The Innocent Carrying His Legacy

  “I’m simply here to inform you that you will have a child in approximately six months, and to discuss options for its care.” Ivy hoped she sounded calm.

  She continued, “As I told you, I don’t have the means to care for a child. I offered to be Connie’s surrogate on the understanding that she would then take the child after he or she was born. I didn’t envisage...” She stopped, a strange feeling constricting inside her, part grief and part an aching fear that she didn’t quite understand. “What I mean to say is that the child isn’t mine. Or at least, I don’t view it as such. It’s always been Connie’s.”

  The sheikh’s gaze ran over her, suddenly very intense, making her breath catch and foreboding twist hard in her gut.

  “You said you didn’t want a family,” he said almost thoughtfully. “Why is that?”

  Ivy blinked at the change of subject. “That’s really none of your business.”

  He lifted one black brow. “Is it not? You’re pregnant with my child, which makes this very much my business.”

  The words pregnant with my child made her feel warm, her cheeks heating. How ridiculous to blush about something like that, especially when it wasn’t what it sounded like and they both knew it.

  Jackie Ashenden writes dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes who’ve just gotten the world to their liking only to have it blown apart by their kick-ass heroines. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, the inimitable Dr. Jax, two kids and two rats. When she’s not torturing alpha males and their gutsy heroines, she can be found drinking chocolate martinis, reading anything she can lay her hands on, wasting time on social media or being forced to go mountain biking with her husband. To keep up-to-date with Jackie’s new releases and other news, sign up to her newsletter at jackieashenden.com.

  Books by Jackie Ashenden

  Harlequin Presents

  Crowned at the Desert King’s Command

  The Spaniard’s Wedding Revenge

  The Italian’s Final Redemption

  The World’s Most Notorious Greek

  The Royal House of Axios

  Promoted to His Princess

  The Most Powerful of Kings

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Jackie Ashenden

  The Innocent Carrying His Legacy

  This one’s for Lily.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM SECRETS OF CINDERELLA’S AWAKENING BY SHARON KENDRICK

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘SHE’S STILL THERE, SIR.’

  Sheikh Nazir Al Rasul, owner of one of the most powerful and most discreet private armies in the world, and a warrior to his bones, gave his guard a hard stare. The guard was young, a boy still, but he wore his black and gold uniform with pride and his shoulders were squared with determination.

  Admirable. But Nazir had left strict instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He’d just returned to Inaris after a particularly delicate operation involving putting down a coup in one of the Baltic states and, after two days of no sleep, he was in no mood to have his orders disobeyed by wet-behind-the-ears guards.

  Nazir lifted his chin slightly—always a warning sign to his officers. ‘Did I say I was to be disturbed?’ He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

  The young soldier blanched. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Then explain your presence. Immediately.’

  The boy shifted on his feet.

  Nazir stared.

  With an effort the boy stilled. ‘You said to let you know if anything changed.’

  Nazir was tired and so it took a moment for the statement to penetrate. And then it did.

  The guard was talking about the uninvited guest who’d turned up outside the gates of Nazir’s fortress. That wasn’t unusual—many people made the trek to his fortress in the middle of the desert. They braved the terrible rumours he’d put about on purpose to discourage visitors, wanting either to join his army or seek his assistance, or request his tutelage. He was a master in the art of war, especially physical combat, and his expertise was well known and sought after.

  He refused everyone who turned up at his gates, which, alas, didn’t stop people from turning up.

  However, they were usually male. This time it was a woman.

  She’d appeared several hours ago along with a local guide, who should have known better.

  Nazir didn’t let anyone into his fortress and he didn’t want to start now, and so he’d given his guards strict instructions to ignore the woman. Usually people went away after the first couple of hours. Waiting outside the gates in the brutal desert sun was a more effective deterrent than any number of dogs or weapons.

  Irritation settled in Nazir’s gut, but he ignored it. A good commander never let either his emotions or physical discomfort affect him, and Nazir was a good commander. No, he was an excellent commander.

  ‘What’s changed?’ he demanded without any discernible change of tone.

  The guard hesitated a second. ‘Well...ah...it appears that she’s pregnant, sir.’

  Nazir stared, this time not taking it in at all. ‘Pregnant? What do you mean she’s pregnant?’

  The guard opened his mouth. Shut it. Lifted a shoulder. Then seemed to collect himself and stood straighter. ‘She asked for water and a...sun umbrella. Because she was pregnant, she said.’

  Nazir didn’t blink, not even at the mention of a sun umbrella. ‘She’s lying,’ he said flatly. ‘Do nothing.’

  ‘Sir. She had...uh...’ The guard made a curving gesture in the region of his stomach. ‘We could see it on the camera.’

  Nazir had had two nights without sleep. He’d just overseen an operation that had required some delicacy, and he already had requests for his services from the governments of two nations, in addition to a number of private enquiries, and what he desperately needed right now was sleep. Not to deal with yet another idiot turning up at his gates wanting God only knew what. Especially a pregnant idiot.

  ‘Do nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Letting her in will only encourage more of these fools. And as to her being pregnant, that’s easy enough to fake.’

  ‘Sir, she’s asking for you by name.’

  Nazir was not moved. ‘Yes, they all do.’ Though admittedly, that did not include pregnant women. The likelihood of him siring a child was, after all, close to zero since he was always careful when it came to sex and even then he didn’t indulge himself often. Giving in to those baser, more physical instincts made a man soft.

  Voices drifted down the echoing stone hallway and then came the sound of running feet. Another young guard appeared, looking excited. He came to a stop outside Nazir’s bedroom door, clicked his heels together smartly and stood at attention. ‘Sir,’ he said breathlessly. ‘The woman has fainted.’

  Of course she had. It was clearly too much to ask that he had an uninterrupted couple of hours’ sleep. Clearly it was also too much to ask that his men ignore her. They didn’t get much in the way of female company, it was true, but if all it took was one woman turning up at the gates to generate this much excitement, then it was apparent that either his men needed more and harder drills, or some leave was in ord
er.

  It was also apparent that he was not going to get any sleep until the issue with the woman had been dealt with.

  ‘Bring her to the guardhouse,’ Nazir ordered tersely, letting no hint of his temper show. ‘I’ll deal with her there.’

  Both guards saluted and disappeared off up the corridor.

  Nazir muttered a curse under his breath then grabbed the black robe he’d hung over the back of a chair, belting it loosely around his waist before striding out.

  This was the very last thing he needed right now.

  There were always people coming to his gates, but he never let them in and he didn’t particularly want to start now. Especially not with a woman who’d demanded first a sun umbrella then fainted. She was probably some idiot tourist who’d heard the rumours he’d carefully cultivated to deter most of the people who turned up at his door—rumours about the brutal warlord and his army of murdering thugs that he’d collected from prisons around the world, who led a nomadic lifestyle in the desert to escape detection and woe betide any who came across them because they did not understand the concept of mercy.

  It was the best kind of rumour, one that held grains of truth. He was a brutal warlord and it wasn’t that he didn’t understand mercy, he just saw no point to it. The murdering thugs and the nomadic lifestyle were smokescreens, naturally, but it succeeded in deterring most idle fools.

  This woman was clearly a fool who had not been deterred.

  One thing he was sure of though: she definitely wasn’t pregnant. And if she was then she was more of a fool than he’d initially thought. What woman would head out into the middle of the desert in search of him, despite the terrible rumours, then spend a couple of hours standing outside his gates in the sun, and all while she was pregnant?

  Nazir strode out of the big stone fortress he called home and across the dusty courtyard in front of it, heading towards the small guardhouse by the massive reinforced steel gates.

  It was a sturdy building made of stone, equipped with the same high-tech surveillance equipment that was in use in the rest of the compound. It was also air-conditioned—unlike the fortress, which didn’t need it due to its medieval construction of thick stone walls that protected from the worst of the heat—since the heat was brutal and Nazir preferred his men uncooked, especially when on guard duty.

  The two guards outside saluted at his approach and Nazir ran a reflexive, critical eye over them. Guards on duty in the hottest part of the day were relieved on the hour every hour, and, judging by the colour of these two, they were due to be relieved any minute. They were also new recruits, young men wanting to prove themselves to him, which often led to unwanted complications.

  ‘Make sure you get some water when you go off-duty,’ he said shortly. ‘Soldiers who can’t look after themselves are of no use to me.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the two guards said as one.

  Nazir pulled open the heavy iron door into the guardhouse and stepped inside.

  Another guard stood near the door while a second sat at the station in front of the bank of screens and computers that constantly monitored all areas of the fortress.

  The downside of being Commander of one of the world’s most sought-after and feared private armies was that he’d made many, many enemies. And there were a great many people who wanted him and his army gone. Preferably for ever.

  His fortress was marked on no maps, nor was it detectable via any other high-tech search, and all its communications were encrypted. To the rest of the world it simply didn’t exist. Yet there were always people trying to find it and trying to find him.

  They always failed.

  The beauty of the desert was that it mostly did his work for him when it came to winnowing out his enemies.

  Of course, there were always a few determined souls who didn’t let sand and savage heat stop them.

  Souls such as the woman who lay in a bundle of dirty white robes on a makeshift camp stretcher set up on the guardhouse floor.

  The two guards came to attention the instant Nazir stepped inside.

  He ignored them, moving over to the camp stretcher where the woman lay.

  She was small, her figure and hair obscured by the robes she wore, which had obviously been bought from the tourist bazaar in Mahassa since the cotton was thin and cheap and would offer exactly zero protection from the sun. Her hair was covered by another length of cotton, but her face was unveiled. She had a pointed chin, a small nose, and straight dark brows. There was an almost feline cast to her features, not pretty in the least, but her mouth was fairly arresting. It was full and pouty and sensual, though her lips were cracked.

  Her lashes were thick and silky-looking, lying still on sunburned cheeks...

  Actually no, they weren’t still. They were quivering slightly and Nazir could detect a faint, pale gleam from underneath them.

  An odd, delicious thrill went through him, though what it was and what it meant, he couldn’t have said. What he did know was that the woman was definitely not unconscious.

  And she was watching him.

  * * *

  Ivy Dean had been on the point of pretending to wake up when the door to the small guardhouse she’d been taken to had opened and the tallest, broadest man she’d ever seen had walked in.

  Her breath had caught and the fear she hadn’t felt once during the long and sometimes frustrating journey from England’s cool, misty rain to the brutal heat of Inaris had suddenly come rushing over her.

  Because it wasn’t just his height—which had to be well over six three—or the fact that he was built like a rugby prop forward, or maybe more accurately an ancient Roman gladiator. No, it was the aura he projected, which she felt like a change in air pressure as soon as he entered the guardhouse.

  Danger. Sheer, heart-pumping, terrifying danger.

  He radiated a kind of leashed, savage violence, like a dragon guarding his hoard.

  And she was the rabbit served up to him for his lunch.

  She stayed very still on the camp bed they’d laid her on, holding her breath and silently regretting her decision to fake a faint as he loomed over her, because no doubt he’d pick up on her play-acting easily enough. He was just the kind of man who saw everything, including pretence.

  Through the veil of her lashes, she caught a glimpse of a face that looked as if it had been carved from solid granite. His nose was crooked, his cheekbones carved, his jaw square and sharp. His chiselled mouth was as hard as the rest of his features and what could have been sensual had firmed into a grim line.

  It was a harsh face, intensely masculine and not pretty in the slightest.

  His eyes were what truly terrified her, though. Because they were the most astonishing colour, a bright clear turquoise framed by thick black lashes. She’d seen eyes that colour in the tourist bazaar of Mahassa, in the faces of people descended from the ancient nomadic desert tribes, and they were unusual and beautiful.

  But in the face of this man, the colour had frozen and turned as icy as the tundra in the north. There was no mercy in those eyes. No kindness. No warmth.

  There was death in those eyes.

  This was the warlord, wasn’t it? The one she’d followed all those rumours about. The terrifying, cruel Sheikh who lived in the desert with an army of murderers who either stole people away to sell in some black-market trafficking ring, or killed them where they stood.

  ‘Stay away from the desert, miss,’ the staff at the tourism information centre had told her. ‘No one goes into the desert.’

  They didn’t understand though. She had to go into the desert. Because it was the warlord she had to find. Even though she hadn’t wanted to. Even though it went against every self-protective urge she had.

  She had to at least try, for Connie’s sake.

  The warlord stared at her, the expression on his harsh face utterly unforgiving
, and Ivy’s mouth went bone dry. Unable to stop herself, she slid a protective hand over the slight roundness of her stomach.

  His predator’s gaze flickered as he spotted the movement and abruptly he straightened to his full height, looking down at her.

  ‘You can stop pretending now,’ he said in perfect, accentless English. ‘I know you’re awake.’

  His voice was as deep and as harsh as his features, like an earthquake rumbling under the ground, and he issued it not so much as an observation but as a command.

  He was a man used to giving orders, which made sense. Authority radiated from him, the kind of authority that came without arrogance, the kind that was innate. The kind of authority that some people were simply born with.

  Ivy found herself stirring and opening her eyes before she’d even registered that she was doing so.

  The warlord said nothing, his frozen gaze taking in every inch of her as she sat up, making it obvious that the onus was on her to explain herself.

  Fear gathered like a kernel of ice in her stomach and she kept her hand where it was, as if she could protect the small life inside her not only from the man standing in front of her, but from her fear as well.

  But giving in to such emotions was never helpful and despite the urging of her primitive lizard brain to make a dash for the door, throw it open, and run for her life, she remained where she was. Being practical was key; she wouldn’t get far even if she did run, not in a fortress full of soldiers. And besides, where would she run to? There was nothing but desert outside, her guide having abandoned her as soon as he realised that she had no intention of merely viewing the fortress from a safe distance, that she actually wanted to go inside and speak to the warlord himself.

  Anyway, show no fear. That was what you had to do when faced with a predator. Running would only get you eaten.

  Ivy ignored the ice inside her, just as she ignored that, even from a few feet away, the man still managed to loom over her, making the guardhouse feel ten times smaller than it actually was.