got time to get changed, then?’
‘Yes. Let’s go into your room,’ Topsy urged, tugging at Saffy’s arm.
A frown indented Saffy’s brow at her sister’s obvious eagerness to get her alone. ‘What’s up?’ she asked as she closed her bedroom door.
Topsy, all liveliness sliding from her expressive face, sank down on the edge of the bed, hunched her shoulders and muttered, ‘I found out something I wasn’t prepared for this week and I didn’t want to bother Kat with it,’ she admitted.
Saffy dropped down on the stool by the dressing table. ‘Tell me…’
‘You’ll probably think it’s really silly,’ Topsy confided.
‘If it’s upset you, it’s not silly,’ Saffy declared staunchly.
Topsy pulled a face. ‘I don’t know if I am upset. I don’t know how I feel about it—’
‘How you feel about what?’ Saffy prompted patiently.
‘A few weeks ago, my dad, Paulo, asked me to agree to a DNA test. I’m eighteen. We didn’t need Kat’s permission,’ Topsy explained as Saffy raised her brows in astonishment at the admission. ‘Apparently Dad had always had doubts that I was his child and since he got married he and his wife have had difficulty conceiving—’
‘Your dad’s got married? Since when? You never told us that!’ Saffy exclaimed.
Topsy sighed. ‘It didn’t seem important. I mean, I’ve only met him a half-dozen times in my whole life. With him living in Brazil, it’s not like we ever had the chance to get close,’ she pointed out ruefully. ‘Anyway, his new wife and him went for testing when she didn’t fall pregnant and it turns out he’s sterile.’
Saffy stiffened at the news. ‘Hence the DNA testing…’
‘And it turns out that I couldn’t possibly be his kid,’ Topsy confided with a valiant smile. ‘So, I went to see Mum—’
Saffy gave her a look of dismay, for Odette was a challenging and devious personality. ‘Please tell me you didn’t!’
‘Well, she was the only possible person I could approach on the score of my parentage,’ Topsy pointed out ruefully. ‘First of all she tried to argue that in spite of the DNA evidence I was Paulo’s kid—’
‘I doubt if she wanted the subject dug up after this length of time,’ Saffy remarked stiffly, cursing their irresponsible and selfish mother and hoping she had dealt kindly with her youngest daughter.
‘She definitely didn’t,’ Topsy admitted with a grimace of remembrance. ‘She just said that if Paulo wasn’t my father, she didn’t know who was. Did she really sleep with that many men that she wouldn’t know, Saffy?’
Saffy reddened and veiled her eyes. ‘There were periods in her life when she was very promiscuous. I’m sorry, Topsy. That was an upsetting thing for you to find out. How did Paulo react?’
‘I think he had already guessed. He didn’t seem surprised. Let’s face it, I don’t look the slightest bit like him. He’s over six foot tall and built like a rugby player,’ Topsy reminded her companion ruefully. ‘Now I’ll probably never find out who my father is but why should that matter to me? After all, you and Emmie have a father who lives right here in London but who still takes no interest in you.’
Saffy groaned. ‘That’s different. Mum and him had a very bitter divorce. She dumped him because he lost all his money. When he built a new life and remarried and had a second family he didn’t want anything more to do with us.’
‘Does that bother you?’
‘No, not at all. You can’t miss what you’ve never had,’ Saffy lied, for that was another rejection that still burned below the layer of emotional scar tissue she had formed. When she and her twin had been at their lowest ebb, their father, just like their mother, had turned his back on them and had said he wanted nothing to do with them.
‘You’re evil…just like your mother. Look what you’ve done to your sister!’ he had told Saffy when she was twelve years old, and even the passage of time hadn’t erased her memory of the look of dislike and condemnation in his gaze.
‘Sorry to land you with all this,’ her kid sister muttered guiltily.
Beyond the door Cameron called them for dinner and Saffy seized the chance to give her kid sister a comforting hug, wishing she had some clever reassurance to offer Topsy on the topic of absent father figures. Unfortunately, not having normal caring parents left a hole inside you and even Kat’s praiseworthy efforts to fill that hole for her sisters had not proved entirely successful. Saffy had simply learned that when bad things happened you had to soldier on, hide your pain and deal with the consequences in private.
Only when Topsy had returned to Kat and Mikhail’s home for the night with her spirits much improved did Cameron turn with a concerned look in his shrewd eyes to ask Saffy suspiciously, ‘What—or should I say who—kept you unavoidably detained in Maraban?’
Saffy visibly lost colour. ‘It’s not something I want to talk about right now.’
‘You know that’s not a healthy attitude,’ Cameron, who was a firm believer in therapy, warned her.
‘Talking about anything personal will never come easily to me,’ Saffy admitted tightly. ‘I spent too many years locking everything up inside me.’
She was extraordinarily tired and she went to bed and lay there with her eyes wide open in the darkness, struggling to suppress the images of Zahir stuck inside her head. Fighting thoughts teemed alongside those unwelcome images. She would get over that little desert rendezvous in Maraban and leave Zahir behind her…in the past where he truly belonged.
Ten days later, Saffy wakened because while she had slept she had slid over onto her tummy and her breasts were too tender to withstand that pressure. With a wince, she sat up, wondering if it was time to use the pregnancy kit she had bought forty-eight hours earlier, but she was still strangely reluctant to put her suspicions to the test. Could she have enjoyed intimacy just one time and conceived when her unfortunate sister, Kat, had been trying without success to fall pregnant for many months? It struck her as unlikely and she had only bought the test in a weak moment of dreaming about what it might be like to become a mother.
Such silly dreams, childish dreams for a grown woman to be indulging in, she scolded herself impatiently, dreams full of fluffy, fantasy baby images and not a jot of reality. Somewhere deep down inside her a voice was telling her that a baby would be one little piece of Zahir that she could have and cherish, but she was intelligent enough to know that the reality of single parenthood was sleepless nights, cash worries and nobody else to share your worries and responsibilities with. Frustrated by her own rebellious brain, she got up and did her morning exercises, desperate to think of something else. When that didn’t work she changed into her sports gear and went out for a run, returning to the apartment drenched in perspiration and on legs wobbly from over-exertion. Stripping, she walked into the shower and washed. She was towelling herself dry when she heard the doorbell buzz. She pulled on her robe and padded across the hall to answer.
She looked through the peephole first and froze, looked again, her heart rate kicking up a storm. Zahir? Here in London? Her teeth gritting, she undid the chain and opened the door.
‘What do you want?’ she demanded sharply.
‘INVITE ME IN,’ Zahir commanded.
Saffy was uneasily aware of the two security men standing by the lift, of the status and level of protection Zahir now required as the ruler of Maraban, and the very idea that he was now at risk of becoming a target for attack gave her stomach a