The Sheikh's Secret Son

The anger was back, cold and hard. “Did I know you were really a sheikh, Ben? How in hell was I supposed to know that? By reading between the lines of that note?”

When he said nothing, she stepped away from the table, picking up her attaché case as she headed past him toward the door. “I waited, Ben. I waited for nearly two weeks, long past the time I’d planned to return home, nearly too late to begin my next law school term. I waited, and I worried, and I finally realized that I knew nothing about you. Nothing important—like where you lived, if you had a family. If you had a wife. Finally, I woke up, realized I’d just had myself a Paris fling, and chalked you up to experience. And that’s how I’d like to keep it, Ben. An experience in my past, one I’m in no mood to repeat.”

He took hold of her elbow. Lightly, not really holding her in place, although she couldn’t move. She was too shocked by the sensation his slight touch set off in her body, a warmth spreading throughout her, betraying her.

“I do not believe you have been asked to repeat it, Eden,” he said quietly, his deep tones a seductive rumble low in his throat even as his words cut her, made her bleed. “But we are going to talk. Not here, not at this moment, but later. You will be at my hotel at six this evening, if you please. The Palace Lights here in San Antonio. Do you know it?”

“Oh, sure, like that’s going to happen!” Eden shook herself loose from his grip, using much more force than was strictly necessary. “I wouldn’t cross the street to see you, Your Highness. Put that in your…oh, hell, just stuff that in your headpiece, okay!”

She started for the door—when had the room grown so large?—but Ben spoke again, once more halting her in her tracks. “You will please tell Attorney Klinger and the others that His Highness has decided not to open Kharmistan to foreign investors. You might call them foreign devils, or infidels, if you think it will help prove that this ignorant Arab has no business sense, no concept of the fortune he is turning down.”

Eden whirled back to face him, her blue eyes narrowed as her entire face pinched and blanched at the same time. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, her heart pounding so loud she could barely hear herself speak.

He turned to her slowly, his dark eyes cold, his face a mask of handsome, deeply tanned, unreadable flesh. “If you have done your research, Eden, and I am convinced you have, you will know that I currently hold the position of twenty-third richest man in the world. I do not have much time for such lists, but they do seem to impress Westerners. So you see, Eden, I do not need your clients. I never did. I would not be here today if I had not seen your name on one of the status reports the faithful Nadim placed on my desk six months ago. He did not remember your name. I, however, have it branded on my heart.”

Eden refused to comment on his last statement. “Six…six months ago? You’ve been planning all of this? Negotiating with our clients for six long months? Putting us all through hoops, acting as if you wanted this deal—all so you could come here today to insult me? Embarrass me? Why? Do you plan to have me lose my job? Is that it? Are you that petty? You’ve ignored me for more than five years. How does that end up being my fault?”

“Six o’clock, Eden.” He walked past her and put his hand on the doorknob. “Now, if you will excuse me? I have a meeting to postpone until tomorrow. It will only be postponed, will it not, Eden?”

Eden chewed on the inside of her cheek, longing to tell him to go to hell, longing to tell him she didn’t give two snaps for the deal her firm had been working on for six long months. “Yes, that’s right. Only postponed, Your Highness,” she ground out at last, then exited the room ahead of him as he held open the door and graciously gestured that she should precede him.

Mary Ellen Fortune poured two cups of tea in the large kitchen of the contemporary Colonial house she and her late husband had built on Fortune land several years earlier.

The house was only two miles from the original homestead that had been expanded to three or more times its size over the years. Not that Cameron had felt the huge, rambling house hadn’t been large enough for he and Mary Ellen to raise their family there, alongside the family of his brother, Ryan.

Cameron had liked elegance, and size, and this house reflected his need for the overtly flamboyant and Mary Ellen’s equal need to make a comfortable and cozy home within the parameters her husband had set up. Now, with the children grown and gone, with Cameron gone, the house she loved was too big, too empty.

“You and Sawyer could come here for a while, darling,” Mary Ellen said as she carried the teacups to the wide butcher-block-topped kitchen table, placing one cup in front of Eden. “Security on the ranch is excellent, as you know. He couldn’t touch Sawyer here.”

Eden ran a hand through her hair, pushing the thick, wavy mass back from her face. She’d driven directly to the ranch as soon as the meeting had broken up, which it had done rapidly once Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir had regally begged the kind indulgence of those gathered and then departed the room without so much as a word of excuse, surrounded by his phalanx of guards.

Eden had been so distracted that she couldn’t even remember what her boss had said to her, what he had asked her. She’d just sicced him on Jim Morris, and been the first person on the elevator when it returned to the twenty-sixth floor.

Her memory of locating her car in the underground parking lot, the drive to the Double Crown Ranch, to her mother’s house, was equally vague. All she’d known was that she’d had to get to her mother, and she had to stay away from her own home on Edgewood Drive. Just in case she was followed…

“I can’t stay here, Mom,” Eden said, shaking her head. “Thanks to Ben—to the sheikh, that is—we’re all meeting again tomorrow in San Antonio. I’d have to get up before dawn to make it into the city on time. But Sawyer could come here, couldn’t he? He and Mrs. Betts.”

“He could,” Mary Ellen agreed, just as if she hadn’t been the one to suggest the visit from her grandson. “And Mrs. Betts could watch him while I’m working. I have to get the quarterly reports in order soon, you know.”

Eden nodded. Her mother had always been just that. A mother first and foremost, a loyal wife. But she also had a great business head that she’d employed to clean up after her husband’s financial messes over the years.

With Cameron’s death, she had stepped reluctantly into the limelight, and her business acumen had quickly landed her with new responsibilities and a reason to face life once more after her husband had gone.

“He wouldn’t be a bother, Mom. He’s got his pony up at the stables, but Mrs. Betts can drive him there whenever he wants…” Eden began, apologizing before the fact, but her mother waved off her weak words.

“I’m not saying I’m agreeing with you on this, Eden,” Mary Ellen said, a hint of motherly sternness creeping into her voice. “But I know you’ve had a shock. The first thing you need to do is talk with this Ben Ramsey…this Sheikh Ramir. Straighten out what happened between you before Sawyer was born, learn more about these letters he swore he wrote to you, make your peace between you. Only then can you decide if you want to tell him of Sawyer’s existence.”

“You think I should, though, don’t you?” Eden asked, grimacing as she looked at the clock on the wall, knowing she had to begin her drive back to San Antonio in the next fifteen minutes or she’d never be able to meet Ben at six o’clock, as he had ordered.

“He is the boy’s father,” Mary Ellen said, raising her teacup to her lips, then setting it down again. “I don’t know that he deserves Sawyer, or that Sawyer deserves him, but I do know that Sawyer deserves some answers.”

Eden slumped against the back of the large wooden chair. “Oh, God.” She lowered her head, rubbed at her forehead. “I’ll send Mrs. Betts and Sawyer here directly after dinner tonight. That’ll give me some time, and some distance. Unless he already knows…” she said, her voice drifting off even as her head shot up and she looked at her mother.

“He could know, couldn’t he? Once he’d seen my name he probably had someone make inquiries, check up on me, make sure I was the same Eden Fortune. Oh, God, Mom, why didn’t I think of this before—he might already know!”

Two

Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir entered the Palace Lights penthouse suite with the slow and measured step that reflected his life of patience, of waiting, of watching for the most opportune moment and then seizing that moment with both hands.

That was life in Kharmistan, the life of a prince, a sheikh. It was the life his late father had lived, and his father before him, for all of the sheikhs of Kharmistan who had known the feint and jab of politics, of intrigue, while these Americans were still learning how to build log cabins.

The sheikh had been raised at his father’s knee, then sent off to be educated; first in England, later in America. He had not needed the education found in books, for there were books and teachers in Kharmistan. At the age of twelve he had been sent away to learn the ways of the world, of the men who were outside his father’s small but strategically important kingdom.

Having an English mother had helped him, but nothing she had taught him could have prepared him for the lack of respect, mingled with hatred and misunderstanding, that had greeted him when he’d taken his first steps out of Kharmistan and into the world beyond his father’s kingdom. In Kharmistan his family name was revered, honored, even feared. In England he was the outsider, the alien being, the oddity. His clothing was ridiculed, his speech pattern mocked.

That was when the young prince had learned the value of conformity, at least an outward conformity that seemed to put his classmates at ease.

He had forsaken his comfortable tobe and kibr for the short pants and blazer of his classmates, even though his father had gained permission for him to avoid the school uniform.

He had answered insults with a smile until he had found sticks big enough to beat them all down. Those sticks had been his brilliant horsemanship, his skill on the playing fields, his excellence in the classroom.

Within a year he had become the most popular student in the school, as well as its top student. He was invited to large country estates over term breaks, introduced to the sisters of his classmates, both welcomed and welcome wherever he went. His friends were legion, and they believed they knew him well.

They never knew him at all. But he knew them. He knew them very well.

What had begun so encouragingly in England had been equaled and then outdone by the success he had found in America during his years at Yale. He assimilated. He blended. He fit in. He became one of “them,” even though he was not one of them.

He could never be one of them, one of those he met, roomed with, ate with, laughed with over the years.

Because he was Barakah Karif Ramir, only son of the sheikh, heir to the throne of Kharmistan.

All his English and American friends knew him as Ben, the nickname his Yale roommate had given him when he could not remember how to pronounce Barakah.

And being Ben was easier, simpler. Nobody groveled, nobody harassed, nobody bothered to try to impress him or beleaguer him or ask anything of him.

It had been as Ben that he had traveled to Paris in an attempt, years after his return to Kharmistan, to recapture some of that simplicity that had been lost to him in the halls of his father’s palace.

It had been as Ben that he had met Eden Fortune, the beautiful Texan he’d foolishly introduced himself to as Ben Ramsey. And why not? He’d anticipated an innocent flirtation, a Parisian romance, perhaps a mutually pleasurable dalliance.

Most women fawned all over him once they learned he was a prince. They fawned, and they preened, and they asked inane questions, and they got mercenary gleams in their beautiful eyes when they looked at him.

He had not wanted to see that acquisitional gleam in Eden Fortune’s lovely blue eyes. And he had not. He had seen interest, yes. In time, he had seen love, a love he returned in full measure.

Even as he deceived her.

The summons back to Kharmistan had come too soon, before he could confess that deception, before he could ask her to marry him, share her life with him. A hurried note left on a pillowcase, and he was gone, flying back to Kharmistan on his private jet, racing to the bedside of his seriously ill father.

But he had written. He had written several times, little more than hurried notes scribbled between taking care of state business and sitting at his father’s bedside. He had ordered those notes hand-delivered to Paris, with her replies placed directly into his hands.