“Wait, you mean he wasn’t happy with Mother?” Bashir asked, incredulous. His mother had spoken of his father as though he ws
“He was happy,” Miriam said. “But—and this is only what I know—he and Alya go back far longer than he and our mother.”
“I know that,” Bahir grumbled. “But he has family—”
“And we need to let him know that we love him,” she said, smiling sadly. “You don’t think he knows what she represents to us? But the heart loves who and how it will,” she said, shrugging. “So come down for dinner. You don’t have to say anything,” she added. “You can be surly if you want.”
He agreed, but it wasn’t until she left that he realized that he didn’t really have any idea how to be surly. He could refuse to speak, of course—but that would only work until someone said something hopelessly backwards. And given that this was Bahrain, and his uncle was here for the wedding as well, backwards ideas were guaranteed.
***
A small wedding.
It was so strange, seeing the great hall filled with people, that 250 people were counted as a “small wedding”. It was an odd mix of modern technology and tradition—the food was traditional although it was catered, the music was traditional music but piped by a DJ who laid an odd disco beat down. Most of the Bahranis were in the traditional Arabic robes, but Bashir had chosen to wear his suit instead. There were also some Westerners there, too—a cadre of French archaeologists who were apparently friends of Alya, and a Dutch contingent from Royal Shell, which Bashir recalled had been in negotiations for drilling rights off the shore.
Bashir sat back and watched the dancing. As the youngest prince, he would have ordinarily left as soon as the ceremony was over, but he was the only prince here today, so his father was keeping him at the table with stern looks and fierce scowls if he dared so much as shift in his chair. Miriam was smiling at him from across the table, waggling her eyebrows—she’d also been admonished to behave herself, but there was no question in Bashir’s mind that she had something planned.
Any chance of ruining the wedding had been dashed the night before when his father had nixed the idea of him giving a toast. The king had couched it in the most diplomatic of words, saying, “Of course it would be lovely to have a toast given by my own son, but I couldn’t possibly impose such a duty upon you with such short notice.” Bashir watched as his father circled around the tables with Alya, watching the reactions of the wedding guests. As far as he could tell, most of them approved of the wedding, but that just meant that nobody had blathered about the history of the King and Alya. Time to change that, Bashir thought sullenly. He’d slipped some vodka into his glass—and now he stood up, not sure about what he wanted to say, only that he was sure he couldn’t call the new queen a whore. Miriam gave him a secret smile—
—just as the DJ started up. He shot the man a displeased scowl, but the man was wearing sunglasses and headphones—standard gear for a DJ, true. But a deliberate way to keep him from being able to give a scathing toast? He had to admit his father was more cunning than he took him for.
Still, now that he was standing, he couldn’t very well just keep standing there like an idiot. He tugged at his sleeves and headed out the side exits—just a guy going to the toilet. The corridors between the great hall and the toilet were full of people coming and going.
He went upstairs. He had his own bathroom in his suite, and it was more private than the bathrooms that were designated for the guests. The palace was a private residence, but it’d been built with public functions in mind, and Bashir had always found it a bit odd that thee bathrooms downstairs had three stalls apiece.
He was washing his hands when he heard the door to his suite open. “Hello?” he called.
“Prince Bashir,” came Misha’s voice. He came out of the bathroom to see Misha standing in front of the door to the suite, at the ready as he always was.
“Didn’t I tell you to take our time here off?” Bashir asked.
“Your father asked me to resume duty for the duration of the wedding.”
Great. “Well, you can tell the old goat to suck it,” Bashir grumbled.
“I’ll pass the message along,” said Misha, nodding his head, but otherwise not moving.
“Well, go on,” Bashir said impatiently, as he took his jacket off and hung it up. “You’re allowed to go—you’re dismissed—”
“A thousand pardons, Prince, but I was ordered to make sure you got back to the festivities.”
“I’m not a child,” Bashir protested. “I know my way to the damn hall.”
“Those are my orders,” Misha said.
“Well, you’re my bodyguard, and my orders are to go back to the great hall, have yourself a cocktail, and just relax already. My dad just wants to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t screw up his wedding.”
Misha hesitated, but in the end he backed out of the room and closed the door after himself. Bashir sighed and took off his tie. It was now that point in the festivities where people were loosening up, and he wanted to be able to stretch his legs and dance.
He went downstairs through the back staircase, though: he was feeling subversive and annoyed that his father would send Misha to do something like that. He was always planning on going back to the festivities—he couldn’t abandon his sister to three additional hours of boredom—but the one thing he couldn’t stand was being summoned like a peon.
I’m his son, too, he thought, fuming. Last in line, true—but still a prince. My father never respected me. He thinks I’m just a kid.
“Hey you, there!”
He was passing the kitchen, where the caterer had set up the trays and trays of food that needed to be served. She was waving him in—at first he thought that there was something wrong with the food and that she wanted him to tell the guests that there wouldn’t be any fruit, but then she thrust a tray in his hands, and shooed him away again, saying, “Remember, smile.”
She was a Westerner, British from the looks of it. Her eyes were tired and there was flour in her dark blond hair and her apron was a filthy mess, but she seemed happy as she curled her hair behind her ear and ticked off another box on her clipboard and went back to piping creamy stuff into miniature puff pastries. Two other men, who were very clearly waiters, came in, swapped their empty trays for full ones and backed out again. No wonder she thought he was a member of the staff—with his white shirt, black pants, no jacket or tie, he looked exactly like one of the caterers.
He found himself cracking a smile—he’d never been mistaken for a member of the staff before—and as he backed out of the door he could only imagine his father’s fury at him showing up with a tray, ready to serve snacks and drinks. It would probably be funny—he wondered how many of the people invited would recognize him with a tray in his hand.
He’d gone to enough of these functions to know what people with trays in their hands did: walk around, asking people if they wanted one, smiling politely as people swiped a canape or two. Nobody recognized him, which only confirmed what he’d suspected for a long time—nobody knew who he was, and nobody cared. Only Misha blinked out of surprise when he realized who was asking him if he’d like a piece of baklava—and then he saw the secretive smile, and he knew he had an ally in this matter, at least.
The only thing that he hadn’t expected was that it was too noisy to overhear any of the conversations. The fragments of conversation he was able to hear were mostly about weekend plans and worries about children—girls getting to that age where they should be married, boys not wanting to be married. A few of them even asked his advice. “I don’t know anything about this,” he said, smiling politely. “I obeyed my father.”
“You are a good son,” the guests said, beaming. He couldn’t help but wonder if it were
He wanted to find the king and see if his father would recognize him, but he ran out of canapes before he could make his way over to the king, who was sitting contentedly with Alya and chatting quietly
with her, so he returned to the kitchen.
“OK, now these,” she said, without even looking up from what she was doing—stabbing skewers of meatballs and vegetables together. She’d pointed to the tray of filled puff pastries, all of them now dusted with a sprinkle of chives and shaved truffles. “Are they still serving tea?” she asked.
“I think I saw some people walking around with pots,” he said. “But they’ve mostly moved on to the lemonade.”
“Good,” she said. She looked up and frowned. “Are you new? I don’t remember hiring you.”
“I’m filling in,” he said, taking the tray and backing out, grinning.
What would she think if she knew that she’d been bossing around a prince? Guilty, he imagined. Or maybe just amused. Hard to say; Westerners had a weird sense of equality—the British Queen was gossiped about like so much schoolgirl drama fodder, but Kim Kardashian, someone he simply did not understand, was elevated to near-idolatry. So how long should he keep this going?
He found Miriam sitting by herself, texting furiously on her phone. She almost didn’t see him as she absent-mindedly picked up one of the canapes and popped it into her mouth. At the last second, though, she caught his eye and her eyes went wide. He grinned and pressed a finger to his lips.
“Bashir!” she whispered, but he turned away and offered some more puff-pastries to another couple before she could stand up to confront him. He saw her smiling despite her shock. There was a reason Miriam was his favorite sibling.
He liked serving the food. It was silly, but he liked the woman’s bossiness, the way she knew exactly what had to happen and when, and how she wanted things done. He liked that she knew stuff and wasn’t afraid to admit it. There was no false modesty about her, and she was easy to talk with, and as the evening went on, he found himself staying in the kitchen for progressively longer times.
He’d been right about her being a Brit: it turned out she’d grown up not too far from where he now lived. Her name was Melinda Doyle, and she had the pale skin and dark hair that was typical of Celts, as she put it. As he helped her clean up and stack the trays into her van, they talked—about the marriages that his father was always proposing, her about how hard it could be as a single woman living here. “So you’re not engaged or attached?” he asked, wondering how this could be. Her Arabic was pretty good, and men would line up for miles for a chance with an exotic girl. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something like that, he supposed—but there was something appealing about English girls, how polite but forceful they could be. There was a dangerous edge to their words—they could go from flatteringly polite to scathing with the slightest change of inflection.
“Nope,” she said. “Never met the right bloke. I never did understand the whole arranged-marriage business,” she added. They’d switched to English—she was probably homesick for her mother tongue, he supposed. “I mean, what if you really hate whoever it is your parents picked out for you?”
“You learn to live with it. So I’m told,” he said.
“But you’re trying to get out of one,” she guessed.
“I’m trying to keep my father from meddling in my life,” he said.
“Good luck,” she said. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“Don’t you miss England, though?”
She shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “But here—I don’t have anybody to tell me what kind of bloke to get with and to hurry up with the grandchildren already.”
“And then they volunteer to take you to fertility clinics?”
“Oh my God, yes!” she cried, laughing. “How did you—is that really a thing here, too?”
“Trust me, Bahrani parents take meddling to level eleven,” he said.
One last crate of equipment. He stacked it into the van for her, and then he walked her around to the driver’s side. “You fancy a lift?” she asked.
“Me?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t see your car here—”
“That’s because my car is in London.”
It was the first indication he’d given that he was more than a guy who’d stepped in to fill a catering job. He could see the mental walls going up in her mind, the wariness as she realized that she might be wading in dangerous waters. “You said you studied in England,” she said.
“I did. I still am,” he said. “Going for a doctorate in international law.”
“A doctorate—so you’re just visiting?”
“My father got married today,” he said.
“Your father—”
Her face froze in shock as she put two and two together. Suddenly she collapsed against him. “Oh my goodness,” she cried. “I had no idea you were the prince! A thousand apologies—oh my god, I yelled at you, too! I—”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You should hear what my professors call me.”
“But you’re the prince—”
“The least important one,” he said, laughing as he helped her up. “I have two brothers and two sisters, all of them older with at least three kids each, which means that as far as succession goes, there are at least two generations before I even have a chance at the throne.”
“But you’re still a prince—”
“Only in title. Practically, I’m one of those annoying rich prats with a trust fund that goes whoring in Amsterdam every weekend,” he said. “That’s all my title means—money that I didn’t earn doing stuff I don’t even like that much.”
She looked at him, puzzled. “Then why do you do it?” she asked.
“Because it’s—”
He’d been about to say “fun” but that wasn’t exactly true, either. It was enjoyable in the moment, sure. But when it was over he always felt vaguely dirty and unhappy with the women he’d just had a screaming orgasm with. Maybe it was the fact that he was paying them, that he couldn’t be sure that they meant it. Or maybe it was the fact that they were whores—God only knew how many men had had them, how exploited they were. The Dutch had policies in place to make sure the girls were treated well and weren’t forced into doing anything they didn’t want to, but he knew just as well as anybody else visiting the Red Light District that the rules were more like guidelines.
“—it’s just something guys do,” he said, acutely aware of how lame he sounded. “I don’t really know why I do it—it’s a power trip, I guess.”
“Weird power trip,” she said. “It’s not even like a hooker is even really under your control.”
“I know, I get it, I’m a bastard, okay?” he snapped.
“No, it’s not that,” she said. “I mean, yeah, having hookers in Amsterdam is sketchy business no matter how you cut it. But if you’re really into hookers for the power trip—that’s like saying that you’re into coffee because you like cocaine.”
“What are you saying?”
“Real power is something that’s earned. You don’t get it just because you pay a pimp.”
She did have a point, and he was feeling chagrined as she slammed the door shut and turned the engine. The van coughed to life. I need to make this up to her, prove that I’m not a pure dick, he thought. “I’m going to be here for two more days,” he said, suddenly. “Want to have dinner tomorrow?”
For the first time since he first laid eyes on her, she was uncertain. He could imagine her mind trying to work through a complicated algorithm, balancing what she’d just said about real power with the fact that she really seemed to like him. “I guess so,” she said, finally. “In Manama?”
“If you insist,” he said. “There’s a lovely restaurant in Jaffa, though. More intimate, quieter—and I’m less likely to get noticed by the Bahrani paparazzi.”
“Really—there are paparzzi here?”
He could understand her incredulity—the island nation had a little more than a million people on it, and a quarter of them were foreign. “Well, yes,” he said. “They’re more polite than your British rags, but you’ll understand if I would rather spare my father another diplomatic incid
ent.”
She smiled. “Jaffa it is, then. Here’s my number,” she said, passing him a business card. “Call me.”
***
The next morning he went downstairs to get some breakfast—he hadn’t had a chance to eat very much the night before because of the screw-up that he’d perpetrated. He told one of the servants to fix something light for him, and bring it to the pool. After all this time in London, fixing his own things, ordering servants around felt a little strange.
Misha was out by the pool already, taking up one of the lounge chairs while reading a Russian newspaper. It always baffled him, how Misha could find a Russian newspaper anywhere in the world, especially since it was at least a two-hour drive to Manama. “Your father is angry at you,” Misha said, as he took the chair next to his bodyguard.
“He’ll be even angrier when he finds out I have a date tonight,” Bashir said.
“Why do you do this?” Misha asked. “Why do you make him so angry?”
If these words had come from anybody else, it would have pissed him off, but Misha had a way of asking questions like this that made it feel like a favor to answer him. Bashir shrugged. “He shouldn’t have married who he did,” he said.
“What is so terrible about your father’s second wife?”
It took Bashir a moment to realize that Misha had only been his bodyguard since he went to London. He wouldn’t have known about the cheating. Bashir debated telling the man about it, and in the end decided against it. There were things that a bodyguard was not entitled to know about. “We have a difficult history,” he said, instead. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
ROMANCE: THE SHEIKH'S GAMES: A Sheikh Romance Page 55
