Stars for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 8)

by Annabelle Winters

  But the Sheikh held her in place, smiling as he drew close to her. “I think it is a sign, Ms. Hilda Hogarth. That this deal is meant to be. A transaction written in the stars. A contract made in heaven.”

  “Hell is more like it,” she had muttered grimly, but he could feel her melting as he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her close, held her tight, kissed her hair that smelled like flowers, tasted her lips that he swore were fresh strawberries, savored her scent which already felt like a drug to him.

  They had made love again, without speaking a word, the two of them moving together against the dark red walls of that dimly lit gypsy’s store, their coupling reflected in the misty glass of that silent crystal ball, the black cat meandering by, its red eyes turned away from the king and queen as they tried to forget the past, fight back the future, pretend this wasn’t the present . . . the perfect present.

  She had cried as they came, climaxing together in time, his seed filling her again, his mouth smothering hers, his hands claiming every part of her naked curves, his need merging with hers in the cloud of that crystal ball. Then minutes later she pulled at the ring again, her tear-streaked face going red with effort until he stopped her once more.

  “You don’t understand,” she said as she flung her hands down to her lap in frustration. “There’s just stuff you don’t know. Stuff even I don’t know. Stuff I don’t understand. Things that don’t make sense, Rahaan!”

  “Then we must grasp at the things that do make sense,” he had whispered. “And if anything makes sense, it is this! It is us! Us in the flesh, the physical, us together.”

  “But we’re not together,” she’d shouted, pushing him away like she was forcing herself to do it, pulling at that ring like it burned her flesh. “How can we be together?”

  “You said you had the same dream,” he said quietly.

  She had looked at him, alarm racing across her face as she blinked and looked away. “I don’t know what I was saying, Rahaan. I was lost in the moment. I think I just meant this whole thing feels like a dream.”

  He had pulled back away from her finally, sighing and staring up at the ceiling, hands on his hips, chest heaving as he tried to calm himself down. “OK,” he had said. “If you will not be honest with me, then at least sit quietly and allow me to be honest with you. Yes?”

  She’d nodded, pulling a red-and-black shawl around her bare shoulders as she sank into her chair and looked up at him. “Yes,” she said softly.

  The Sheikh had taken a breath and then begun. He told her of his teenage dream, the vision that had haunted him for two decades, raising questions he didn’t even want to ask let alone know how to answer. He told her of the coincidence that brought him down to Albuquerque, brought him through that door, brought him into her life. And then he told her of the dream, the two of them together, three dreams in one, three women in one, three of them in one, all of time itself as one, one moment, one event, one life, one love.

  “You said you had a dream,” the Sheikh said again, searching her expression that seemed bordering on catatonic, like she had checked out, didn’t want to process what he was saying, didn’t even want to listen. What the hell was she hiding? “Was it the same dream? Three dreams mixed together? The two of us in—”

  “You need to go,” she had said, deadpan and cold, like a wall had come down in her, shutting her off from him, perhaps shutting her off from herself.

  “What are you not telling me?” he asked. “Tell me, Hilda. I have told you everything, at the risk of sounding like a goddamn lunatic. But you are holding back. You are holding something back. My instinct tells me you are—”

  “You need to go,” she said, fumbling with that ring again as tears rolled down her round cheeks. “Please. I’m seriously at the end of my rope here, and . . . and . . . damn this ring! What the—”

  “I think it wants to stay with you,” the Sheikh had said gruffly, feeling himself close up too as he buttoned his shirt and shrugged. Bloody hell, he’d exposed himself as a weak-minded fool swayed by dreams and visions, and if she was not going to respond, if she was going to simply shut down after opening herself to him physically in a way that could not have been fake, was absolutely genuine, then . . . then to hell with her! “Diamonds are forever, as the advertising slogan goes. So perhaps when you wake up tomorrow and try to convince yourself that none of this happened, that none of it is real, that you or I or what we have shared are figments of your imagination, then perhaps this diamond will remind you that at least some of it was real, that you do not get to choose what is real and what is not.”

  “Rahaan, wait,” she had said, still pulling at that ring. “I can’t keep this—”

  “Then throw it in the trash,” he said as he turned to go. “And since you have made it abundantly clear that what we just shared means nothing, then all I have to say to you now—if you will pardon my crudeness—is thanks for the fuck.”

  “Screw you!” she had screamed as he slammed the door and walked out into the street, his mind swirling in raw confusion as he tried to understand what in bloody hell had just happened, where in Allah’s name all this inexplicable emotion was coming from.

  Prince Alim was still waving his arms and moving his lips when the Sheikh focused back in on the present—or at least what he thought was the present. He did not know which way the arrow of time pointed anymore. After reading Sideways Through Time his mind was ricocheting between clarity and confusion, understanding and insanity, delight and despair. A lot of what Norm and Di wrote made sense at an intuitive level, but he was damned if he could understand it logically.

  Emotion is the wild-card, the joker, the secret ingredient, the connective tissue, the book had said towards the end. If consciousness is the only thing consistent across the infinite past, present, and parallel lives we lead, then emotion is its foil, the lump in the pudding, the devil in the detail. Strong, unresolved emotions ripple through lives, bleeding through dreams and realities, merging possible worlds, smashing together strands of consciousness in ways that can lead to madness and despair one moment, elation and celebration the next, death without mourning, new life without warning.

  New life, thought the Sheikh as he blinked hard and tried to think back to those three dreams. What was the defining emotion in those dreams, he asked himself. Yes, there was sex, there was love, there was . . . Ya Allah, there was new life!

  A child, it hit him, as a strange clarity smashed its way into his consciousness, like those strands were suddenly pulled together in his mind, like he could see it clearly, see what was hidden, what Hilda was hiding, what she was keeping secret.

  27

  “A secret baby,” Hilda said to Sabbath as the cat rubbed against her bare ankles. “So instead of a fake marriage story, I’m now in a secret baby romance. Maybe the lamest of them all. I mean, why the hell would you keep a baby secret from the father unless you don’t want the guy in your life at all, ever. And if he’s so horrible that you don’t want him in your life, why the hell do you want to have his child?! Hello?! Common sense, anyone?”

  Sabbath glanced up at her with his red eyes that Hilda had pretty much just accepted now. She’d done some research and decided that cats’ eyes were weird and they could look different as the critters got older. Cataracts can form, mucus membranes can burst, other shit can happen to make the light reflect off its retinas in different ways, making the color look different. It was even possible Hilda herself was going color blind. Perhaps she should poll her customers about Sabbath’s eyes.

  “What color are my cat’s eyes?” she said out loud, nodding very seriously at an imaginary person in her living room. She sat up straight on her couch, facing the blank television screen as she tried to keep a straight face. “No, I’m not crazy. What’s that? Green? So I’m the only one seeing red? Great.”

  We’re all very good at seeing what we want to see and blocki
ng out everything else, Norm and Di had written in their book, which Hilda had been reading feverishly over the past two days as she’d been trying very hard not to open the bottle of wine she’d found behind the television set. Which explains why we can easily explain away or simply dismiss evidence that a shift between parallel realities has occurred. Most of the time the shift appears consistent enough to provide a cause-and-effect relationship that seems reasonable. For example, things like sudden weight fluctuations or hair loss can be explained away. But how do you explain something that’s “scientifically” impossible? How do you explain, say, a certifiably blind man waking up to fully restored vision? How about an irreversibly paralyzed woman walking again? See, we explain those away too as “medical miracles” or “wonders of the human body.” But what do we say when a woman without a left leg wakes up and wiggles all ten toes when she was sure she went to bed with just five little piggies? Humans can’t regrow limbs. We aren’t lizards or worms. So what do we do when faced with something biologically or physically impossible? We ignore it. We simply tell ourselves it didn’t happen. And you know what? Eventually the brain simply adapts to that new belief, and life goes on as usual. A self-induced hallucination that lasts the rest of your life. Photographic evidence, video recordings, eyewitness testimony . . . all of it is regularly ignored by normal, intelligent people. It’s how the brain works. It’s an adaptive, survival mechanism. We see what we want to see. We create this hallucination called reality, this dream called life.

  So what happens if we allow ourselves to wake up?

  28

  “Wake up before you drown,” Norm said through her dream, and Di sputtered to life, spitting out soapy water as her mouth went under for a moment.

  “Shit,” she gasped, rising up out of the tub and grabbing the towel Norm was holding out for her. “I fell asleep. I can’t believe I—”

  “The entire bottle of wine, Di? That’s not like you. Besides, I thought you weren’t supposed to drink with the fertility drugs. Are you all right, love? Here, let me—”

  “I’m fine,” Di said, blinking away the confusion and covering her naked body as if she didn’t want Norm looking at her. “I’m not drunk.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Norm. “One look in the mirror should dispel that claim.”

  “Why?” Di said, frowning as she wrapped the towel around her breasts and allowed Norm to help her out of the tub. “What’s wrong? Did I shave my eyebrows or something?”

  “Thankfully, no,” said Norm, wiping away the condensation from the mirror. “But three hours ago you were a redhead. And now you’re blonde down to the roots. Damn, that’s some quick-drying color.”

  “What? Oh, my God. Oh, my fucking God! Move, Norm. Move!”

  Di burst out of the bathroom, towel falling away as she ran to the desk near the hotel room window. She grabbed the hotel stationery and began to write, muttering excitedly as she tried to get everything down before it vanished from memory.

  “What’s going on, Di?” Norm said, hurrying out of the bathroom and staring at his naked wife like she was insane. “What’re you writing, hon?”

  “The dream I just had,” she said without looking up, a smile of excitement breaking on her face. She thought for a moment, wrote a bit more, and then put the pencil down and stumbled to the bed, collapsing on the sheets and staring up at the ceiling.

  “What dream?” Norm said, sitting on the second double-bed, his soft body sinking into the even-softer mattress as he frowned and touched his nose. “Honey, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet. I mean, I can’t be sure. But if this isn’t hair-color,” said Di, standing up again and walking to the full-length mirror against the closet. She examined her golden hair and tried to control her breathing, holding back the involuntary panic at looking at someone who was drastically different. Then she glanced down at her full reflection, her breath catching in her throat when she looked between her legs and realized that no, this wasn’t fucking hair-dye. “If this isn’t hair-dye—and I don’t think it is,” she whispered as she turned and saw Norm’s eyes go wide when he glanced at the triangle beneath her flat belly. “Then shit is about to get very, very strange.”

  29

  That is exceedingly strange, the Sheikh thought as he stood in front of the mirror and gazed at his reflection. Not just strange, but bloody impossible! Ya Allah, how could it be? How in God’s name could it be?

  He turned from the mirror and raised his arm, staring at the faded black tattoo on the inside of his right bicep. No, he was not going blind. He’d had this tattoo for almost two decades and he rarely looked closely at it anymore, but he certainly remembered getting it done that night in London during his college days. Yes, he certainly remembered the arrogance of his youth, when he had “Dayimaan Almalik” tattooed in Arabic along his arm.

  “Always a King,” it had said when he got it done. And it had said that every moment afterward too. That was how a tattoo worked—it was permanent. It would always say “Always a King.” Except now it didn’t say anything. It was not even Arabic, perhaps not even words! Just symbols—and not even coherent symbols. Gibberish! The scribbles of a child at best!

  “By Allah,” he said out loud as he stood there naked, not sure if the excitement raging through his hard body was elation or panic, confusion or clarity, disbelief or dread.

  His thoughts raced as the world spun around him. He reached for his phone and pulled up Hilda’s number. But then he stopped and took a breath, looking at his tattoo and then up at the ceiling. Finally he looked back at his phone, scrolling through until he found the text message with Di’s number on it.

  30

  “Nothing that I can think of. I mean, nothing that I’ve noticed,” Hilda said as she glanced once again at Di’s luscious new locks. Even the texture seemed different, Hilda thought, glancing at Rahaan now, thinking of the strange tattoo he’d shown her—along with photos of that same tattoo a few months ago: the same tattoo that was also a different tattoo.

  “So there’s nothing different about your life? Eyes, hair, nails? Something else about your body perhaps?” Di said, frowning and narrowing her eyes as she searched Hilda’s face for perhaps a mole with a smiley face on it. “Nothing strange that’s showed up over the past few days, weeks, maybe even months?”

  “Just you two,” Hilda said firmly, crossing her arms over her breasts as she heard Sabbath lapping at his water bowl against the side wall of the store. She remembered seeing Rahaan’s tattoo the other day when they were in the café with Norm and Di. Those symbols were there then, weren’t they? Yes, and photographs could be faked, so there was no real proof that the Sheikh’s tattoo had ever been different.

  As for Di’s hair? Please. Yeah, it looks different in texture and volume, but it’s a woman’s hair, for God’s sake. People have been working magic with women’s hair for a thousand years now.

  Hilda shifted in her chair as she stared over her wooden desk at the Sheikh and Di sitting before her, their faces in shadow because of the light pouring in from the front door and store window. Things felt so goddamn weird right now, she thought as she glanced down at the flat wood of the desk, thinking of what had gone down on it just a few days ago. Shit, even that felt like a dream now, didn’t it? So faraway. So out of place. So . . .

  Stop it, she told herself, forcing herself to stay focused instead of letting her thoughts drift back to him, to what they’d shared, to what felt so damn real—both in the dream and right here in her store. Hilda balled her fists beneath the table, realizing she still had that damn ring on. She’d tried to get it off with dish soap, but it seriously would not budge. Finally she’d given up, figuring that the stress was making her retain water or swell up or something, and perhaps she just needed to relax. Maybe even exercise. Hah!

  But now Rahaan and Di were here, unannounced and excited, like there was something to actu
ally be excited about. Had they been together the past few days concocting this scheme? The guy was a billionaire from the Middle East, for God’s sake. Who the hell knew what got him off! Maybe he was still pissed about the twenty grand. Maybe the baby wasn’t real, the doctor had been bribed, all the drugstores had been bought out and restocked with fake pregnancy tests, her water-supply had been messed with to give her morning sickness. Yes, this was all some elaborate scheme to destroy her totally and completely, mentally and emotionally, turn her into a walking joke with stars in her eyes before pulling the curtain aside so everyone could laugh at the fortune-teller with the fat ass who thinks she’s meant to be with a King, carry his heir, ride off in his royal carriage through the mists of time!

  He walks in all smooth and seductive, makes up some cheesy fake-marriage plan right out of Mills and Boon, puts a goddamn ring on my finger that’s probably fake, makes me almost feel like there could be something here. Then the devil kisses me and turns on the charm, and suddenly I’m on my back, moaning like a whore, wailing like a wench, spreading like a slut. Just think for a moment, you dumb cow, she told herself. Is it more likely that there’s some magical, pseudo-scientific, past-life, dream-world, parallel universe nonsense going on? Or is it more likely that this is a pissed-off, eccentric Arab billionaire’s elaborate scheme to get back at you for humiliating his brother and him? To build you up and break you down just because the sick fuck gets a kick out of it? I mean, you still barely know each other. The sex felt real, but so what? That doesn’t mean shit.

  Now the wheels started to turn faster, a sort of relief pouring through Hilda as she allowed herself to think of a real-world explanation for what was happening. No magic. No dreams. No past lives. No parallel universes. Earth to Hilda: Come back to us, you stupid weirdo. Use logic and common sense. You’re smarter than this. You’ve read about psychology and the ways in which we can deceive ourselves. Every single thing that’s happened has a logical explanation, a simple explanation that doesn’t require you to believe in this madness. The thing with the cat’s eyes is freakish but it can happen. You’ve sorta decided that. And the pregnancy . . .