by Holly Rayner
“I get that,” Zelda said. “I understand.”
“We’ll also need to get you a special gown for the night,” Zayed told her. “It will be your debut into high society here, so you’ll have to look absolutely spectacular.” He gave her a quick, appraising glance. “Not that the basic ingredient isn’t already more than acceptable.”
“That’s…thanks, I guess?” Zelda wasn’t sure if it was necessarily a compliment.
“You’ll be meeting some of the wealthiest people in this country,” Zayed told her, “as well as some minor royalty from my family.”
Zelda set her fork down again, staring at the Sheikh. “Minor royalty? In your family?”
He dismissed the shock in her voice. “I’m distantly related to them,” he told her. “But I’m nowhere near close enough to the throne to ever consider inheriting it. Over a dozen people would have to die for me to even have a chance.”
“So I’ll be meeting with…the equivalent of dukes, or something?”
Zayed considered the question, tilting his head from side to side.
“Basically,” he agreed finally. “Everyone invited to the party will either be press or upper class, so we will need to be absolutely flawless.”
“Are you getting a special suit for the occasion?”
Zayed smiled. “A tuxedo, yes,” he told her. “Events here tend to be extremely formal. You’ll have an evening gown specially made, too.”
Zelda thought about the amount of money that he was investing in the enterprise of them getting married and it staggered her; it was almost absurd, and she was tempted to ask again why it was possible for him to game the system but not change the law.
The Sheikh served her a little more of the meal from the platters in front of them, and Zelda noticed that he had somehow discerned which items she liked the best from her first serving.
“Shouldn’t I be at least a little involved in the process of planning my own engagement party?” she asked. “My own wedding?”
“You will be,” the Sheikh said. “I’m a busy man, after all. You’ll be meeting with my personal assistant, Tarek, who’s in charge of the arrangements. He can handle it, but of course he’ll consult with you about your preferences.”
They continued to talk and eat, and Zelda found herself feeling somehow both more comfortable with the prospect of what they were going to do and more anxious at the stakes they were playing with.
Of course, she thought to herself when she and Zayed finished their meal, it wasn’t as though the Sheikh having a marriage of convenience would really impact his life in any way. She somehow imagined that in the eyes of Murindhi law, a fake marriage—as long as it was legal—would be as good as a marriage for love.
It would probably have more of an impact on her if the scheme was found out. Living in Miami, Zelda was familiar with the concept of “green card weddings,” where people from different countries made deals with Americans so as to find an easier route to citizenship.
When Zayed left, their conversation cut short by an “urgent” business call, Zelda walked back to her quarters, thinking about the strange twists and turns her life had taken in less than a month. She never would have expected to find herself stowing away on a yacht, or being rescued by a billionaire—still less the proposal that said billionaire sheikh had made.
Zelda stripped off her fine new clothes and decided that the saying was right: truth was even stranger than fiction. She went into her bathroom and decided to put some of the bath products Zayed had had delivered to her room to good use; she would need to get into character as quickly as possible if she wanted to see their scheme through and not get caught.
After fiddling with the taps for a few moments, Zelda got the water running and selected a bath package that smelled of lilies and jasmine. Sinking down into the warm water, she sighed at the strangeness of life, her thoughts turning towards assembling a character that would match up to the Sheikh’s expectations of his imaginary bride-to-be.
Chapter 8
“Where is Zayed? We were supposed to meet after breakfast,” Zelda said to Hadya.
The older woman shrugged. “He leave for business. Back maybe three hours.”
Zelda smiled politely at the older woman, inclining her head in a respectful nod that concealed her annoyance; it was the day before her and the Sheikh’s supposed engagement party, and she had wanted plenty of time to go over their cover stories in detail once more.
The days since she’d moved into Zayed’s palatial mansion had been intense, more so than any other period of learning in her life. She and Zayed had spent hours out of every day learning about each other—or in Zelda’s case, solidifying her cover story—and rehearsing their tale of meeting and falling in love.
Zelda went back to her room after Hadya’s news, thinking about the engagement party to come. She felt anxious, restless; she wanted to be doing something, wanted something else to fill her mind with.
The Sheikh had taken her to one of his designer friends the day before to do the final fitting on her gown for the party, and they’d spent the entire drive speaking about their pasts.
“It’s actually a good thing that your parents are so highly educated, and passed that onto you,” Zayed had said at one point.
“I thought you said having two professors for parents wasn’t good enough for people here?” Zelda had raised an eyebrow at the Sheikh’s apparent hypocrisy.
“It isn’t,” he said, smiling slightly. “But you benefitted from having highly intelligent parents who taught you well.”
Zelda shrugged. “Why is it such a benefit if I can’t even claim it?”
“Because you have poise, and you can speak well,” Zayed told her. “That will give everyone the impression of class, even if you don’t speak the language.”
“What about you? What was your education like?”
Zayed fleetingly looked almost sad, but the impression left his face so quickly that Zelda thought that she might have imagined it.
“Private tutoring from a young age,” he said. “Then boarding school in Switzerland when I was a teenager, and of course college,” Zayed told her. “My parents wanted me to have the very best in everything that would be important to my future.”
“Mine too,” Zelda had told him, glancing out through the windows as the reminder of the fight she’d had with her parents sent a chill through her. “They didn’t have the means for some of those things, but I went to private school, and to one of the better in-state colleges.”
“You said that you dropped out?”
Zelda had cringed, shrugging off her embarrassment as best as she could. “I started out studying literature,” she’d explained. “And then I realized that I wasn’t likely to get any kind of relevant job once I graduated, and I didn’t really think any of the other programs my university offered would put me in a better place. That was why I ended up going to culinary school; I thought it would be more practical.”
“I studied hotel and hospitality management for the same reason,” Zayed told her. “Of course, I had my father’s success to draw on. He started his hotel business as a sideline to another pursuit, and I took it up before I went to university, as a sort of practical education.”
They’d continued talking while Zelda had her dress fitting, and while Zelda thought she had a good handle on the facts of her future husband’s life, it had occurred to her more than once that she still didn’t have a good idea of who he was as a person.
Zelda looked around her sitting room, feeling her anxiety and restlessness increase. “You know,” she said to herself, “I’ve been here a week and I haven’t seen more than maybe a third of this place.” She glanced at the empty room around her; she wasn’t certain that a wander around the house would help the feeling of ants crawling up and down her arms and legs, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
She decided to start with the parts of the palatial home farthest away from the wing that her room stood in. The handful of serv
ants around the house had mostly ignored her in the week since she’d arrived, and Zelda had been relieved, because the idea of trying to navigate social interactions with people she barely knew, who barely spoke the same language, had been too daunting.
Zelda wandered towards an older wing of the home and looked around. It wasn’t as ornately decorated as the rest of the mansion, and she noticed that the colors were much more somber than in other parts of the house.
She peered at pictures on the wall and realized gradually that it wasn’t that the room was different in its coloring, it was that some of the windows had been covered, and some of the art was shrouded in dark fabrics, creating a forlorn atmosphere. Zelda frowned to herself and tried to think of why that could possibly be.
A big portrait of a beautiful woman and a handsome man, dressed in wedding finery, dominated one wall, and as Zelda stared at it, she realized that the two had to be Zayed’s parents: she could see Zayed’s eyes on the woman, his lips on the man.
Once she realized that, her eyes took in more details: the room was full of images of Zayed’s parents, the ones that weren’t covered shrouded in darkness. He mentioned his parents had passed away, Zelda reminded herself; apparently there was a convention about how the people of Murindhi grieved.
As she looked at the pictures of the beautiful couple, Zelda thought back to the curt, almost cold way that Zayed had talked about his parents; he hadn’t spoken of them as if he disliked them, but there had been a definite air of “just the facts” about his comments.
He must miss them a lot, Zelda mused, peering more closely at a picture that had been taken—she assumed—shortly after Zayed’s birth, of his mother holding him, his father standing behind her, beaming.
Zelda moved on from the room, hoping to rid herself of the melancholy of it, and went into one of the other parts of the old house, feeling thoughtful.
The walls of the corridor had more pictures, and in many of them, Zelda recognized a much younger Zayed. Some featured him and his parents, at the beach together, or at a park somewhere. There was a picture of young Zayed and his father at one of the hotel properties, cutting the ribbon for the grand opening. A picture of Zayed and his mother showed them playing some kind of game in a garden, with Zayed running away, grinning widely, his face more open and carefree than Zelda had seen it in the weeks she’d been around him.
She continued on, finding more and more pictures of the man she was set to marry in a week’s time, trying to understand how he could have been so different from the way that he had seemed to her in all of their interactions.
She’d assumed that Zayed was simply a businesslike, slightly aloof man in general; his generosity notwithstanding, he had seemed to be part of his group of friends without really connecting much with any of them. They seemed to exist more as an accessory to his life, as a moving display, but the pictures she saw around the house, taken over the years, tucked away in parts of the palatial home where Zayed never seemed to go, told a different story.
Zelda had to wonder what it was about the Sheikh that made him so...not quite distant, but disengaged from the people in his life, when the evidence scattered around his home informed her that at some point, years ago, he’d been involved, expressive, and interested in the lives of all the people he interacted with. Obviously he was a good businessman, and Zelda had enough experience to know that he wasn’t the type of billionaire who hoarded his money, but who found pleasure in sharing it with others.
This guy is more complicated than he seems, she thought, shaking her head at the odd contradiction in his character.
She checked the time and realized that she’d spent nearly two hours just wandering the house, looking at things, and trying to figure out just who Zayed really was.
Zelda made her way back to her quarters and tried to find something to occupy her time with while she waited for the Sheikh to get back from his office in the city proper. But no matter what she tried to do, she found herself thinking again and again about the strange difference between the child she’d seen in the pictures throughout the house, and the man she’d come to know during her time in Murindhi. It just didn’t make any sense.
She wondered if perhaps the change had something to do with the Sheikh having his heart broken. She concocted a story in her mind about a beautiful, charming and wealthy woman—everything that Zayed wanted to pass Zelda off as. Maybe they’d met somewhere else, maybe they’d met in Miami. And maybe the woman had stolen his heart. Perhaps he had intended to marry her, not just in order to buy out his rival, but because he’d loved her.
Zelda dismissed the idea as she started trying to decide whether the woman—her imaginary invention—had broken the Sheikh’s heart on accident or on purpose. It wasn’t a very likely story.
Feeling like she wanted to change into something more comfortable—she’d put on one of the nicer designer outfits the Sheikh had bought her—Zelda went into her bedroom and slipped off the heels she’d wandered the house in, letting her feet sink into the thick rug near her bed. She slipped off her skirt and blouse and pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt—one of the few more casual items Zayed had allowed her to buy during their shopping trip.
A knock at the door cut through Zelda’s addled thoughts.
“Coming,” she called, smoothing her hair back from her face.
She assumed it must be Hadya or one of the other members of the household staff, but instead, Zayed himself stood on the other side of her door, dressed in what she’d come to think of as his business uniform: a clean, crisp three-piece suit with a bright white shirt and silk tie.
“Oh,” Zelda said, blushing slightly and feeling more than a little underdressed compared to her future husband. “Hadya said you were in the city on business.”
Zayed smiled slightly. “I was,” he said. “I just got back.”
“Do I need to change? I’d gotten dressed for the city but then you were away, so I figured I could put on something more comfortable.”
Zayed shook his head. “You look fine to me,” he said softly. “I thought you might want to practice our first dance for the wedding.”
Zelda smiled; it seemed like an almost inane detail, amongst all of the other things going on in the flurry of activity surrounding their wedding. She’d met with officers of the court to sign the preliminary paperwork, with Zayed’s personal assistant multiple times to go over specifics for the flowers, the food, the decor for the wedding, and with designer friends of Zayed’s both for her engagement party gown and her wedding dress. She had generally spent her days doing so many things that it was all she could do some nights to eat her dinner, take a bath and go to sleep so that she could do it all over again the next day.
“I should at least put on my heels if we’re going to practice,” Zelda pointed out; they’d picked out her shoes for the wedding reception, and while she had worn heels before, the ones made by another one of Zayed’s designer friends did not fill Zelda with confidence that she’d get through the day without taking a tumble and ruining the society heiress image she and Zayed had concocted.
“I’ll meet you in the east garden,” Zayed told her. He kissed her on either cheek and Zelda couldn’t quite suppress the little tingle that ran through her at the contact.
“I’ll be out in ten minutes,” she said, turning to find the new shoes in her closet.
Zelda shook her head to herself; it had been over a year since she’d seriously dated anyone, and now—after knowing her future husband for all of a few weeks—she was going to be getting married.
But there’s no romance in it, she reminded herself firmly, finding the box in her closet and taking the shoes out of it. Stop getting so emotionally involved, already.
The shoes were beautiful: ivory satin with brilliant red flowers, in honor of Murindhi wedding tradition. The thin heel scared Zelda; she was still convinced that she was destined to face-plant before she made it through the vows.
She slipped the shoes onto her
feet and stood up experimentally, taking a deep breath. Her ankles wobbled slightly until she pushed down on the arches of her feet, steadying herself. She took a deep breath and stepped from side to side, and then forward and back until she was satisfied she would make it to the garden, at least, without tripping up.
Zelda grinned at herself in the mirror. She hadn’t changed out of her skinny jeans and T-shirt, and somehow the combination of the casual clothes with the extra-formal shoes was both stylish and absurd.
She took a deep breath and carefully stepped out of her room, through the sitting area, and into the corridor. She could already feel the balls of her feet complaining at the onslaught of pressure from the shoes, but she ignored it; eventually the pain would go away, and the more important concern was to keep from twisting one or both of her ankles, or falling on her face, on her way to meet her husband-to-be.
Chapter 9
Zelda found the Sheikh in the east garden, connecting his phone to the sound system there.
It was one of the more beautiful spaces on the property: the exterior wall totally obscured by lush plantings, ringed with trees that extended up so far over her head, Zelda could almost forget that the compound was walled in at all.
The center of the garden was cleared out, a patio area with space for maybe a few dozen people to congregate. Zelda thought that they would probably have the private reception, intended only for Zayed’s close friends and business associates, there, so it made sense to practice their first dance as man and wife on the granite surface.
The Sheikh looked up from his phone and smiled slightly, nodding towards her. “I think we just might get it right this time,” he said, reminding her of their first few awkward attempts with the dance instructor a few days before.
