An Arabian Marriage. LYNNE GRAHAM

by adding, ‘So what if he belongs to some other woman? Do you think she’d think twice in my shoes? It’s a hard world out there!’

      By nine the following morning, Freddy was ready for her visitor. The apartment shone because she had got up at six to ensure that not a sliver of dust lurked in any corner. Garbed in a navy suit, white blouse and flat court shoes and with her thick curly blonde hair scraped back into an old-fashioned bun, which she felt gave her a much-needed look of greater maturity, Freddy surveyed her reflection with a critical frown. Then, remembering the spectacles she had once worn for eye strain while studying, she went and dug them out and perched them on her nose. Yes, indeed, she thought with satisfaction, she could easily pass for a sensible young woman of thirty, not that she would lie if questioned, but most probably she would not be asked.

      ‘The kindest man I have ever met,’ she kept on repeating to herself to ease her nervous tension. If she could just get the opening, she had lots of arguments to make in her own favour. Ben’s father would not need to maintain such a hugely expensive apartment for their benefit, nor would her own living expenses with Ben run to a hundredth of Erica’s. If he would only agree to her becoming Ben’s legal guardian, she would save him an absolute fortune in all sorts of ways! Please, please, please, she prayed, fingers knotted together as she paced up and down.

      And then it finally occurred to her to wonder how Ben’s father had been able to say that he would not show up if there was anyone else in the apartment. A shiver of belated dismay ran down Freddy’s taut spine. The only way he could have uttered that warning would have been in the knowledge that he was having the apartment watched in advance of his own arrival and that was a seriously scary thought! Aware that she had disliked the handful of Erica’s male friends whom she had actually met, Freddy suddenly felt quite sick with worry. Ben was adorable but his father could well be a creep or a criminal or both!

      The bell buzzed. Sucking in a shaky breath, Freddy went to answer the door. As she stood back, three dark-skinned men dressed in suits and built like human tanks strode into the hall. Completely ignoring her, they proceeded to march into every room of the apartment, evidently checking out whether or not she and Ben were on their own. Surging like a frantic mother hen into the lounge where Ben lay asleep on a sofa, Freddy stood over him, muttering, ‘Please go away…please don’t wake him up…he’ll be scared…I’m scared!’

      One of the men spoke into a mobile phone and the trio regrouped together out in the hall while still behaving as if she were invisible. Trembling like a leaf, Freddy folded her arms and listened to the lift arrive with a ping on the landing outside the still-open front door: it was that quiet. She heard footsteps, a low exchange of masculine voices and then a tall dark male appeared in the lounge doorway.

      He did not look like the kindest man she was ever likely to meet, but she kept on staring like an idiot because he was so incredibly good-looking she was knocked for six. She did not know quite what expectations she had had, but certainly she had assumed he would be a much older man. Not a guy who looked as if he wrestled with sharks for fun before breakfast, ran a couple of marathons before lunch, ruled some vast business empire throughout the afternoon and finished off the day by taking some very lucky woman to bed and exhausting her. Caught up in dismay by that last far too intimate thought, Freddy reddened to the roots of her hair.

      ‘You are Miss Frederica Sutton?’ he demanded, scanning her with brilliant dark deepset eyes that set her heart racing as if she had just heard a fire alarm.

      Freddy nodded in slow motion, her entrapped attention running over his luxuriant blue-black hair, his fabulous bone structure, the delicious hue of bronze to his complexion, his arrogant nose, his sinfully beautiful mouth. He was an absolute pin-up, he was totally fantastic, and Erica must have fallen madly in love with him. Just about any woman would, Freddy reflected dizzily, until she recalled that he was a married man and strove in shame to rise above all such inappropriate and personal reflections.

      ‘Speak,’ he commanded.

      It really was a command too, Freddy noted, still searching for her lost vocal cords. He spoke like a male who took it for granted that instant obedience to his every wish would follow. ‘I’m Frederica Sutton, just like—’my late cousin, the mother of your child, she had been about to say.

      ‘If I wish to enter a conversation with you, I will inform you,’her visitor drawled, running bold and derisive eyes over her taut figure, his highly expressive mouth curling at the corners. ‘I am Jaspar al-Husayn, Crown Prince of Quamar, and I stand here in my brother’s place as next closest of kin and uncle to your son, Benedict.’

      Freddy’s hearing and comprehension seized up and slowed to a snail’s pace the very instant he mentioned that he was a prince, a Crown Prince moreover. Erica had not been telling entertaining fibs? Ben’s father was a royal prince? Silenced by sincere shock at that revelation, Freddy stared, eyes wide and shaken behind her spectacle lenses. But had he not also said that he was Ben’s uncle and not his father?

      ‘Why have you presented yourself to me dressed in that peculiar way? Do you think to impress me with the belief that you are a good mother? Though it must pain me to be so frank, I am well aware of the life that you lead and equally aware that your ugly appearance can only be a pretence calculated to mislead.’

      He did not know that Erica was dead, she registered in dismay. He believed that she was Erica, got up to be ugly, for some strange reason. Ugly. Freddy experienced both anger and pain at that label. No, she knew she wasn’t pretty, but it was not good news to hear that a plain suit, a dated hairstyle and a pair of spectacles were sufficient to make her worthy of that cruel word: ‘ugly’. He looked like a dark angel, talked like an ignorant, unfeeling louse and probably couldn’t pass a single mirror without falling in love with his gorgeous reflection! Was it his business that she was not Erica? All that nonsense about discretion and here she was being treated like dirt and he wasn’t even Ben’s father!

      ‘Your brother…’Freddy murmured icily while drawing her slender frame taut to reach her full quota of five feet four inches, her back ramrod straight. ‘I’m prepared to speak only to your brother, Ben’s father.’

      ‘Adil died of a heart attack last month.’

      Freddy frowned at him, her mind struggling to compute the reality that Ben truly was an orphan, that not only his mother but also his father was dead. She swallowed hard, seriously troubled by that news. By some awful quirk of fate, Ben had been deprived of the only remaining individual who had had an indisputable right to make caring choices on his behalf.

      ‘It is I who will take charge of Benedict and remove him from your less-than-adequate care.’ And having made that utterly devastating announcement, Crown Prince Jaspar strolled over to gaze down with unfathomable dark eyes at the little boy still curled up asleep on the sofa. ‘He is very small for an al-Husayn male. We are a tall family,’ he remarked critically.

      ‘What do you mean when you say that you are planning to take charge of Ben?’ Freddy mumbled, her tummy suddenly behaving as though it were a boat in a storm-tossed sea.

      Her imagination was already running riot. She didn’t like him and she didn’t trust him. What did he mean by that comment that Ben was small? Use your brain and think fast, Freddy urged herself. Her shockingly offensive visitor could only be implying that Ben might not, after all, have al-Husayn genes. In other words, he was suggesting that Erica might have lied about her son having been fathered by his brother!

      And wasn’t it perfectly possible that Jaspar al-Husayn might be hoping that Ben would prove not to be a member of his family? Now that Ben’s father had passed away, where did Ben come into the scheme of things? Why would this Crown Prince want to take Ben from a woman he believed to be his mother? Yet in contrast, his brother, Adil, had gone to great trouble to keep his illegitimate son a secret and had pledged a great deal of money to the task of ensuring that the child he’d had no intention of acknowledging would have a financially secure future.

      ‘If you value your present lifestyle and income, don’t argue with me,’ Crown Prince Jaspar murmured, smooth as silk.

      And in that moment Freddy decided that