The Sheikh's Claim by Olivia Gates

Author:Olivia Gates [Gates, Olivia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2012-08-06T21:00:00+00:00

Eight

Lujayn snatched her hand from his, heaved up to her feet and wiped away the tears that had abruptly stopped. “I can’t do that.”

He rose to stand, feeling as unsteady as she seemed. His lips and heart compressed on the anger condensing inside him. “Even now, you still persist in trying to deprive me of my son? Zain, kaif ma tebbi—as you wish. I only asked you as a courtesy. I don’t need your permission or your cooperation to see my son. I’ll go to your uncle’s to see him, right now.”

She lunged at him, caught his arm in a frantic grasp, her face urgent. “You can’t. They have no idea you’re his father.”

A suspicion skewered him in the chest. “You told them he was Patrick’s?”

Her color rose into the danger zone. “N-no, they knew he couldn’t have been Adam’s father. I—I told them it was someone else, but it wasn’t important who he was.”

Would everything she said keep hurting more? “And they just accepted that?”

She winced. “My father’s side of the family did. My mother’s, being conservative Azmaharians, were mortified. They rationalized my ‘lapse’ by my grief, and placated themselves that I’d make it…lawful. When I told them there was no hope of that and I’d decided to keep the baby and would disappear from their lives forever if they couldn’t deal with it, they eventually succumbed.”

“Decided to keep the baby?” He caught her by the shoulders, each heartbeat a wrecking ball inside his chest. “You considered…terminating your pregnancy?”

“No.” Her eyes filled again. “It was a shock to find myself pregnant, under the circumstances, but no matter how difficult I knew it would be, how it would change my life forever, I wanted Adam more than I wanted to live.”

A mixture of overwhelming sweetness and bitterness, of longing and regret, expanded inside his chest. He wanted to crush her into him, assuage the alienation, wanted to push her away feeling her nearness would cause him permanent injury.

He did neither, kept holding her at arm’s length.

Then he rasped, “Do you have photos?”

“O-of Adam?” Her eyes widened, brightened as if he’d handed her a lifeline. She stumbled out of his hold and to her purse, produced her phone, her hands trembling as she accessed her photos. “I should have thought of this.”

She thought he’d be satisfied with seeing his son in photos.

His hand covered the phone’s screen as she extended it to him. This wouldn’t be how he’d first lay eyes on his son.

“Photos of yourself. When you were pregnant.”

The relief on her face drained as hard as her arm fell to her side. “I wasn’t in any condition to think of posing for photos. I’d decided to have Adam, but I wasn’t exactly…”

“Happy?”

She shook her head, her eyes filling with the days of anxiety and anguish she’d lived, a woman becoming a single mother.

Suddenly it was vital for him to find something out. “Did you stay in the Hamptons during your pregnancy?”

He’d known from Fadi’s reports that she’d put the mansion up for sale around the time she must have given birth.

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