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 at the kid, the more he wanted to believe the woman who lay on the hospital bed with her eyes glued to the screen and tears misting her fine eyes.
“Nice, strong heartbeat. See that?” the radiologist asked him.
And he could. The heart pulsed rapidly in the middle of the screen. The image was mesmerizing. He didn’t like the softening it brought out in him.
Most likely, the woman was a money-hungry scammer.
The report he had received on her last night certainly pointed in that direction. Her family had been anything but upstanding and responsible. Her father left early on. Her mother dumped her and her siblings into the foster-care system. Julia floundered around for a while after that, then went to college on some sort of government program. Ended up with a nonprofit organization where she seemed tolerably successful.
He considered her alluring beauty, the crown of hair that to his disappointment she wore up today, that light in her eyes as she stared at the screen.
Hell, who wouldn’t have fallen for that? Maybe she’d done so well because she could flirt successful businessmen into large donations. But her track record hadn’t been enough. Her organization was downsizing and she was let go a month ago.
Pregnant and without any income. That had to be the definition of desperate for a woman.
Last night when he’d gotten the report, he’d been certain she was lying about the baby belonging to Aziz and was impatient for that DNA test. He wanted her to be gone.
Then she had come to his room, and in a moment of insanity, he just plain wanted her. He had wanted her to offer herself to him, and not only to prove him right about her character.
But now, looking at the child, the rapidly beating heart on the screen, suddenly he wanted there to be a baby from Aziz, someone left behind by his brother. He wanted the feisty, auburn-haired beauty to be true and not a conscienceless liar. He wanted her and her baby to belong to him.
Because of Aziz. He would take care of them for Aziz. There was so infuriatingly little he could do for his dead brother otherwise. Finding his killer was about it, which he would do even if he had to put his own life at risk in the process.
“Looks like you are just entering the second trimester. Everything looks well,” the radiologist said. She was a petite, modest woman who wore a veil that covered most of her head and a large part of her hospital uniform. “The baby seems healthy.”
“I called Dr. Jinan last night. She said something about the possibility of an amniocentesis,” he said.
“That would be done sometime between week sixteen and week twenty of the pregnancy. Is there a concern about genetic problems?” The technician looked up.
