by Holly Rayner
It certainly didn’t help Lucie’s nerves.
Calista turned off the engine, and Lucie realized that they hadn’t been stopped by anyone their whole way here. She hadn’t seen any security in the palace grounds, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were there. The Sheikh must know she was here, and he had let her through.
“Bonne chance,” Calista said, smiling slightly.
Though she wasn’t usually much of one for hugs, Lucie gave her one. She’d needed the reassurance, and she couldn’t have been more grateful to Calista for providing it.
Then she took a deep breath and got out of the jeep. It was time.
SEVENTEEN
She walked up the stairs into the palace slowly, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. She’d spent the whole day collecting her thoughts, and yet they still felt scattered.
When she reached it, the front door slid open. For the life of her, she couldn’t see anyone there, until a man emerged from the shadows.
“Go to the roof,” the man said, in heavily accented English. “He’s waiting for you there.”
She did as she was told, taking the main staircase up. Now was not the time to bother with secret passageways.
As she stepped out again into the evening breeze, she found herself on the opposite side of the palace to where she and the Sheikh had stargazed from his sitting room.
On this side, the ramparts weren’t damaged, and it looked and felt very much like the kind of castle that she’d read about in story books when she was a child. It seemed a fitting place to have a final conversation, if it was to be that.
The Sheikh was standing there, his back to her.
Her heart pounded. It was now or never. But she couldn’t remember the opening phrase she had planned to say. The magic of the night air pulled her so swiftly back to the time when they had drunk honey liquor and gone walking together through tunnels and gardens. And, so lost in her memory, she could not find her tongue.
Before she could figure out how to speak, he turned. He’d been looking out across the desert in what she’d deemed to be anger, but when she saw his face she realized she’d been wrong.
She’d been wrong about everything.
“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping towards her and reaching out his arms. “I’m so sorry, Lucie. I should never have suspected you.”
She stumbled forward, everything in her wanting to find her way into his arms, in spite of how confused she was.
“It wasn’t me,” she said weakly, still trying to follow the script she’d worked out over the course of the day.
Another few steps forward. A few steps closer.
“I know. The paper listed a source. Once I read it fully, I realized it wasn’t you. Of course it wasn’t you!”
Another step. She was so close to him now that she could see the worry written all over his face.
It nearly made her laugh. She’d been waiting the whole day for him to settle down enough for her to make her case. And yet, here he had obviously been, doing the same. Hoping for her to return.
She suddenly felt exhausted. The work she had done, and the lack of food caught up with her. With the adrenaline in her system beginning to die down, she felt herself falling forward.
And then she felt him catching her, his arms wrapping around her.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s no excuse, but I was still so shaken. The whole thing, everything between us…”
Lucie nodded, sensing where he was going.
“It should have been simple,” she completed for him.
“It shouldn’t have been secret in the first place. I should have just reached out to you, without a care for what anyone might have thought. I shouldn’t have given Zach that ammunition in the first place.”
Slowly, as one, the entwined lovers found their way to a sitting position on the ramparts. It was a little colder here, without the fireplace and glass dome that encased the other side of the roof. But they had each other for warmth.
At Zach’s name, Lucie came down to earth slightly.
“I gave him quite the lecture, earlier,” she said, in Arabic. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but it felt more intimate, somehow, to talk to him this way. She was a little afraid he would answer her in English.
But he didn’t. A string of his soft, rich Arabic answered her.
“I did the same—and so did my head of security. Tomorrow he will be filming an apology, to be broadcast on national TV, for spreading lies about the nature of my relationship with you.”
Lucie’s heart began beating more quickly again. She could feel her adrenaline kicking back in.
“Right,” she said. “Only I thought…”
The Sheikh shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean that he should deny that we are together. Let him say that he got that part right. But let him say that he misrepresented it, and that it certainly wasn’t his place to announce it to the entire country.”
Even the crescent moon gave enough light to glint in Abdul’s eyes.
“I don’t want any more secrets. Not between us, and not in front of my people.”
Relief and guilt flooded through Lucie in equal measure.
“In the spirit of not keeping secrets,” she began, her voice wavering slightly, “I have something I need to tell you.”
With all that had happened between them, the Sheikh could be forgiven for being a bit nervous at this. But if he was, he didn’t show it.
“What is it?”
There was no way to say it but to say it.
“I’m pregnant.”
There was a long pause. All Lucie could hear was the sound of the breeze.
“Really?”
She couldn’t read his face. It was either complete joy, or complete shock. She was in agony, trying to tell between them.
And then she felt his arms around her again.
“My sweet Lucie,” he said, “you have made me the happiest man.”
She wanted to say that he had made her the happiest woman, but her heart was too full of joy to speak. She only sat there, wrapped in his warm embrace, with a huge smile on her lips.
Then, suddenly, he pulled back.
“But you must marry me!”
She laughed.
“That wasn’t very romantic, was it?” he said to the bright chorus of her laughter.
“Any way of saying that you want to spend your life with me would be romantic. I’m just surprised. I’ve been dreading this moment… wondering and fretting over what you might say. And now that it’s here, it’s better than I ever dared hope it would be.”
He cupped her cheek in his hand, and she let the weight of her head sink gently into it, loving the way it felt to be held by him.
“We do a lot of thinking,” he said. “You and I. Perhaps we should think a bit less. Maybe we’d be happier.”
“Please don’t,” she said. “I love you for your mind, just as much as I love you for your heart. I couldn’t bear it if you stopped.”
He smiled. “Then I’ll never stop thinking. But I will think of the best version of things, not the worst.”
She blinked slowly, her eyelids feeling heavy. “Then so will I. And I think there will be a lot of good things for you and I to think about.”
Lucie had always thought that being in love was for fools. And, indeed, it had always looked like it was a foolish thing.
But as she sat with Abdul, wrapped up in his arms, under the stars, murmuring the same kinds of words that would have seemed like platitudes to her mere months ago, she finally understood.
It wasn’t about the words. It wasn’t about what they said to each other—it was the feeling behind it. The feeling that she could only hear in the sound of his voice, not the meaning of the words. The feeling that she could sense in his touch, and in the warmth of his glances.
And it was that feeling that she knew she would trust, now and forever.
Epilogue
EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER
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Lucie couldn’t believe little Nadiah was running already, but she couldn’t deny the evidence as she chased her around the palace. Not that she minded. She loved racing through the halls as much now as she had loved exploring them that first day with the man who was now her husband. And, besides, tonight would be an important night—it was good for little Nadiah to get out her energy before the guests arrived.
Were Abdul a stricter father, he likely would have insisted she be kept away somehow, so that she wouldn’t be underfoot while all the dignitaries, scientists and academic luminaries might be annoyed by a child in their midst. They would begin arriving at any moment, and in a household where children were to be seen and not heard, she would have been spirited away.
But theirs was not a very traditional household. They didn’t cling to the old, dusty ways of either of their families. But they did honor some traditions. They honored loyalty, and love, and a certain amount of blissful chaos. And, Lucie remembered, as she put her hand on her belly, soon they would be honoring the tradition of big, noisy families as well.
Not that they were waiting for the rest of their children to come to fill the palace with people. What had once been such an empty, lonely place now teemed with life. There was a certain inconvenience, maybe, to the garden being torn up. But living in an active dig site had made the inconvenience well worthwhile.
“The first guests from your alma mater are here,” her husband grinned at her. He was adjusting his tie on his way down to greet the guests, but on the whole he was much more prepared for the night ahead than Lucie was.
“Harvard or Yale?” she asked, though she was already moving on, lest she lose her daughter around a corner.
“Harvard!” she heard Abdul call from behind her as she continued the chase.
Life after finishing her PhD was better, certainly, than it had been before. Though she could hardly give all the credit to having completing her studies.
Living in Al-Brehoni had been an adjustment, but it had been one that she made quickly. Once she had realized that the center of pottery that she had theorized had once been on the site where the palace now stood, the rest of her dissertation practically wrote itself.
And, once the small matter of her achieving her lifelong dream and completing her doctorate was out of the way, she achieved the dream she never even knew she had, and married the love of her life.
And tonight, she would stand beside him, and announce a formal, permanent joint program between the newly-formed Al-Brehoni Archeological Trust and certain key American universities. The test program had certainly been a success—in more ways than one.
As Lucie caught her daughter, and scooped her up into her arms, she remembered the first time she had come to Al-Brehoni. She’d known so little, then, about what an impact the trip would have on her life. She’d thought she had, but she’d been clueless. And, in the end, though there was much confusion, and anger, and unhappiness along the way, she knew she’d do it all again in a flash. She’d go through anything again to end up with the life she had now: living and working in a place she loved, with a man she loved, and the family she didn’t know she had so badly needed. Finally, she was home.
The End
Holly Rayner
HASSAN:
The Bad Boy Sheikh’s Baby
By Holly Rayner
Copyright 2016 by Holly Rayner
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.
All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.
Table Of Contents:
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
ONE
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“Another round for the pretty lady?”
Morgan glanced up from her Diet Coke and into the twinkling eyes of the bartender. He was trying to be funny, she knew, but she graced him with a small smile anyway.
“Why not?” she replied, taking one last pull from her straw and allowing the soda to slurp loudly against the ice in her glass before sliding it across the wooden bar.
The bartender snatched it up and went to pull the soda hose from the back, tipping the glass slightly to prevent too much fizz forming at the top. Morgan thanked him as he slid the full glass back to her with a wink, shaking her head with a bemused expression.
Men were idiots.
Morgan’s mind reeled back to a particularly rainy day, a few years back, when she had been pulled over by a cop, and her life had changed forever.
Cursing, she shielded her eyes from the blinding light glaring through her back window as she reached for her license and registration. She rolled down her window to find a pudgy man in a blue suit and lopsided hat glaring down at her.
“Do you know why I pulled you over, miss?” he asked.
Morgan quirked an eyebrow at him. “Because I was going five over the speed limit, sir?” She tried to keep her tone pleasant, but her annoyance leaked through anyway.
“Left tail light’s out,” he replied, reaching a hand out for her documents, which she duly handed over. “Not safe in this kind of weather.”
“It’s Houston. The rain will be over in five minutes,” she said, curt. She knew this behavior wasn’t going to save her from a ticket, but she wasn’t the type of person to cry just to get out of a violation. She liked to meet people straight on, with honesty. If they didn’t like it, that was their problem.
To her surprise, the cop chuckled. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Hey, can I ask you something?’ Morgan said. “What’s it like, being a cop?”
The officer hesitated, thinking for a moment before he replied. “Oh, it’s not so bad. On slow days we’re pulling people over for minor traffic violations, but there are times when we get to save people’s lives—make the community a better place. It’s nice to feel like you’re making a difference in the world, even when people don’t thank you all the time for it.”
Morgan thought about that for a moment.
The officer leaned in a little closer. “Are you thinking of joining?” he asked, and Morgan laughed.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I’ve got a job—I just hate it.”
“What are you, Army?”
“No, corporate. You know, the cube farm; small talk, meddling middle management. Not my bag at all.”
“Sounds like you need to get out of there. There’s a preliminary entrance exam coming up in a few weeks. You look like you’re in good shape—why don’t you come try out the physical exam and see if it’s something you want to do?”
“Maybe I will,” she replied, her gaze darting to the man’s paunch and wondering how he got into the force if you really did have to be in “good shape.”
With that, the cop handed back her license and registration. “On good faith,” he said simply. “Come to the exam, Miss Springfield. You strike me as a good fit for our force.”
Morgan had had some time to think about it, sitting in her cold, gray cubicle. What was she doing with her life?
On the afternoon of the physical exams, she ended up being one of only three women there to perform the series of tests to be
considered for the police force, and she was the only one who passed. One long month later, and she was officially a member of the Houston Police Department.
At first it had been exciting. Morgan got to ride in police cars. She got to perform undercover detective work, following clues that led to bad guys being arrested. It wasn’t long, however, before she started to get frustrated.
