Tears threatened to fill her eyes. She gritted her teeth and held them back. This was not the time for a hormonal moment. “Go to hell.” She lifted her head and stuck her chin out. “You want to intimidate me? Congratulations, you succeeded. That’s what turns people like you on, isn’t it? Scared women.”
A muscle jumped in his face, just beneath the four-inch scar on the right side that started above the eye socket and ran straight down. And then she realized the eye didn’t move along with the other one. He was blind on that side. Not that his left eye wasn’t lethal enough on its own.
He took his time to look her over from her bare feet to the top of her head, returning to linger on her breasts, which had grown already during the pregnancy and were stupidly sensitive to smoldering looks from half-naked men. More misery to blame on hormones.
“The same things turn me on as any other healthy man, I suppose,” he said, his voice a notch lower than before.
The space between them was insanely small. Without warning, the adrenaline that had been pumping through her already was metamorphosing into primal heat, making her fingertips tingle.
He had masculine lips, what some old-fashioned novels might have defined as cruel. Heathcliff lips. Incredibly sexy. She got a little woozy from looking at them this close.
The sharp sense of desire was insane, but perhaps understandable, considering that her body was hormonally unbalanced and out of her control.
His voice was a soft whisper when he spoke. “Why are you here, Julia? Why are you in my bedroom in the middle of the night?” He lowered his head as if wanting to carefully listen to her response.
If he came any closer, he was going to feel the banana she’d hid down the front of her shirt.
Her pulse sped, and not just from the danger of being discovered as a fruit thief. “Looking for a glass of water,” she croaked out with effort. Her mouth did feel extraordinarily dry. She looked into his good eye.
His Heathcliff mouth tightened, but he didn’t back away an inch. “Excuses?” He examined her. “Interesting. You’re bold enough to come to me like this, yet you feel the need to come up with a pretext for seeking my bed.”
Outrage quickly overcame awakening desire. Of all the conceited—“You know what I’m doing?” she asked sharply, and ducked to the right from the circle of his arms. “I was trying to get out of this stupid place. You have no right to keep me here. This is kidnapping.” She darted toward the door.
If she thought the lack of sight in the right eye was a weakness, she was quickly disabused of the notion. He caught her easily.
“You will stay for as long as I see necessary,” he said. “If I catch you trying to run—I’ve given you some freedom, Julia. Freedom that can be taken away.”
What freedom? Her room? Meaning he could be keeping her closer to him? How close? His bed sprawled imposingly in her peripheral vision. She didn’t want to know. Or maybe he’d meant he had some dungeons in the basement. That would be more likely. Nothing would have surprised her at this point.
Fear spiked her pulse. “I was wrong,” she told him with all the contempt she felt. “You are nothing like your brother.”
“And what do you know about Aziz?” His gaze slid to her abdomen. “My brother wasn’t an irresponsible man.”
A moment passed before she understood what he meant.
“He wasn’t.” And that was all she was prepared to say on the subject of birth control, which obviously was not as reliable as she’d thought.
His gaze journeyed back up, slowly, to her face.
The warning system in her brain was screaming that she should run for her life. “This baby has nothing to do with you and your family.” She was desperate to escape his palace.
He didn’t respond.
“You don’t believe me.”
More silence, just his dark gaze searching her face.
“And if I said the child was Aziz’s? Would you believe that?” she said, testing him.
“No.”
“So you’re determined to think me a liar.” Which, God help her, she was quickly becoming. But yes, she would do even that. She would lie, cheat and very possibly kill for her unborn child.
The question was, how far was Karim Abdullah willing to go for his niece or nephew?
“I’m just questioning your motives,” he said.
“Is that what you call it?” She braved a sneer. “In my country this would be called kidnapping.”
His masculine lips pressed into a tight line.
Her heart drummed against her rib cage. She tugged her arm. “You have to let me go.”
And this time, he released her at last. “Get some sleep. I made an appointment for you for tomorrow morning. You’ll get the full workup. You had a fall today. I arranged for an ultrasound.”
Not one for minding his own business, was he?
Her initial instinct was to protest, but she hadn’t had an ultrasound yet. Her first was scheduled for the week after her planned return to the States. She desperately wanted to see her baby. And she was no longer sure when exactly she would be back in Baltimore. Or if she could afford even the most basic medical care.
She did have that fall. And despite feeling fine, she did worry. And it wasn’t as if he was going to give her a choice about going. “Fine. But don’t think you’re coming with me. Absolutely not.”
“And I looked into testing,” he said. “There’s something called amniocentesis that can be done during pregnancy. They can obtain DNA and determine paternity.”
She didn’t know how she felt about that. The test would prove that the father was Aziz. That would bind her even tighter to Karim, an outcome she wanted to avoid at all cost. Could she refuse? What would that gain her? Time.
She turned from him and marched out with the half-eaten banana in her hand, calling a “Go to hell” over her shoulder on principle.
As she sped her steps, the banana under her top dislodged and fell to the floor. She picked it up, glad he didn’t see her. But a glance back at his bedroom door revealed that, in fact, he had.
He’d come after her and was leaning against the door frame, watching her with a superior smirk on his face. “You may take the whole fruit bowl if you’d like.”
THE RADIOLOGIST asked him no questions, one of the privileges of being sheik. Karim stared at the staticky-looking black-and-white screen, at the blurry outline of what seemed like a head and part of the abdomen. He kept his gaze studiously on the screen, ignoring the creamy expanse of skin in his peripheral vision.
He had come in with her because despite the blood test, he still half believed there might not even be a baby. Tests could be wrong. Tests could be altered for the right amount of money. She could have had it all set up at the hospital.
And if she were pregnant, he had half hoped that the ultrasound would reveal that she was lying about the child being Aziz’s. The time of conception could have been wrong. Or the kid could have had stark red hair and looked obviously Irish, or whatever. What did he know? He’d never seen an ultrasound before.
But the date of conception was right on the money, during the time that Aziz had been in Baltimore. And, although the gray blob on the screen bore no resemblance to Aziz, Karim could hardly hold that against it. It barely looked human.
But here was the funny part, the thing he hadn’t seen coming: the longer he looked