by Ella Brooke
“All right,” she said, “but just coffee.”
“My word of honor as a gentleman on it,” he swore.
The cafe area was bright and busy, not the intimate space she had feared, and to her surprise, coffee with Seif wasn’t a terrible ordeal at all. He kept up most of the conversation, and as she listened, she got a chance to compare him to Faris.
They were so similar in some respects. They were men of similar backgrounds, with very similar advantages. They knew the same people, they ran in the same circles, and they had some of the same feelings about the world at large.
However, after that, the differences in them were bone-deep. It occurred to Danielle that if she had met Seif before she met Faris, she might have been quite impressed. However, now that she could compare him to the man she was just getting up the urge to call her lover, she could see how lacking he was.
Where Faris was quiet strength and intent determination, there was something flashy and flimsy about Seif. He seemed less like a true man of the desert and more like something a movie had created. He talked to hear himself talk, and unlike Faris, who listened to everything that was said around him, the only thing that it felt like Seif could hear was the sound of his own voice.
By the time she was done with her cup of coffee, she was more than ready to be gone. She smiled, told Seif that she had had a good time, and was standing up to go when a man who apparently could not live any longer without his caffeine fix shoved by. She ended up nearly in Seif’s lap, and to her horror, her bag spilled her dress box on the table. Their coffee had been cleared away, thank goodness, but it gave Seif the chance to pick up the box.
“Thank you for not letting it hit the floor,” she said with a sigh. “Just pass it here.”
“Elise’s—I recognize that name. One of my girlfriends raved about her the other day. What did you get?”
To her shock, he thumbed the box open to peek inside. She wasn’t sure what he saw before she made an inarticulate noise of rage and pulled it away. She knew it wasn’t lingerie or anything like that, but the sense of violation was real. She abruptly took back every kind thing she had thought about him.”
“That’s private,” she said, shoving the box back into her bag. “And God, you really are just that grabby, aren’t you?”
He started to apologize, but she no longer trusted it. Danielle turned on her heel and stormed out. This time, apparently respecting the black anger on her face, no one got in her way.
She was in the cab again before she had the ability to think straight. Who the hell did he think he was? If that was what being born rich and cultured produced, she was better off without it. Suddenly she wondered if that was why Faris had taken up with her. Perhaps it was because she could see people like Seif for what they were. Perhaps she wasn’t a step down from the women he had seen before after all.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a phone call, and when she glanced at her phone’s screen, she was pleased to see that it was Faris.
“Hello, darling,” he said, and something warmed in her just from hearing his voice. “How are the books?”
“Less good than I thought they were going to be unfortunately,” she said after a moment. She knew that she wanted to make her visit to Elise’s a surprise. She decided that it would only make him irritable to hear about her run-in with Seif.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “Well, we’ll be going to London in two days—perhaps you can find something good there…”
“Maybe, but I am afraid I am going to be very busy taking you to all of the dumb tourist attractions I am sure you have seen a million times,” she said jokingly. It only occurred to her what she had said after she said it; it was another thing they had spoken of, going to see the Tower of London and Big Ben. It gave her a warm feeling, another support of why he might have liked her, cared for her.
“I told you that I would like nothing more than to do exactly that,” he retorted. “But I think we can spare a few hours for a good bookstore. Listen, do you have anything you want to do tonight?”
She glanced at the box next to her.
“Not… not exactly,” she hedged. “I’m always open to suggestions. What do you have in mind?”
“We were invited to the opera. I have no idea which one, and I have no idea what it’s going to be like because neither of us speak German, but Sheikh Kahild has invited us to it.”
“Actually, that would be great,” she said. It occurred to her that that dress would have looked out of place at dinner or if she was just lying around the townhouse. Being at the opera was the perfect reason to wear it, to show Faris that after all, she could be as beautiful, as refined, and as glamorous as the women he had been with.
“Are you a fan of opera and I have never noticed?” he asked in surprise.
“I have hidden depths,” she declared, “and opera is something that fascinates me.”
He laughed a little at that.
“I love a woman who has hidden depths,” he quipped. “All right. I am going to bring home a small dinner so we can get through the opera without starving, and then we can grab some food afterward, all right?”
They said good-bye, and when she ended the call, Danielle was in a far better mood. Her meeting with Seif was turning into a dull memory, and it looked like she had an interesting evening ahead of her.
*
Faris hung up the phone and looked up to find Ahmed smirking at him.
“What?” he growled.
His friend laughed a little.
“I told you not to mess with this one,” he joked. “I think I told you that about five minutes after you met her.”
Faris snapped his teeth at Ahmed.
“I seem to recall it had something to do with you thinking that I was some kind of wolf after her honor,” he said. “As it happens, I’m taking her to the opera tonight. Is there anything particularly salacious about that, oh defender of all women’s virtue?”
“Not at all,” Ahmed responded. “Though I have to say that there is something hilarious about you going to the opera.”
“It is considered to be the height of European musical achievement,” Faris said loftily. “Or so Sheikh Kahild tells me.”
“It sounds like something you once said sounds like a lot of bellowing over overwrought stage settings,” Ahmed observed. “I remember that as a direct quote.”
Faris sighed, because if he were honest with himself, it sounded tiring and dull.
“She seemed happy about it,” he said halfheartedly, and Ahmed laughed out loud, clapping his friend on the shoulder.
“I’ll admit that I was concerned that she was going to end up a lamb led to the slaughter where you were concerned, but perhaps I should have been more worried about you. You sound like a man who’s off to be wed on the morrow.”
Faris started to brush it aside, but the thought caught him.
In Aswar, brides were traditionally dressed in black silk, but their gowns were embroidered with gems. The idea of Danielle dressed all in black but gleaming with pearls struck him as unbearably lovely, her face solemn but her eyes dancing with life and happiness.
Faris came back to himself to realize that Ahmed was watching him with amusement.
“That serious, eh?” Ahmed shook his head. “Well, a good love only comes to the lucky ones, and I’ve always believed that you were a lucky man. Go on. Enjoy your opera tonight, and give my best to your translator.”
On his way back to the townhouse, Faris picked up some food for them and then noticed a florist next door to the restaurant. The florist’s shop front was a profusion of color and scent, but he was drawn to a container holding tall stalks of flowers, white with gentle purple streaks. The flowers made him think of bells, perfect and gentle, and something reminded him of Danielle.
“What are these?” he asked the dark man behind the counter.
“Ah, those are called foxgloves in English, sir,” was the response. “They are beautiful flowers in bouquets or
in single sprigs. They are also used to make a medicine for the heart…”
That felt perfect to Faris. He had never thought that he had a broken heart before he met Danielle, but there was something about the way they were together that felt profoundly healing. He bought an armload of the flowers and made his way back to the car.
Before he got in, he glanced up at the sky. Before, Faris would have said that it was just another late-afternoon city sky, dimmed by pollution and cluttered with the sounds of an irritated city. Now, though, he could look at the blue and the faintest streaks of gold and purple as they started to appear from the sunset. He could see it as the sky of the City of Light, and he knew it was all due to one amazing young woman.
Chapter Fourteen
The moment she got home, Danielle stowed her box underneath her bed. She had barely finished doing that when Faris appeared, his arms full of purple-and-white flowers.
“For you,” he said, giving her a gentle kiss on the cheek. “I saw them and I couldn’t resist.”
“They’re amazing,” she said, burying her face in the flowers to catch the subtle scent. “I love them.”
I love you, she wanted to say, but before those fateful words could slip past her lips again, she turned to find a vase for the flowers. She set them on the mantelpiece as Faris spread their food—Italian that night—out on the table.
Though the rose sauce and the sausage smelled amazing, Danielle couldn’t do more than pick at it. She knew that her nerves were making her spacy and distracted. The fourth time she had to ask Faris to repeat himself, he looked at her with concern.
“Are you all right, Danielle?” he asked. “You’ve been a little strange all night. Are you sick? Do you want to stay in?”
“No!” she said and then reeled her tone back in. “I mean, no, I think all of this rich food is putting me into a daze. I’ll just drink some more water.”
It was a lame excuse at best, but Faris let it go, watching her carefully. It seemed like dinner took forever, but finally it was over and Danielle stood up.
“I’m going to go dress for the opera now,” she said, and she knew she was being stiff and strange. Faris looked more confused than ever, but he nodded, and she breathed a little better when there was finally a door between them.
All right, she thought to herself. Remember. You are sophisticated, you are perfect, and he is going to be utterly enchanted with you.
She focused on getting the dress out and on, something that was more difficult now she did not have people who were intent on helping her. For one terrible moment, she thought she was going to have to get help doing up the zipper at her back, but with enough contortions, she somehow managed it.
There were a pair of gold pumps she had in the closet that would suit well enough, and after a moment, she merely brushed her hair out, letting it fall in a sleek black river down her back.
As she had at Elise’s boutique, she felt like a different person when she looked at herself in the mirror. Her complexion was clear enough that she could get away with simply lining her eyes in black, and a touch of red lipstick gave her mouth a bit of definition.
She wasn’t sure that she looked like one of the women out of the magazines that Faris had been seen with before, but at the very least, she didn’t look like herself. That had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
In the other room, she could hear Faris preparing himself as well, and she wondered what it was like to be so certain about things, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt what the right thing to do was, what to wear, what to say.
She shook her head. Now was not the time to get philosophical about things. She squared her shoulders, took one last look into the mirror, and carefully started walking toward the sitting room.
She waited, standing up by the mantel for a moment, making herself breathe and still adjusting to the weight and the drape of her dress. She heard the door open, and she started to turn toward him, but then she heard him gasp.
When Danielle could look at him, she saw that his blue eyes were wide at her outfit, and she felt a kind of triumph bloom inside her.
“You look amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “I never would have… well, let me look at you…”
With a smile, she started toward him. However, the combination of long dress plus tottery high heels was not one she was accustomed to. On her second step, the hem of her dress somehow ended up straight under her heel, and then she tried to take a step anyway. She could feel her weight pitch forward as she plummeted toward the ground with a shriek.
It all seemed to happen at once. Her arms came out in a desperate attempt to break her fall, she heard a rough purring rip as something tore, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dark blur. She flinched away from the pain and humiliation of falling hard onto wooden floors, but then warm strong arms were around her and she was being carefully set back on her feet. Danielle blinked back tears of surprise, and Faris stepped back, though he kept one hand on her arm.
“That was quite a fall,” he was saying. “Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?”
She started to say that she was fine, that there was nothing to worry about at all and that she hadn’t hurt herself, but then she glanced down. To her dismay, there was a dark horizontal rip in the lush blue fabric, an ugly tear that showed off her ankle and that sagged wider when she moved. Something about that tear, more than anything else that had been going on, was just too much, and she could feel her eyes fill with real tears.
Oh God, my makeup’s going to run and I am going to look like a raccoon, she thought with horror, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. From a few halfhearted sniffles, her body became wracked with sobs, and she hugged herself hard to prevent herself from flying to pieces.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Faris said, and then his arms were around her again. He urged her over to the divan, where he lifted her on his lap. She knew that she should be an adult about this, pull away and go get things fixed if she could, but in that moment, all she could do was cling to him. burying her face in his chest, and crying out her stress. It felt as if it had been building up for a long time, and now that she had given it a chance to go, it was going to come out.
It felt like it had taken hours, but she realized that it had only been a few minutes before her tears finally slackened and stopped.
“God, I feel like an idiot,” she sniffled, wiping her eyes. “We were going to go to the opera, and I had go be, well, me, and ruin it all.”
“You have ruined absolutely nothing at all,” Faris said firmly. “Was that what all that crying was about?”
Danielle fiddled with a fold of her skirt. She was distressingly aware that she had to tell Faris what was on her mind, but she didn’t want to. It would only make her sound more like a fool than she had before. In the end, though, she found that she simply couldn’t lie to him.
“I… I remember the first time I saw you.”
Faris blinked.
“Back at the Transglobal office?”
“No, it was actually before that. I was newly come to Dubai, and I had just started working for Transglobal. One of the girls I was working with had a magazine, and you were on the cover with this amazing-looking woman all dressed in red.”
She risked looking up at Faris then, but he looked baffled.
“I was?”
“You were. I thought you were the most handsome man that I had ever seen, just so amazingly good-looking. I didn’t think all that much of it, but then there you were again, just a short while later with this stunning blonde in green.”
Faris still looked confused, and Danielle realized that she would likely have to spell things out for him.
“I can’t compare to those women,” she said at last. “I can’t. If you dress me up, it’ll be like putting… putting, I don’t know, a waitress in a ball gown. I’ll never be those amazingly sophisticated women, and sometimes it… it…”
To her horror, she was starting to cry again. She managed to c
hoke the tears back, and when she did, he touched his finger to the point of her chin to make her look up.
“I have no idea who those women were,” he said firmly. When she looked at him with surprise, he nodded.
“I have no idea in the world. They were doubtless very beautiful, but I have no memory of who you were looking at or what I might have been doing with them.”
He sighed, hugging her closer.
“I have never been with someone like you before,” he said, “and you need to understand what a wonderful thing that is. No matter where we are, when I look up to see you, I feel something happy open up inside me. It… there’s nothing in the world like it, Danielle, nothing at all. You are not like those women, and it is a good thing.”
A feeling of relief flooded through her, and she managed a tremulous smile.
“So you don’t mind missing the opera? I know I got this dress made up specially and in secret, but…”
“Not at all,” he said with a laugh. “If I’m entirely honest, I was a little surprised that you leaped on the idea so very eagerly. As it is, I am more than happy to call out for something good, and to spend the entire night here with you. We’ll be doing plenty of sight-seeing in London, after all.”
It might not have been glamorous or sophisticated, but the genuine warmth and care of Faris’s smile made something warm grow inside her.
It was the man she craved, not the magazine cover, she thought. That magazine cover was the falsehood, and the man she was cuddling up to right now, the one who wiped her eyes and smiled at her, he was the real one.
A little later, as they were finishing up an incredible Italian meal that had been delivered straight to the door, Faris sat back and looked at her. His eyes were so serious that she felt a little startled.
“What is it?” she asked, slightly nervous.
“You need to have faith in me,” Faris said quietly. “You need to trust the fact that I am here exactly and only because I want to be, and that everything I am telling you is the truth. Have faith in me.”
