as she had re-voyaged over that territory she had explored the first time she had touched him, she truly did believe that something in her at some deep, little understood level had recognised him as her soul mate.
‘Once I would not have believed you,’ he told her in turn. ‘But now, how can I deny it when every breath I take is witness to my love for you? I am so very blessed, Natalia,’ he told her as he kissed her throat and then her jaw, his deliberate slowness making her ache for the feel of his mouth on her own. ‘I have you, and our child…a father who loves me, a country that, with you at my side to guide me, has taken me into their hearts. Truly I am indeed blessed.’
And then he kissed her and Natalia knew that nothing in the world could possibly ever mean more to her than this man and the child he had given her. Just thinking about last night was making her body ache with longing for Kadir. But now that ache was edged with the delicious eroticism of anticipation instead of the pain of doubt. Tonight she would hold him and touch him and show him…
‘Princess, it is time,’ the countess announced importantly, bringing her out of her secret sensual daydream by gesturing to the waiting maids to pick up the train of Natalia’s coronation gown.
There had not been such an occasion in the whole lifetime of many of the people gathered in the square and along the streets, lining the way to the cathedral, and Natalia could hear their cheers of encouragement and delight as the old fashioned horse-drawn coaches bowled past them.
