An Arabian Marriage. LYNNE GRAHAM

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      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ