tone somehow made her remember how lonely she had felt when Nadir had walked away from her. She’d felt lonely before, of course, but with Nadir she had felt as if she had got a glimpse—a taste—of paradise, only to have it snatched away when she was least prepared.
Powerful memories surged again and she couldn’t look at him. ‘Why am I here, Nadir?’
He didn’t say anything, his eyes troubled as they made contact with her own. He leant against the cherry wood dining table, his gaze riveted to Nadeena, kneading her T-shirt like a contented cat, his silence drawing out the moment. Drawing out her nerves until they lay just beneath the fine layer of her skin like freshly tuned guitar strings. ‘Why is there no public record of her birth?’
Bewildered by both the flat tenor of his voice and the unexpected question, Imogen frowned. ‘There is.’
His gaze sharpened and she could see his agile mind turning. ‘Under what name?’
Imogen stared at him. At the time of Nadeena’s birth she had only put her own name down on the birth certificate. She hadn’t known what to put in place of the father’s and a kindly registrar had told her that it wasn’t essential information. That she could fill that part out later. So far, that section was still blank because she’d been so busy and so tired learning how to care for an infant she hadn’t even thought about putting Nadir’s name on it. Sensing that this was a loaded question, she raised her chin. ‘Mine.’
‘Imogen Reid.’
His earlier words—‘I have not searched for you for the past fourteen months to be given the runaround now’—and his personal bodyguard waiting for his arrival came back to her and clicked into place in her mind and confused her even more. ‘Benson.’
There was only the briefest of pauses before he roared, ‘You gave me a false name!’
Imogen pressed back against the seat of the sofa. ‘No.’ Well, not intentionally. ‘Reid was my mother’s maiden name and...’ She swallowed, hating herself for explaining but compelled to do so by the fury she read in his eyes. ‘It wasn’t deliberate. The girls suggested that I use a stage name because they sometimes had trouble with the clientele and you only asked me my name one time.’ She took a quick breath. ‘At the beginning.’
He stabbed a hand through his hair and paced across the room like an animal trapped in a too-narrow cage. ‘And your mobile phone number?’
‘What about it?’
‘You changed it.’
‘I lost it...well, it was stolen my first day in London. I just use a pay-as-you-go now.’
He swore under his breath, a ferocious sound.
‘What’s this about, Nadir? As I recall you were the one who left town the morning after you found out I was pregnant. Are you now saying you tried to contact me?’ She tried to stifle a small thrill inside, wondering if perhaps he had been worried about her. That perhaps he had cared for her after all... Another more skeptical voice reminded her of the horrible text he’d sent her but still some deeply buried hope wriggled its way to the surface.
‘I had an emergency in New York and by the time I got back to Paris you had disappeared as if you’d never existed,’ Nadir grated. ‘The Ottoman Empire would have benefited from your stealth.’
Resenting his sarcasm, she stiffened. ‘I did not disappear. I left.’
‘Without a trace. No one had any idea where you had gone.’
That was most likely because the only person who knew had been Minh’s sister, Caro, and she had been leaving to go travelling at the same time. Imogen had meant to keep in touch with some of the other girls but she hadn’t counted on feeling sick and sorry for herself during her pregnancy and she hadn’t had time since then.
‘Nor did you give your employer a forwarding address or email.’
‘I didn’t?’ She blinked. ‘I wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the time.’ And since her pay went directly into her bank account, she hadn’t even realised. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t check my bank records.’
His look said that he had. ‘False names tend to hinder that kind of search.’
‘I told you that wasn’t deliberate.’ She took a deep breath and tried to keep a lid on her emotions so she could think rationally. ‘Why were you looking for me, anyway?’
‘Because before you ran you were supposedly pregnant with my child.’
‘I did not run,’ she bit out tensely. ‘Why would I when you had made it abundantly clear you didn’t want anything to do with me any more?’
She heard the challenge in her voice and knew it was because some part of her was hoping he would refute her statement.
‘I texted you from New York.’
Her top lip curled with distaste. That horrible text was still etched into her brain as if it had been carved there. ‘Oh, please,’ she scoffed, ‘let’s not talk about your lovely text.’
‘Or your response,’ he grated. ‘Telling me that you had taken care of everything.’
Imogen tossed her ponytail over her shoulder, careful not to awaken Nadeena, who had dropped into another exhausted sleep. ‘I did take care of it,’ she said softly, her arms tightening around Nadeena.
‘Yes, but not in the way I expected.’
Hoped, his tone seemed to imply. And there was the reason he’d been looking for her. He’d wanted to make sure she’d done what he expected.
Imogen felt that small spark of hope that she’d been wrong about him completely wither and die and she felt angry with herself for succumbing to it in the first place. Had she not learned anything from his treatment of her in the past?
Caro’s words of warning came back to her. ‘Be careful, Imogen. Any man who takes off like that without a word and accuses you of sleeping around is likely to insist on an abortion if he ever comes back.’ At the time Imogen had thought her friend had been overreacting. Now she knew that she hadn’t been and she felt physically ill.
‘And now you’ll have to deal with the consequences,’ he grated, staring at her as if she was somehow to blame for everything that was wrong in the world.
IMOGEN LAPSED INTO a horrified silence, focusing on her daughter instead of the sick feeling swirling in the pit of her stomach.
Quite honestly she had never expected to see Nadir again and she really wished she hadn’t. But at least he’d well and truly put paid to those times she’d wondered if she shouldn’t contact him and let him know that his child had been born. Put paid to those silly girlish fantasies that he would one day ride in on a big white horse and offer her undying love.
Yeah, right. Probably she’d listened to way too many love songs while she had been incapacitated on Minh’s sofa and possibly watched way too much day
