The Sheikh's Purchased Bride

by Holly Rayner

It turned out that a good way of getting a second wind on a night that had been punishingly busy and stressful was to get asked out to dinner by a handsome sheikh.

  Or so Anita was finding. The exhaustion that had begun settling in when the Sheikh’s party had gotten up had left her completely.

  It had been a hard night, and there was no one left in the restaurant but her and Fadi. Fadi had sent the dishwashers home, not realizing that Anita had already sent the busboys home, leaving them with no one left to help them close up for the night.

  So they did it all themselves.

  Anita could tell that Fadi was still in a sour mood, it was just that it was hard to care when she was floating on a cloud the way she was. She turned up the music, which they would normally turn off during cleanup, and danced around him.

  She was determined to pull him out of whatever kind of funk he was in, but Fadi wasn’t having any of it. She couldn’t remember a time when he’d so stubbornly committed to being upset, so she tried harder, turning her enthusiasm up a notch, and putting on a song that she knew for a fact he liked, even if he would deny it if she ever told anyone.

  She sang in his ear. “Shake it off, ah ah ah, shake it off!”

  “Enough!” His voice was a half-growl, half-roar.

  It scared Anita. Fadi had never scared her. He’d made her anxious to please him, and sorry she’d disappointed him. But scared?

  “Turn that off,” he said, more quietly. “I need to talk to you.”

  Like a puppet on strings, Anita went to the sound system and turned off the music. The restaurant felt so cold and empty without it.

  She returned, and stood in front of him, waiting for whatever punishment was coming.

  “Now,” he said. “The waitresses said they saw you talking to the Sheikh tonight. Is this true?”

  She nodded. She wanted to add something in her defense, about how they had just been making the usual waitress-customer small talk, but it wouldn’t have been true, and she had a feeling that excuses would only have made things worse.

  “And am I to assume,” he continued, with the same glowing coal of anger in his eyes, “that your good mood is due to something he has said?”

  Anita nodded again, but this time Fadi looked like he was waiting for further explanation. She gave it to him, her voice sounding quiet and weak in the light of her father’s anger.

  “He lost his ring. I returned it to him. He said he wanted to take me out to dinner to thank me.”

  Fadi looked like he was about to boil over again, but he held it in. There was something else in his expression that Anita couldn’t quite make out.

  And then she placed it. It was fear.

  “You’re not going,” he said, then he turned away, as though that was the end of the discussion.

  Anita was worn out from a day that had been an endless roller coaster of emotions. She was in no mood to have one of the greatest feelings she had felt in her young life yanked away from her with no explanation.

  “I am going,” she replied. Her voice shook when she said it.

  Fadi’s voice shook when he answered, but with anger rather than trepidation. “You have no idea what I’ve given up for you.”

  Anita felt her own anger rising to meet his. “And how would I? You never tell me anything!”

  He turned back to face her, the hot coal in his eyes again.

  Anita continued, her own emotions rising. “Hakim taught me more about my family in two sentences than you have in eighteen years! I have a right to know!”

  He started stepping towards her, now, and the fear she’d felt earlier was coming back. He was like a powerful beast, she thought. She’d never given much thought to how strong he was, but he was more musclebound than a cook had any right to be.

  “Right?” he bellowed. “What right? You don’t have a right to anything, girl. You only think you do because I raised you like a little princess!”

  Anita felt her rage turn into righteous anger. He’d done nothing of the sort. She’d worked alongside him for everything they’d ever got. Yes, he’d struggled to make a life for them, but she’d always struggled with him. Nothing had ever been handed to her. And he had the nerve to insult her that way now, just because she had talked to a man that he didn’t approve of?

  “Well, I’m not a little princess anymore. I’m not a little anything anymore. And I deserve to know.”

  She could see the conflict in him. It was like he wanted to say two things at once, but he couldn’t say either. Instead, his rage boiled over. He grabbed a glass candleholder off the nearest table, and hurled it across the restaurant.

  The sudden movement seemed to break the spell. All Anita could think was that that was quite a lot of rage for her never to have seen in the last eighteen years.

  Fadi turned back to face her. The emotions had drained from his face, his anger broken with the glass candle holder.

  “It’s dangerous for you to talk to those men. You won’t do it. You can’t. That’s all you need to know.”

  And then he walked away, leaving Anita alone in the empty restaurant.