The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum Read Online Free PDF Page B

family, many of the women still lived together, three generations, sometime more, and other women in the family visited every day for breakfast or coffee. His grandmother would have picked up a pregnancy in an instant.
    ‘Was this daughter living with her mother?’ he asked, intrigued now. ‘Or seeing her regularly? Would the mother not have noticed her pregnancy?’
    He won another smile, only a small one but still it felt like a victory.
    ‘Her daughter had always been big, and had put on more weight, but she hadn’t been obviously pregnant before she’d left on the trip. She’d kept in contact with her mother, so Rose knew she’d been with her friends in Brisbane at the time Alexandra was found, but left almost immediately afterwards. By the time Rose saw the appeal for information, the daughter was in Central Australia somewhere, and, from photos sent on the mobile phone, considerably thinner.’
    ‘And this Rose contacted you?’
    ‘She phoned the hospital while the programme was still running on her television. She’d tried to phone her daughter but couldn’t get through, but Rose turned out to be a determined woman and no grandchild of hers was going to be brought up in care. She offered to have a DNA test the next day and get the lab to send the results straight to the hospital, but even before she knew for certain, she was on a plane to Brisbane.’
    ‘And she is the grandmother?’
    Was he really so interested in one tiny baby, Liz wondered, or was he talking to divert her as the plane was rising smoothly into the sky? She had no idea, but Rose and Alexandra’s story was a good one, so she continued to explain.
    ‘She not only is, but she’s a force to be reckoned with. She slashed her way through all the red tape, parried any objections and took her grandchild back to Melbourne yesterday. She says it’s up to her daughter to decide what they tell Alexandra—she’s keeping her name, too—but Rose is more than happy to bring the infant up as her own.’
    ‘So, a happy ending all round,’ Khalifa said with a broad smile, and Liz forgot about toes curling because this smile was enough to make her entire body spark and fizz in a most unseemly manner.
    She’d heard about physical attraction but had obviously never experienced it, because this was something entirely new, and entirely ridiculous because she was going to be working with this man and couldn’t go around all sparky and fizzy every time he smiled.
    Although perhaps he wouldn’t smile too often!
    ‘It was a happy ending,’ she said, ‘and a great relief as far as I am concerned as I’d have hated to go away leaving Alexandra in limbo.’ She hesitated, then the words she knew she shouldn’t say came out anyway. ‘It’s not a very comfortable place, limbo!’
    She turned her attention back to the papers in on lap, although she knew their contents by heart. She hadn’t needed to check out neonatal units on the internet, as she’d always kept up with latest developments, but she didn’t want to get anything wrong or miss out on something that might work in Al Tinine.
    Al Tinine…If Najme meant star, did Tinine also have a meaning? She pulled out the little table Saif had shown her and set down her file on the new unit, digging into her bag for the brochures on the country, certain there’d be an explanation somewhere.
    She could ask.
    But asking meant starting another conversation and having a conversation meant looking at him, and while she was looking at him he might smile and…
    Klutz!
    As far as she could remember, she’d never been a mental klutz, confining her clumsiness to the physical, but now her mind was running wild and bumping into things and losing the plot completely.
    Could she put it down to a slight release from the grief and tension of the last few months?
    She had no idea but hopefully it would sort itself out before too long and return to the focussed, professional brain she would need to do her job.
    And