by Avery Laval
His pained words took the wind out of Marissa’s sails. Khalid was talking about himself, of course, not some possibly nonexistent son. She’d never thought of what he’d gone through in quite that way. She’d always assumed he’d been glad to find out his true origins. Proud to take his proper place in Rifaisa. She’d never truly considered just how much he’d given up to do so.
She bit back all the anger that had been coursing through her and forced herself to imagine what that would have been like if it had happened to her. How she’d miss her family and friends and everything familiar. How lost she’d feel in such a strange country, where she didn’t even speak the language.
Well, she was about to get a crash course in empathy, she thought. And if she was indeed pregnant, she would have to learn how to survive all that change permanently, just as Khalid had. For she knew as sure as she knew she was alive, he would not let his own child go through what he’d been through. And she would not want him to. If there was a baby, that baby would stay in Rifaisa. And that meant she would stay, too.
With a sigh, she let her shoulders go slack, her expression soften. She plopped down on the big bed and folded her hands in her lap. “If there is a baby,” she said, all the anger out of her tone, “I want him to know who he is. But this whole discussion is most likely moot.”
Khalid, too, relaxed his stance, and for a moment, she felt as though they could be partners in this mess. That they could handle whatever came their way together. Then he spoke, and the fantasy shattered. “Hopefully. In which case, believe me, I will be happy to return you to your family at the earliest opportunity.”
The blast of reality reminded her who she was to him. Not a partner, and certainly not a lover. Only an annoyance, pure and simple. One that would be dispatched with as soon as possible. She tried quickly to cover up the hurt that realization caused. “I can hardly wait to book the flight,” she said, hearing the pettiness in her voice.
“Soon enough,” he replied. “In the meantime, I came here tonight to tell you the travel schedule and give you time to prepare. We fly to Dubai tomorrow at two, where my yacht is docked—”
“Your yacht?” Marissa interrupted, incredulous.
“Of course. I am the sheikh of an exclave whose livelihood depends on the ports that host every passing oil tanker coming from the north. We take our connection to the Gulf very seriously.”
“But wouldn’t it be faster to fly all the way—or drive?”
“Maybe. But it wouldn’t be as beautiful. I’m allowed very little freedom in this life,” Khalid explained, “and I like to spend it on the water.”
Surprised, Marissa said nothing.
“Assuming mild seas, we’ll be in Rifaisa before the night is out. That should allow us a low-profile entry to the palace.”
She nodded. “Is there anything special I need to wear? Or do?”
Khalid frowned, then seemed to comprehend what she was asking and shook his head. “Rifaisa is a progressive area. Assuming you packed appropriately for Cairo, you’ll be fine. Haven’t you met Jana?”
“Yes, but.” She trailed off, realizing just how ignorant she was of the place she was about to experience. “Of course. I’ll follow her lead.”
“She’s an excellent role model,” he said, and even that tidbit of praise raised an irrational flare of jealously in Marissa. She refused to acknowledge it. He folded his arms in front of his chest. “If you have any questions about protocol, speak to her.”
In other words, Marissa thought, don’t bother me with petty details. “I’ll do that.”
“Where’s your phone?” Khalid’s eyes darted around the room. “I’ll program her mobile number into it so you can reach her at any time.” She spotted it on the bedside table and unlocked it so he could input the information. She tried not to notice the fact that he had Jana’s number memorized. Why should she care?
“There. If you need anything, call her.” He dropped her phone on the bed where it bounced once, then he looked at her. “Before I go, I have to ask. Why would you throw away what we had for a tumble with Knox’s B-school buddy? You might have hidden a mercenary side from me, but only a fool would take a few shiny baubles over an entire kingdom.”
It felt cathartic to finally say the words he’d kept inside since he’d first seen her in the restaurant. But they weren’t getting the reaction he’d expected. She didn’t look horrified or guilty. She looked utterly confused. “In your phone,” he attempted to supply. “You just called Grant. That’s Grant Blakely, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So you two are still together?”
“What?” said Marissa. “We’re not together. We have never been together. For one thing, his wife Jenna—one of my best friends—would kill me. Wait, you didn’t think—No.”
“I didn’t think. I knew. I got the entire case file. That car accident. I was out of my mind with worry until I learned you had been off diamond shopping with Grant Blakely, the biggest playboy in Vegas.”
Marissa looked at him with complete blankness. Like she was too angry to even scream. “Khalid, you’re an idiot. How long have you been laboring under this misunderstanding? Months? Years? This entire time?”
Khalid found himself off balance. “I saw the headlines. I saw the photos.”
“You believed a tabloid headline over me? You couldn’t call me and ask? I was in the hospital. I had just lost my baby—your baby. You couldn’t pick up the phone?”
Khalid stammered. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Didn’t he, though? Could he have gotten it so wrong? He looked around, flailing for his footing in this shifting conversation. “You didn’t cheat,” he said at last.
“Of course I didn’t.”
“But you also didn’t tell me about the baby. You kept my son or daughter from me.”
“It was a complicated situation. There was a lot of grief. I thought I was saving you—”
“You thought you were saving an orphan from knowing about his own child?” he interrupted.
Marissa froze. Khalid felt the upper hand for a moment. “You see why it’s so hard to trust you, don’t you?”
Her mouth clamped shut.
“What you did,” his voice trailed off while he tried to process the loss and betrayal.
“I know it is hard to trust me, Khalid, because of that, because of how you grew up, because of the whole picture. I get it. That’s why I’m agreeing to go with you, and not calling the embassy and screaming bloody murder. But what you suspected of me and Grant, it’s beneath you. I used to think it was beneath us.” Marissa took a deep breath. “So I’ll go with you. But I won’t pretend to think you’re the man I thought you were. That man would never have treated me this way.”
6
The next day at twelve-fifteen, Khalid paced through the lobby of the Cairo Four Seasons trying to disguise his mounting annoyance to anyone who might be watching. Marissa was late, and lateness was unlike her. She’d always been obsessive about time, telling anyone who’d listen that her mother had taught her that punctuality was the greatest sign of respect. Now she was making him wait. He figured that showed exactly how much respect she had for him. Or maybe how much respect he’d lost last night.
He knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Everything he thought he had known about the end of their relationship had been dead wrong. But she’d been keeping secrets, painful secrets, all the same. And between his misperceptions and her betrayal, they’d managed to lose everything.
Just thinking of it made his brain ache. With anger, yes, and fury at being lied to. But with heartbreak, too. Before, he’d only thought that accident had signified his loss of Marissa. Now he knew it was the loss of what could have been. A son or daughter. A child of their own.
He took a deep breath in and out, trying once more to contain his emotions. The last thing he needed was a hotel full of the world’s most well-heeled travelers talking about how the Sheikh of Rifaisa looked upset or tired or what
ever else they might imagine. And his own staff, who waited with him, needed to know his feelings even less. He shook off the loss, the strange displaced sense of grief, and looked again at his watch. Where was she?
And who was she? Marissa hadn’t always been a devious person. He knew that in his bones. When they’d been together before, he couldn’t think of a single time she’d seemed untruthful. In fact, sometimes she’d been too honest, blurting out far information than needed. He remembered one day, early in their relationship, when the waitress at a diner had asked her if she was having a good day. She’d answered that she was, except that her elderly cat Peter had just peed all over her only clean pair of jeans and as a result she was wearing a stinky pair from her dirty laundry. He laughed to himself now, remembering the waitress’s polite “Ah” as she quickly backed away from their table.
As if conjured by his thoughts, Marissa stepped out of the elevator, looking just as sweet as the ripe berries he’d had on his cereal that morning. Her hair was pulled back into a neat, low ponytail. She wore a flowing pair of grey linen pants and a cropped violet V-neck sweater that outlined the shape of her breasts, and beneath it a cream-colored shirt narrowed to her waist. He was disappointed to see she’d chosen such a loose pair of trousers—it would make it harder for him to admire her abundant backside or the long legs that he’d so enjoyed having wrapped around him.
Then he scolded himself, remembering that she was not about to accompany him to Rifaisa as some kind of sexual plaything. Though if she were, she would be damned good at it.
“Good afternoon.” She crossed the lobby and stopped feet away from him. “Thank you for sending for my baggage. I’m ready when you are.” Her voice was cold. Good. It would make it easier for him to keep his distance.
“I was ready twenty minutes ago,” Khalid snapped. “Come, the driver is waiting out front.” He led her toward the big glass entryway, noticing the slow way she followed and the long looks she took at the amazing views on either side of them. “What kept you?” he demanded.
“I had an email to send,” she said.
Khalid raised an eyebrow and held a door open for her to sail through. She’d made him wait for an email? Let the games begin.
“It was to my mom,” she went on when they were outside in the hot Egyptian afternoon. “You know how if you say anything a little off to her, she’ll get suspicious. I wouldn’t want her sending Seal Team Six after me.”
Khalid nodded. “So you decided not to tell her what was going on?” He spotted his driver in the circle, and gestured her over to the car.
Marissa nodded and followed. “Knox and I decided,” she said. “She’s on her first vacation in years. The first one since she left Dad.”
When she said that, he snapped his head back to her quickly. “She left your father?”
She nodded again. “Last year. Don’t pretend that you care, Khalid.”
But he did care. As he ushered her into his car and slid in beside her, Khalid recalled the stories Marissa had told him about her father. How he’d cheated on her mother for years, expecting her to accept the betrayal as part of the cost of marriage. And she had, trying to keep her misery and her husband’s philandering a secret from her children. She had, of course, failed miserably. Children, he knew all too well, had a way of sensing chaos around them. They got used to it, but they never forgot it was there. He certainly hadn’t when he’d been bounced around foster homes, no matter how kind his caretakers were. He’d never forgotten that he would be moved, eventually, and there’d been no point in getting comfortable.
Inside the car, Marissa stared silently out the window at downtown Cairo speeding by, while Khalid was lost in thoughts of the past, recalling every time she’d confided in him about her parents’ dysfunctional relationship. At the time, he had been sympathetic to her mother’s distress, but deep down he’d felt Mrs. Madden was doing the right thing to keep the family together at all costs.
“Your mother,” he said, startling her gaze away from the window. “She was brave to leave him, after all that time.”
Marissa smiled at him, a beautiful, lit-up smile that tugged at his heart as it had always done, even though the smile wasn’t meant for him. ”Brave is exactly the right word,” she said. “She always made excuses to stay. But when Natalie got the job in Chicago, there was no more pretending it was something she had to do for the children. We were all grown,” she said, “and we wanted her to have her chance to be happy.”
Natalie was Marissa’s younger cousin whose parents had died when she was young. Marissa’s parents had taken her in without question, despite having a many children of their own. One of the things Khalid had loved about Marissa was her big, open family. Her mother had been loving and generous, and her siblings had been accepting of him, despite the color of his skin or the troubles of his childhood.
“And is your mother happy?” he asked. “Now that she’s rid of her heartless, cheating husband?”
“Don’t forget that heartless cheater is my dad,” Marissa said quickly. “But yes, she seems very happy. And I don’t want to take away from her happiness with this nonsense with you, not unless this nonsense turns out to be more than a false alarm.”
Khalid nodded. “All the more reason to keep this out of the papers,” he said.
Khalid realized that he could never do to his own wife what Marissa’s father had done. Now, as a single man, he preferred to stick with women who knew what they wanted, and only wanted one night. It was easy. Uncomplicated. After going through a divorce in an Arabic nation, he had no interest in complications, not yet.
But here he was in the back of his limousine with Marissa Madden, who might be carrying his child. Who had once been pregnant with his child and never told him. Had she been with him back then, safe in Rifaisa, she never would have been in that car accident and never would have lost the baby. The very thought filled him with both grief and anger. He resolved to stop this back-and-forth, this friendly chatter. He didn’t need to hear about her family, or anything else that could be considered even slightly intimate. He needed to keep her at arm’s length.
With that, he reached down and grabbed his briefcase. Inside was his laptop, with plenty of distracting emails and paperwork that he needed to review. He booted it up, behaving as though she were no longer in the car. They rode the rest of the way to the airport in silence.
7
Marissa wasn’t raised to go without by any stretch of the imagination, but she’d certainly never been on a private jet before. The flight to Dubai was a memorable experience, and one that she would have enjoyed a lot more under different circumstances—circumstances that didn’t involve her suspicious, angry, unreasonable ex-boyfriend. She didn’t know what she’d said, but after she’d told Khalid about her mother’s divorce, he clammed up like a prisoner of war. He hadn’t spoken another meaningful word to her the whole trip. They’d managed to navigate the private airport, make their way to the plane, and settle into seats just feet from each other without ever saying much more than “Here?” or “This way” to each other. After ten minutes of the uncomfortable silence that followed their boarding, Jana and the other aides had arrived and filled the remainder of the seats, chatting companionably, if totally incomprehensibly, with one another. Jana sat next to Marissa, probably instructed to do so by Khalid, and exchanged pleasantries in her lyrical English. From the looks of it, Jana had made trips like these time and time again. She seemed utterly comfortable despite a bumpy takeoff, and when tea was served, she turned to Marissa and said conspiratorially, “Ask for the almond cookies. They’re amazing.”
Marissa wished for a moment she could climb in Jana’s head and borrow all the experience she had, so she wouldn’t feel so totally on edge about everything that lay ahead of her. Since that wasn’t an option, she asked Jana about her homeland instead.
The hour-long flight passed quickly after that. Jana’s eyes lit up when she spoke about her tiny coastal exclave. She described
the red-tinted sands east of the capital city, which were stained with iron oxide. Rust, Marissa realized with surprise. Jana nodded, and then explained that the beaches were pure white, the color of the coral that had created them. “After the beach, it is all desert sand, in every direction,” Jana said of Rifaisa, “but every desert is different.”
A fitting homeland for a man who seemed so hard and foreboding on the outside, Marissa thought. She stole a glance at him across the aisle of the jet. His mouth was set in a hard line, his eyes focused like lasers on the laptop open in front of him, his fingers dancing across the keys at lightning speed. What was it about that man that she found so fascinating? If he were a desert, she wanted to turn over every bit of sand within.
No, she realized. If he were a desert, he was the kind full of deadly snakes and scorpions. She needed to steer as clear as she could under the circumstances. Khalid had broken her heart over a stupid misunderstanding and left her to suffer the worst pain of her life alone. He could easily do it again.
By the time the group deplaned, Marissa had a much better idea of what to expect in Rifaisa, and a much better resolve to avoid the man who would one day rule it. And he seemed willing to let her avoid him, choosing to ride alone in his private car for the trip to the marina, leaving Marissa to go with the others. Relieved, she began to relax on the long drive, letting herself enjoy the sights of skyscrapers and exotic gardens that whizzed by her window. By the time they reached the dock and she laid eyes on the magnificent white yacht, the Rifaisi Princess—how ironic—bobbing gently in the bright blue-green waters, she had even let herself become a little excited at her upcoming adventure.
That excitement didn’t last long. Rough seas from a windstorm coming in near their destination meant they would not be traveling on their intended schedule. They would stay here in the port until they had an all-clear from Rifaisa.
Jana translated the captain’s announcement for Marissa as they boarded the craft, and then, seeing the American’s worried expression, Jana smiled warmly and tried to reassure her. The yacht had very spacious chambers, she told Marissa. Spending the night aboard, if required, would be just as comfortable as a night in the palace.
