An Arabian Marriage

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‘It looks worse than bad,’ Jaspar interposed with cutting contempt. ‘It’s obvious that you have no taste for being a mother and even less concern for your child’s welfare. Adil’s son is an al-Husayn. Honour demands that we now acknowledge our responsibility towards him.’

‘And who does “we” cover?’ Freddy prompted, because she knew he was single after looking at that website. In fact there had been some emphasis on the subject of the current heir to the throne of Quamar still being unmarried. Maybe they were subtly advertising him as being up for grabs, hoping that some veiled Middle Eastern princess of unimpeachable virtue and blue-blooded lineage would apply for the privilege of becoming a queen-in-waiting.

‘My family,’ Jaspar enunciated with pride.

‘But you’re single and a young child needs a mother figure,’ Freddy pointed out with some satisfaction.

His fabulous bone structure tightened. ‘I have many relatives within the extended family circle. I hope that some one of them will offer my nephew a caring home.’

‘But not you,’ Freddy noted, angry at the concept of Ben being casually rehomed with the first party willing to take him in.

‘As I am unmarried, it would look very suspicious were I suddenly to produce a child out of nowhere and announce that I intended to bring him up. I am not in a position to even consider that possibility.’ Jaspar dealt her a look of flaring impatience, his firm mouth compressing. ‘Had I had a wife and had she been willing to enter such a pretence, we might have been able to pass him off as an orphaned relative of hers. But, right now, it is not an option.’

So, although he was Ben’s uncle, he would not be person-

ally involved in his nephew’s future. Freddy was dismayed. Such a proposition was hardly what she had imagined.

‘You must understand that our society is not liberal and discretion is a necessity. My nephew’s parentage must be concealed for his own sake. Illegitimacy is still a mark of shame in Quamar,’ Jaspar al-Husayn continued with gravity. ‘Naturally we also wish to avoid creating a scandal which would cause severe embarrassment to Adil’s family.’

From beneath her lashes, she noted the brooding tension of his stance. ‘You resent me asking questions…but I love Ben very much and all I want is what is best for him.’

‘In the light of what I know about you, I find that claim difficult to credit.’ His lean, strong face set hard. ‘You have valued your son not for himself but only for his worth in financial terms. I have little taste for this dialogue with you, so let me assure you that your current income will continue at its present level if you give your son into my care.’

‘Whatever you think of me, money does not come into this,’ Freddy breathed tightly, her tummy giving a sick little somersault at the idea. ‘Ben needs to be loved. All children need to be loved and he’s an affectionate child. You talk about honour and responsibility but I’m talking about daily love and support—’

‘You have no right to question me in this way. Whatever we offer will be immensely superior to the level of care that Ben currently receives,’ Jaspar stated with hard finality.

Freddy snatched in a ragged breath. ‘But it will take time for Ben to adapt to a new home and new people.’

‘I don’t have time to waste. My father is at present ill and most eager to meet his grandson. I would like to fly back to Quamar with my nephew tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Freddy was aghast. ‘Ben hasn’t even met you yet and you know nothing about him. He’s not a parcel you can just lift and toss onto a plane!’

‘I have highly qualified nursery staff waiting to take charge of him.’

Freddy shook her blonde head slowly and looked at him with shaken aquamarine eyes. ‘You really don’t know anything at all about young children, do you?’

‘He is still only a baby and he will soon adapt to a new life with caring people,’ Jaspar delivered.

‘He would be traumatised if he was suddenly taken away from me. He needs to be eased into that transition,’ Freddy told him with spirit. ‘It can’t be done overnight—’

‘If the break must be made, it should be quick and clean. I cannot accept that his attachment to you or your attachment to him is of any true consequence,’ Jaspar countered with perceptible derision. ‘After all, you have spent most of his short life sunning yourself on tropical shores and partying without him!’

Freddy was thinking frantically fast and she came up with what seemed like a solution on the spur of the moment. ‘I’d be willing to come out to Quamar with him and stay in a guesthouse or something until he was able to manage without me for longer periods—’

Brilliant golden eyes shimmered over her. ‘You’re talking nonsense. This is the same child who had to get by without you for weeks on end, and I have no hesitation in telling you that you won’t be welcome in Quamar at any time now or in the future.’

He was a bone-deep stubborn male, Freddy registered, her anxiety on Ben’s behalf steadily mounting. He had not a clue about children but it was quite beneath him to admit it. He did indeed believe that he could remove Ben from everything familiar without causing him distress. For the first time, it occurred to her that she had made a cardinal error in allowing Jaspar al-Husayn to continue believing that she was Erica. He was all too well acquainted with her cousin’s poor record as a parent and it was hardly surprising that he was impervious to her arguments. So did she now tell him the truth?

If she confessed that she was only his nephew’s nanny, he would be outraged. He did not strike her as a forgiving type of male. He might feel that she had tried to make a fool of him. He would be furious that he had discussed what he clearly regarded as very private family matters with a humble employee. Worst of all, he would immediately realise that she had no power to prevent him from removing Ben from her care. He might walk straight into Ben’s bedroom and just lift him out of his cot without any further discussion, she thought fearfully.

‘Tomorrow morning, I will send the nanny here to collect my nephew so that she can spend the day with him and get to know him. Will that satisfy you?’ Jaspar asked drily.

Freddy saw that she was fighting a losing battle. She remembered the solicitor who had suggested that she was taking too much on her own shoulders in seeking to interfere and she lost colour at that recollection. How much was she truly thinking of Ben? And how much was her judgement being influenced by her own wants and wishes? After all, she did not want to give Ben up and wasn’t that very selfish of her?

‘Will Ben have proper parents in Quamar?’ she whispered shakily.

‘Of course. There is more than one childless couple in the family.’

Freddy hung her head, shame enclosing her. Had there ever been grounds for her to suspect his motives in seeking to change his late brother’s arrangements for Ben? Wouldn’t it have been much more simple for the al-Husayn family to leave those discreet arrangements in place? Even the investigation report that he had mentioned suggested that his family’s most driving concern had been for Ben’s welfare.

‘If it suits,’ Freddy muttered tautly as she stood up, ‘I’d like to speak to you again tomorrow evening.’

In the hall, Jaspar al-Husayn gave her a keen appraisal. Perhaps she felt that she had to go through the concerned maternal motions, he reflected. Perhaps she couldn’t help herself; perhaps, as was often the case, she could not see herself as the appalling parent that she in fact was. But he had won and he knew it. She would give up her rights to her son on his next visit. He was surprised to feel a faint pang of compassion as he scanned her strained face and the tense down-curve of her ripe mouth.

As the apartment door closed behind him a painful shuddering sob broke from Freddy. Ben was as good as gone. When she admitted that she was merely his nanny, who knew what Jaspar al-Husayn would do? He would certainly never accept the strength of the bond between her and Ben. ‘If the break must be made, it should be quick and clean.’ No, had she confessed her true identity, Ben might have been removed from her care even sooner.

CHAPTER THREE

AFTER a sleepless night, Freddy rose early the next morning.

Every last minute she had to spend with Ben now seemed so impossibly precious. She sat watching him eat his favourite breakfast of a boiled egg with toast soldiers for dipping and her throat closed up so much, it physically hurt. She studied his rounded little face below his dark fluffy curls, the twin crescents of his long lashes, the smooth baby skin still flushed from sleep, and she honestly thought that her heart was going to break.

The night before, she had let herself get all worked up about a stupid kiss probably because it had been easier to concentrate on that foolishness than to face and deal with the loss of the child she loved. But Ben wasn’t hers and he never would be hers and somehow she had to learn to accept that and step back. The pain she was feeling now was entirely her own fault. During her training, she had been warned not to make the mistake of forgetting that the child in her care had a mother and that she was only a temporary carer who would inevitably move on to another family. But she had not been able to abide by that rule. Ben had looked to her for love and she had given it to him, rationalising that in Erica’s absence, Erica’s very unwillingness to make that commitment, someone had to compensate Ben and give him what he needed to thrive.

It had been Freddy who had sat by Ben’s incubator hour after hour during the first worrying weeks of his life, Freddy who had ultimately named him after their paternal grandfather when Erica had said she couldn’t care less what her son was called. Eyes watering as she forced a smile for Ben’s benefit and washed his face and hands, she found herself thinking back to her earliest memories of Erica.

When her widowed father had taken her orphaned cousin into their home, Freddy had been a lonely eight year old. Even then, Erica had been an incredibly pretty girl with an elfin face, catlike eyes and silky dark brown hair. She had had enormous charm as well. She had had the power to make Freddy’s dour father laugh and had been wonderful at teasing him out of his bad moods. Admiring Erica for her vivacity and confidence, Freddy had been happy to take a back seat. She had had to get much older before she’d appreciated that, beneath all that superficial sparkle, Erica was quite incapable of being happy for more than a couple of hours or of ever feeling truly secure.

Seven years later, there had been a huge scandal when Erica had run away with a neighbour’s husband. Freddy’s father had raged at the embarrassment of it all for days on end. Only weeks later, the erring husband had slunk back home again and Erica had attempted the same feat, only to have the door slammed in her face by her uncle. Freddy had been heartbroken that awful night. She had seen the shock and disbelief on Erica’s face, Erica who had never ever thought of consequences or of how her actions might have impacted on other lives.

But the following year, Erica had come to see them again. Looking very glamorous and impossibly penitent, she had soon won her uncle’s forgiveness and had told them stories about her exciting life as a successful model in London. Stories full of whopping fibs, Freddy had later appreciated, for the truth that Erica had depended on her lovers to keep her would scarcely have been acceptable.

At nineteen, Freddy had gone to college to train as a nanny and, for some time afterwards, contact with her cousin had dwindled to the occasional phone call. However, when Freddy’s father had died, Erica had come to the funeral, wan and pregnant and indeed looking anything but well. The cousins had had an emotional reunion and Erica had asked Freddy to come and live with her in London and help her get through the remainder of her pregnancy.

Freddy had not had to think twice about that decision. At the time she had just completed her first job as a nanny and, in the wake of her father’s death, she had been ready for a change. Erica had been genuinely ill, suffering from continual nausea and the constant threat of a miscarriage. Her cousin had spent the last weeks preceding her son’s birth lying flat on her back in a hospital bed, her only visitor, Freddy.

So, to some degree, Freddy had understood Erica’s refusal to relate to her tiny child in his incubator. In so many ways, Erica had never really grown up. Like a kid just let loose from school, Erica’s only thought after her delivery had been to regain her figure and reward herself for all those months of sick and joyless boredom. In her mind, Ben had already had too big a slice of her life.

‘Why do you think I brought you down here to look after me?’ Erica had asked when Freddy had tried to remonstrate with her cousin. ‘I know you’ll do what I ought to do. You can be his substitute mum.’

‘But he needs you to love him.’

‘I think the only person I have ever loved is you,’ Erica had quipped.

Freddy was dredged from her painful memories by the buzz of the doorbell. It was barely nine in the morning and the nanny had arrived to collect Ben much earlier than Freddy had hoped she would. The young woman introduced herself in perfect English as Alula. A slim brunette in her twenties, constrained in her manner and reluctant it seemed to even look Freddy in the face, Alula immediately centred her attention on Ben.

Freddy hovered and answered questions about Ben’s dietary preferences and routines that were asked with reassuring professionalism. She scolded herself for feeling uneasy at the brunette’s total lack of friendliness. ‘Where are you taking Ben?’ she asked, trying to sound casual.

‘I haven’t yet received instructions.’ Alula knelt down on the floor to study Ben much as if he were one step narrowly removed from divinity and practically begged for the toy he was holding. ‘He is a most beautiful child.’

Ben was by no means untouched by the tidal wave of almost reverential appreciation coming his way. Beaming, he bestowed the toy on his admirer. Freddy felt like a fly on the wall and tried to tell herself that she was delighted that Alula was so marvellous with children. Some time later when she had gained Ben’s trust, Alula turned and opened the front door again for herself. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, holding Ben’s hand in hers. ‘Say goodbye, Ben.’

‘Bye…’ Ben breezed and then he suddenly pulled free of the brunette, startling her as he ran back to Freddy to demand, ‘Kiss Ben!’

Swallowing hard, Freddy hugged his warm, squirming little body close. ‘If he’s upset, please call me. I can advise you,’ she said unevenly.

With a nod that might have signified agreement, Alula walked out onto the landing. Freddy stared out at the two tough-looking men with the cropped haircuts who must have been standing out of view when the other woman had arrived. Bodyguards, she assumed, and they already had the lift open and waiting. As Ben stepped into the lift, he glanced back over his shoulder and grinned at her, patently proud of his own independence.

How trusting a confident child was, Freddy thought wretchedly as he disappeared from view and she retreated back into the apartment, almost blinded by the tears swimming in her eyes. She ought to be proud of herself. She had taught him to be confident, taken him to a playgroup from an early age and encouraged him to mix with other children as well as the nannies she had met up with from time to time.

It was the slowest, longest day of her life. She kept on trying to concentrate on how she could best explain her brief masquerade as Erica to Jaspar al-Husayn. Would he understand the shock and anxiety which had initially persuaded her into that pretence? Would he recognise and radically disapprove of the special bond between her and his nephew? And would he be reasonable? Or would he walk right back out again with Ben, shorn of any fear of her interference?

As the afternoon crept on, a tight knot began to form in Freddy’s hollow stomach. She had only eaten a morsel of toast at breakfast and had not been able to face lunch. Well, Jaspar al-Husayn had said that his nanny would be spending the day with Ben and it seemed that the entire day was going to run its course. In her heart she was glad that Ben had not become upset and had not had to be brought home early, but she was also surprised. He was not accustomed to doing without her and as he got tired he usually became very clingy. But then no doubt Alula had laid on a feast of attractions to keep him distracted, or possibly Ben was being allowed to enjoy a lengthy nap.