by Holly Rayner
to reach out to you without the chance that what happened between us might get out. There are many people in my country who don’t agree with the changes I’ve made. They think that I have changed things for the worse. It’s a delicate time in our history; if word got out that I’m in love with a Western woman, well, it could end up costing me more than a broken heart.”
There were those words again. Abdul was still talking, but Lucie didn’t care for his explanations anymore.
Instead, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him close to her. Then she kissed him, with all the force of the longing she’d been repressing for weeks, truly believing she would never again indulge in the touch of his lips.
They kissed for a long time, each lost in the feeling of being lost in the other. And, when they finally parted, Lucie finally felt the contented stillness that had been missing from her life since the last time she’d left the palace.
“I was hoping you might feel that way,” he said, a wry smile on his lips.
Then he pulled back, sliding his hands down along her arms until he caught her own hands in his. He gently coaxed her forward, around the dining table that Lucie only now realized had never even been set.
To her surprise, he opened up a set of windows at the back of the room and brought her out to a balcony. From here, they could overlook the whole of the gardens, the oasis and the desert beyond. Lucie’s eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the place where they had had their first kiss.
“Come,” Abdul said, drawing her out of the revelry of memory. “You must be starving.”
There was a table there, laid out with two settings, with the first course already in place. When she smelled the food, Lucie was suddenly aware of how very hungry the day at work on the site had made her.
So she sat, and she ate, speaking in low tones to Abdul while the sun inched closer and closer to the horizon, casting the world below them in a golden glow.
She should tell him about the baby, she knew. She should tell him now. But the moment, now, felt too precious. She didn’t know how he would react. She didn’t know if he would be angry that she hadn’t told him sooner, or even if he would believe her when she said she had only just found out.
All she knew was that she would remember these precious few moments for the rest of her life.
When they finished eating, she told herself, then she would broach the subject, and let the chips fall as they may.
But they lingered over the meal, eating their courses slowly, and speaking much in between. There was course after course, each exquisite, but also small and delicate enough that they could draw the meal out almost indefinitely, it seemed. By the time they had finished eating, the sun had hidden itself away, and the moon and stars had come out to replace it.
As dessert was finished, Lucie knew that now was the time she had promised herself she would tell him. But instead of opening her mouth to speak the words that might yet ruin it all, she opened her ears to the music that was carried out of the house on a perfumed breeze.
It was something written for piano; soft, sweet, and contemplative.
“Do you want to dance?” the Sheikh asked.
He was standing, now, holding his hand outstretched. Lucie’s mind flashed back to the moment when he invited her to follow him through the house and explore the tunnels below. She remembered the feeling of her body betraying her mind and following him, wherever he wanted.
And it happened again. In spite of her better judgement, in spite of knowing that the longer she put off telling him, the worse it would be, she found herself standing to join him in a dance.
I’ll tell him after we’ve danced, she told herself. Just after she had spent a little more time in his arms, lost in the music.
She longed to hear his voice. Not when he spoke in English, but in Arabic. With her ear against his chest, she thought it would sound even richer than when she had heard it before.
“The night is so dark,” she said in Arabic, her accent was a little stiff. She wanted him to like that she would speak to him in his native tongue, and, from the quickening of his heartbeat, she knew he did.
“Yes,” he answered in Arabic, and she felt the warmth of his voice wash over her. “I wish it could be as it was six weeks ago, when the moon was full, and we walked beneath it. I think of it often.”
“As do I,” she said.
But she didn’t mind that the moon was in a different phase. She didn’t mind the way the sun had set so quickly, and left the world cold and dark so suddenly. All she needed was his heartbeat, the gentle swaying of their slow, intimate dance, and the feel of his arms around her.
Or at least she thought so, until he brought up his hand to her face, tilting her chin slightly so he could look her in the eyes.
She let herself gaze at him, drinking in every detail. If everything was, in fact, about to go wrong, she wanted to remember every moment of this. She would cherish the curve of his mouth, and every last word he spoke to her.
But he didn’t speak. Instead, he brought his lips to hers, filling her again with the sparks and fireworks that had burned bright at their first kiss.
And with that, Lucie found that she again wanted so much more of him than his heartbeat, and his arms, and his kiss. She pulled away, and took him by his hand, and led him, once again, back to the royal suite.
FIFTEEN
The second time waking in the Sheikh’s bed was even sweeter than the first. This time, instead of reaching out to find him in the mess of sheets, she only had to listen to his chest to hear his heartbeat.
They were wrapped up in each other’s arms. Lucie couldn’t be sure who had woken first, as neither of them wanted to move, or speak. There were no words that could make this any better.
She replayed everything in her mind. Starting at this moment of perfection, and casting her mind all the way back to their first meeting. It was like she was standing at the top of a mountain, and with the benefit of hindsight, all the hardships that had befallen her didn’t seem nearly as difficult as they had when she’d been going through them.
From here, their time apart had only served to show her the strength of her own feelings. After all, how would she know just how completely he had her heart if she hadn’t seen firsthand what being abandoned by him would do to her?
Now, lying in bed with the man who had her heart, even her disappointment that her dissertation theory looked as though it would be disproven didn’t seem like such a tough break. She would make her point about the center likely existing, but not being where it had at first seemed to be. And the work would continue, and when it did at last come to light where the center had been, it would be all that much more satisfying.
“What are you thinking about?”
He asked the question in Arabic, and Lucie wished he had asked it a minute before, so she could truthfully tell him she had been considering how lucky they were to have found each other, even with all the confusion they had faced.
Instead, she leaned up on her arms and brought her face up so that she could kiss him.
And she did. She kissed him deep and long.
This was the sweetest morning she’d ever had. His lips tasted of cinnamon and the bed smelled of some musky perfume that she couldn’t quite place.
“You were thinking about the dig, weren’t you?”
He asked the question with a smile on his face, seemingly amused, and Lucie laughed at the way he already knew her so well, despite the small amount of time they’d spent together.
“I have a surprise for you,” he said. “If you can get out of bed, that is.”
“In a minute,” she said softly. “I’m not ready to let go of you yet.”
So together they lay, making sweet small talk now and then, saying nothing important, quietly reveling in their closeness to one another.
Finally, Lucie’s craving for her morning coffee got the best of her.
“I can fix that,” the Sheikh said when she told him as mu
ch. “But first you must cover your eyes.”
She was hesitant at first, but his smile convinced her. And so, together they went through the hallways. She thought she knew the palace well enough to be able to keep a general sense of where they were, but found that he was taking her in circles, and up and down stairs.
“All right,” she said, stifling a laugh. “I’m lost already!”
Another minute of walking down hallways she couldn’t see, and they had arrived.
“Open your eyes,” he said, his voice echoing slightly.
The first thing that she saw was what looked like a picnic breakfast. There was a blanket on the floor, and cushions that looked very much like the ones they had lounged on six weeks ago, drinking honey liquor.
The second thing she noticed was the room they were in.
“The ballroom,” she said, her eyes widening as they took in every detail.
The floor had been cleaned, and sections of it were clearly being repaired, although the restorers appeared to have taken a day off. Seeing the room in the daylight, Lucie noticed great, tall windows she hadn’t seen before.
And surrounding the windows, she saw the pattern. The same pattern she’d seen on so much of the distinctive pottery that had first led her to believe there was once a center for pottery production in the region.
“Where are we?” Lucie said quietly.
“Not too far from the site,” the Sheikh said, picking up her meaning entirely.
Maybe she’d been wrong about the precise location of her mysterious pottery center. But maybe she hadn’t been that far off… Her heart swelled at the sudden realization that her dissertation wasn’t doomed at all.
“Come,” the Sheikh said, sitting down himself. “There’ll be plenty of time for work later. For now, we must eat!”
He kept speaking in Arabic and Lucie kept expecting that the pleasure of hearing his voice would wear off. But if it was going to happen, it certainly wasn’t going to be any time soon.
She joined him on the floor. The coffee was still hot, and the food was a mixture of western and Al-Brehonian cuisine. She down sat across from him, but immediately thought the better of it, and moved to his side so that her leg could touch his as they sat together.
Breakfast was delicious, the setting thought-provoking, and the company perfect. Lucie had thought nothing could improve on the feeling of waking up in the Sheikh’s bed, with the certainty of his love, but she’d been wrong.
Less than a minute later, however, her perfect joy was shattered. In came a servant—the same one who had refused her request to go to the palace before she left the country. In his hands, he held a newspaper in Arabic.
The Sheikh read it, and Lucie saw the peaceful, contented expression on his face transform in a split second to one of complete and utter rage.
Seeing the flash in his eyes, her gaze darted to the headline. Upside down, and in embellished type, it was hard at first for her to make out the words that were written there.
And then, she did. And her heart sank.
The headline called him a “playboy” royal, indulging a “foolish dalliance” with an “American whore”.
She didn’t know what bothered her most about the headline, but stopped short of saying so when the Sheikh dropped the newspaper and got to his feet.
“How could you have been so stupid?” he asked quietly, menacingly. He’d switched back to English, and hit the hard consonants with full force. “You were angry, I know. But to ruin my reputation… to risk everything I’m trying to achieve just because you felt insulted…”