by Holly Rayner
Bought by the Sheikh Single Dad
Holly Rayner
Ana Sparks
Contents
Bought by the Sheikh Single Dad
Want More?
1. Shannon
2. Shannon
3. Umar
4. Shannon
5. Shannon
6. Shannon
7. Shannon
8. Shannon
9. Shannon
10. Shannon
11. Shannon
12. Umar
13. Shannon
14. Shannon
15. Shannon
16. Shannon
17. Umar
18. Shannon
19. Shannon
20. Shannon
21. Shannon
22. Shannon
23. Shannon
Epilogue
Bought by the Sheikh Next Door
Introduction
1. Kelsie
More Series by Holly Rayner
Bought by the Sheikh Single Dad
Copyright 2018 by Holly Rayner and Ana Sparks
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.
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Chapter 1
Shannon
In my dream I’m playing a concert in West Bend Park. There’s a three-hundred-strong crowd gathered at the top of the hill outside of Slater-McCall Pavilion—roughly the entire population of the town. It’s midsummer and the setting sun is casting a hazy golden glow over the dogs and the lawn chairs, the paper lanterns, the kids blowing bubbles and the vendors selling candied apples.
I’ve been here before for Shakespeare in the Park, but this is different. Now I’m the one standing on stage, flanked by a backing band. My best friend, Ginger Ashmole, is on keyboards. And then I step up to the mic with guitar in hand and launch into “Small-Town Girl,” the song I wrote for my hometown Woodfell, the song that made my name and earned me near-permanent rotation on music television a few years back.
By now, it’s been almost a year since my return from LA, almost a year since the release of my third and probably last album. Tonight, I’m not thinking about how badly that album flopped, or how my agent had warned me I might never work in LA again. Tonight is about the people in front of me, the community that supported me through first failures and unexpected fame. The people who never forgot me, never gave up on me, even when it seemed like everyone else had.
And just for a moment, if I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m still famous. I can pretend the last twelve months never happened.
“You know, I’ve been all over this country,” I say during a lull in the music, “but there’s no sweeter feeling than the feeling of being home.” Below me in the crowd, I can see a girl of about seven years old in a pink-purple dress, her eyes closed as she sways to the music. “You know what I love more than the sound of my own voice? The sound of your voices all singing back to me. Can you sing loud?”
“Yeah!” the crowd shouts in chorus.
“I want to hear you sing loud!”
I hold up the microphone and the crowd sings along, repeating every word like a football anthem. My heart pulses to the rhythm of the drums, my body alive to the crowd’s adulation. There’s never been a concert this big in the history of Woodfell. This is Live Aid. This is Queen onstage in London in 1985 in front of an audience of billions. This is perfect.
Or at least it’s perfect until Katie Rees-Howells shows up.
Katie: my nemesis since middle school. The girl who once offered me a gelatin cup and “forgot” to warn me that it was alcoholic. The girl who spread a rumor that I had written sexual innuendos into the lyrics on my first album, inspiring the Concerned Mothers of Woodfell to launch a boycott.
The girl who resented my success and had laughed—actually laughed—when she found out I was leaving LA.
Now, in the dream, Katie is standing near the front of the stage. Panic pulses through me as I wonder whether she’s going to launch herself at me. I don’t have a bodyguard, not anymore.
I keep singing, keeping a wary eye on her all the while. At first she mouths along to the song as if she’s here just like anyone else to enjoy the concert. But then she reaches into her denim backpack and pulls out a large banner. As she begins to unfurl it, a sensation of horror courses through my body. That’s my face in the middle of the banner, and in bold green letters she’s printed the words, “SHANNON O’NEILL IS SELLING YOU LIES!”
How do I fight this? If I ignore it, she wins. If I stop the concert and ask her to take it down, she has the satisfaction of knowing she humiliated me in front of the whole town. Already, they’re pointing and laughing; no one seems to have a problem with the substance of the message. Katie turns around, grinning and triumphant like a foul toad, so that those sitting behind her can see it.
“You’re a fraud!” she yells, like the youngest and prettiest evil witch you ever saw. Then the rest of the audience begins chanting it along with her, and she’s conducting them like a choir: “Shannon O’Neill thinks she’s God! Shannon O’Neill is a fraud!”
Somehow, the words are louder than the music; no matter how loudly I sing, I can’t drown them out. Everyone in the audience seems to be participating: Mr. Timmins who runs the general store; the girl in the pink-purple dress; my brother, Brian; old Maggie Prejean, probably my biggest fan; my mom and dad…
“We have to go on, we have to keep playing!” I yell to the band. “I want you to play louder than you’ve ever played in your life!”
But no one is listening. That’s when I realize, to my horror, that my bandmates are chanting along. One of them is even improvising a riff to go along with the chant…
I awoke in a cold sweat, my T-shirt clinging to my skin. It took me a moment to realize where I was: back at home in my apartment, awash in morning sunlight. A washed-up former celebrity whose last two albums had flopped in spectacular fashion, but who had never yet, thankfully, been booed off a stage. Not in my hometown; not anywhere.
Still, the memory of the dream hung over me like a bad smell as I climbed out of bed, out of my cat pajamas, and into the shower. I had given a private concert at a nursing home the weekend before and I couldn’t stop thinking about my mediocre performance. It shouldn’t have mattered—the ladies of San Angelo’s weren’t known for their social media reach, and it wasn’t as if anyone outside of the room would ever find out—but I knew I could have done better. I’d always had a fiercely perfectionist streak. On weekends, I used to spend hours watching videos of past concerts and studying my performances to see where they had gone wrong.
And as I drove over to my parents’ house that morning, the dream was replaying in my memory like one of those videos. Humiliating me in public seemed like exactly the sort of stunt that Katie might pull now that I was back in town. She had spent much of the past year simmering in frustration because my song was all over the radio and all over TV; my voice was inescapable, while her own dreams for herself had stalled right out of high school. She’d probably spent all that ti
me dreaming of clever ways to embarrass me, and for the first time since I had left home, she would be able to sense I was vulnerable. My career was headed nowhere; I turned twenty-five years old today and was no closer to achieving my ambitions of being a world-famous pop star. I was in imminent danger of becoming one of those one-hit wonders celebrated on the music channels, but otherwise forgotten by a world that was constantly moving on in search of something new.
I threw on a blue flannel plaid shirt and a pair of dark jeans and paused to examine myself in front of the mirror. I’d smudged eyeliner around my eyes to give it a smoky effect, but I doubted anyone would notice after I put on my glasses. I never wore those onstage, of course. Onstage, in my cuffed shorts and cotton tank tops, I was a small-town girl with a dream in her heart, the kind of girl you invite home to your mom. In real life, I was shyer, quieter, a bit more old-fashioned. I preferred spending an evening alone at the piano to a night partying. Maybe that was the reason I had struggled to make it in an industry where the most successful artists were tireless, gregarious, and aggressively driven.
On my way through the living room, I paused in front of the TV, which was turned to one of the music channels. I waited for a moment, wondering whether my song would come on. It was a ritual I had been thoughtlessly performing every morning since I moved home. The first few days it had been playing, and after that, I hadn’t seen it since.
With a sinking feeling of disappointment, I gave up and walked out onto the patio to join the rest of my family.
As much as I tried to deny it, there was a certain shame in being back in this town after I thought I had escaped it forever. A year ago, I had been eating smoked salmon and sipping champagne in a rooftop bar with a three-time Grammy winner. This morning, I had to listen in frustration as Mom got onto Dad for devouring his crawdads too messily.
“How did we manage to raise two children with perfect manners,” she asked, “when you don’t even know how to eat over a plate?”
“I can’t help it, I’m excited,” Dad retorted. He had half a crawdad sticking out of his mouth, which gave him the look of some alien creature from a sci-fi film. “Crawdads are finally in season again and it’s my daughter’s birthday. Forgive me for being a little enthusiastic about it!”
“You don’t have to take that passive-aggressive tone with me,” said Mom. “Brian, for heaven’s sake, put your phone away!”
“I’m doing business!” said Brian. “It’s important!”
“I’m sure it’s urgent, but you can wait at least thirty minutes while we celebrate your sister’s birthday. Shannon, dear, I hope the past year has been everything you hoped it would be.”
“It was, really.” I hoped she wouldn’t ask where I had imagined myself on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday, because the honest answer would have been: not here. Not watching my dad fill up on crawdads while my brother texted his girlfriend (who was also his manager, so he wasn’t lying). Around the back of the house, Brian’s dog was peeing into a marigold bed, while the neighbors were blasting some blues band that hadn’t had a hit since 1972. Why was success so elusive, and why did genius fade so young?
To Mom’s amazement, Brian set down his phone—and reached into the cooler for a beer.
“Brian O’Neill, you put that beer right back!” Mom shouted, sounding a little hysterical. “You know very well you can’t legally drink yet.”
“Mom, I’m twenty,” moaned Brian. “I’m an adult, for goodness’ sake.”
“Still not old enough,” she said reprovingly. “Come talk to me about it in six months.”
“But you and Dad are sitting right there! Honestly, if Dad says I can have one, what’s the harm?”
He glanced hopefully at Dad, who in turn glanced nervously at Mom. Everyone involved knew that Dad would have happily handed him one if Mom hadn’t been sitting there.
“Son, if your mom doesn’t think it’s a good idea, then I support her decision,” he said without much conviction.
Brian threw his hands up in the air and returned to his phone, as if trying to annoy Mom out of spite. Mom must have sensed this, for she shouted as loudly as ever, “Brian, you put that away while your sister is here! You can check your email any time!”
“Mom, it’s okay,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “I don’t care if he sends emails. It’s just my birthday, and at least he was good enough to show up.”
“He only showed up because he lives here,” Mom pointed out.
“At least he came out of his room,” I offered, and Brian nodded in agreement.
“Could you tone it down a little, Sheila?” asked Dad, motioning for calm with both hands. “Everyone else is trying to relax and have a good time.”
“Excuse me?” demanded Mom, her face turning a dangerous shade of puce.
“Hey, how about we cut the cake?” I motioned to the cake with a helpless feeling, a magnificent lemon zucchini sponge that Mom had spent most of the last night preparing. Whatever her faults, I could at least count on her not to run down to the store and buy something inedible.
“We’ll cut the cake in a minute,” said Mom, still glaring at Dad with disdain. “We were waiting on Ginger to get here.”
“Is she coming?”
“She just texted me to say she was on her way. I hope she remembered to comb her hair, I don’t want the neighbors gawking at us.”
“Mom, Ginger can wear her hair however she wants it. And if the neighbors don’t like it, they can just stuff it.”
My friend Ginger was an eccentric dresser who inevitably drew stares when we went out in public. With her thick boxy glasses, wavy red hair and colorful pleated skirts, she looked like the sort of woman who would end up joining a commune in New York, marrying a beekeeper and having a single daughter named Rainbow.
Katie had never forgiven me for choosing Ginger over her in middle school. Back then, Katie had been parading through school in her blue pinafore, the head of the drill team and the envy of every girl, while Ginger haunted Renaissance fairs and Celtic stores and was teaching herself to play the tin whistle. Dreamy and friendless, she usually sat by herself at lunch—until the day I came over and sat down beside her. This was a serious transgression to Katie, who dictated where everyone sat and with whom, and for a few weeks, I had been shunned by the rest of the cool kids. But to Ginger’s amazement, I continued to sit with her, and she never forgot it. By the middle of seventh grade, we were best friends.
“She could learn to take better care of herself,” Mom was saying. “If not for her own sake, then for those of us who have to be seen with her in public.”
“Mom, since when have you ever cared what the neighbors think?” I asked, my anger flaring. “Remember when they complained about one of our trees growing into their yard and you said they could just live with it?”
“Yes, well, that was different.” Mom had taken the cutting knife in hand as if impatient to cut the cake. “You know how I feel about trees: they should be allowed to grow wherever they want.”
“Just think of Ginger as a wild tree. You’ll never tame her, and you would be wasting your time trying.”
Not having a ready answer for this, Mom turned back to bothering Brian. “Are you seriously meme-ing in the middle of your sister’s party?”
Brian, however, didn’t look like he was in the mood to argue. “I think we may have some bad news,” he said in a quiet voice, not looking up from his phone. “Rita just sent me this article, and it’s not exactly flattering.”
“Is it about me?” I asked. “You can just ignore it; the webloids say horrible things about me all the time. Just one of the perks of having been famous.”
“It’s not the webloids.”
He tossed me the phone. The browser was open to the home page of the Woodfell Beacon, our hometown newspaper. Written across the top in bold letters were the words “SHANNON O’NEILL: HAS HER BUBBLE BURST?” And then in smaller letters just beneath it: “Once-proud pop star perplexed by plummeting
popularity.”
“What in the world?!” I exclaimed, my face reddening in a mixture of rage and humiliation.
“Oh, it gets worse,” said Brian.
It did get worse. The article went on to speculate that I had moved home because my records had stopped selling, and that I was going to start charging extravagant prices for concerts in the park so that I could continue funding my “lavish lifestyle.”
“The question on all of our minds should be this,” the essay read. “Having developed a taste for the high life, will O’Neill be able to get by without her caviar and champagne? Will tuna sandwiches and ginger ale ever satisfy? And how much will the rest of us have to pay to support her expensive living?”
I threw the phone back at Brian, my veins pulsing. “Where do they get any of that? I’m perfectly fine sitting here eating my homemade cake, thank you!”
“And the comments are a gold mine,” Brian added, pocketing the phone before Mom could reach it. “Lonny Mills who owns the dry-cleaner worries that you shouldn’t even be allowed to come back because you’ll corrupt Woodfell with your ‘Hollywood values.’”
“What values?!” I nearly shouted. “And just how do they propose stopping me from living in my own town?”
“Ignore them,” said Dad as he handed out paper plates. “Most of those folks are retired and have nothing better to do than to sit around gossiping.”
“I really thought you would be more upset about this,” I said, a little annoyed by his indifference.
Dad shrugged. “I’ve read the webloids, and what they said in that article is nothing compared to some of the things they’ve been saying about you online. Don’t ever search for your name if you want to be able to sleep at night.”
“Yes, but this is our hometown newspaper!” I said indignantly. “I know the editor. Remember when I was in fourth grade and I submitted a report on our class hamster, and they were gracious enough to print it? The point is, we know all these people.”
