Bought By The Sheikh Single Dad_A Sweet Sheikh Romance

by Holly Rayner

  “Are you really going to invite him back here?” Brian asked, reaching down between the couch cushions and pulling up a stick of beef jerky that had to be several weeks old. Gingerly, he tossed it in the direction of the trashcan, but it missed and landed with a clatter next to the tissue box.

  “Probably not,” I said sadly. “I’d be better off bringing him back to Mom and Dad’s house. It’s no haunted mansion, but it’s a respectable suburban home.”

  “I figured you’d invite him over the last time you were in town, but after we left the crab shack on Saturday, y’all headed straight for the mansion. Dad said he got the feeling you were ashamed of us.”

  “I probably was, and I’m sorry.” At this point, there was no use pretending to be anything other than what I was. “I’ll do better this time, now that I don’t have a mansion to hide in.”

  “I’m surprised you’re even willing to let him back in,” Brian said.

  “Why wouldn’t I? He wasn’t the one who ruined things. It was me who did that.”

  “I mean, your breakup was pretty devastating, and I wouldn’t want to relive that trauma. If it was me, and he told me he was coming back, I’d probably run and hide.”

  “Really? You never struck me as the hiding type.”

  “I’m just saying,” said Brian. “If I was in your position…”

  I knew what he meant because I had been debating with myself whether I really wanted Umar to come back. Seeing him again would be like picking the scab on a wound that had only just started to heal. On the other hand, if I turned down the offer, I would spend the rest of my life haunted by the memory of that final fight in the kitchen on that warm Sunday morning. That wasn’t how I wanted the story to end.

  It wasn’t until Brian began fumbling around for the tissues that I realized I had begun crying again.

  “You okay?” he asked, handing me a paper towel. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  I shook my head. “It isn’t that. It’s just… Do you remember when we were kids and Dad took us to the circus? I remember Mom wanted us out of her hair for a while and the circus had just come to town, so he took us. Early fall and it was just the three of us. And I remember the candied apples and the tea kettles hanging from the trees and how you nearly threw up when we rode the tilt-a-whirl, but I didn’t because I was a brave girl.”

  Brian shook his head in annoyance, but a glimmer of a smile shone in his eyes. “You have never let me forget that.”

  “It was one of my proudest moments. And I remember standing under a tree holding the stuffed gnome that Dad had won for me at the duck-hunting booth, and I remember thinking, ‘This is what happiness feels like.’ And I think everything I’ve ever done, since that day, has been an attempt to recapture that single moment of magic.

  “And you know, sometimes I think I would give it all up—this whole life, this aching and striving to be famous—just to be a kid again for one day and to be at the circus with you and Dad.” Brian offered me a second paper towel and I took it. “Sometimes I wish life had a ‘go back’ option so you could relive certain days over as often as you liked.”

  “Sort of like a carnival ride,” said Brian.

  “Exactly.”

  I leaned back and lay my head in his lap, not sure how to put in words what it was I wanted to say. I felt like I had betrayed so many people—not just Umar and Kalilah, but Ginny and my whole family—in my pursuit of fame. Not that my ambition itself had been inherently wrong, or the ten years of labor and tears I had put into it, but I had striven so hard to be someone else that I had come perilously close to denying who I was and where I had come from.

  “You want to know something?” I said finally.

  “Tell me.” Brian began to stroke my hair softly, the way Mom used to do when we were little.

  “Sometimes I have this feeling like all my dreams of being rich and famous were just that—delusions. And like the life I have now is the only one I’m ever going to have.”

  “Would that be such a bad thing, though?” he asked.

  “Maybe not.” I rolled over on my back so I could see my brother’s face. “Maybe it’s enough to have a couple close friends and a family that really loves me. I don’t know.”

  There was a weird moment where Brian looked into my face and I had the experience of seeing him as a human being. Not that I hadn’t known he was a human, but he had always just been my brother before. My freckle-nosed, doofy brother Brian. Somehow, it had never connected that he was an individual person with a life apart from me, with fears and ambitions and desires of his own.

  “How is it,” I asked, “that you’ve never given up on me, even when I’ve been the biggest idiot in the family?”

  “You’re my sister, Shannon,” said Brian. “One of us is going to attend the other’s funeral. I’m afraid we’re stuck with each other.”

  “Unless I do something just really stupid and the rest of the family shuns me forever.”

  “Maybe even then,” Brian said quietly.

  Chapter 21

  Shannon

  I took a few days off work and spent much of the next week getting ready for the concert at Slater-McCall Pavilion. I sank most of the rest of the money I had earned from my last concert into renting out the venue for a single night, and with Ginger’s help, I began passing out flyers and spreading the word through social media.

  I came home for the weekend to practice and ultimately allowed Brian to talk me into using his band, The Sea Foxes, as a backing band. Each night, they came over for dinner and afterwards the five of us played in the garage until Dad made them leave.

  “You know, they’re really not terrible,” he told us one night as we watched them drive off at around midnight. “You ought to consider making them your official backing band, Shanny. With a bit more work, you could be ready for touring.”

  “Maybe I would,” I said, “if we ever manage to rise above ‘not terrible.’”

  “Unlikely,” Brian said modestly. “If you couldn’t make it in the music world, we’re never going to make it.”

  “I made it!” I said, in the kind of joking tone that only comes from a bruised place. “For a whole year, I made it!”

  “And you’ll do it again,” said Dad. He took off his glasses and began cleaning them with the hem of his Hawaiian shirt. “Just keep practicing and someday, you’ll rise to the heights.”

  I was tempted to ask him what he thought I had been doing before, but I held my tongue.

  The concert had been scheduled for Friday and Umar and Kalilah were flying in that afternoon. Contrary to my expectations, Umar had asked if I wanted to meet up before the event, if I wouldn’t be too busy rehearsing. I’d told him I would like to see them beforehand, but not without a pang of nervousness. I knew the relationship had shifted since he had seen me at my lowest point, but I could only guess at how much. Were we just going to stand around awkwardly while Kalilah hovered near us, wondering why we were being so tense and quiet? How could I apologize without bursting into tears and embarrassing myself even more?

  “You know, I could watch Kalilah for a few hours if you and Umar need to talk,” said Ginger as we finished testing the sound equipment on a sleepy June morning. “I feel like there are probably things you’ll want to say to him that you can’t say in front of her.”

  “Thanks, Ginny,” I said, setting my guitar back in its case, “but I’ll have to okay it with him first. There are a few things I’d like to say to both of them before you whisk her away.”

  As much as I was looking forward to seeing him again, there was a part of me that dreaded it. As the hours passed and the moment of his landing approached, I felt my stomach twist into knots, and when I went out to eat with Ginger at one of the more affordable Italian restaurants in town, I ate only a single breadstick. Sensing my discomfort, Ginger ordered me a tall glass of seltzer water to settle my stomach, but that didn’t help at all as it reminded me viscerally of him; Umar had ordered seltzer at
every meal we ate together.

  “You know, you don’t have to despair,” Ginger said. “You’ve already done the hardest part: you convinced him to come back. You convinced him to give you another chance.”

  “I don’t know if another chance is what he’s after,” I replied. “From what he said in the email, it sounds like he’s only doing this for Kalilah.”

  “He can use whatever excuse he wants,” Ginger said sagely. “He wouldn’t have flown all the way across the world, again, if he had no interest in seeing you.”

  Maybe it was the seltzer, but I began to feel a little better by the time we had finished eating. When Umar texted me at 4:00pm to let me know that he and Kalilah had just landed, I felt an unexpected twinge of anticipation. I wanted to see him again, wanted to hold him again. Despite his protestations, Ginny was right—he wouldn’t have come unless he wanted to talk to me. And I was relieved to have been given this unlikely second chance.

  It was nearly five when Umar and Kalilah met us at the park, where a crowd was already beginning to gather—men and women reclining on blankets, college students in preppy clothing pulling trays of fruits and cheese and summer sausage out of small coolers, children blowing bubbles. Kalilah came running up and threw her arms around me while Ginger and Umar hung back, smiling shy, awkward smiles.

  “Hey, how was your flight?” I asked him.

  “Restful,” he replied. His hands fluttered nervously, as if he was the one with all the making up to do. “I spent most of it listening to the playlist you made me during your visit.”

  “You’re only just now getting around to listening to that?” I had made him a playlist of my favorite musical inspirations from the 1960s and early ’70s.

  “Well, I kept putting it off before,” he said.

  “Ah, right. About that.”

  Umar hitched his thumbs into the belt loop of his slacks. “Yes. About that.”

  With a weird feeling of embarrassment, I lowered myself until I was eye-level with Kalilah. Somewhere behind us, a dog was yipping loudly. “Hey, I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for lying to both of you—and for misleading you for so long. I don’t want to offer any excuses. I just… I got swept along in a lie and I didn’t know how to get out of it. And that’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” said Kalilah. She took me by the wrist and shook it affectionately. “It’s like you said in ‘Steel Velvet’: we all make mistakes, but we can’t let them sink us.”

  “Did I really say that?” It was just some banal advice I had written mostly for the sake of a rhyme, but at that moment, I needed to hear it. I risked a glance over at Umar, hoping for some glimmer of forgiveness, but he stood there impassively watching the band as they noodled with their guitars.

  “So…” I rose and walked over to where he was standing. If we had still been together it would have been the moment when I playfully took him around the waist or tugged at his shirt collar. But I had lost that privilege. “I was thinking if you wanted to take a walk, just the two of us…”

  “Anything to get us away from that dog,” said Umar, brows creased, but just then Brian came running up, his R.E.M. T-shirt soaked with sweat.

  “Hey, sorry to interrupt,” he said, glancing nervously between us, “but the band wanted to go through one more rehearsal before the rest of the town really starts showing up. And the backup dancers would like to run through their routine again.”

  “Wow, backup dancers!” said Ginger, visibly impressed. “Fancy! How many people are we expecting?”

  “Well, when we sent out the social media invites,” he said, “over 600 people said they were maybe going to attend.”

  “That’s twice the population of the town,” Ginger pointed out skeptically. “And you know half the people who say they’re going to come never show up.”

  “I know, right? But people kept inviting their friends. I think a lot of them are coming from out of town.”

  “Makes me wonder why none of my recent concerts have been this well attended,” I muttered.

  “Well, no one can say no to a free concert in the park,” said Brian. “Especially not in the summer when the skies are clear and the air has that freshly-cut-grass smell.” He turned and started heading back toward the stage without waiting for me to follow.

  I turned back toward Umar, and was relieved to see a look of disappointment flash across his face—one that he quickly covered up.

  “Look, I’m really sorry…” I started.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said reassuringly. “Do what you have to do. We’ll talk later.”

  Chapter 22

  Shannon

  After all the weeks of doubt and planning and panicking, it was a relief to finally be onstage, to stand in front of the microphone as the sun set over the pavilion and see several hundred eager faces staring back at me.

  I eased us into the performance by playing a couple of the more popular songs from my first album. Sensing that the crowd was getting into it, and feeling encouraged, I then played a song or two from my follow-up album—the one that critics had loved, but the public had shrugged at, the one that was just me on acoustic guitar musing on questions of faith and fame and success. Now, with the full backing of the band, the songs took on a potency they had never attained in the studio. I began to wonder if perhaps I should have heeded the advice of my manager, who had warned against going solo on my second album when my original sound had been so widely praised.

  It was an exhilarating feeling to perform in front of a crowd of people and know that I had moved them to dancing and heartache. As dusk settled and the street lamps that lit West Bend Park began to glimmer in the purple haze, I scanned the crowd for Umar. I wanted to impress him, just as I wanted to impress everyone else from Woodfell who had gathered tonight. I felt like a single moment of brilliance could expunge the mistakes of the past, could erase the lies that had been told about me and the truths I had been unwilling to face.

  Near the top of the hill at the back of the crowd, just outside the pale circle of light, I glimpsed Ginger’s unmistakable red hair. Beside her stood a slender young man with a thick pair of Buddy Holly glasses. It took me a second to remember where I had seen him before—it was Ari, the clerk at the new-age bookstore. As I launched into the first verse of “Small-Town Girl” and the pavilion erupted in appreciation they began to dance together, wildly, goofily, unashamedly, eliciting broad smiles from the families and couples behind them.

  At the end of the second verse I signaled for the band to continue playing without me for a moment. “I’d just like to say—there’s a really special girl here tonight who has flown clear from the other side of the world just to be at this concert. And I want her to know how much I appreciate it. Kalilah al-Taleb, would you care to join me onstage?”

  Although I had been scanning the venue for any sign of Kalilah or Umar, I hadn’t yet seen them since they had taken their seats. Now, however, the crowd parted and Kalilah appeared, her dark curls bobbing eagerly as she ran forward, taking care not to step on hands or overturn picnic baskets in her haste to reach the stage.

  And it was then that I saw the exact person I had least wanted to see.

  Katie Rees-Howells stood near the edge of the crowd, her face hidden in shadows. I might not have seen her if she hadn’t been hearing her tell-tale pinafore and clutching an enormous blue and white megaphone; my guitar pic nearly slipped from my sweaty hands at the sight of it.

  At first, I thought I must have been hallucinating, but no, it was really her and the recurring dream I had been having for months was threatening to come true. Why had she even come to the concert if she hated me so much? Why had she brought a megaphone, and what was she planning to do with it?

  I stood paralyzed, wanting to warn the band that she was about to cause an outburst, but not knowing how without removing my microphone.

  Kalilah clambered onto the stage in another burst of applause and I introduced her to the audience, twi
rling her around as we moved into the third verse. My memory flashed back to that moment in the high school cafeteria at homecoming and I realized that at every concert I’d played, I had worried that this would happen: that Katie would somehow appear and take the love of my fans and spit on it, humiliating me in front of them and shaming me into hiding so that I would hang up my guitar and never play again.

  “Kalilah al-Taleb, everyone!” I said as we finished our dance, and toward the back of the crowd I caught Umar’s nod of approval. But as I helped her down from the stage the band’s fade-out was interrupted by an amplified screech that shattered the evening’s stillness.

  “SHANNON O’NEILL IS A FRAUD!”

  Katie had moved out of the shadows to the front of the crowd, flanked by what looked like a three-person marching band in black uniforms, carrying drums, tambourines and a trombone. I stood paralyzed at the edge of the stage, my mouth rapidly drying and a strange sensation of déjà vu coming over me.

  “Shannon O’Neill is a liar!” she cried in a voice that could cut through steel. “She’s exploited the hard-working men and women of this town for her own gain! She doesn’t deserve an audience! She doesn’t deserve your applause!”

  It felt like my conscience had manifested in human form to embarrass me in front of the entire town. Katie wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already believe about myself, which made it hard to shut her down with a quippy response like I would have done in the movies. Numbly, I turned to Brian, imploring him with my eyes to get rid of her before she rallied the audience against me.

  But Brian wasn’t paying attention to the events going on below. I could see him mouthing to his fellow guitarist, “Play it as loud as you can.” A second later, they and the drummer exploded into a punk-tinged version of “Small-Town Girl.”