The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum (2 page)

She smiled again—not much of a smile but enough to light a spark in the wide blue eyes she hid behind the chunky glasses.

‘Gold plate would probably be toxic anyway,’ she said, then the smile slid away and the little crease of a frown returned. ‘My next question would be, are you setting it up as a working, effective unit that will give preemie babies the very best chance of leading normal lives later on, or are you putting it in because you think hospitals should have one?’

The question shocked him even more than the previous assumption had, although would he have considered it if not for Zara’s and the baby’s deaths?

That
thought angered him.

‘Are you always this blunt?’ he demanded, scowling at her now. ‘I expect you to set up a properly organised special care neonatal unit with some facilities for infants who would, in a larger hospital, go into a neonatal intensive care unit. I understand you have such facilities in your unit here at Giles, which is one of the reasons I chose this hospital.’

No need to tell her that the other reason was because he’d heard and read such impressive reports of
her
work with neonates.

‘Fair enough,’ she said easily, apparently unperturbed by his scowl and growling reply. ‘But when you said “you”, did you mean “you” as in someone from the unit or me personally?’

Direct, this woman!

‘I did mean you personally,’ he told her, equally direct. ‘It is you I wanted—or was you.’

‘And having seen me, you’ve changed your mind?’ The words were a challenge, one he could see repeated in the blue eyes for all she hid them behind those revolting glasses. ‘Too tall? Too thin? Wrong sex, although the Elizabeth part of my name must have been something of a clue?’

‘You’re pregnant.’

He spoke before he could consider the implication of his statement, and as her face flushed slightly and her eyes darkened with some emotion he couldn’t read, he knew he’d made a mistake.

A big mistake!

‘So?’

The word was as steely as the thrust of a well-honed sword, but as he struggled to parry the thrust she spoke again.

‘Pregnancy is a condition, not an illness, as I’m sure you know. I have worked through the first thirty-two weeks and I intend to continue working until the baby is born, returning to work…’

The fire died out of her and she reached out to support herself on the filing cabinet behind which her ‘condition’ had originally been hidden. The air in the alcove had thickened somehow, and though he knew you couldn’t inhale things like despair and sadness, that was how it tasted.

‘Actually—’ the word, her voice strong again, brought him back to the present ‘—a trip away right now might be just what the doctor ordered. I presume if you’re setting up a neonatal unit you already have obstetricians and a labour ward so my having the baby there wouldn’t be a problem. As far as this unit is concerned, we have visiting paediatricians who are rostered on call, plus there’s a new young paediatrician just dying to take over my job, so it would all fit in.’

The steel was back in her voice and he wondered if it came from armour she’d built around herself for some reason. She’d shown no emotion at all when she’d talked about her pregnancy, no softening of her voice, just a statement of facts and enquiries about obstetric services.

Neither did she wear a wedding ring, although handling tiny babies she probably wouldn’t…

‘Well?’

Liz knew she’d sounded far too abrupt, flinging the word at him like that, but the idea of getting away from the turmoil in her life had come like a lifeline thrown to a drowning sailor. She was slowly learning to live with the grief of Bill’s death, but Oliver’s continued existence in a coma in this very hospital was a weight too heavy to carry, especially as his parents had banned her from seeing him.

Oliver’s state of limbo put her into limbo as well—her and the baby—while the unanswerable questions just kept mounting and mounting.

Would Oliver come out of the coma? Would his brain be functioning if he did? And would he want the baby?

She sighed, then realised that the man had been speaking while she was lost in her misery.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and this time heard him asking about passports and how soon she could leave the country.

‘Right now, today!’ she responded, then regretted sounding so over-eager. ‘To be fair, I’d need a week or so to bring my replacement up to date. She’s worked here before, which is why she wanted to come back, so it won’t take much. And it’s not as if I won’t be coming back—you’re talking about my setting up the unit and getting it running, not offering a permanent placement, aren’t you?’

The man looked bemused, but finally he nodded, though it seemed to her that his face had hardened and the arrogance she’d sensed within him when he’d first spoken had returned.

He didn’t like her—not one bit.

‘There is no one with whom you should discuss this first?’ he asked.

Liz shrugged.

‘Not really. Providing I leave the unit in good hands, the hospital hierarchy won’t complain, and as you’ve probably already discussed your idea of staff swapping with them, they won’t be surprised. And this first trip shouldn’t take long, anyway. It will be a matter of organising space, equipment and staff. It’s not as if you’ll be taking in babies until those are all in place.’

Now he was frowning. It had to be the pregnancy. He obviously wasn’t used to pregnant women working. Well, it was time he got used to it.

The silence stretched, so awkward she was wondering if she should break it, but what could she say to this stranger that wasn’t just more chat? And though she certainly hadn’t given that impression earlier, she really didn’t do chat.

Relief flooded her as he spoke again.

‘Very well. I will be in touch later today with a date and time for our departure. I have your details from the HR office. In the meantime, you might make a list of equipment you will require. My hospital is the same size as Giles, and I would anticipate the unit would be similar in size to this one.’

The words were so coldly formal Liz had to resist an impulse to drop a curtsey, but as the man wheeled away from her, she gave in to bad behaviour, poked out her tongue and put her thumbs to her ears, waggling her fingers at him.

‘He’d have caught you if he’d turned around,’ her friend Gillian said, before taking up what was really worrying her. ‘And what on earth are you thinking? Agreeing to traipse off to a place you’ve never heard of, with a strange man, and pregnant, and with Oliver the way he is, not to mention leaving all of us in the lurch?’

Liz smiled. The sentiments may have been badly expressed but Gillian’s concern for her was genuine. Could she explain?

‘You know Oliver’s family won’t let me near him,’ she began, ‘and Carol is the perfect replacement, and she’s available so no one’s being left in the lurch. That said, what is it you’re most worried about—the pregnancy, the strange man, or that I’ve never heard of this Al Tinine?’

‘It’s the decision,’ Gilliam told her. ‘Making it like that. It’s totally out of character for you. You took months mulling over doing the surrogacy thing—could you do it, should you do it, would you get too attached to the baby? You asked yourself a thousand questions. And while I know you’ve been through hell these last few months, do you really think running away will help?’

Liz shook her head.

‘Nothing will help,’ she muttered, acknowledging the dark cloud that had enshrouded her since Bill’s death, ‘but if I’m going to be miserable, I might as well be miserable somewhere new. Besides, setting up a unit from scratch might be the distraction I need. I love this place, would bleed for it, but you know full well the staff could run it without much help from me, so it’s hardly a challenge any more.’

‘But the baby?’

Gillian’s voice was hesitant, and Liz knew why. It was the question everyone had been wanting to ask since the accident that had killed her brother and put his partner in hospital, but the one subject they hadn’t dared broach.

Liz shrugged her shoulders, the helplessness she felt about the situation flooding through her.

‘I’ve no idea,’ she admitted slowly. ‘The accident wasn’t exactly part of the plan when I agreed to carry a baby for Bill and Oliver, and with Oliver the way he is and me not being able to even see him, who knows what happens next? Certainly not me! All I can do is keep going.’

She suspected she sounded hard and uncaring, but from the moment she’d agreed to carry a child for her brother and his partner, an agreement made, as Gillian had reminded her, after much soul-searching, she’d steeled herself not to get emotionally involved with a baby that would never be hers. She’d played it music Bill and Oliver loved, told it long stories about its parents, cautious always to remember it was their baby, not hers.

It would never be hers.

Now its future was as uncertain as her own, and she had no idea which way to turn. No wonder the challenge the man had offered had seemed like a lifeline—a tiny chink of light shining through the dark, enveloping cloud.

Then another thought struck her. Had the man said ‘our’ departure? Did he intend to hang around?

She felt a shiver travel down her spine, and her toes curled again…

* * *

Khalifa sat in the hospital’s boardroom, listening to his lawyers speaking to their counterparts from the hospital, but his mind was on a woman with heavy-framed glasses, a pregnant woman who seemed totally uninvolved in her own pregnancy. Zara had been transformed by hers, overjoyed by the confirmation, then delighting in every little detail, so wrapped up in the changes happening in her body that any interest she might ever have had in her husband—not much, he had to admit—had disappeared.

To be fair to her, the arranged marriage had suited him as he’d been building the hospital at the time, busy with the thousand details that had always seemed to need his attention, far too busy to be dealing with wooing a woman. Later, Zara’s involvement in her pregnancy had freed him from guilt that he spent so little time with her, though in retrospect…

He passed a hand across his face, wiping away any trace of emotion that might have slipped through his guard. Emotion weakened a man and the history of his tribe, stretching back thousands of years, proved it had survived because of the strength of its leaders. Now, in particular, with El Tinine taking its place among its oil-rich neighbours and moving into a modern world, he, the leader, had to be particularly strong.

‘Of course we will do all we can to assist you in selecting the equipment you need for the new unit in your hospital,’ the chief medical officer was saying. ‘Dr Jones has updated our unit as and when funds became available. She knows what works best, particularly in a small unit where you are combining different levels of patient need. I’ll get my secretary to put together a list of equipment we’ve bought recently and the suppliers’ brochures. Dr Jones will be able to tell you why she made the choices she did.’

He hurried out of the room.

Dr Jones…The name echoed in Khalifa’s head.

Something about the woman was bothering him, something that went beyond her apparent disregard for her pregnancy. Was it because she’d challenged him?

Not something Zara had ever done.

But Zara had been his wife, not his colleague, so it couldn’t be that…

Was it because Dr Jones running from something—the father of her baby?—that she’d leapt at his offer to come to Al Tinine? There had been no consultation with anyone, no consideration of family or friends, just how soon could she get away.

Yes, she was running from something, it had to be that, but did it matter? And why was he thinking about her when he had so much else he hoped to achieve in this short visit?

It had to be her pregnancy and the memories it had stirred.

The guilt…

He, too, left the room, making his way back to the neonatal ward, telling himself he wanted to inspect it more closely, telling himself it had nothing to do with Dr Jones.

She was bent over the crib she’d been called to earlier and as she straightened he could read the concern on her face. She left the unit, sliding open the door and almost knocking him over in her haste to get to the little alcove.

‘Sorry,’ she said automatically, then stopped as she realised whom she’d bumped into. ‘Oh, it’s you! I
am
sorry—I’m a klutz, always knocking things over or running into people. My family said it was because I live in my head, and I suppose that’s right at the moment. The baby in that crib was abandoned—found wrapped in newspaper in a park—and the police haven’t been able to trace the mother. We call her Alexandra, after the park.’

Liz heard her rush of words and wondered what it was about this man that turned her into a blithering idiot, admitting to her clumsiness, thrusting ancient family history at a total stranger.

‘The baby was found in a park?’

Despite the level of disbelief in the man’s voice, her toes curled
again
. This was ridiculous. It had to stop. Probably it was hormonal…

‘Last week,’ she told him, ‘and, really, there’s nothing much wrong with her—she was a little hypothermic, occasional apnoea, but now…’

‘Who will take her?’

Liz sighed.

‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ she admitted. ‘She’ll be taken into care. And while I know the people who care for babies and children are excellent, she won’t get a permanent placement because she obviously has a mother somewhere. And right now when she desperately needs to bond with someone, she’ll be going somewhere on a temporary basis.’

Why was she telling this stranger her worries? Liz wondered, frowning at the man as if he’d somehow drawn the words from her by…

Osmosis?

Magic?

She had no idea by what. Perhaps it was because he was here that she’d rattled on, because worrying about Alexandra was preferable to worrying about her own problems.

‘You think the mother might return to claim her? Is that why the placement is temporary?’

Liz shook her head.

‘I doubt she’ll return to claim her. If she’d wanted her, why leave her in the first place? But if the authorities find the mother, they will do what they can to help her should she decide to keep the baby. It’s a delicate situation but, whatever happens, until little Alexandra is officially given up for adoption, she’ll be in limbo.’