by Lia Lee
If she went with Raheem… literally anything could happen. However, some part of her, no matter what kind of sense she tried to offer it, told her that she was far safer where she was.
“Why?” Irene asked. She hadn’t thought she had said it. When Raheem tilted his head to one side, she blushed, aware of how she sounded. When he answered her question, however, he was serious.
“Because I could not get you out of my head,” he said simply. “Because I was already enchanted with you when I spoke to you at the airport. When I found out that you were involved with such a heinous deed, I was furious. I spent days in my chambers in Khanour, trying to see how I had been fooled so badly. I have always been a good judge of character. I have staked my position and my government on such judgments, and they have always been right. When I found out that you were thieving a true part of my country’s history, I wanted to know just how I had been so very wrong.”
He paused, gazing out the window for a moment. For just that instant, Irene could see why Khanour followed him so willingly. He was a man who always thought of his country first, who would fight to the death for them.
“And what did you decide?” she asked softly.
“I decided that I wasn’t wrong at all,” he said, and as he did so, he looked straight into her eyes.
In that moment, it looked as if he could look straight into her soul and her spirit, finding the secrets that she hid there. She resisted the urge to cover her eyes with her hands, instead continuing to stand there and look right back.
“I have not offered any defense,” she said, but he shook his head.
“You have offered very little at all,” he said with a shrug. “You are hiding something, and the woman I spoke to before all hell broke loose, I think she would have a very good reason for hiding. She needs to realize that she is safe before she gives up her secrets.”
“Safe…” She echoed the word softly, startled by how it woke a deep longing inside her. She hadn’t felt safe in weeks… if she were honest, she hadn’t felt safe for most of her adult life. There was always one more wolf to be kept from the door, her brother to protect.
“Yes. And I swear to you as the sheikh of Khanour, there is no one in the world who is safer than the person standing next to me. You are my wife.”
“What do you want from me?” Irene asked, and this time, there was a tremor in her voice, something that felt just a few inches away from being tears.
“I want you to be my wife for a week,” he said, as if it was the most simple thing in the world.
“What?”
“For the next seven days, you will be my wife in all things. At the end of that time, we will either see eye to eye on what you tell the police and you will give them what they want before you walk free…”
“Or?” she asked.
“Or you have decided that you do not trust me and I will leave you in Romania, a country with whom we do not have an extradition treaty. You will walk out of here, if not free, then freer than you would be if you had persisted with your silence in prison.”
“Why are you doing this for me?” Irene asked, dazed. “You surely do not make a habit of breaking out women you think are innocent from prison to help them…”
“Who is to say I don’t?” he asked teasingly, but when she looked up at him in surprise, he shook his head.
“No. I would not do this for just anyone else. I think it was the moment where our eyes met at the airport when you were being taken away. You wanted to tell me that you were sorry. I have known many thieves in my life, Irene, but believe me when I say that no thief has ever told me that they were sorry, not like you did.”
Irene bit her lip, unsure of what to say, but he continued, his tone light and casual.
“After that, I simply had to make sure that I actually could help you.”
She looked down at her hands. “So I have to be your wife for the week, and after that, one way or the other, I will walk free.”
He nodded. Irene knew that she should keep the next part to herself, but some innate honesty refused to allow her to do so.
“I… I am not going to tell you anything,” she said quietly. “I won’t. I can’t…”
To her surprise, he did not seem to be angered by her pronouncement. Confused, Irene tried again.
“I mean it. I have no intention of telling you what you want to know.”
“I heard you,” Raheem said, his tone gentle. “I only know that that is going to change.”
For a moment, she wanted to laugh at him for his confidence. Regardless of the situation she had landed in, she had always been a very strong-willed person. Now he was implying that his will was stronger than hers. Instead, Irene nodded.
“All right.”
“And I hope you understand that you are my wife. This is not an arrangement in name only, or something created merely to remove you to my custody. This is a real thing, consecrated by law and by tradition.”
Under his hot gaze, she could feel the color rise to her cheeks. She knew exactly what he was talking about. Perhaps another woman would have been afraid or horrified, but for her, her heart began to beat faster.
“I understand,” she said softly. “And I submit.”
Something about the way she said the words made the desire in his eyes explode into a bonfire. For a moment, she thought he would simply lunge at her and make her his right then. To her surprise, she saw him rein himself in, a slight smile on his sensuous lips.
“All right. Good. Then we shall have no problems.”
***
The plane touched down next to an oasis in the middle of miles of desert. Irene couldn’t get over how the land seemed to jump for a moment, dropping the lush green forest of the oasis in the middle of the barren desert.
“The sands look like they could kill you,” she murmured, looking out over the darkening land.
“They can,” Raheem replied, coming to stand next to her. Together, they watched the plane take off into the night. It would return for them at the end of the week.
“I don’t feel as if I am in danger, however,” Irene mused. “I feel… safer here than I have in a long time.”
To her surprise, he pulled her back against him, kissing the top of her forehead. It was a different kiss from the one they had shared on the plane. This one was tender, almost ordinary if it hadn’t been happening in the most extraordinary of circumstances. It felt affectionate, and though she knew that they were operating in a strange space, a part of her craved more.
“Good. That is how I want you to feel.”
He led the way to a luxurious house set back by the water. It was a gorgeous home, a gem of modern design set in the middle of an ancient landscape. It had all of the modern conveniences of the city while being lost in a wild paradise.
He went to build a fire in the steel pit at the center of the living room, looking over his shoulder at Irene.
“You should go shower. There are clothes in the small bedroom to the right, if you wish to get out of those robes.”
“You gave me these robes,” she said, and he shrugged.
“You can wear what you like. The robes were simply convenient and would get you out of the city without too much trouble.”
She wasn’t sure what to say, so she found her way to the bathroom, where there was a shower in an enclosed glass chamber with water sprinkling from the ceiling in a gentle rain. For several long moments, she simply luxuriated in the spray, reminding herself of her freedom all over again.
When she got out, she considered the clothes in the bedroom. They were obviously new. Someone had come out with clothes that were roughly her size, the tags still on them. Irene wondered if she should be worried at how thoroughly Raheem had planned all of this, but she pushed it aside.
She found a simple dress with a lovely flowing skirt in deep blue, shot through with silver threads. It was a dress she would have sighed after before, and now, after a moment of hesitation, she slipped it on.
> Before Irene made her way back into the living room, she found herself looking at the pile of jewelry she had discarded. She hesitated for a moment, and then she simply went with what was in her gut. She left the earrings and bracelets, but she picked up the necklace. Something about its cold heavy weight comforted her, and when she put it around her neck and looked in the mirror, the moonstone seemed to wink at her. Good enough, she decided.
Back in the living room, the fire was crackling away. Raheem had removed his own robes, and now he wore a simple pair of dark trousers and a dark tunic. Though they were simple, the cut and quality were obvious, and she thought absently that he looked like a model in the gorgeous living room, the fire crackling merrily and throwing lively shadows on the wall.
When his eyes lit on her, they brightened, and he gestured for her to come sit next to him. Though she felt more than a little shy, she came to sit on the couch. Then it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to lean her weight into his body, pressing against him.
“Tell me something about yourself,” he said, and she laughed a little.
“Is it a command from my lord and master?”
“A request from your husband,” he said instead, and for that reason alone, she considered for a moment.
“All right,” she said softly. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything. Why you studied art. Where you grew up. What you think of Khanour.”
She bit her lip. Talking about growing up and Khanour seemed too risky, but the other…
“I was never an artist,” she said. “A lot of people who go into art history are artists, and surprisingly good ones, but that was never me. Instead, I always wanted to spend all my time fascinated by the art, allowing it to surround me and subsume me. It was something I have always wanted, from the first time I saw a Matisse painting at the art museum in Chicago. There was always something about how good it felt to look at a painting that was beautiful, and that had history behind it. It was… uplifting. Elevating.”
“And so you wanted to make it into your career?”
“I would have been happy waiting tables if it had covered my tickets to the art museum for the rest of my life,” Irene said with a rueful laugh. “But I won a scholarship in my senior year of high school, and I thought that I could simply go work with the art myself.”
“I saw in your records that you were in graduate school,” he said thoughtfully. “What do you think you would do with that degree?”
“Work in museums,” she said promptly. “In conservation especially. There is so much art and beauty that could be returned to the world if we only knew the right ways to take care of it…”
She stopped abruptly. What museum or archive would be willing to hire her on if this came out? If she had a future at all after this week? She shivered, pressing a little closer to Raheem. His arm tightened around her, but he didn’t comment on it.
“I have never had a choice about what I was going to do,” he said. “From the time I was very young, I knew that I was going to be the sheikh. I knew that I was born to rule and care for my country.”
“Do you regret that?” she asked.
There was nothing but sincerity in her voice, but he laughed.
“You mean do I regret the wealth and the luxury?”
She tilted her head to the side, wondering if she was going to be laughed at or mocked.
“Yes,” she said. “When I got that scholarship, I could feel the world open up for me. I could be anything. I could be a nurse who helped people, or I could be an engineer who built things. I could be a librarian or a lawyer.”
“And you chose to study art.”
“I did,” she said thoughtfully. “And I don’t regret it at all. That moment of choice… that was freedom.”
He laughed, but this time, there was a slightly strangled sound to it.
“I don’t regret it,” he said with a soft sigh. “Not really. I am good at what I do. My country prospers, and my people love me. The wealth and the fame doesn’t’ hurt. But that choice. You are right. It is a freedom that my money and my family could not buy for me.”
They sat in silence for a moment, and then he spoke again.
“I wonder what it would have been like if our places had been switched,” he mused.
“You mean if you were a poor scholarship student from Pennsylvania and I was the sheikha of Khanour?”
“Hmm. I imagine that I would have wanted to go to college,” he said, “and perhaps I would have studied engineering, but I wonder if history would have called to me.”
“History?”
He grinned, slightly rueful.
“Yes. Where you saw the beauty of art, I saw the wide stretch of human history. From the moment we could write, we started writing down where we had come from and what we wanted. Who we were and what we did. Those stories… above almost anything else, they are precious. We are no one without knowing where we came from.”
“Where we came from…” Irene repeated.
It was such a luxury to imagine the past as history. If it was history, it was carefully contained in a book. It couldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t be used to hurt the people who shared it with her. A memory popped into her mind, and before she could stop herself, she started speaking about it.
“When I was just a little girl in Pennsylvania, my brother, Peter, and I went out to play. There was a pond behind the house, and the ice had been frozen thick. It was warming up, however, and we all knew that the ice was going to go… well, maybe Peter didn’t know.”
“Was he your younger brother?”
“Yes, but as twins, that matters less than you think,” she said with a wry smile. “He was reckless, running out onto the ice. I knew better, but after a terrible moment, I ran out after him. There was a crack, like the end of the world, and he fell in.”
She paused, remembering how terrible it had been, how the black water seemed to open up under the rough ice, ready and able to swallow up something as small and unwise as a little boy.
“What happened to him?”
“If I hadn’t followed him out there, he would have died,” she responded. “He would have thrashed under the water until his strength gave out, and he would have died. Instead, I was there to pull him out, screaming for help as I did so. When I pulled him out, I was exhausted, but fortunately a neighbor heard.”
Raheem’s arm tightened around her as if afraid for the little girl that she had been.
“And what happened then?”
“The neighbor took us into her garage, stripped off our sodden clothes, and got us into a warm bath. It’s an old trick for people who have suffered a shock. She gave us hot chocolate, which looking back, I’m certain was laced with a bit of brandy, and she called our parents.”
Irene laughed to herself a little bit.
“They were furious. We were both grounded for months, until it was spring at least. Terrible.”
“But you had done nothing wrong,” Raheem protested, frowning at the injustice. “You saved your brother.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Irene said, her voice slurring a little. In the warmth of Raheem’s body, and clean and dry in a way that she hadn’t been for what felt like years, she could feel herself dropping off.
“I would think it matters a great deal,” said Raheem, who already sounded a little distant.
“Doesn’t,” she insisted. “He’s my brother. He’s my family. I have to look after him. Always.”
She had the idea that Raheem was saying something else, but it didn’t matter. Instead, the world was falling away into a deep and indigo haze. She was safe now, and her body needed it so badly that she fell asleep without another thought.
***
Raheem watched his wife sleep for a few moments. She was a warm weight against his body, gorgeous and soft and pliant in a way he had never seen her before. It took all of his strength not to touch her, not to kiss her again. It wouldn’t be right. When he kissed her, he wanted her
to kiss him back, to know what was happening and to want it as much as he did.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he had bought a kind of trouble that would be with him the rest of his days. He could feel that fingerhold she had on his spirit and his heart growing greater, but he put it out of his mind. That reckoning could come later on.
Right now, there was more to think about. For several long moments, he simply stroked her bright hair, relishing the way the firelight glinted off it. She fell asleep in his arms so trustingly that it made a foreign part of him ache. He was not known to be a sympathetic man, or sometimes, even a compassionate one, but this little thief brought it out in him.
If she was a thief at all.
The story she had told echoed in his head until he realized what he had to do. With a gentle touch, Raheem detached himself from her, leaving her curled on the couch. She uttered a small sigh of protest before drifting into a deeper sleep, and he smiled a little.
He stepped into another room briefly, his phone in hand.
“Yes, it’s me. No, sorry about waking you up, but this can’t wait. All right. I want you to put together a dossier on Peter Bellingham, Irene Bellingham’s brother. Yes, her twin. All right…”
CHAPTER FOUR
Irene awoke slowly, blinking her eyes against the bright morning light. For a moment, she thought that the past few months had just been a dream. She was still in her graduate dorm in Khanour, and she had nothing ahead of her but the study to which she had devoted her life. Her brother was fine, and everything was safe.
Then she woke up a little further, and while she wasn’t in the prison cell any longer, she was far from home.
The bed that Irene had been sleeping on was enormous, white cotton in all directions. She started to wonder if it was the bed that had given her one of the best nights of sleep that she had ever enjoyed, but then she heard another person’s breathing.
She finally woke up the rest of the way when she saw that she was not alone. Sleeping beside her was none other than Raheem himself. Against the stark white of the covers, Raheem’s dark skin seemed to glow. For the first time, she could simply look at him, and her chin in her hand, she took the opportunity to do just that.
