by Holly Rayner
“I don’t think I like this,” Zelda said, picking at one of the vegetable salads on her plate. “How is that any more respectable than them being professors?”
“In my country, it just is,” Zayed insisted. “Money talks, and besides, it makes it easier for people to believe that we met and fell in love.”
“Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” Zelda said wryly.
“So I met your parents first, discussed the possibility of going into business together, it fell through, and in the process I met you and we fell in love.”
Zelda took a deep breath. It’s not like you have a whole lot of choices here, she reminded herself. If she didn’t go along with the Sheikh’s plan, it was easy to believe that she would at least be deported, and possibly spend years in prison to boot.
“Okay,” she said finally. “But we are not changing my name.”
The Sheikh shook his head. “Of course not; it would only make it harder to have documents that would work for you if we gave you a fake name. Besides, the press will love the alliteration of Zayed and Zelda,” he added.
Zelda grinned, smiling drolly. “So we met through my parents, had a whirlwind secret romance, and now I’m getting ready to marry you,” she said. “I should probably know about you, too.”
“We’ll be working on that for the next few days, as well as rehearsing your story,” Zayed told her. “For tonight, let’s focus on hammering out the details of your past.”
Zelda took a deep breath and ate a forkful of some grain which was both spicy and sweet. “My fake details,” she said with a wink.
The Sheikh gave her a quick, not quite sympathetic look. “Our engagement party is scheduled for a week from today,” he told her. “You are going to need to be able to stick with your story, to know it so well that questions can’t shake you.”
“I get that,” Zelda said. “I understand.”
“We’ll also need to get you a special gown for the night,” Zayed told her. “It will be your debut into high society here, so you’ll have to look absolutely spectacular.” He gave her a quick, appraising glance. “Not that the basic ingredient isn’t already more than acceptable.”
“That’s…thanks, I guess?” Zelda wasn’t sure if it was necessarily a compliment.
“You’ll be meeting some of the wealthiest people in this country,” Zayed told her, “as well as some minor royalty from my family.”
Zelda set her fork down again, staring at the Sheikh. “Minor royalty? In your family?”
He dismissed the shock in her voice. “I’m distantly related to them,” he told her. “But I’m nowhere near close enough to the throne to ever consider inheriting it. Over a dozen people would have to die for me to even have a chance.”
“So I’ll be meeting with…the equivalent of dukes, or something?”
Zayed considered the question, tilting his head from side to side. “Basically,” he agreed finally. “Everyone invited to the party will either be press or upper class, so we will need to be absolutely flawless.”
“Are you getting a special suit for the occasion?”
Zayed smiled. “A tuxedo, yes,” he told her. “Events here tend to be extremely formal. You’ll have an evening gown specially made, too.”
Zelda thought about the amount of money that he was investing in the enterprise of them getting married and it staggered her; it was almost absurd, and she was tempted to ask again why it was possible for him to game the system but not change the law.
The Sheikh served her a little more of the meal from the platters in front of them, and Zelda noticed that he had somehow discerned which items she liked the best from her first serving.
“Shouldn’t I be at least a little involved in the process of planning my own engagement party?” she asked. “My own wedding?”
“You will be,” the Sheikh said. “I’m a busy man, after all. You’ll be meeting with my personal assistant, Tarek, who’s in charge of the arrangements. He can handle it, but of course he’ll consult with you about your preferences.”
They continued to talk and eat, and Zelda found herself feeling somehow both more comfortable with the prospect of what they were going to do and more anxious at the stakes they were playing with.
Of course, she thought to herself when she and Zayed finished their meal, it wasn’t as though the Sheikh having a marriage of convenience would really impact his life in any way. She somehow imagined that in the eyes of Murindhi law, a fake marriage—as long as it was legal—would be as good as a marriage for love. It would probably have more of an impact on her if the scheme was found out. Living in Miami, Zelda was familiar with the concept of “green card weddings,” where people from different countries made deals with Americans so as to find an easier route to citizenship.
When Zayed left, their conversation cut short by an “urgent” business call, Zelda walked back to her quarters, thinking about the strange twists and turns her life had taken in less than a month. She never would have expected to find herself stowing away on a yacht, or being rescued by a billionaire—still less the proposal that said billionaire sheikh had made.
Zelda stripped off her fine new clothes and decided that the saying was right: truth was even stranger than fiction. She went into her bathroom and decided to put some of the bath products Zayed had had delivered to her room to good use; she would need to get into character as quickly as possible if she wanted to see their scheme through and not get caught.
After fiddling with the taps for a few moments, Zelda got the water running and selected a bath package that smelled of lilies and jasmine. Sinking down into the warm water, she sighed at the strangeness of life, her thoughts turning towards assembling a character that would match up to the Sheikh’s expectations of his imaginary bride-to-be.
EIGHT
“Where is Zayed? We were supposed to meet after breakfast,” Zelda said to Hadya.
The older woman shrugged. “He leave for business. Back maybe three hours.”
Zelda smiled politely at the older woman, inclining her head in a respectful nod that concealed her annoyance; it was the day before her and the Sheikh’s supposed engagement party, and she had wanted plenty of time to go over their cover stories in detail once more.
The days since she’d moved into Zayed’s palatial mansion had been intense, more so than any other period of learning in her life. She and Zayed had spent hours out of every day learning about each other—or in Zelda’s case, solidifying her cover story—and rehearsing their tale of meeting and falling in love.
Zelda went back to her room after Hadya’s news, thinking about the engagement party to come. She felt anxious, restless; she wanted to be doing something, wanted something else to fill her mind with.
The Sheikh had taken her to one of his designer friends the day before to do the final fitting on her gown for the party, and they’d spent the entire drive speaking about their pasts.
“It’s actually a good thing that your parents are so highly educated, and passed that onto you,” Zayed had said at one point.
“I thought you said having two professors for parents wasn’t good enough for people here?” Zelda had raised an eyebrow at the Sheikh’s apparent hypocrisy.
“It isn’t,” he said, smiling slightly. “But you benefitted from having highly intelligent parents who taught you well.”
Zelda shrugged. “Why is it such a benefit if I can’t even claim it?”
“Because you have poise, and you can speak well,” Zayed told her. “That will give everyone the impression of class, even if you don’t speak the language.”
“What about you? What was your education like?”
Zayed fleetingly looked almost sad, but the impression left his face so quickly that Zelda thought that she might have imagined it. “Private tutoring from a young age,” he said. “Then boarding school in Switzerland when I was a teenager, and of course college,” Zayed told her. “My parents wanted me to have the very best in every
thing that would be important to my future.”
“Mine too,” Zelda had told him, glancing out through the windows as the reminder of the fight she’d had with her parents sent a chill through her. “They didn’t have the means for some of those things, but I went to private school, and to one of the better in-state colleges.”
“You said that you dropped out?”
Zelda had cringed, shrugging off her embarrassment as best as she could. “I started out studying literature,” she had explained. “And then I realized that I wasn’t likely to get any kind of relevant job once I graduated, and I didn’t really think any of the other programs my university offered would put me in a better place. That was why I ended up going to culinary school; I thought it would be more practical.”
“I studied hotel and hospitality management for the same reason,” Zayed told her. “Of course, I had my father’s success to draw on. He started his hotel business as a sideline to another pursuit, and I took it up before I went to university, as a sort of practical education.”
They’d continued talking while Zelda had her dress fitting, and while Zelda thought she had a good handle on the facts of her future husband’s life, it had occurred to her more than once that she still didn’t have a good idea of who he was as a person.
Zelda looked around her sitting room, feeling her anxiety and restlessness increase. “You know,” she said to herself, “I’ve been here a week and I haven’t seen more than maybe a third of this place.” She glanced at the empty room around her; she wasn’t certain that a wander around the house would help the feeling of ants crawling up and down her arms and legs, but it certainly couldn’t hurt.
She decided to start with the parts of the palatial home farthest away from the wing that her room stood in. The handful of servants around the house had mostly ignored her in the week since she’d arrived, and Zelda had been relieved, because the idea of trying to navigate social interactions with people she barely knew, who barely spoke the same language, had been too daunting.
Zelda wandered towards an older wing of the home and looked around. It was not as ornately decorated as the rest of the mansion, and she noticed that the colors were much more somber than in other parts of the house. She peered at pictures on the wall and realized gradually that it wasn’t that the room was different in its coloring, it was that some of the windows had been covered, and some of the art was shrouded in dark fabrics, creating a forlorn atmosphere. Zelda frowned to herself and tried to think of why that could possibly be. A big portrait of a beautiful woman and a handsome man, dressed in wedding finery, dominated one wall, and as Zelda stared at it, she realized that the two had to be Zayed’s parents: she could see Zayed’s eyes on the woman, his lips on the man.
Once she realized that, her eyes took in more details: the room was full of images of Zayed’s parents, the ones that weren’t covered shrouded in darkness. He mentioned his parents had passed away, Zelda reminded herself; apparently there was a convention about how the people of Murindhi grieved.
As she looked at the pictures of the beautiful couple, Zelda thought back to the curt, almost cold way that Zayed had talked about his parents; he hadn’t spoken of them as if he disliked them, but there had been a definite air of “just the facts” about his comments. He must miss them a lot, Zelda mused, peering more closely at a picture that had been taken—she assumed—shortly after Zayed’s birth, of his mother holding him, his father standing behind her, beaming.
Zelda moved on from the room, hoping to rid herself of the melancholy of it, and went into one of the other parts of the old house, feeling thoughtful. The walls of the corridor had more pictures, and in many of them, Zelda recognized a much younger Zayed. Some featured him and his parents, at the beach together, or at a park somewhere. There was a picture of young Zayed and his father at one of the hotel properties, cutting the ribbon for the grand opening. A picture of Zayed and his mother showed them playing some kind of game in a garden, with Zayed running away, grinning widely, his face more open and carefree than Zelda had seen it in the weeks she’d been around him.
She continued on, finding more and more pictures of the man she was set to marry in a week’s time, trying to understand how he could have been so different from the way that he had seemed to her in all of their interactions. She’d assumed that Zayed was simply a businesslike, slightly aloof man in general; his generosity notwithstanding, he had seemed to be part of his group of friends without really connecting much with any of them. They seemed to exist more as an accessory to his life, as a moving display, but the pictures she saw around the house, taken over the years, tucked away in parts of the palatial home where Zayed never seemed to go, told a different story.
Zelda had to wonder what it was about the Sheikh that made him so...not quite distant, but disengaged from the people in his life, when the evidence scattered around his home informed her that at some point, years ago, he’d been involved, expressive, and interested in the lives of all the people he interacted with. Obviously he was a good businessman, and Zelda had enough experience to know that he wasn’t the type of billionaire who hoarded his money, but who found pleasure in sharing it with others.
This guy is more complicated than he seems, she thought, shaking her head at the odd contradiction in his character. She checked the time and realized that she’d spent nearly two hours just wandering the house, looking at things, and trying to figure out just who Zayed really was.
Zelda made her way back to her quarters and tried to find something to occupy her time with while she waited for the Sheikh to get back from his office in the city proper. But no matter what she tried to do, she found herself thinking again and again about the strange difference between the child she’d seen in the pictures throughout the house, and the man she’d come to know during her time in Murindhi. It just didn’t make any sense.