The Sheikh's Collection. Оливия Гейтс

ground her teeth together in silence, wishing that her Russian billionaire brother-in-law had minded his own business when it came to Zahir. Even as she thought it she knew she was wronging the man. Undoubtedly Kat’s concerns about her sister’s bridegroom had prompted Mikhail’s investigation into Zahir’s reputation. ‘He would never be sleazy,’ Saffy declared, suppressing her recollection of that invitation to be his mistress.

      ‘Are you upset about Emmie refusing to come today?’ Kat asked ruefully.

      ‘No.’ Saffy lied sooner than add additional worry to Kat’s caring heart. ‘I can understand her not wanting to get into a bridesmaid’s frock when she’s so pregnant and I can also understand her saying that she’s not in the mood.’

      ‘Some day soon, you two need to sit down and talk and sort out the aggro between you.’

      ‘Easier said than done with Emmie always avoiding me like the plague,’ Saffy countered ruefully. ‘I phoned her and said I understood her not wanting to be a bridesmaid but would love her to come just as a guest and she said she wasn’t feeling well enough to travel.’

      ‘Well, she has had a pretty tough time being pregnant, so that probably wasn’t a lie,’ Kat conceded. ‘It makes me wonder if I’m wise to be considering IVF in case that kind of sickness and nausea in pregnancy runs in the family.’

      ‘I’m not feeling sick…not yet, anyway,’ Saffy pointed out bracingly, smiling as Topsy bounced into the room, bubbling with excitement in her glittering green bridesmaid’s dress and quite unaware of the serious chat her older sisters had been involved in. It seemed natural to the three sisters that neither Saffy’s mother nor her father were taking part in the coming ceremony. Saffy had had virtually nothing to do with her mother, Odette, or her father since they had abandoned her to foster care when she was twelve years old. Her parents had divorced when she was much younger and the bitterness of their estrangement had had an inevitable effect on her father’s attitude to his twin daughters. He had left them behind and moved on. Although Kat had encouraged Saffy to foster a forgiving attitude towards their mother, Saffy had too many memories of childhood neglect to do so. Odette simply wasn’t a loving parent and never had been.

      The wedding took place at the church only a few doors down from Kat and Mikhail’s London home. The church’s rather gloomy interior had been transformed with an abundance of white and pink flowers and knotted ribbons. Saffy walked down the aisle on Cameron’s arm, her heart banging like a drum at a rock concert when she finally got close enough to see Zahir’s imperious dark head at the altar. How did he feel about this? How did he really feel? Throughout the past crazy busy week while she packed up her life in London her only contact with Zahir had been by phone. She had rung him after the doctor had confirmed her pregnancy. He had rung her several times to find out about the wedding schedule. There had been nothing intimate about those exchanges.

      She had also ploughed through a half-dozen frustrating meetings with her agent and various clients as the reality of her condition forced the need for urgent rethinks on previously planned shoots. A couple of clients had taken the opportunity to drop her because her pregnancy meant that she was in breach of contract. Desert Ice, however, had retained her services because they were more than halfway through their campaign. She was grateful for that because it was mainly her earnings from the cosmetics company that funded the orphanage she supported.

      Zahir’s stunning black-fringed golden eyes met hers as she drew level with him and she felt painfully vulnerable, which she didn’t like at all. Unfortunately wounding memories of their first wedding were assailing her, reminding her of a day when she had not had a doubt in the world about becoming a wife, had indeed innocently overflowed with feelings of love and happiness. The wedding ring slid onto her finger and she breathed in deep, conscious that Zahir retained a hold on her hand. It was done, the die was cast, she told herself soothingly. What was she afraid of happening? What was there to fear now? That he didn’t love her—well, she knew he didn’t love her, didn’t she? Unfortunately the awareness that he was marrying her to give their baby a name and a home was no more welcome to her heart or her pride.

      On their passage back down the aisle, Zahir pressed a supportive hand to her spine. ‘You feel very shaky,’ he admitted when she cast him an enquiring glance.

      And it was true, she did feel shaky, had ridden roughshod over her misgivings to marry him, trying at every step to put her child’s needs ahead of her own.

      Zahir participated in the photographs in silence. Sapphire was pale as death and silent and her family, aside of the little bouncy one in green, who had smiled brightly at him, were clearly hostile and suspicious. No doubt her family had taken their cues from Sapphire. She didn’t want to be married to him again; he could feel it in the tension that gripped her every time he touched her. That made him angry and bitter, roused memories better left buried. But he had royally screwed up by allowing his primal instincts to triumph and there was always a price to be paid for recklessness, he reminded himself darkly. He had got her back. That was, at least, a beginning, and only time would tell whether or not she would continue to hold the threat of a divorce like a gun to his head.

      ‘You look stunning,’ Zahir told her belatedly as she scrambled into the limo that would whisk them from the church to the embassy to undergo a Muslim marriage ceremony. ‘How are you feeling?’

      ‘I’m not ill, only pregnant,’ Saffy countered defensively, wishing he hadn’t reminded her of her condition, reluctant to be viewed as in any way in need of special treatment.

      The second ceremony was brief, witnessed by embassy officials and a posed photograph was taken afterwards. They returned to Mikhail and Kat’s house where a reception was being held in the ballroom. After the wedding breakfast, they circulated. Surrounded by the familiar faces of the models she often worked with, Saffy began to relax a little, bearing up well to comments about how quiet she had been about her supposed long-term relationship with Zahir and striving to behave more like a normal bride.

      ‘Of course, I shouldn’t mention it,’ trilled Natasha, a six-foot-tall Ukrainian blonde, well on her way to supermodel status. ‘But Zahir was mine first.’

      It was said so quietly and with such a sunny smile that it took several seconds for that spiteful confession to sink in on Saffy. She stared back into Natasha’s very pale blue eyes and murmured, ‘Really?’ as politely as if the other woman had commented on the weather.

      ‘Yes, a couple of years ago now. A fling at a film festival,’ Natasha confided with a little shrug of a designer-clad shoulder. ‘But he was hard to forget.’

      ‘Yes,’ Saffy acknowledged, passing on as soon as she could into less aggressive company, anger licking like fire at her composure. Mine first? No, he had been hers, her husband and then her ex-husband before he became anyone else’s. But the truth that he had sought amusement in other beds could still slash like a knife turning in her breast. She glanced back at Natasha, beautiful and reputedly sexually voracious, struggling not to picture Zahir entwined in her arms, and the nausea she had never experienced until that moment turned her stomach into a washing machine and sent sickness hurtling up her throat. Her skin clammy with perspiration, she rushed off to the cloakroom and made it just in time. She was horribly sick and it took a few minutes for her to freshen up and lose the unsteadiness that afflicted her in the aftermath.

      When she emerged, Topsy was waiting for her. ‘Are you OK? Zahir saw you leaving and asked me to check.’

      Zahir didn’t miss much, Saffy reflected wretchedly. ‘I think I just got bitten by morning sickness.’ And a very tall shrewish blonde.

      But Saffy was no fan of ducking reality and she knew she had to deal with life as it was. Zahir had been with other women when he was no longer married to her and that was his business, not hers. His past was his own, just as hers would have been had she lived a little more dangerously since their first marriage. But unfortunately there had not been a cure for the fact that she had still found Zahir and her memory of him far more attractive than other men. What did that say about her? He was like a habit she had never managed to shake, her one and only fantasy, and the