Most people, especially women, heard who he was and began to act as if this was pre-revolutionary France and he was the Sun King. They gushed. They fluttered their lashes. He’d been on the receiving end of more than one curtsy and it always embarrassed the hell out of him when it happened.
The thought of Rachel gushing or fluttering or curtsying was laughable.
She’d made it clear that she was disdainful of his being a prince, a sheikh, heir to the throne of Alcantar. That he was almost embarrassingly rich didn’t win any points from her, either.
She treated him the way he suspected she’d treat anybody else. Anybody else she didn’t like, he thought, and he smiled.
Rachel was a very interesting woman.
She was a woman making it on her own, with a child to raise. That couldn’t be easy. His mother—his and Rami’s—had been a woman with all possible means and resources at her fingertips, yet her sons had been amusing at best and at worst an inconvenience.
He could not imagine Rachel ever feeling inconvenienced by the child.
So what?
Good mother or not, the baby would be better off with him. Being a prince was the child’s destiny. Rachel would get over losing him …
Dammit, why was he thinking about her at all?
His mouth thinned.
He knew why.
Sex.
He wanted Rachel in his bed.
He wanted her naked and moaning beneath him, wanted the taste of her on his tongue. He wanted her scent on him, her wet heat on him, he wanted to sink into her and watch her eyes blur as he made her come and come and come …
Karim cursed and rubbed his hands over his face. He was being a damned fool.
He’d kissed her but that would not happen again. Absolutely it would not. He certainly would not sleep with her—and standing here, thinking about it, was pointless.
He strode through his rooms, yanked open the door and headed for the stairs.
A brandy. Two brandies. Then he’d stop this nonsense, go back to his rooms, fall into bed—
What was that? A faint sound. The wind?
The sound came again.
It was the baby.
Rachel had said something about teething. Babies cried when they teethed; he’d heard that or read it somewhere.
Dammit, that was all he needed. A crying child …
The sound stopped.
Karim waited but it didn’t come again. Either the child had gone back to sleep or Rachel was soothing him …
Enough thinking about Rachel tonight.
Moonlight dappled the living room, lost itself high in the shadowy darkness of the fourteen-foot ceilings. He went straight to his study, to the teak shelves and a Steuben decanter of—
Hell.
The child was crying again.
He must have been wrong. Rachel wasn’t dealing with the boy, but that was her responsibility.
His was to gain custody, see to it the child was raised properly.
As he had been raised.
By tutors and nannies and governesses, so Rami’s son would learn to be responsible and not waste his life on frivolity or anything but meeting his obligations …
The crying was annoying.
“Dammit,” Karim growled, and he put down the glass, left the study, went quickly up the stairs and down a long corridor to the suite where Rachel and the boy slept.
The sitting room door was shut. He tapped his knuckles against it.
“Rachel?”
No answer.
Great.
She was fast asleep while he paced the floor.
He tried again. Knocked harder, said her name more loudly. Still nothing.
A muscle in his jaw knotted.
“Dammit,” he muttered again, and he opened the door and stepped into the sitting room. She had to be in one of the two bedrooms that opened off it.
The noise had stopped but he knew it would start again. There was only one way to deal with it. He’d find Rachel and tell her to keep the child quiet.
He had a full schedule ahead and needed his rest.
He moved briskly through the sitting room. The first door was ajar. He hesitated, then pushed it open.
No crib. No stacks of baby gear—all the stuff he’d arranged to have delivered. He saw only a bed in the same condition as his own, blankets twisted and pushed aside as if the occupant had had difficulty sleeping.
It was Rachel’s room. Rachel’s bed.
There was the faint scent of lemon in the air. Rachel smelled of lemon. It suited her, that fresh, sweet-sharp tang. It was clean. Delicate.
Honest.
Who but an honest woman would have looked him in the eye when she admitted she’d hated the man who had been her lover?
Then, how had it happened? How could a woman like her have gone to the bed of a man she didn’t love?
Karim cursed under his breath.
He was here to deal with a crying baby. Nothing more, nothing less. That his thoughts were wandering was proof that he had to get some sleep if he was going to be able to function well enough tomorrow—actually, today—and put this mess behind him.
He strode back through the sitting room, went straight to the second door.
It, too, was ajar. He stepped inside.
Yes, this was the boy’s room. There was the crib. Boxes of baby stuff. The soft illumination of a lamp—what was that, anyway?
A lamp shaped like a carousel.
The work of his assistant?
He’d have to remember to thank her for her creativity, Karim thought wryly …
And then he saw Rachel.
She was asleep in a big wing chair, the baby in her arms. Her hair was loose, falling like a glossy rain over the shoulders of a high-necked white cotton nightgown long enough to cover her feet, which were tucked up under her.
Karim’s throat constricted.
He had seen this woman in glitter. In denim. He had seen her naked. She had been beautiful each time, but this, the way she sat now, so unselfconsciously lovely, so perfect and vulnerable, was almost enough to stop his heart.
Whatever the reason she’d been with Rami it didn’t matter.
What did matter was that he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any other woman.
He drew a long, shuddering breath.
But wanting was not the same as having. And he could not have her.
It would only complicate something that was already far too complicated. He had a responsibility. A duty. To his father, his people, his dead brother’s memory.
The boy.
That was what this was all about.
His mother had been focused on herself. So had Rami. But he was not like that. He never would be. He—
“Babababa.”