The Sheikh's Secret Son (14 page)

T
he sun was setting before the limousine carrying Eden and Ben approached the suburbs of San Antonio and the mellow brick house on Edgewood Drive. Theirs had been a mostly silent drive, punctuated only by the ringing of Ben's cell phone and his quick, clipped conversations in Arabic to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Eden's Arabic was less than nonexistent, but she did believe she had caught the name Jamil at least twice during one of the conversations.

So, she'd decided, that's how it was going to be, was it? Ben making plans, hiding those plans from her? What had he been saying? Worse, what had he been planning? She resolved to phone her Uncle Ryan out at the ranch later tonight, to impress on him yet again that Sawyer must never be alone, never be left unprotected.

Unprotected? From his own father? Did she trust Ben so little?

“Ah, we are here already?” Ben commented, bringing Eden back to the moment. “I had not re
alized. Eden, have I left it too late to tell you that I have planned a small surprise for this evening.”

She immediately went on the alert—her jangled nerves tangling themselves around her heart. “A small surprise?” she asked warily. “What kind of small surprise?”

The limousine pulled up against the curb, and Eden looked out to see a white delivery van parked in the driveway. The words Custom Catering were painted on the side in rather elegant, dark blue script.

“What's that?” she asked, pointing toward the van, hating the fact that her hand was trembling.

“If we can trust Haskim's powers of translation,” Ben told her, smiling rather sheepishly, “I imagine it is a four-course dinner for two. You do still enjoy French cuisine, Eden? I ordered—had Haskim order—the same menu we enjoyed together in Paris the first night we met. Do you remember that night, Eden?”

Her mouth had gone dry, so that she was forced to swallow down hard before she could answer. “I remember, Ben,” she said at last, as the driver came back to open her door. Haskim, who obviously had been the ear on the other end of Ben's cell phone calls, and who had followed them in another car that had magically appeared at the ranch, seemed to have
been given the night off. “I also remember that neither of us ate more than a few bites.”

“We were too busy talking, weren't we?” Ben agreed as he nodded a farewell to the driver and slipped his arm around Eden's waist, escorting her up the walk, to her front door. “Will tonight be very different, do you think?”

“That—that depends on what you want to talk about, I suppose,” Eden replied as she dug in her purse for her keys, wondering how it was that her legs were supporting her, how her feet knew to move along the walkway.

Because there was a strange lightness in her head, a curious buzzing in her ears…and a definite flutter in her stomach.

Her entire body had gone all strange on her. With what was left of her mind Eden decided that what her traitorous body was doing, was about to do, was to betray her completely, falling once more under the spell of Ben Ramsey, her Paris lover.

“Ben…” she said, looking back toward the smiling men carrying large chafing dishes up the walkway…then looking at Ben, her eyes begging him to help her. “I can't do this. Please understand. I just can't do this.”

Ben took her key ring from her unresisting fingers, opened the front door. “The kitchen is down
this hallway, gentlemen, and to your left. You know where to set up your table?”

“Yessir,” one of the men said, shifting the bubble gum in his mouth. “In front of the fireplace, that's what our orders say. And then we're to make ourselves scarce until tomorrow morning, right? Bubba—I mean, Francois—was mighty put out that he wouldn't be serving you. Had himself all done up in his tux and everything.”

“My most profound apologies to Francois,” Ben said as the three workers passed by them, heading into the house. Then he winked at Eden, who had inexplicably gone from abject fear to near hysterical laughter, finding she had to lean against the doorjamb or otherwise collapse in a puddle of laughter.

“Bubba Francois,” she got out at last, wiping at her streaming eyes. “Supposedly the finest caterer in the city. Maybe we ought to rethink this, Ben. I mean, I don't know about you, but I'd have loved to hear his French accent.”

Her sense of humor, that had just betrayed her as badly as her nervous system had done a moment earlier, evaporated as Ben took hold of her elbow and steered her inside, toward the stairs.

“Not that you are not always lovely, even in jeans and T-shirt, but I believe we have at least a half hour before our dinner is served, if you wish to go
upstairs and change into something more suited to our candlelight dinner.”

Overbearing, arrogant, bossy man! How dare he tell her to take herself off upstairs and change into something more “comfortable.” Who—
what
—did he think she was?

“Your Highness?”

Eden, who had been ready to tell Ben to go to hell, and what he could do when he got there, whirled about to see Haskim standing just outside the still-open door. He was holding a garment bag and small overnight suitcase.

“I don't believe this! Do you actually think you're going to be staying
here?
God, Ben, where do you come off—believing I'd invite you to stay here?”

Haskim stepped past her, heading for the staircase. “I have your suit, Your Highness, and all else that you shall need for a formal dinner. Miss Fortune? Perhaps you might direct me to the proper room upstairs, so that His Highness can refresh himself, dress for dinner?”

Eden looked at the grinning servant, then to an almost contrite-looking Ben, who reminded her of a dangerous wolf draped in a sheepskin trying to blend in with the rest of the flock.

“Oh, go ahead, Haskim,” she said at last, glaring at Ben to let him know that, whatever he had
planned, it wasn't going to work. “Upstairs and to your right. The room with the blue-and-white-striped wallpaper.”

“Thank you, Eden,” Ben said as Haskim climbed the stairs. “This is difficult for both of us, I know. Our conversations about Sawyer are best not conducted in public, but I felt that we might be more comfortable if we at least had the trappings of civilization surrounding us as we converse.”

She looked him up and down. Sniffed. “Yeah, Ben. Right. I believe that—as much as I'd believe that Garth Brooks has always had a hankering to sing opera.”

“Who?” Ben looked at her questioningly, clearly not understanding the comparison.

Which, yet again, served to send Eden into nervous laughter. “You honestly don't know, do you? Hasn't old Garth hit Kharmistan yet? He's hit the rest of the world. The next time you see Sawyer, you might want to ask him to sing
Friends in Low Places
for you. But be warned—don't tell him his father never heard of Garth Brooks. I mean, the child might never recover.”

She stood beside the staircase, holding on to the newel post until Haskim reentered the foyer, then she bounded up the stairs, singing loudly, “‘I've got friends in
low places…
'”

It wasn't until she had stripped out of her clothing
and was standing under the shower in the bathroom attached to the master bedroom that the unnatural hilarity that had seemed to be her defense against hysteria at last deserted her completely.

She put her arms out in front of her, pressing her hands against the tile wall on either side of the water-control knob, and bowed her head, letting the pulsating water from the shower head beat down on her neck, her upper back.

The water massage didn't help. Turning on the waterproof shower radio and tuning it to a country station, praying the music would drown out her own thoughts didn't help. She was still wound as tightly as a drum, her senses heightened, her heart refusing to maintain a steady beat for more than a few moments at a time.

Then she heard Willie Nelson singing about a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timing man. Eden had always considered that tune to be her mother's theme song, and her father's greatest failing.

Was she doing it again? Was she once more going to think like her mother…and act like her father? The last time she'd thrown conscience and responsibility and possible consequences to the winds she'd had her heart broken.

And she'd gained Sawyer, the child who'd healed that broken heart.

Eden turned off the radio, grabbed a bottle of shampoo from the shelf inside the large shower stall, and began washing her hair with an intensity that brought fresh tears to her eyes.

She knew what he wanted.

He wanted her to remember.

God help her, she did remember. She would never, could never, forget…

She'd been wandering through a small Paris museum devoted to less well-known artists when she'd stumbled over a threshold and straight into Ben Ramsey's helpful arms.

She had raised her head, her mouth already forming the words “Thank you,” when her eyes met those of her rescuer and she forgot what she had been about to say.

Those eyes. Those dark, laughing, seen-everything, done-most-of-it eyes.

And then, as her tongue did everything but twist itself into a knot, he smiled, and with that smile she knew that her life had suddenly, unexpectedly, changed forever.

When she at last could speak, when he answered, the words were unimportant. They both somehow knew what the other had meant:

“I—I—” she stammered.

“And I,” he'd said feelingly, his voice deep as a
velvet midnight even as he threaded her arm through his and guided her toward the exit.

She went with him, unprotestingly, feeling safe and yet in perilous danger at the same time.

There had been a small restaurant only a few hundred feet from the museum door, and within minutes Eden was seated across a table from this magnificent physical specimen straight out of any girl's dreams.

He'd ordered for them both in flawless French, then tasted the wine before nodding that, yes,
mademoiselle
could now be served. The waiters, all five of them, had all but fallen over themselves with happiness that
monsieur
had approved the wine, but then discreetly melted into the dimness at the merest lift of her companion's hand.

It was magical. More than magical.

She was Cinderella at the ball.

She was Sleeping Beauty awakened by only the promise of a kiss.

She was Eden Fortune, hopelessly out of her depth, and ready to throw more than twenty years of calm common sense straight out the window without a moment's regret.

“Speech, at this moment,” he'd said to her at last, “would almost seem redundant, would it not? For I know you, have known you since the beginning of time. You do feel that? I pray you feel as I do.”

From another man, at another time, in another
universe outside this small world they seemed to have created between themselves, Eden would have laughed lightly and said something like, “Well, that's a come-on line I haven't heard before.”

But they were in this time, they were together, the two of them, in this small world. And he was not another man. He was like no man she'd ever met.

“I am Ben,” he said when she didn't speak. “Ben Ramsey. And you—you are beautiful.”

At last she did answer, smiling at him, smiling with her eyes, her lips, her heart. “Now
that
one was more than a little hokey, Ben,” she told him, waving her hand at his outrageous compliment.

“
Ho
-key?” His smooth brow furrowed questioningly for a moment, and then he sat back in his chair, grinned with the openness of a child. “Yes, it was, was it not? My apologies—”

“Eden,” she told him, knowing he was waiting for her to fill in the blank. “Eden Fortune. Now, if you'd please explain what we're doing here, how we got here,
why
I allowed you to bring me here—well, I'd really appreciate it. Because, and I'm not ashamed to say it, I've never done anything this impulsive in my entire life.”

He smiled once again, that smile calming her, relaxing her, even as she felt the same physical thrill she'd experienced earlier. “Do you believe in fate,
Eden Fortune?” he asked, taking her hand in his across the small table, lifting it to his lips. “I do.”

Before the evening was over, an evening spent talking, and laughing, and doing their best to ignore the hand-wringing waiters who took away course after course of nearly uneaten delicacies, Eden also believed in fate….

“But I don't believe in fate anymore. And I sure don't believe in history repeating itself!” she assured herself firmly as she dried her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, then scraped the thick dark brown mane back into a French twist.

She all but stomped to her walk-in closet, clad only in small wisps of black silk, and reached far into the back of the closet to pull out a plastic wardrobe bag. She couldn't believe what she was about to do, but she was going to do it anyway.

Just to prove that she was now immune, her heart hardened, her resolve intact…and her silly dreams forever banished into the fairyland that had been that first night in Paris with Ben.

 

They met on the stairs, Eden coming from the master bedroom, Ben walking down the hallway from the opposite direction. She knew where he'd been, could see it in his face.

“The room you changed in is at
my
end of the hallway, not the direction you just came from,” she
told him, noticing the far-off look in his eyes. “The house isn't that big, Ben, you couldn't have gotten lost.”

“I visited Sawyer's room,” he said honestly. It was not an admission of any sort of guilt, not a statement even slightly tinged with apology. It was simply a statement of fact. He had been in his son's bedroom.

“I see,” she said as she preceded him down the stairs. “And did you find anything that interested you? See any lack that you and your bottomless pockets will have some underling fill before Sawyer comes home? I didn't think you'd stoop to buying your own son, Ben, but I guess a lot has changed in nearly six years.”