The Sheikh's Hidden Heir. Оливия Гейтс
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Название: The Sheikh's Hidden Heir
Автор: Оливия Гейтс
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Короткие любовные романы
Серия: Mills & Boon M&B
isbn: 9781474047333
isbn:
The surgery was urgent and basic. It had to be. It was a classic Caesarean, a vertical incision, performed for haste. In seconds Felicity was being handed a scrap of life, and Karim delivered the placenta that had been ripping away from the uterine wall. It was the only way to stop Bedra from haemorrhaging to death.
Felicity worked on. The baby was flaccid, but responding to her resuscitation. She tried not to think, just to do.
Still her heart went out to Aarif. He looked over a few times, his eyes blank. This quiet man was guarding his emotions because it wasn’t safe to have them yet.
Karim was calling to Aarif to give him more drugs, then packing the abdomen to prepare Bedra for transfer. Just as Felicity was about to ask Karim how she should summon help she heard the sound of a chopper landing.
Here in the desert Karim had saved not one life but two, against impossible odds, and now help had arrived.
He was shouting rapid orders to a doctor Felicity recognised from the hospital. It was Dr Habib running from the chopper to the four-wheel drive, but thankfully he didn’t glance at Felicity, just headed straight for the mother. A paediatrician came to take over the infant’s care. Aarif must have seen the fear in her eyes, and Felicity wondered whether he understood or misinterpreted it as shame at being uncovered. But he threw her a drape and hastily Felicity put it over her head.
Just not in time.
She saw the absolute shock on Helen’s face. There was a stunned, questioning second, where both women swallowed the response on their lips. Then Felicity gave Helen a quick, urgent shake of her head, to indicate that this must not be acknowledged, and they did what they had to—got on with the job of preparing the little babe for urgent transfer. He had pinked up and was crying, but his cry was weak. To Felicity he looked around twenty-six weeks’ gestation, and the paediatrician agreed.
Karim only relaxed when Bedra was under full anaesthetic and blood was dripping into her veins. Resting back on his heels, he stared over at the incubator, stared at the little life he had saved, and remembered his nephew, Kaliq, whom his brother had refused to hold. He remembered too Jamal’s wailing, his father’s tears—the whole country had been in mourning for the tiny little baby that had died in his hands.
And then he stared over at Felicity, chatting with the paediatrician, her eyes watchful on the child, and he knew that it would kill her to give her child away.
He straightened his back, refusing to let sentiment in. Because…Well, she might have to.
Only when they had loaded the mother and infant into the rescue chopper, the blades whirring as it prepared for takeoff, did Felicity manage to utter a few vital words to Helen—her only link with the real world, the one woman who could understand her predicament.
‘I’ll make contact.’
IT SHOULD have brought them closer, what they had shared, what they had achieved. Karim had been about to make love to her before the interruption, of that Felicity was absolutely sure, but as for the first time in his life Karim prepared his own bath his silence spoke volumes. He stonewalled her questions, pretending to be asleep by the time she’d bathed and returned to his bed.
‘Karim?’ She spoke to tense broad shoulders. ‘You did so well out there…’
Yes, pretending to be asleep. Because in response to her question he proceeded to snore. And for all his ruthless ways, there were some redeeming features—and one of them was that Karim didn’t actually snore.
It was worse than being told to be silent.
She persisted in her own way. She refused a husband who was less than he could be, refused to live with his silence. So at various times, as the days dragged on and they were truly alone in the desert, she chatted happily, though mostly to herself.
‘I’ve cut myself,’ she said—and she had, lounging on cushions, reading a magazine. She had a tiny paper cut that really didn’t need anything doing to it, but she mentioned it just the same. ‘I wonder if there are any plasters…’ He was reading a thick black book, and he didn’t look up as she stood, just lay stretched out on cushions. ‘I know!’ Felicity said brightly. ‘They’ll be in the fully equipped mobile theatre which just happens to be close by. I might go out and look…’
There was a ghost of a smile on the edge of his mouth as she walked past him.
‘No, don’t bother getting up, Karim. I’ll get them.’
He caught her ankle, smiled up at her, and it was brighter than the sun outside. Scorching, warming, and it dazzled.
‘You talk too much.’ Still he held her ankle.
‘You talk too little.’
‘Sit.’ He let go of her ankle and patted the cushions beside him, but she just kept on walking. ‘Felicity,’ Karim said with a rather strained sigh, ‘why don’t you have a seat and we can talk for a while?’
It was a little like being back in the restaurant—formal and awkward at first. But they avoided hot topics, like sex and babies, and given there wasn’t much else between them spoke about the one other thread they had in common—their work.
‘I just always wanted to be one,’ Felicity answered when he asked. ‘I think I was born wanting to be a midwife. I love pregnant women, and I just adore newborns.’
But that was about babies…At every turn they couldn’t avoid their issues, couldn’t talk about her hopes to work in a natural birthing centre when she returned to England, because somehow it was too much to acknowledge that that hope was now gone. And she couldn’t talk about her family, about her father and the legacy his alcoholism had left, because that would mean she trusted Karim.
And she didn’t.
Finally, after a few stalled attempts, they spoke about Karim—which didn’t help either, because the more that was revealed the more she liked him.
And the more confused she became.
‘So you practise medicine out here?’
‘With Bedra’s help.’
It was Stockholm syndrome, Felicity told herself—where you fell in love with your captor. Only she’d loved him long before that, and every moment he intrigued her more.
‘It is like a mobile hospital,’ Karim explained. ‘I cannot practise any more at the hospital. It is not appropriate.’
‘But you trained as a surgeon.’ Felicity blinked. ‘You worked as a surgeon.’
‘I cannot be accessible to the people.’ He frowned at her, and she chose to stay silent—chose instead of arguing just to listen. After a long pause, Karim delivered perhaps his first honest admission. ‘I do miss it at times.’
Felicity blinked at the revelation, at his first display of emotion, feelings—proof that this remote man was actually real.
‘You СКАЧАТЬ