They both stopped and looked at one another.
‘Daniel,’ Christa began shakily again, her heart overflowing with love and the joy of knowing that he still cared; that she mattered enough to him for him to be here, that…
‘No,’ he denied her softly, ‘let me speak first-please…’
Emotionally Christa watched him. Once she had explained to him just how wrong he had been in suspecting that she had been going to tell Paul Thompson she did not trust him, then she intended to make sure that he knew, irrevocably and for all time, just what it had meant to her to see him waiting for her here and to see his love for her in his eyes.
‘I love you, Christa,’ he told her fiercely, ‘and if it makes me less of a man to admit that I need you more than I need my pride, then so be it. I’m not going to pretend that your trust isn’t—’
‘Daniel, don’t,’ Christa begged huskily. ‘I do trust you…I realised that when I was listening to Paul Thompson spouting all that rubbish about you telling people that you’d taken me to bed to get me to change my mind about your courses. It was so obvious that it couldn’t possibly be true,’ she added scornfully, her voice softening slightly as she said, ‘That was what I was going to say to him when you walked in. Ridiculous, isn’t it, she added, her voice becoming dangerously wobbly, ‘that it took listening to someone like Paul to make me see the truth? I was jealous of your business, of your enthusiasm for it. I was afraid that somehow it would come between us.’
‘Nothing, nothing could ever do that,’ Daniel assured her roughly. ‘You’re my life, Christa, my love…my soul…’
As she listened to him, Christa felt her bones starting to melt, her body beginning to ache.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Daniel warned her hoarsely. ‘Not here in public. Have you any idea what it’s been like—not knowing where you were? How you were…I’ve spent the last eighteen hours checking the passengers on every flight from Pakistan…’
‘There had been a mix-up over the booking and I had to wait for a standby seat,’ Christa told him. ‘Oh, Daniel…’
As they stood facing one another, gazing into each other’s eyes, someone bumped into Daniel, apologising as he hurried past.
The forceful contact had dislodged some papers from the inside pocket of Daniel’s jacket. As he bent to retrieve them one of them became separated from the others. It was a letter, Christa realised, the paper headed with the name of one of the country’s most prestigious universities.
Frowning, she stared at it and then, before Daniel could stop her, she bent down and picked it up, reading it quickly before he could retrieve it from her, her face pale with shock as she stared at him.
‘You’ve applied to go back to lecturing,’ she said in disbelief. ‘But you said that that was something you would never do.’
‘Yes,’ Daniel agreed quietly.
‘Then why?’ Christa asked him, even though she suspected she already knew the answer.
‘Because you mean more to me than the centre does, Christa, and I could see that it was always going to come between us, that while it existed you would always have fears and doubts.’
‘No, Daniel. No,’ Christa protested. She felt as though he had held a mirror up to her soul and shown her how mean and selfish she had been.
‘Oh, no. You mustn’t do that,’ she told him fiercely. ‘You mustn’t.’
Christa saw from the look in his eyes that she hadn’t convinced him.
Taking a deep breath and then crossing her fingers behind her back for good measure, she said quickly, ‘You can’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair. A baby…a child needs fresh air and freedom…not…not the cloistered atmosphere of a university.
‘He or she needs a father who will be there for him, not one who’s too busy lecturing or constantly away on lecture tours.’
‘A baby…’ Daniel had gone oddly pale. ‘Are you sure?’ he demanded.
‘No,’ Christa admitted honestly. ‘But…but sooner or later there will be a baby, Daniel…a child…our child. Won’t there?’
‘Yes,’ he told her thickly. ‘Yes. Yes…Yes…Oh, God, Christa what the hell are we doing here? Let’s go home…’
Two hours later, curled up next to him in the chair in her workroom, the samples she had brought home with her scattered all over the floor, Christa sighed happily and snuggled closer to him.
‘You’ve never asked me what exactly I did say to the Chamber of Commerce head,’ Daniel reminded her.
‘I didn’t need to,’ Christa responded. ‘It isn’t important…’
‘Mmm…perhaps not, but, just for the record, what I actually told him was that, in view of the personal relationship which had developed between us, I wanted it put on record that my challenge to you and my claim to the chamber was null and void.
‘It was the honourable thing to do,’ he added, when Christa looked lovingly at him.
‘Like marrying me because I might be carrying your child?’ she teased him, her lips touching his.
‘No, not at all like that,’ he laughed. ‘That is extremely dishonourable, given the fact that, if I’m honest, I’ve been secretly praying that you have conceived.’
‘And if I haven’t?’ Christa asked him.
His mouth against hers, Daniel told her lovingly, ‘Well then, in that case, we’ll just have to try harder, won’t we, my love?’
Christa’s response was non-vocal, but abundantly plain nevertheless.
* * * * *
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Sharon Kendrick’s next book,
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABY
Sheikh Zuhal is shocked to discover he has a son! To claim his child, he must get former lover Jazz down the palace aisle. And he’s not above using seduction to make her his wife!
Read on for a glimpse of
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABY
CHAPTER ONE
IT WAS THE LAST place he’d imagined her living.
Zuhal frowned. Jasmine? Here? In a tiny cottage in the middle of the English countryside, down a lane so narrow it had challenged the progress of his wide limousine? The woman who had loved the sparkle and buzz of the city, hiding herself away in some remote spot. There had to be some kind of mistake.
His frown became a flickering smile of anticipation. Not that he had given a lot of thought to her accommodation. If ever he’d stopped to think about his lusciously proportioned ex-lover—something he tried not to do, for obvious reasons—then it had usually been a predictable flashback to her soft skin. Or the tempting pertness of her breasts. Or the way she used to rain kisses all over his face so that his heart used to punch with pleasure. His groin, too
.
He swallowed.
And that, of course, was the reason for his unexpected appearance today. The reason he’d decided to drop in and surprise her.
His throat dried. Why not? He liked sex and so did Jasmine. Of all his lovers, she had been the one who had really lit his fire. Sparks had flown between them from the start and it seemed a pity not to capitalise on that explosive chemistry with a little trip down memory lane. After all, it wasn’t as if either of them had entertained any unrealistic expectations. There had been no dreams to be shattered. They hadn’t asked for the impossible and had known exactly where the boundaries lay. They had conducted their affair like adults. What possible harm could it do to revisit the past and revel in a little uncomplicated bliss at a time in his life when he needed some light relief like never before?
He felt the smile die on his lips as part of him questioned the sanity of revisiting the past—and a woman—like this. Because he never went back. If you reignited an old relationship, then a woman could almost be excused for thinking it meant more to you than it really did…and no relationship ever meant more than sex to Zuhal Al Haidar.
And since Jazz was realistic enough to accept that, maybe this one time he could be excused for breaking one of his own rules, because destiny was leading him down an unwanted path—a path which had altered his whole future. Silently, he simultaneously cursed and mourned his foolish brother, but all the wishing in the world wasn’t going to bring him back, or rewrite the pages of history which had changed his own destiny. He wasn’t going to think about that. He was going to concentrate on Jasmine Jones and her soft body. To have her obliterate everything except desire and fulfilment. He was growing hard just thinking about it, because she was the sweetest lover he had ever known.
He stepped over a cracked flagstone, through which a healthy-looking weed was pushing through. It had crossed his mind that she might have replaced him in her affections during the eighteen months they’d been apart, but deep down Zuhal refused to countenance such a scenario—mainly because his ego would not allow him to.