Free Shamed in the Sands by Sharon Kendrick Page B

she’d just told him she might be carrying his child?
    His mouth tightened. If he pulled her into his arms and started to kiss her, she would not resist. No woman ever did. He imagined himself reacquainting himself with her scented flesh, because wouldn’t that help him make some kind of sense of this bizarre situation?
    ‘Leila,’ he said, but she had stood up very quickly and was brushing her hand dismissively over the sleeve of her raincoat, in a gesture which seemed more symbolic than necessary.
    ‘I must get back before anyone realises I’ve gone,’ she said.
    She walked across to the other side of the room, and Gabe felt the bubble of his erotic fantasy burst as she fixed him with a cool look. For a moment it almost seemed as if she had just rejected his advances—even though he hadn’t actually made any.
    ‘Phone me at my hotel and tell me where to meet you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I will have to use Sara as a decoy again, but I’m sure I can manage it.’
    ‘I’m sure you can,’ he said with the grim air of a man whose whole world was about to change, whether he wanted it to or not.

CHAPTER FIVE
    ‘S O , ’ SAID L EILA slowly. The word was tiny and meant nothing at all, but one of them had to say something . Something to shatter the tense, taut silence which had descended on them the moment they’d left the consulting room. Something to make Gabe move again instead of sitting there frozen, staring out of the windscreen as if he had just seen some kind of ghost.
    He had brought the car to a halt in a wide, tree-lined street, and Leila was glad he’d driven away from the Harley Street clinic which had just delivered the news she had already known.
    He hadn’t said a thing—not a thing—but she’d noticed the way his hands had tightened around the steering wheel, and the ashen hue which had drained his face of all colour.
    She was pregnant.
    Very newly pregnant—but pregnant all the same.
    A new life growing was beneath a heart now racing as she waited—though she wasn’t really sure what she was waiting for.
    She remembered Gabe’s barely perceptible intake of breath as the expensively dressed consultant had delivered the results of the test. The doctor had looked at them with the benign and faintly indulgent smile he obviously reserved for this kind of situation. Probably imagining they were yet another rich young couple eager to hear what he had to say. Had he noticed the lack of a wedding ring on her finger? Did anyone actually care about that kind of thing these days? She swallowed. They certainly did in Qurhah.
    She wondered if the medic had been perceptive enough to read the body language which existed between the prospective parents. Or rather, the lack of it. She and Gabe had sat upright on adjoining antique chairs facing the medic’s desk, their shoulders tense. Close, yet completely distant—like two strangers who had been put into a room to hear the most intimate of information.
    But that was all they were really, wasn’t it?
    Two strangers who had created a life out of a moment of passion.
    She turned in the low sports car to glance at Gabe. She didn’t know what to do. What to say or how to cope. She wanted something to make it better, but she realised that nothing could. Something unplanned and ill-advised had resulted in both their lives being changed— and neither of them wanted this .
    The sunlight illuminated his chiselled features, casting deep shadows beneath the high slash of his cheekbones. But still he hadn’t moved. His profile was utterly motionless, as if it had been carved from a piece of golden dark marble.
    She knew she couldn’t keep sitting there like some sort of obedient chattel, waiting for his thoughts on what had happened. She wasn’t in Qurhah now. No longer did she have to play the role of subservient female. She had always longed for equality—and this was what it was supposed to be about. Taking control of her own destiny. Learning to express