The Sheikh's Secret Son (11 page)

So why was Sawyer looking at her so accusingly? And why was she feeling so guilty?

“Your daddy might be able to answer some of your questions better than I can, Sawyer,” Eden said at last, watching as her son bit his lip, as one heartbreakingly large tear escaped the absurdly thick fringe of long dark lashes around his too bright eyes, rolled down one unnaturally pale cheek.

“I won't talk to him!” the boy said at last, his voice high, almost shrill. “I won't see him, and I won't talk to him. I hate him! And I hate
you,
too!”

Eden sank back onto her heels, both hands pressed to her mouth, watching as Sawyer ran back toward her mother's house, toward Holden who stood on the back porch, his arms held open, to gather his sobbing nephew close against his strong chest.

“Talk to him, Holden, please,” she whispered as
her brother lifted Sawyer high onto his shoulders, went back into the house. “Talk to him, make him understand what I can't understand, what's impossible to explain. Explain to Sawyer. To Ben. And then let me find a way to make Ben understand that his son doesn't really hate him.”

 

Eden sat on the old rocker, where she had been ever since watching her mother and Mrs. Betts drive off toward the main house, Mary Ellen saying she felt her daughter and Ben would feel more free to talk if no one else was in the house.

She could smell the honey buns her mother had baked before she left, and even summoned a small smile as she realized her mother still believed there was nothing so bad that it couldn't be helped by a little home cooking and a talk around the kitchen table.

She could picture it now. “Hi, Ben, you hate me, your son hates you, I bungled the explanation so that he hates me, too. Perhaps you'd care for some butter on that bun?”

Eden watched the road, waited for the small cloud of dust that would tell her Ben's limousine was on the grounds, heading toward her mother's house. She watched, and she waited, and she wished she could think of something even moderately coherent
to say when Ben arrived. Anything to say. Anything at all.

And then he was there. The black limousine appeared along the curving road to her mother's house, situated two miles away from the main ranch house, an eternity away from the safety of her mother, her family.

Haskim hopped out of the front passenger seat the moment the limousine came to a halt, running to the rear compartment, throwing open the door.

Ben Ramsey did not get out of the car.

Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir—His Royal Majesty, Big Chief Emir, Prince Whatever—of the ancient land of Kharmistan, however, was there in all his glory.

Thanks to her stint on the Internet, Eden knew Ben was wearing a princely
aba,
an ankle-length coat of many colors, this one striped unevenly in dark purple, blue, and orange, all displayed on a pure white background. His
kaffiyeh
was of whitest white silk, banded by an
agal
of spun gold around three thick coils that held the cloth on his head.

As he mounted the steps to her, the
aba
moved with him, revealing a peacock-green silk lining, as well as the dark purple caftan beneath the robe and worn over a pure white
kamis
—the name, she knew now, for what was really only a long white shirt.

Only Ben's shoes were Western. Or as Western
as Gucci could be. The rest of him, from his
aba
to the imperious look on his tanned, handsome face, the steely glint in his dark eyes, was pure Kharmistan.

This,
his look seemed to say to her,
is who I am. This,
the set of his jaw told her,
is who my son is. When we speak, we will speak with these truths before us.

“Your Highness,” Eden said shortly, rising, opening the screen door and motioning for him to precede her into the house, toward the smell of honey buns, toward the reality of this comfortable home Eden had to hold on to as hers, as Sawyer's.

Ben inclined his head slightly, allowing her to understand that, yes, he was her superior, then swept through the doorway, his robes whispering as he went, taking the desert into her mother's house, taking centuries of Kharmistan pride and arrogance and sovereignty and employing it to take possession of her mother's house.

He was, Eden decided, looking for a spitting contest, and believed he was the obvious winner. Well, he hadn't counted on the Fortunes of Texas. They'd been winning spitting contests for a lot of years, and she, as a Fortune, wasn't about to roll over and play dead just because the blood of desert princes ran in his veins.

Now, if she could only convince herself of the
truth of her own bravado, somehow put some of the starch back in her knees.

“Your mother's house, I understand,” Ben said, motioning her to a chair, as if he acknowledged where he was and still set himself up in the role of host. “My son visits here often?”

“Oft—often. Yes, often.” Oh, this was going well. Why didn't she just bow down and kiss his Guccis? “Sawyer and I are lucky to be surrounded by a loving, caring family,” she went on, raising her chin a fraction. “A very protective, powerful family.”

“I am sure this is so, Eden,” Ben answered, picking a photograph of Sawyer up off an end table, taken the day the boy had first sat on his pony, Hercules. “My son rides?”

Eden felt herself begin to melt, because even the Sheikh of Kharmistan could not keep the pain out of his voice as he asked his question. As he knew, yet again, how very much of his only son's life he had missed, could never be a part of through anything more than photographs.

“He…um, Sawyer was sitting a pony almost before he could walk,” she told him, crossing to the fireplace and taking down another photograph, this one of their son at the age of two, sitting on Santa's lap at a San Antonio department store. “Would you
like to have them?” she asked, handing him the second photograph.

“Yes, thank you. I would like to have these. I would like to see every photograph and video you have of our son. Where is he? Have you told him about me?”

She motioned toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “Would you like some coffee, Ben, a piece of cake? My mother baked some buns this morning.”

“You did not tell him.” Ben's dark eyes skewered her. She wouldn't have been surprised if he called for Haskim to drag her away to the dungeons.

“I told him,” she answered when she could find her tongue. What was going on here? She felt as if she'd been caught up in some Hollywood version of
The Sheikh and the Texas Girl,
or something just as inane. “Ben, for crying out loud—”

“And what did he say? How did he react?”

There was only one safe way to take a fence, and that was head-on. “He says he hates you and doesn't want to see you. But that's all right, because he hates me, too. You didn't gain a son last night, Ben, I— I lost one. So you can stop acting the big bad sheikh now, all right, because you're not impressing me—and then help me figure out what in hell we're going to do now.”

She sat on the nearest chair and dropped her head
into her hands. She fought tears as she took in deep breaths, willing herself back under some semblance of control. A control that broke entirely when Ben knelt in front of her and took her into his arms, pulling her against his shoulder.

“Oh, God, Ben,” she said on a sob, “what am I going to do now? He's my baby. My own sweet baby. How can I make him understand what happened? How can we ever make this right, for all of us?”

He held her as she cried, as all the fear and the heartache, combined with the hazy knowledge dawning at the edges of her brain that Ben was holding her close for the first time in more than five long, lonely years, washed over her, robbed her of any strength, both physical and mental.

He smelled so good. His muscles were so strong, so solid beneath her grasping fingers. Memories forcibly buried so long ago returned in a hot rush of physical awareness, her traitorous body remembering how he had held her, how he had loved her.

“I believe in fate, Eden,” she heard him say, whispering the words into her ear as his warm lips brushed against her bare skin.

“I believe in luck, Ben. Bad luck,” Eden replied, pushing herself out of his arms, struggling to gain her feet, to put some much needed space between them. “It can't be fate that separated us, but bad
luck. And our own pride. Now Sawyer's paying the price.”

Ben rose to his full height, his robes still impressing her even as she wished she weren't so easily intimidated by the trappings of his royal office.

“Our son does not hate you, Eden. You must give him time to accustom himself to the idea that he no longer dreams of a father, but that I am here. That I intend to stay, to learn to know my son as he learns to know his father. Deeper explanations will wait until he is older, more able to deal with complete truths. For now, I will move slowly, at Sawyer's pace. We will become friends.”

Eden rubbed at her damp cheeks with the back of her hand. “Oh, really, Ben? And how long do you intend to stay here in Texas? A few weeks? A month? Because you don't know your son. He's not going to fall into your arms if you show up with a couple of toys and some stupid, romantic explanation it would take six gallons of water to swallow. Not your son. Not my son. You don't know him.”

“I know you, Eden, and I know myself. The fig does not fall that far from the tree.”

Eden didn't know how, but his last statement reached her, touched her, even brought a small smile to her lips. “That's
apple,
Ben. The apple doesn't fall that far from the tree.”

He shrugged, stepped toward her once more.
“Are the two so different, Eden? Are we all not more alike than we are different?”

She put out her hands, hoping to hold him at arm's length. Because he was too close to her. His proximity frightened her. Her reaction to his proximity terrified her. She had been shocked at his reappearance in her life, shocked to learn who he was, what he was.

That shock had kept her from thinking too much about how she had once loved him, how she might still love him. Love could only cloud her reason, end with her making decisions based on her own need, and not on what was best, safest, for Sawyer.

“We can't do this, Ben,” she warned him, warned herself. “We can't muddy the waters with some sort of transitory involvement that has no chance of being more than that. I know you've been hinting at starting up where we left off, and I'm flattered, Ben, truly I am. But I'm also Sawyer's mother. Any decisions I make will be to benefit him. They won't be to scratch an itch we both had almost six years ago.”

Ben tipped his head to one side, looked at her closely. “‘Scratch an itch,' Eden? Is that what you thought we were doing in Paris? I do not believe you.”

That was understandable. Eden didn't believe herself. But this was important. She had to divide Ben
and herself from any decisions made about Sawyer and Ben.

“I don't believe it really matters whether you believe me or not, Ben,” she said, running a hand down the back of her head, along the single braid. “What matters is that you're not going to use our son to get me to topple back into bed with you.”

He looked at her for a long time. Watched her closely, silently, assessingly. “Very well,” he said at last, turning away from her. “If you would be good enough to contact me at my hotel when you have come to your senses, I will be awaiting your call. Until then, Eden, I will busy myself making my own very legal, very proper arrangements as concern visitation with my son.”

“You—you wouldn't do that, Ben,” Eden said, rushing after him as he walked toward the door. “You wouldn't put this whole mess into the hands of lawyers, would you? You wouldn't force the issue, make Sawyer do something before he has had time to…to…to
accept
that you are his father? And it'll hit the papers, Ben, you can count on it. Somebody in the lawyers' office will sell the story to the tabloids. God! You can't do this, Ben!”

The eyes he turned on her were cold and hard, empty of anything except an almost palpable distaste directed toward her. “You would deny me my son, Eden, even as you say that you are not doing so.
You would deny yourself, turn away from even the chance we might build on what was begun in Paris. I am not so willing to deny myself, Eden. I will see my son. One way or the other, I will talk to him.”

“Oh, all right, all right!” Eden took hold of his arm, pulled him back toward the center of the room. “I'll admit it. I can't do this without you. Sawyer deserves to meet you, you deserve to meet him. Only we have to separate the two of us from our feelings for Sawyer. You can see that, can't you?”

“You might see that, Eden,” he answered quietly, picking up the photographs of Sawyer, looking at them again. “I do not. We are a family, no matter how much you may deny that fact to yourself.” He looked up, looked deeply into her eyes. “I do believe in fate.”

Eden returned his look, somehow not flinching at either his expression or his words. “If you could summon Haskim, Ben, I will show him where to put your bags,” she said at last, knowing that the only thing worse than having Ben here, talking to Sawyer, would be to not have him here, talking to Sawyer.

Ben gave her the ghost of a smile, not a smile of victory, but one that promised a truce if she would allow it, then went outside to speak to his servant.

Moments later, Haskim was walking into the room, a large suitcase in one hand, a three-foot high
stuffed white plush Arabian stallion with velvet bridle and jeweled saddle tucked under his other arm. Eden had no idea where Ben had found the toy, but she doubted she would ever become accustomed to the man's resourcefulness.

“Ben, that won't work,” she warned him, pointing to the toy.