The Sheikh's First Christmas - A Warm and Cozy Christmas Romance

by Rayner, Holly

  "Would you like to come in?"

  I poured him a cup of coffee, and he drank it at the square, linoleum-topped table that had been sat in the kitchen for as long as I could remember. I didn't imagine the police had any concerns that I might have stolen it—I'd had to have been robbing houses since the early seventies in order to have picked that one up new.

  "Did you sleep well?" he asked.

  "Really well, actually." I sat down across from him. "I don't think I've ever been so tired."

  "I can imagine. From the looks of you last night, it seems you gave the police quite a chase." He shook his head, but he sounded amused.

  "Not exactly. I tried to get to my car, but they caught up with me."

  "You looked as though you'd wrestled a bear in the mud."

  "Well, I guess the police don't appreciate it when you make them run. The one that arrested me pushed me down to put the cuffs on. So really, I got to play in the snow twice in two days." I laughed dryly.

  Sadiq didn’t laugh. He sat very still, appearing to examine the rim of his mug as he spoke.

  "But you're so tiny; it seems unnecessary for them to have treated you like that."

  "It wasn't exactly excessive force, Sadiq. They didn't know who I was, or that I wasn't going to fight them. Once the cuffs were on, they were fine." I smiled, trying to reassure him.

  He was quiet for a moment.

  "You could have been killed, Annabelle."

  My smile disappeared.

  "Yeah, I know."

  We sat together in silence for a minute or two, then I got up and poured another cup of coffee.

  "By the way, I wanted to say thank you, for last night," I said, my back turned to him. "And I’m sorry I forgot to say it before. I was so glad to get out of that place, you see. I don't know how I'll ever repay you." I turned to face him, leaning against the counter and holding the hot mug in both my hands.

  He shook his head, and waved his hand in dismissal.

  "Oh, don't concern yourself with that. It's trivial."

  "Sadiq, it's not trivial. I—"

  "Of course I came for you." He cut me off, his voice hard. "Of course I didn’t leave you in that place. You don't need to thank me for that. I’d be insulted if you thought I'd have done otherwise."

  My eyes went wide.

  "I didn't mean to insult you," I said, confused.

  He sighed and set his cup aside. He rose to his feet and came over to where I stood, looking down at my cup. With the gentle touch of his fingertips, he lifted my chin so that I was looking at him.

  "I don't know why you matter so much to me," he said, his eyes searching mine. "But you do."

  "I don't deserve this," I said hoarsely. "I don't deserve for you to be so good to me."

  "Since when has that ever made a difference, in matters such as these?"

  Before I could answer, his lips came down to mine. He kissed me softly, without the urgency that had been between us that night in the ballroom. One of his hands cupped my jaw, the other went to my hip, bringing me nearer. If our first kiss had been like fire, this one was like rain, sweet and quenching, tender and sure. I returned his kiss with slow eagerness, drinking him in without thought or shame.

  When he drew back, my eyes were wet. He smiled at me, and my cheeks flushed red.

  "Of course I came for you," he said gently. He lifted his hand and touched a spot above my cheekbone, a little scratch I'd gotten when the cop had pushed me to the ground. "I hate that they hurt you."

  "It's nothing. It doesn't even hurt anymore."

  "Please promise me, Annabelle, that you won't do this again, not ever. If you need anything, tell me."

  I looked away from him. "Sadiq, you don't—"

  "Just tell me, please. I cannot keep worrying that tomorrow, or a month from now, I'll get a different call about you, and you'll be gone."

  I met his eyes and saw fear there for the first time.

  I don't know why you matter, but you do.

  "I promise."

  TWELVE

  "You can't give me a car."

  "Of course I can. It's mine, is it not?"

  We stood together in Sadiq's enormous garage. It was a cold, echoing space, with a half dozen luxury vehicles parked in a neat row. I looked from the red Audi in front of us to the bunch of keys he held out to me.

  "It's too much," I insisted. "I just can't."

  He sighed and lowered his hand.

  "If it makes you feel better, you can consider it a loan. Until your legal troubles are resolved."

  At home in my kitchen, I'd reluctantly told Sadiq about my car, my phone, and my inaccessible bank accounts. He'd offered to loan me money, and I'd refused. I'd taken him up on his offer of lunch in hopes it would satisfy his desire to help me without doing too much to deepen the already massive debt I owed him. After a delicious meal at a restaurant I feared was much too sophisticated for my faded jeans and oversized sweater, I'd gone with him back to his house, presumably to retrieve the scarf, hat, and gloves I'd left on our snowman. After we'd arrived, though, he'd led me to his garage and showed me the car. He'd tried to downplay the gesture by telling me how he never drove the car, how he'd been thinking of selling it or donating it to charity anyhow. Whichever way he explained it, though, the idea of taking such a gift from a man I hardly knew alarmed me.

  "I appreciate it. I really do, but I’ll be fine. I can take the bus, or a taxi."

  "With the money you won't borrow from me?"

  I ignored his comment.

  "This just feels like taking advantage of you. You've already given me so much. I mean, a hundred thousand dollars! That's so much more than I could ever ask. I can't take anything else from you, Sadiq. I don't want you to think—" I broke off, embarrassed.

  He narrowed his eyes at me.

  "You don't want me to think what?"

  I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. The temperature had dipped again, and the wind blew hard, whistling as it rushed against the building.

  "I don't want you thinking that I'm some kind of... gold-digger."

  "Gold-digger?" he repeated, puzzled. "I don't understand what you mean."

  "It's an expression. It means a woman who just wants money and gifts from the man she's with."

  "Like a prostitute?"

  "Not exactly. A prostitute is honest about what she wants. A gold-digger manipulates. She deceives men, uses them."

  He nodded. "Ah, yes. I think I understand what you mean."

  "Don't you have women like this in Almarain?"

  "Sure. But you have to understand, some things are different there. It's expected that a man will provide his woman with whatever she needs. No one would look down on a woman for taking gifts this way."

  I wanted to ask, then, if he thought of me that way, as his woman. To say I wasn't ready for that was an understatement.

  "It's different here," I said instead. "Here, unless a woman is married to someone, or at least in a very serious relationship with them, people will look down on her for something like this. They look at her like she's cheap, like she's selling herself—and not just her body, her heart, too."

  "Because she's only pretending," Sadiq said, taking a step toward me.

  "Yes," I agreed.

  "I've pretended nothing with you, Annabelle." His breath rose like smoke in the air between us. "Have you been pretending with me?"

  "No." I looked down as he took my hand in his. "I've only told you the truth. I've told you more of the truth than anyone else. I've told you things I've never said out loud to anyone."

  "Do you believe that I like you?"

  "Yes."

  "And do you like me? Even if only for friendship?"

  I met his eyes.

  "Yes, Sadiq. I like you."

  I didn't know exactly what that meant, yet, but neither was he demanding to know. He was accepting the simplest part of my feelings for him, the part that didn't stir my blood and muddle my thoughts.

  "I
believe you, too," he said. "I understand more than you think I do. To accept a gift, that's a sign of trust. It's this way everywhere. In many places, there are rules, customs, that make it easy to know when and how you can accept a gift. Here, you don't have those rules. You have to make a choice each time, asking yourself if you really trust this person.”

  "I do trust you," I said. "You know that I do. It's just that--"

  "Then trust me when I say that I want you to have this for no other reason than that it pleases me. I want nothing in return, and I take no meaning from this other than a friend giving help to a friend." He lifted the keys again, holding them up between us.

  I took them from him with a shaking hand and stared at where they rested in my palm, black plastic and alarm buttons, steel teeth so clean and new it seemed they'd never been used at all. They were held together on a simple fob, silver and shining. I closed my hand around them and looked up at him.

  "Thank you," I said.

  He reached out and tucked a piece of my hair that had slipped free from my ponytail back behind my ear.

  "You're welcome."

  THIRTEEN

  Sadiq came to my house each day that week, as I waited for the morning of my hearing to arrive. Some days he took me out, to a restaurant or a movie. Sometimes he sat in my kitchen and drank coffee while I washed dishes and told him about Marion, my mother, or the friends I'd had in college. He listened with interest and asked questions, but not the hard ones. He didn't ask me why I didn't have friends to help me now or why my father hadn't been around during my childhood. He didn't ask me if I was going to go back to school or how much I'd told Marion about my arrest.

  I'd planned to tell her everything. Sadiq had convinced me to let him buy me another phone. The expensive model he'd picked out was nothing like the old, often temperamental phone I'd left in my confiscated car, and I'd told him so. I'd also told him that I didn't need a new phone at all, not really. I could talk to Marion online until I got my stuff back.

  "Really? The police left you your computer?" he'd asked, as if he didn't already know the answer.

  I'd made a face at him, but hadn't protested further as he'd paid the cashier.

  I'd called Marion that afternoon, but the words I'd practiced died inside me. Instead of telling her that her sister was a thief, and that her college tuition, clothes and books were all stolen, I'd made up a story about a bout of food poisoning that had kept me in bed all Christmas Day. She'd believed me easily, and I'd called myself a coward for putting off the inevitable. I'd have to tell her eventually, and now it would just be worse.

  Sadiq noticed my mood the next morning when he picked me up. I climbed into the passenger seat of his Jaguar and said a distracted hello.

  "Hello to you," he said, eyeing me. "Is something wrong?"

  I shook my head.

  "Nothing you can help with—sister stuff."

  He nodded, but a hint of sadness came into his eyes that reminded me that this man who spent every day seeing to my needs had problems and a past of his own.

  "Where are we going today?" I asked, in an effort to change the subject.

  "Shopping," he said.

  "Sadiq..."

  "You can’t appear in court in jeans, Annabelle. However lovely you are to me in whatever you wear, your judge is unlikely to feel the same."

  I wanted to argue with him, but he was right. I wanted to tell him that I'd at least pay him back, but I could make no such promise. As much as I tried not to think about it, it was only a matter of time before I went back behind bars. And this time, it would be for years instead of hours.

  We drove past the mall to a downtown district so pricey I didn't even bother window shopping there. He pulled his car to the curb and left the engine running. As he opened my car door, a valet in a black vest hurried up and took his keys from him. Sadiq offered me his arm, and I took it, feeling terribly aware of my cheap jeans and tattered sneakers.

  The saleswoman in the first store we entered was a fine-boned woman with smoothly bobbed, silvery-blonde hair and makeup so perfect she could have been a painting, or a doll. She wore a dark purple pantsuit and low heels. She started to greet us, then paused as she took in my appearance. To her credit, her surprise registered only briefly before her professional smile returned. However obviously I didn't belong in such a place, Sadiq did, and she was experienced enough to know it.

  "Good morning. My name is Marilyn. How may I assist you today?" she asked. She clasped her hands together in front of her and stood waiting, all graceful attentiveness and immaculate French manicure. I half expected her to curtsy.

  "Good morning to you," Sadiq said. "My companion is in need of some new attire. Something conservative, perhaps a suit."

  "I can certainly help with that. And what is the occasion?"

  "I'm appearing in court," I said, feeling the beginnings of annoyance at their discussing me as though I weren't there.

  "Ah, of course," she said. Any surprise or disdain she may have felt at this information was expertly concealed. "A suit is the perfect choice; something in navy blue, perhaps."

  "Yes, I was thinking that as well," Sadiq said.

  "Shall we get your measurements first?" She beamed her plastic smile at me.

  I followed her back to a curtained room where I stripped down to my underwear and stood on a circular platform raised about a foot off the floor. She moved around me with a cloth tape, murmuring numbers to herself and jotting them down in a little notebook. Sadiq waited in one of several plush chairs arranged in a cluster on the other side of the curtain. When she'd finished, I reached for my clothes, but she gave me a robe instead. It was white satin, with the name of the store embroidered over the left breast.

  "If you'll wait here, I'll bring some things for you to try," she said. "I do think we’ll be able to find just the thing." She patted my shoulder and hurried away, leaving a faint smell of expensive perfume behind her.

  I waited obediently for a few minutes, but eventually grew restless. I peeked around the edge of the curtain. Sadiq looked up from his magazine and raised his eyebrows.

  "You'll cause a scandal, naked girl," he scolded, frowning in mock disapproval.

  "No I won't," I said in a low voice. "Didn't you see how she treated you just now? We could walk through this place wearing nothing but Mexican sombreros and she'd just tell us about the lovely weather we've been having."

  He laughed. "You might be right about that."

  "I think I am, not that it makes any difference. It seems to me that rich people are the only ones who can get away with breaking the rules, and yet they follow them more than anyone else. I don't understand it. I'd be a terrible rich person."

  There were only a few other shoppers in the store; two middle-aged women browsing shoes on the far side of the room, and an elderly woman carrying a huge purse who looked at me sourly. I ignored her.

  "You watch and see, Sadiq. When we leave here, I'm going to look exactly like Marilyn. I hope you like frosted hair."

  He laughed again, struggling to muffle the noise in the quiet shop.

  "I like your hair, and I will defend you to the death against any who would frost it." He sat tall in the chair and held his fist solemnly to his chest.

  I spotted Marilyn hurrying back to us, a hefty pile of navy-blue clothing in her arms. I ducked back into the room and sat down on the pink-upholstered bench.

  "I think I have some excellent options here," she said as she came in and tucked the curtain tightly shut behind her. "And if these don't work, there are plenty more we can choose from." She started hanging the suits side-by-side on a row of hooks along the wall.

  "Wow," I said.

  "What's that, dear?"

  "I just had no idea there were so many blue suits in the world."

  She shook her head and smiled with gentle exasperation.

  "Your gentleman has his hands full with you, doesn't he?"

  Her words caught me off guard, but I found it impossib
le to be offended.

  "Yes, he certainly does," I said, slipping out of my robe.

  We tried all of the suits, one by one. Two of them looked fine to me, but Marilyn ordered me to remove them at once, without even showing Sadiq.

  "Terrible, just terrible," she said, as though she were describing a natural disaster or similar tragedy. "A suit that can make you look boxy does not deserve to be viewed by any human eye."