by Holly Rayner
When they’d both gotten most of the way through their first glass of wine, and Kehlan was feeling just slightly loose and easy, he set aside the nothings they were discussing and instead brought up the everything that he wanted to say.
“Paige, I want to thank you.”
She looked at him quizzically.
“You chauffeur me around all day, find me an adorable kitten, then make me dinner, and you want to thank me?”
She said it in a playful tone, trying to back out back into the lightly flirtatious mode they’d settled into. But Kehlan wouldn’t be dissuaded.
“Yes, I do. I want to thank you. I don’t know what I thought that I would find when I came here. I don’t know what I thought I was looking for. A distraction, probably. But these last couple of days have been so much more than that. It’s been more like—”
He was cut off mid-sentence by the soft, sweet feeling of her lips on his. It was a quick, searching kiss. And she pulled back from him just after, with questions in her eyes. He answered them with a deeper, fuller, more passionate kiss of his own.
After that, no more words were possible. But, then, no more words were necessary, either.
Chapter 13
Paige
For the second day in a row, Paige woke not to an energetic child, or to an insistent alarm clock. Instead, today, she woke to a vague feeling that something was not right.
As she came into her senses, and shook off the little sleep she’d managed to get, she realized what it was.
She was alone.
She was naked, in her bed, but Kehlan was nowhere to be seen.
She tried not to worry. After all, she’d awoken alone yesterday, and he’d just gone to go get breakfast. As much as she wished she could wake up in his arms for once, the way everything within her longed to do, there was no reason to think he was gone for good already, or that anything was wrong. That was just her letting the old wound of Kyle’s abandonment get to her, which was something she had promised herself yesterday she would try not to do.
But then the sound of Kehlan’s voice, speaking quickly and hotly in its natural Arabic, told her that her initial instinct had been correct. There was something wrong. Something very wrong.
She pulled on a shirt and wandered to the living room, where Kehlan was talking into his phone. At least before she lost him, she would get to know the difference between his scowl of concentration, and an actual scowl of anger. But that didn’t feel like a victory.
So intent was he on the conversation he was having that he didn’t see her standing there. Not until he had thrown down the phone onto the couch and was mid-curse.
He froze, and withered under her gaze.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
He looked down.
“My mother—”
“I don’t want to hear about it. We both knew you were going to leave, and now you are. Please, don’t drag this out.”
“But I want to explain. I know, from your perspective, it must seem like—”
“It doesn’t seem like anything other than what it is. I was a distraction for you. And you were a distraction for me. And don’t get me wrong, you were a great distraction. But we both knew the whole time how this was going to end. Let’s not make this anything more than it always was.”
Her voice sounded cold even to her own ears, but it hardly betrayed the aching emptiness she already felt opening in her chest. She felt hollow. Insubstantial. Like she would blow away at the slightest breeze, if she didn’t shatter instead.
He looked so small in that moment. That hurt more than anything else in a way she hadn’t expected. She didn’t want to remember him looking this way.
And then, something changed in him. He looked right at her with fire in his eyes.
“Come with me.”
Was this the breeze that would shatter her?
“What?”
“Come with me. Back to Al-Derra. Today. Now.”
She scoffed.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.”
“Dylan can come, too!”
He just had an answer for everything, didn’t he?
“He’s nine!”
“There are nine-year-olds in Al-Derra.”
“This is his home. And come to think of it, this is my home. If you learned nothing else from the last two days, I would have thought you would at least have learned that. Or are you only good at pretending to pay attention?”
She paused, waiting for his quick rejoinder, but none came. Instead, she continued.
“So, what are you trying to say? You want me to uproot my son, leave my family, leave the only home I’ve ever known, and the only home I’ve ever wanted to…what? Go be your pet while you do things that we both know you don’t even want to do?”
The words came quick and hot, and when they were out of her, she somehow felt even more fragile than before. Her calm, incisive tone had abandoned her, but she instead heard it echoed back to her in his voice.
“You’re being unfair.”
“This is what dragging it out looks like. I asked you not to.”
They stood, staring at each other. Paige kept wishing there was something he had to say to make this better—hoping against hope that there was something that she hadn’t thought of. But after as long as she could stand of their horrible silence, she turned her back to him and took a step forward. The tears were coming, now, and she didn’t want him to see them. She didn’t want to ruin his memory of her the way he had just ruined her memory of him.
“Thank you for being a wonderful distraction, Kehlan. I guess it’s time for us both to get back to reality. Goodbye.”
With that, she walked back the way she had come, closing the bedroom door behind her. She put her back against it, slumped down to the floor, and wept as quietly as she could.
Chapter 14
Kehlan
Two days. He’d spent only two days in Washington, but they had changed so much. More than anything, they made his next two days back in Al-Derra unbearable.
It was always going to be unpleasant. He’d known that ever since it had first occurred to him that, one day, it would happen. Even with the kind of warning he had thought he would have, and the month or two that he thought his mother was giving him, it still would have been a difficult day. But sitting here at his mother’s retirement ceremony, with his days and nights with Paige still so fresh in his mind and in his heart, he found it hard to be the well-behaved, engaging son and royal he was supposed to be.
And it didn’t go unnoticed. He could see the judgement in the eyes of those around him. He could feel the implicit disapproval. From the outside looking in, and from his many conversations with normal civilians, he knew that others thought that being a royal meant freedom. How little they knew!
It didn’t help that every aspect of his mother’s retirement seemed designed to highlight the expectation that Kehlan would be stepping up to take her place. It wore heavily on him throughout the ceremony, and if he hadn’t trained his whole life to put up with situations like this, he wouldn’t have made it.
But his stiff, tight-lipped acquiescence was interrupted by an unexpected savior: his mother herself. And along with his relief came a wave of worry.
Her persistent cough was a problem; he’d heard enough coughs to know that. And by the way the Sheikha was quickly and efficiently shuttled out of the room when her coughing fit began, he suspected there were others present who knew it was a problem as well.
How was it that everyone paid lip service to his power, but at the same time he was so miserably powerless in every way that mattered? He could summon a plane at a moment’s notice, and order any number of people to do any number of things. At a word, he could have a free man imprisoned, or a prisoner set free. But he couldn’t free himself from the tedious obligations that were expected of him, and he couldn’t even demand to know the state of his own mother�
��s health.
With the Sheikha gone, he was left alone in a room of gossipy, catty extended family and Al-Derran high society, and found he had no desire to remain there. His choices were to talk with the people who had been granted the honor of being seen to sit next to him, and following his mother out into the hall.
The choice wasn’t a difficult one. He stood, causing no small stir by doing so, and quickly caught up with his mother’s entourage. Out in the hall, he took her arm and dismissed her attendants with calm authority. They needed somewhere nearby where they could talk without being overheard or interrupted, and luckily, they were in the palace where Kehlan had spent much of his early childhood, and which he knew exceedingly well.
Brooking no argument, not even from the Sheikha herself, Kehlan guided them to an alcove nearby that was off the beaten path enough that they wouldn’t be disturbed.
“It’s time you told me the truth, Mother. You owe me that. I know you’re not well.”
For all his anger at her, and what her expectations were forcing him to give up, he found his voice was still loaded more with grief and worry than anger.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, adjusting her elaborate headdress with one elegant finger. “I have a chesty cough. It’s hardly ideal, but it’ll pass. And that ceremony is a bore, anyway. The important legal things have been done, and I’m sure no one will mind getting to leave a little bit early. The after-party is what everyone is looking forward to, anyway, so why not let them get to that all the sooner?”
This was the mother he remembered. And when he saw the defiance in her eyes, it sank in just what he was losing.
But instead of calming his growing anger, that realization only stoked it. He was reminded of the conversation they’d had before he left, and what she had demanded of him, while not allowing him the barest information in return.
“For once in your life, can’t you learn the difference between saving face and telling a lie? Even to your own son? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I should be ashamed of myself? I, who have done nothing in all my life to let down the family? And you, the only son I ever had, who refuses even to do what little has been asked of him, when he has been given so much—”
“What little has been asked of me?” Kehlan interrupted hotly.
Years of carefully managed anger were bubbling to the surface, now, filtered through the pain of separating from Paige. Her face flashed before his eyes like a vengeful ghost haunting him.
“How can you say you’ve asked little of me? You’ve asked everything. Even the one thing I want—to be able to actually help people—you force me to do within bounds and one day abandon. You would have me be worthless to everyone, and call that virtue.”
“I would call that obedience.”
Kehlan cursed under his breath.
“Do you want a sheikh, or do you want a slave? I wish you would make up your mind. Or learn the difference. Either one would do.”
At that, the Sheikha laughed what was obviously intended to be a cruel, biting laugh. And with her lifetime of practice, it may well have been, except that it was undercut by the coughing fit that it brought on.
The hostilities should have ended there. Concern for his mother should have overcome his rage.
“Mother, tell me.”
But she was insistent.
“I’ve told you everything you need to know. It’s not my fault that you are too deaf to listen. We give you every advantage in life, and yet you think you are somehow persecuted. You! Who we have given everything! You think you have been wronged!”
“I think I’ve been lied to. I think I’ve been forced into a life I don’t want, and don’t value. And, you know what? It’s a life I won’t live anymore.”
It was bold defiance, and he stood in a defensive pose. She looked like she wanted to laugh again for effect, but thought better of it with what had happened the last time she had done so.
“You are refusing to do your duty?”
“I’m refusing to play the idiotic role you want me to play in your farce. Not when I’m being lied to.”
She was quivering with anger, now. Her voice, which had been steadily rising throughout the conversation, suddenly dropped down in volume so as to be a barely audible hiss.
“If you will not do the job, you do not deserve the rewards. You are cut off. You will get nothing. Not a single dinar. You will be a poor man, my son.”
At that, a rough, raw laugh ripped from Kehlan’s throat.
“All this time, all these years, you thought I stayed because I needed the money? Because I even wanted it?”
For the first time in his life, Kehlan thought his mother looked uncertain. He lowered his voice to match hers, both in volume and intensity.
“You only have one son, as you say, Mother. It will never make sense to me that you never understood anything about him at all. And that you were so willing to drive him away.”
He turned from her, and left her in the alcove. He was finished with her. Finished with all of it.
Chapter 15
Paige
Two Weeks Later
Everything was supposed to be go back to normal. Maybe not quite normal, but a bit better for the memory. That was the plan, wasn’t it? That was what little flings and flights of fancy were supposed to do for you, right?
And, for a while, when she had been spending time with Kehlan, Paige had thought it would work out. She’d fight through the pain of losing him. She was supposed to be better equipped to deal with it, preparing herself as she had been all the time they’d been together.
But none of it had worked out the way she had expected. If her attempts to defend her heart from being broken had helped at all, she couldn’t tell. She was heartbroken in a way she hadn’t been since Kyle had left. All that those attempts at self-preservation did now was make her regret that she hadn’t made the most of every moment she had gotten to spend with the Sheikh.
With her sheikh.
She thought of him that way, now that she had lost him. And there had been no small number of times over the last two weeks that she had wondered if she’d made the wrong choice, not uprooting everything in her life to follow him across the world.
After all, what would she be leaving? A town that was slowly dying, as more and more of the younger generation moved away, and no one moved in to replace them? A job that paid her just enough to get by, but only if she worked enough hours that she was constantly stretched in too many directions to even feel like she was present in raising Dylan?
But those doubts always circled back around to Stockton and the life that she wanted for her son. He was close to nature, here. He was doing well in school, and had good friends and good grades. Being close to her parents made all the difference in getting by from day to day. How foolish would she have to be, to put some romantic notion, about a life she might have with a sheikh who had made her no real promises, above the welfare and happiness of her son?
Sure, maybe there was a world where everything worked out perfectly, and where somehow moving to Al-Derra would have been the best for her and Dylan. But you don’t raise a family on lottery tickets—you raise it on a salary. And if she just kept repeating that to herself enough times, maybe eventually, she would grow to believe it.
She was struggling to make peace with what had happened—what she’d lost, and what she’d never really had. But as hard as she tried to let the memory of Kehlan go, she found that her daydreams about him coming back grew all the more intense.
They came unbidden at all the worst times of the day—not that there was really a good time of day or night to get lost longing for something and someone she couldn’t have.
But now, for instance, Paige found herself trapped in one, through no fault of her own, while working a shift at the Coffee Cup. A tourist just passing through had asked her for recommendations, and said she looked like she could be a tour guide, and that was all it took these da
ys to bring her back to the moment when Kehlan had asked the same. It captured her, and held her hostage to the memories of their time together. Her attention for the next half hour was diverted, and she hovered like a ghost halfway between the world as it was and the world as it would never be.
Which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, if it hadn’t been such a busy day at the Coffee Cup. The first trickles of the summer tourist season were beginning, and today more than most just happened to be packed.
And it still might not have been such a bad thing if she hadn’t stayed up half of the previous night, drinking that same wine they had drank together, reminiscing and doubting herself, even though she knew she couldn’t afford to tire herself out and start the day off at a disadvantage like this.
Even then, it might still have been all right if she hadn’t been taking so many extra shifts, trying to tire out her mind from thinking of Kehlan, but succeeding only in tiring out her body instead.
But as it was, all those factors together doomed her. She had a heavy pile of plates she was taking to the kitchen, and she stooped to pick up another one that a small child dropped on a booth. On the way back up, she felt a rush of blood to her head, and the world became a blur.
And then, that blur became nothing.
When she came to, her heart sank. She’d known she was playing with fire, letting herself get so attached to a man she couldn’t have. She knew she wasn’t handling it well, and that she’d let herself get pulled into all kinds of unhealthy habits. But she didn’t think she was so fragile that the experience would make her break from reality.
But there in front of her, she saw Kehlan, just as gorgeous as the first time she’d seen him, kneeling down in front of her, just as real to her eyes as all the people who were really there.
