Sheikh's Marriage of Convenience

by Ella Brooke

  She took a deep breath. It was time to stop denying it. She had to take action, and she might be the only one that could. Who else knew where he was going or what route he might have taken. She fought down the idea that her delay might have been deadly, and she reached for the phone again.

  The moment she touched it, however, it started to ring. Danielle nearly yelped in surprise, but then she saw that the name on the phone was Faris’s.

  She felt a huge knot of tension loosen in the middle of her chest, and there were fresh tears, joyful ones, in her eyes now. She sobbed once with relief and then cleared her throat, answering the phone.

  “It’s you,” she said. “Oh thank God, I was worried sick. I was so afraid something had happened to you.”

  Faris’s laugh was deep and strange. For some reason, even though she knew it was him, she felt a thrill of fear run up her spine.

  “I’m sure you are,” he said, and there was something dark in his voice.

  “Faris, where are you? What’s happening, where have you been?”

  “So many questions,” he said in a voice that came just short of mockery. “Don’t worry about them right now; you’ll get your answers soon enough. I called to tell you that I will not be returning to the townhouse tonight.”

  “You… you’re not?” she asked hesitantly. She tried to match the bitter man on the other end of the call to the sweet and smiling lover who had left her hours ago. They barely sounded like the same person at all.

  “Do you mean that you are going to send a car for me?” she asked, and he laughed again.

  “Hardly. I have just left the police station. Right now, I have a feeling that if we saw each other… well, it wouldn’t end well. I’m going to stay at a hotel tonight. I’m going to return to the townhouse first thing tomorrow.”

  The adrenaline rush from seeing Faris’s name on her phone was swiftly twisting toward fear and confusion.

  “We were supposed to take the plane tonight…” she said meekly, and he cut her off.

  “I am not going to London with you,” he said coldly. “Right now, you have a choice. I assume you have packed your things, and that is convenient, at least. If you want, you can simply leave and never speak to me again. That may be the wisest thing for both of us. Alternately, if you feel that you must have a discussion over what has happened, one that I warn you might not be as civil as either of us prefer, I will return to the apartment by ten tomorrow. The choice is up to you, and in either case, I advise you to decide what you want.”

  His words made her feel as if she had been pulled into the high winds of the hurricane, as if her body and mind were being ripped apart in the maelstrom. She tried to protest, tried to ask him again what was wrong, why he had been with the police, but the call ended abruptly. For a moment, she only stared at the phone in her hand, and then she burst into tears.

  Some of it was over the relief that he wasn’t hurt or dead, but the rest were for the overwhelming conclusion she felt. What in the world was going on? Why was he doing this to them?

  When she had cried herself out, Danielle drifted to the kitchen. She concentrated on the simple task of making herself some food. It calmed her, and it allowed her to focus on something that was not Faris. If she thought about him for too long, she knew the tears would return and render her utterly mad with confusion and fear. Instead, she had to stay calm. She only concentrated on what was happening in the next few minutes. The sandwich she made could not last forever, but it lasted for a brief while, and then she turned on her tablet.

  She had hours to kill yet before she could go to bed, and somehow, she made it through the gray day without going mad with nerves. She kept her mind carefully blank, though at one point, she wondered if this was what purgatory felt like, the gray inexhaustible wait for something terrible to happen.

  When night finally fell and she could justify going to bed, Danielle automatically put on a nightgown, something that she hadn’t done since she and Faris had started sleeping with one another. The bed felt far too large and far too empty, and she huddled up close to one side, as it prevented her from stretching out to feel the space where Faris should have been.

  She didn’t think that she was going to sleep at all, but she did drift off toward dawn. Her dreams were thin and frightening things, where she and Faris were whipped up high into a tempest wind. He was shouting something at her, but though she could hear his rage, she could not reach him to make him understand.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the opulent hotel he had checked in to, Faris spent almost a full hour under the hot spray of the shower. He felt bone tired, as if he could lie down in the bed and sleep out a year, but he was also wide-awake.

  When he got out of the shower, he gulped down some of the painkillers he had bought at the drugstore, wincing a little when he glanced in the mirror. In addition to the assorted cuts and scrapes on his body from his altercation with Seif, his eye was purpling up dramatically, nearly swelling shut. Growling at the damage, he piled some ice into a towel and pressed the makeshift ice pack against the bruised flesh. The instant shock of cold was painful, but after that came a frigid numbness.

  He could still hear Danielle’s voice in his ear during their call. First she had been overjoyed to hear from him, and then as he started talking, he could hear the fear and the bewilderment come through.

  She was an amazing actress, he thought coldly. She had fooled him for weeks, and if he hadn’t been so thoroughly on his guard, she would have kept fooling him. He wondered how he had been so wrong, how even Ahmed had been fooled.

  When he thought of how close she had gotten to him, when he thought about what they had done together, it stoked the rage in him even higher. Faris clung to the rage, because if it departed, he would have to deal with the other emotions, and that would have been hell. He tried to will the rage to burn hot and to destroy the rest, but whenever he faltered for a moment, it was there.

  There was a pathetic and mewling part of him that said there had to be a rational explanation for this. Of course she was innocent. Of course she was the same sweet woman who had turned his life into something wonderful. It couldn’t be a fake. No woman was that good an actress.

  The rest of him refused to see it. If someone had hurt him this badly, then there was absolutely no end to what she might be willing to do. Tomorrow, he would see what she had decided. If she was a smart woman, if she was a smart con, she would simply cut her losses and leave. She had gained some beautiful clothes out of the bargain and far more money than she had any right to expect. If she left, it would mean that she had some kind of respect for the illusion of what they had shared.

  If she stayed…

  Faris’s hands fisted, and then relaxed.

  If she stayed, that meant that she still thought that he was a fool. It would mean that she still thought that there was some kind of fertile ground for her to play her tricks, and if she was still there when he went to the townhouse, then he didn’t know what he might do. He had no idea what it would be like to be so thoroughly betrayed.

  A part of him whispered that forgiveness was still an option. If she confessed to everything and showed him that she was truly repentant, then perhaps there was something that could be salvaged. Perhaps he could try to find a way to live with her. They would not be as close as they were before. They would not share as much as they had, and he certainly would not consider the wild hope of making her his wife, but perhaps she would be a mistress, someone kept for the pleasure of her company and nothing more.

  The thought had its appeal, but he pushed it away as well. It persisted, though, even as he fell into a restless slumber. When he woke up as dawn started sliding golden rays through the curtains, he knew that a part of him would always reach for her, and against that part of him, he must guard himself very, very well.

  *

  Danielle was up long before dawn, showered and dressed by seven in the morning. She had deliberated over her outfit, finally choosin
g a businesslike charcoal dress. It seemed somehow disrespectful to wear anything more casual to something that would be such an important talk.

  When she glanced at herself in the mirror, she flinched. There were dark circles under her eyes, and the way her hair was pulled back tightly gave her a waifish expression, like a starved orphan searching for a home. She wondered briefly if it would help make Faris feel sympathy for her, and then she hated herself a little bit for it.

  No matter what happened, she wanted to be honest with Faris. If he didn’t want to keep her, it disrespected both of them to create an artifice against it.

  She sat in the sitting room, her spine perfectly straight. For a little while, she tried to play on her phone, but then she realized that she wasn’t actually seeing anything at all in front of her. Instead, she stared out at the gray day, wondering when Paris had lost its magic for her. When she looked out at the sky now, she saw something dull and sad, so far from how she had felt when she first arrived.

  Sometimes, she wanted to cry, but she kept her tears at bay fiercely. She would not appear to him crying like a wounded child. She refused.

  When Danielle heard his key in the door, her heart leaped. Some part of her hadn’t really believed that he was safe, and her first instinct was to run to him. She wanted to run her hands all over him to make sure that he was all right, and to make sure that he was really there. She wrestled this instinct down, and instead waited, heart in her mouth as he made his way down the hall and entered the sitting room.

  She started to stand to greet him, but then she saw his face and gasped. His eye was a livid purple, and from where she sat, she could see a small cut on his lip. When her eyes flew to his hands, she saw that his knuckles were raw. What the hell had happened?

  “Well,” he said so mildly that she was nearly fooled, “one forgets how very beautiful a woman can be.”

  “Me?” she squeaked, and then she regretted it. It felt like such a childish thing to say.

  He chuckled, and for a moment, she wondered if the madman who she had spoken with the night before was simply some kind of bad dream. It almost made her rise to go to him, but then he spoke again.

  “Of course you,” he said, coming casually into the room. “I have to admit, you have certainly made the most of your charms. Most of the confident women that I have known have been, shall we say, of a different type from what you are.”

  “What are you talking about?” Danielle asked, baffled. “What confident women?”

  “To put it bluntly, most of the women who have tried to trick me were classically beautiful, charismatic, sophisticated, and incredibly desirable. I won’t say that you don’t have your charm, but the truth is that your awkwardness and that shy little act of yours got underneath my armor the way that a more glamorous woman never would have. I suppose I should commend you.”

  Danielle could feel herself going pale.

  “Why are you saying these things?” she asked numbly. “Why are you saying them to me?”

  He snorted, shaking his head.

  “Are you still keeping up the act?” he asked sardonically. “I have to say, that is impressive. Most people who have been found out would have been on their way right after that phone call. Instead, you have stayed to try to make the most of it. Brave of you, I suppose.”

  “Please stop this,” Danielle pleaded. She was aware that there was a note of hysteria in her voice. “Please. Just tell me what I was meant to have done!”

  “Oh, so we’re going to play this out all the way?” he sneered. “Fine. I know all about you and Seif. I know that you gave him the papers for the deal with Marais, and I know that you betrayed me while blushing and giggling away like a little schoolgirl.”

  Danielle wondered if this was how Alice felt when she fell through the rabbit hole. Nothing made sense.

  “What are you talking about?” she whispered. “I never gave anyone the Marais papers except for you, and…”

  “Really. So why don’t you tell me about the last time that you saw Seif?”

  She opened her mouth, and then she closed it again, a horrifying realization dawning. She remembered their strained and uncomfortable meeting at the bookstore, the day she had bought her dress.

  “How… how did you know?” she asked, and the moment she did, she winced. It was likely the worse thing she could have said at that point; it sounded tantamount to admitting that he was right, and Faris seemed to take it as such.

  “He knew what color your goddamn dress was, Danielle,” Faris hissed. “Did you show it off for him? Did you tell him that you were planning to play the ingenue in it, ripping it and all?”

  “It was completely innocent!” she cried, “Faris, I swear, we only met at the bookstore, nothing else! We had some coffee, the bag opened, and he saw the dress! That’s all that happened.”

  “I spoke to him yesterday,” Faris snarled. “I spoke with him, and he all but confessed it all to me. He’s the one that has the Marais deal now, and he’s the one that told me that you were the one who passed him the papers. Dear God, how blind do you expect me to be!”

  Tears were falling freely down her face now. A part of her wanted to do nothing more than to flee. His anger was nearly palpable, a red raw flame that threatened to flay her skin away if she stood in it too long. She could feel him slipping away from her, and she couldn’t let the greatest passion in her life go with no fight at all. Though it was one of the hardest things in her life, she walked up to him, her hands open and beseeching.

  “Please, Faris, I am so sorry I didn’t tell you about Seif. I knew you hated hearing about him. I didn’t want to spoil our night…”

  “Of course you didn’t,” he said, but she forced herself to keep going.

  “I would never betray your trust,” she said, looking up into his burning blue eyes. “I would never hurt you, and I am so, so sorry you are hurting right now. Please listen to me, though. I would never betray you! I love you!”

  Her words hung in the air between them. For a moment, Danielle thought that she had gotten through to him and that they could sit and talk about what was going on. The look on his face was almost wondering, and gently, he reached out to touch her face. Acting on instinct, she leaned into his touch, taking comfort in it even in this charged time.

  “Amazing,” he breathed. “I almost think that you mean it.”

  He drew his hand back.

  “Tell me, was your performance in our bed a sham, or are you really so awkward?”

  For a moment, Danielle thought that her vision had gone blank. She simply stared at Faris, wondering what in the world had happened, how he could change so quickly overnight. Stunned, she took a step back, every instinct in her body telling her to run, to make sure that she put as much distance between them as she could.

  Then, as if some blessing from a furious goddess had descended upon her, she stepped close to him again. She even found it in herself to smile somehow, though it felt as there were things breaking in her. Faris looked surprised at her smile, and that surprise turned to shock when she raised her hand and slapped him in the face as hard as she could.

  “Goddamn you,” she breathed. “I was a virgin before you…”

  She turned on her heel and went to her bedroom, where thankfully her bag was still packed for their trip to London. London still sounded amazing, but now she wondered if she was ever going to be able to think of it again without some kind of sick feeling in her gut. She shook her head. She couldn’t think of that now.

  She stalked out of the house, looking neither to the right nor the left. Danielle didn’t care where she was going as long as she was away from Faris and the terrible things he had said to her. If stopped and paid attention to it too long, there was a dry heat behind her eyes and a kind of weight in her chest that made her gasp. If she stopped and thought about it too long, there was a chance that she would simply sit down and weep.

  Holding her head high, Danielle left the townhouse and for a moment was
bewildered on the boulevard. Ever since she had come to Paris, she was startled by the fact that it was so beautiful, so very gorgeous and magical. Now when she was looking at it, her heart feeling as if it had been ripped into small pieces, she finally realized that it was no different from any large city.

  Shaking her head at her own foolishness, she started walking away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Come on,” Katie said, leaning close. “You’ve been working here for three months… Don’t you think it’s time that you came out and got to know everyone?”

  Danielle started to protest, pointing to all of the work that she still had to do, and then she realized with a start that it had all been done. She bit her lip, hesitating for a moment, and Katie pressed her advantage.

  “We’ve been dying to get to know you a little better,” said the small blonde. “You’re just Miss Mysterious over here, and if it’s any enticement at all, Bertie from accounting thinks that you’re awfully cute…”

  Danielle had met Bertie, who looked handsome enough but who also had a habit of standing too close and speaking far too loudly. She was getting ready to decline yet again when she sighed and nodded.

  “I’ve not been out with people in a while,” she said cautiously. “I mean, I might want to bail early…”

  “That’s no problem at all,” Katie said reassuringly. “It really is just a few drinks and some company.”

  Despite her reluctance, Danielle felt a small warm glow when Katie took her arm and led her out onto the street where their coworkers were waiting.

  “Look who I found!” Katie crowed, and the others cheered.

  Really, Danielle thought, walking into the job with Jannsen & Foley was pure luck. In everything else that mattered, she had landed on her feet, so why didn’t she feel more grateful?