The Desert Lord's Love-Child. Оливия Гейтс

goodbye. But it seems I should have spared myself the unpleasantness, should have known you’d react with the barbarism of your culture and the conceit of your inherited status. You may be good in bed, Farooq, but so are a hundred other men. I like variety, and I always leave when my lovers start to bore me. I thought it best to go before I was sick of you. I didn’t want to spell it out, but it’s clear I shouldn’t have bothered with civility.”

      Before she collapsed at his feet in a weeping mess, she staggered around him, snatched up her handbag, images of a baby who looked like him fueling her march out of his bedroom, out of his world.

      But the image that would remain imprinted on her retinas for the rest of her life was of his face. The face of the hostile stranger she’d managed to turn him into in mere minutes.

      The hostile stranger she’d never see again.

      One

      “Bagha … bagha …”

      Carmen paused in the middle of hanging the nursery’s new curtains. She looked down at Mennah, listened to her chirping her latest “word,” her heart in a state of expansion.

      She’d gotten used to feeling her heart filling her whole chest, her whole being, since she’d given birth to her daughter.

      She’d demanded Mennah the moment she’d come out of her womb, disregarding the doctor’s grumbling that he had to close said womb first. He’d succumbed, though, had placed the smeared, nine-pound miracle on Carmen’s bosom. And for long moments, as she’d first touched her baby, felt her precious weight, her flesh and heat and reality, Carmen had been afraid she wouldn’t survive the explosion of emotions raging through her.

      She’d searched for the right name long and hard. She’d found the perfect one, what this baby was, in her father’s mother tongue. Mennah. Her gift from God.

      Now her gift was latching chubby fingers onto her playpen’s railings, hauling herself up to a standing position. She then tried to stand unsupported and landed on her diaper-padded bottom with a cry of chagrin-mixed glee, tearing a laugh from Carmen’s depths.

      “Oh, Mennah, darling, you’re in such a hurry.”

      And she was. At only nine months, she’d been sitting unsupported for almost three, crawling for almost two and was now clearly on her way to overtaking another milestone.

      Carmen slotted the last hook, climbed down the ladder and headed to the playpen. Her sunny angel grinned at her, good nature brimming from golden eyes, displaying her newly acquired set of teeth, her dimples flashing in the perfection of her cherubic face. A surge of emotions clogged Carmen’s throat, rising to her eyes.

      Could she have been so blessed?

      Mennah held up her arms. Carmen obliged at once, bent and cradled the robust little body that was her reason for living. Mennah mashed her face into her mother’s neck, and Carmen’s arms convulsed around her. It was a good thing Mennah loved fierce hugs. Carmen bore down on the flare of love, rocked Mennah in her arms, one hand luxuriating in the raven silk of her locks. Hmm, the bald patch from before Mennah started rolling around was totally gone.

      Suddenly Mennah pushed away, looked up expectantly. “Bagha bagha.”

      Carmen tickled her nose. “Yes, darling, you’re trying to tell me something and your mommy is so dense she hasn’t figured it out yet. But that’s a new word. Give me a day and I’ll figure it out. Say—could it be you’re telling me you’re hungry? It has been a couple of hours since you’ve eaten.” Carmen started to undo her shirt only for Mennah to slap her hands on top of Carmen’s, squealing, part playful, part admonishing. Carmen sighed. “No mommy-produced sustenance?”

      Mennah giggled. Carmen sighed again. She’d been hoping to prolong nursing. But this was another area where Mennah was in a hurry. She’d been refusing to nurse more and more ever since she’d been introduced to solid foods, decreasing Carmen’s milk flow. This was the second day with no nursing at all. During that time Mennah had even given her grief about eating previously much-loved foods. And Carmen could guess why.

      “I shouldn’t have given you a taste of my filet mignon, darling. Seems you share more than your looks with your father. He, too, is a big panther who relishes red meat—”

      Carmen stopped. Mennah was looking up at her with such absorption, as if she was memorizing everything her mother said.

      Carmen had been indulging in the heartbreaking pleasure of constantly talking to her about her father. Maybe she should resist giving in to the urge. There was no way Mennah understood now, but maybe before Carmen realized, she would. And she didn’t want to explain her father’s absence for years. Not that she’d ever have enough time to come up with an adequate explanation.

      Exhaling, shaking off a resurgence of the despondency that had suffocated her all through her pregnancy, she walked out of the nursery, headed to their open-plan, sunlit kitchen.

      She secured Mennah in her high chair, dropped a kiss on top of her glossy head. “One bagha bagha coming up.”

      She placed plastic toys in front of Mennah, set the iPod to a slow rock collection and started preparing the dish that had converted her baby to gourmet cuisine. Amidst singing along with her favorite songs and Mennah’s accompanying shrieks of enthusiasm, she stopped periodically to gather the toys with which Mennah gleefully tested gravity, giving them back to her so she’d restart her experiments over and over again.

      She was finishing the mushroom sauce when she noticed it had been a couple of minutes since she’d fetched for Mennah, since her daughter’s squeals had disharmonized with her singing.

      She turned around and her heart overflowed with another gush of love. Mennah was out like a light on the high chair’s tray.

      She always did fall asleep without warning. But she couldn’t have been hungry after all, if she could fall asleep among all those mouthwatering aromas.

      Sighing, eyeing the meal that had to be served hot to be good, Carmen turned off the music, unbuckled Mennah from her seat then went to put her down in her crib.

      The singing had stopped.

      The crashing of Farooq’s heart hadn’t.

      And it wasn’t only his heart that manifested his upheaval. Every muscle in his body was clenched, every nerve discharging.

      He’d been standing there for what felt like a day, listening to the sounds coming from inside. Wistful love songs accompanied by the gleeful noises of an infant. And the overpowering melody of a siren.

      He’d willed himself over and over to ring the bell. Better still, to break down the door.

      He’d just stood there, his ear almost to the door to catch every decibel of a slice of life of the tiny family that lived inside, his hands caressing the door as if it were them.

      He felt as if he’d disintegrate with an emotion so fierce he had no name for it, no experience and no way to deal with it.

      It had to be rage. An unknown level that made what he’d felt when Carmen had told him she was leaving pale in comparison. It dwarfed what he’d felt when he’d pursued her, bent on erasing the ugliness, the madness of that confrontation, on bringing back his Carmen and the perfection they’d shared, only for more betrayal to tear at him when he’d seen her getting into his cousin Tareq’s car. It even eclipsed what he’d felt when he’d confronted Tareq and discovered why she’d really left.

      His cousin and arch nemesis had confessed that he’d sent Carmen to seduce Farooq, to get pregnant and create a scandal large enough to stop Farooq’s rise to the succession. Tareq had snickered that their uncle’s latest decree had thrown a sabot in the cogs of his treachery, turning a pregnancy into an asset, not a liability, forcing him to order Carmen to leave, going back to the drawing board to think of something else to eliminate Farooq from the running.

      It had all made sense to Farooq then. From the moment he’d seen her to the moment