“How about I arrive in Kolah as not your guest but . . . your wife,” Di had said, swallowing hard before delivering the line. “As your wife, Alim. Do you see?”
A long silence as the young prince looked close to fainting. Then he cleared his throat and blinked. “What do you mean?” he said hoarsely.
Di had shrugged, holding her gaze, playful determination in her eyes. “Instead of waiting five months and then telling Rahaan you knew his marriage was fake all along, why not turn the tables on him. Flip the script, Alim.”
“I do not follow,” Alim had said, stammering in a way that almost annoyed Di, the fire of Diamante briefly rising as if that princess was being reminded once again how fate had insisted on pairing her with a man way below her level.
“Rahaan is faking a marriage because the laws of your kingdom stipulate that if the Sheikh marries a woman who isn’t Arabian royalty, then he must abdicate the throne to the next in line, correct?”
“Correct. But I still do not—”
“Just be quiet and listen,” Di had snapped, almost losing her cool at the prince’s slowness. “Listen and think for a moment, Alim. Now, what would the laws of your kingdom say if even the next in line marries a woman who isn’t Arabian royalty?”
It took Alim a moment, but then his face lit up. “Ah, heavens, it would be a mess! There is no precedent! I think . . . I think the Ministry would have no choice but to declare that Rahaan cannot abdicate! There are no other heirs! It is just Rahaan and I, and since he is the older brother, if both of us disqualify ourselves by marrying American women, then Rahaan’s brilliant plan is dead in the water and he will have to back down and admit defeat! Yes! Flip the script, like you say! A fake marriage to foil another fake marriage! Ya Allah, it is genius! You deserve that PhD, Ms. Diamond! What is your field again?”
“History,” Di had said, smiling as she sat back and exhaled. “History.”
Rewriting history is more like it, Di thought now as she watched the car turn onto the broad, magnificently straight highway that plunged into the endless desert. “Oh, Diamante,” she whispered beneath the steady hum of the car’s powerful engines, watching as Alim pulled out a red box with her “fake” wedding ring. “We’ve somehow managed to rewrite our past as we claw our way to the future, haven’t we!”
And as the young, clueless prince slipped the ring onto her finger, blushing like a teenager as he did it, Di caught sight of herself in the side mirror, that flaming blonde hair, those sand-colored eyes that seemed dark with determination. And as they passed the rolling dunes of magnificent gold, Di slowly understood just how much of her past she’d managed to rewrite, how much power she might actually have to shape her own future, turning the tables on destiny itself. Perhaps she could indeed rewrite her story, have her own say in what was to come.
40
“Well, what did your brother say?” Hilda asked, her voice peaked with anxiety, her mind still whirling. She’d watched Rahaan call his brother and ask him very politely if he knew that the woman he’d just brought to the Royal Palace of Kolah as his goddamn wife had just brutally murdered her husband with a Samsung laptop. She’d listened as Rahaan switched to Arabic, pacing the hotel suite as he ran his fingers through his thick black hair, his voice deep and calm even though his eyes told a different story.
The Sheikh was still on the phone and he didn’t answer her, and so Hilda sighed and turned back to the TV to see if there was anything new about poor Norm and his fugitive wife. There was a commercial on, and Hilda poured out two cups of milky sweet tea as she wondered what would happen after Rahaan got his palace guards to detain Di and hold her while they figured out what came next.
“Well, we’d obviously call the local police first and tell them Di’s being held in Kolah,” Hilda reasoned, talking out loud to Sabbath, who’d finally emerged from the far side of the suite, nonchalant and disinterested as usual. “Then they’d get in touch with the FBI? No, the FBI is just for domestic stuff. They’d have to get the CIA to pick up Di and have her shipped back! Wow! Maybe Professor Di gets to visit Gitmo for free along the way, yes? What do you think about all this, Sabbath? Come. Come hither, Sabbath. Come!”
Sabbath came, reluctantly at first before purring in approval when Hilda lifted him up onto her lap. Then she almost flung the poor critter across the couch when she looked into his eyes.
“Oh, God,” she cried, placing a hand over her chest as she tried to slow her heartrate. “And just when I was getting used to those red eyes of yours, Sabbath!”
She tried to smile as she looked at the cat’s eyes once again to make sure. Yup. Dark yellow. Not green. Not red. Yellow. Yellow like sand. Yellow like . . . like Di’s new hair.
So she’s managed to pull Alim and even my little Sabbath into this new parallel world, Hilda thought. What else has Di and Diamante managed to pull into our shared reality along with your yellow eyes, Sabbath?
Hilda glanced at the TV again and frowned. The news was back on but it was just a local reporter covering some mild graffiti at a church or something. Strange. She flipped to another channel, then another, finally tossing the remote and grabbing her phone and pulling up the news.
The realization hit her just as Rahaan tossed his phone onto the carpet and shouted in anger, turning to her with the same realization in his steely green eyes.
“She has somehow changed her past,” he muttered in disbelief as he stood before her, rubbing his chin furiously. “She has pulled all of us into her reality, a parallel world where she did not kill Norm, where—”
“Where she never even married Norm!” Hilda cried out as she feverishly read through the faculty bios on the UNM website. “This is insane, Rahaan! How could she have changed her past like that?”
The Sheikh shook his head as he thought. “Remember what Di and Norm wrote in the book. It is not a matter of changing her past. The parallel world in which she murdered Norm still exists, but it is no longer in our current timeline. Di has pulled us all into a parallel timeline. Ya Allah, that is . . .”
“It’s terrifying, is what it is, Rahaan!” Hilda shrieked. “She’s no longer a criminal, which means . . .”
“Which means we have to take care of this ourselves,” the Sheikh growled, grabbing his phone again and barking out orders in Arabic, then switching to English just long enough for her to catch something about getting a private jet ready. “It is just us now, Hilda. I hope your cat likes airplanes, sand dunes, and camel milk.”
41
Hilda watched the coastline of America fade away beneath them as the silver jet headed into the thick cloud cover. She couldn’t see the ocean beneath her, couldn’t see the sky beyond. It was just white mist outside the windows, and then the plane broke through the clouds and ascended into the thin air of cruising altitude, the cloud cover forming a thick layer of white beneath them as if to remind her that she wasn’t grounded on Earth but wasn’t quite in heaven yet either.
They’d talked themselves hoarse for the past three hours as they tried to understand what the hell was going on, how Di had managed to pull herself—and the rest of them—into a parallel world in which so much of Di’s past timeline was different. At one point Hilda wondered if Di had managed to change everyone else’s past that dramatically too, and she almost panicked when it struck her that ohmygod was she even pregnant anymore?!
Of course, then she’d looked up and seen the Sheikh sitting across from her, dark and handsome, calm and composed even though he had to be anxious for his brother’s safety. No, Hilda had thought as she felt herself share in his strange calmness. His child is still in me. I can feel it. No one and nothing can change that, no matter how crazy everything gets. This is something I know. Not Di, not Diamante, not the Demon-goddess herself can change this part of our past. This is our past! Mine and his! Our emotions control this! Our love protects this! Our strength drives this!
&nb
sp; But she is strong too, Hilda thought as she watched the clouds drift by. And she understands so much more of the mechanics of how this works, perhaps even more about the psychology of it. Perhaps Di is combining her own conscious will-power with Diamante’s emotional intensity to drive things to the future she wants.
So maybe that’s what I’ll have to do as well, Hilda thought as she smiled at Rahaan, who’d gone silent and thoughtful. Perhaps I’ll have to find the will power in myself to fight for the future I want. I don’t know how—or even where—I’ll need to fight: dreams, parallel worlds, in the women’s room of the Abu Dhabi airport . . . but I’ll have to figure it out pretty damned quick. And I’ll have to be ready, just like she’s ready.
Hilda watched Rahaan quietly, an overwhelming feeling of love swelling in her breast. She could feel the depth of their connection again, like she’d felt when they made love, when he held her in his powerful grip and took her to that place in her consciousness where things all made sense, where logic and timelines didn’t matter, where past and present and parallel were all one and the same, one beautiful, playful, magical moment that contained all of time within it.
“What’re you thinking?” she asked him softly.
He smiled and blinked as he slowly looked away from the window and into her eyes. “The past. Family. My mind was wandering.”
“Take me along,” she said. “Take me where your mind is wandering, Rahaan. Tell me about your family. I know your parents died when you were young. What happened, exactly?”
The Sheikh sighed and reclined his seat, raising his long legs and resting them on the empty seat next to Hilda in the secluded seating area. She smiled and placed a hand on his heavy legs, feeling his muscular calves beneath his smooth trousers, stroking him gently and listening as the Sheikh began to tell of his past, his own timeline, his own story.
“My father had been very excited about this new state-of-the-art oil rig being built by his newly-formed Royal Corps of Engineers. You see, building an offshore oil rig is so complex that there are only a handful of engineering companies with the know-how and staff to do it. None of the smaller Sheikdoms of the Arabian Peninsula have a domestic engineering corps that can pull off something like that, and many other Sheikhs had told my father it would never be completed on time, that it was an impossible task, that he should concede defeat and simply hire the Saudi Arabian engineers like everyone else did.”
“And he refused, I gather,” Hilda said, as if she knew Rahaan’s father would have been as stubborn and determined as the son, as convinced of his own power to build or fix anything, take care of anything.
The Sheikh nodded. “He set a date for when the rig would begin pumping, announced it to the kingdom as well as the entire region. He said the entire Royal Family would attend the opening ceremony, and he invited several other Sheikhs and Sheikhas to attend.” Rahaan paused and shook his head. “Of course, the date he set was actually two months ahead of schedule. My father was always a believer in setting aggressive deadlines. He used to say there is a kind of magic to setting a deadline, that when you set a deadline—no matter how impossible—strong people will rise to the occasion and deliver the goods, accomplish the mission, save the day.”
Hilda squeezed his leg as she felt him tense up. “So the engineers were rushed, and they made a mistake? Or was it something else?”
Rahaan shook his head and shrugged. “Nobody knows exactly what happened. I mean, there was no indication of a bomb or anything like that. No evidence of sabotage—though it is quite difficult to retrieve already-shattered evidence from the bottom of the Arabian Sea.”
“Oh, God, no—I wasn’t implying there was anything nefarious. Do you believe there was? Did your father have any enemies?”
Rahaan snorted. “A rich, proud king who always gets his way? Such a man makes enemies without even realizing it.” He smiled and shook his head. “But no. Kolah has been a nation of peace for almost forty years, as have most of our close neighbors. The rivalries have always been there, but just in the form of ego and showmanship.”
“My rig is bigger than yours,” said Hilda, snorting as she saw Rahaan’s face light up with surprised laughter. God, they needed a moment of lightness, didn’t they? Especially now that somehow, as crazy as it sounded, sweet professor Norm was back in Santa Fe, preparing for summer classes, oblivious to that entire thread where he got beaten to death by his psycho wife!
“Something like that,” the Sheikh said, laughing heartily as he reached across the seats and unbuckled her seatbelt. “Come. Sit by me. Sit by your husband.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Hilda said, feigning an epic eye-roll as she got pulled across the seats and plunked down squarely on the Sheikh’s lap like she was light as a feather. “I forgot about the fake marriage. Are we still doing that?”
“We absolutely are still doing it. Now that my brother has got a fake American wife, I must prove that my fake marriage is more fake than his!”
“Wait, what?” said Hilda, scrunching up her face. “For one fake marriage to be more fake than another fake marriage, doesn’t it actually need to be more real than the other?”
“Please do not attempt to use logic at this point in our fake lives, woman,” the Sheikh said sternly. “It could very well drive us both over the edge.”
She laughed as he leaned in and kissed her, his hands caressing her thighs as she snuggled into him. They kissed again, and she felt secure in his arms, confident against his mass, happy against his body. She touched his hard chest, looking upwards to receive his warm lips again. But then she stopped.
“You just went all serious again,” she whispered. “What happened? Where’s that mind of yours wandering now? Come back to me. I want you here with me now. Body and mind, Rahaan.”
He nodded and took a breath, kissing her gently once before exhaling. “I am sorry. Yes, I was wandering again. Thinking of what you asked me about my father having enemies.”
Hilda took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. She was starting to get hot and bothered under his touch, and she wanted him back now. “I shouldn’t have asked you about that. I’m—”
But the Sheikh’s mind was off again, even though he pulled her against his body as he spoke. “And the truth is, he didn’t have any real enemies as far as I can remember. I’ve spoken to older attendants, his personal guard, some of the older ministers who knew him well, and they barely even mentioned him having any serious disagreements with other Sheikhs or ministers within Kolah. Father was an outspoken, immovable man, but he also had a way with people, with diplomacy. In fact, the only time I ever heard my father seriously angry with someone, it was . . .”
“You, for being a brat?” Hilda said, looking up at him hopefully as she wriggled her bottom on his lap. What was wrong with her, she wondered when she realized she was getting hot and was so not into talking anymore.
“Well, if we are counting that, then my father was angry a lot,” he said with a half-grin. “But no. It was actually with the head of the Royal Engineers. A man called Yezid Mohammed Iqbal. I remember my father summoning him to our private day-chambers, and they had a heated discussion about the progress of the oil rig.”
“Wait, what? So that’s significant, right? I mean, if the head engineer was saying the deadline was too aggressive, perhaps he sabotaged something just to prove himself right?”
Rahaan shook his head and smiled. “Ah, you give me a run for my money when it comes to paranoid thoughts, my little con-artist wife. And yes, I thought of that. It might have actually made sense too—if not for the simple fact that Yezid Iqbal himself died in the explosion along with my father and the queens. And suicide-bomber stereotypes aside, I do not think Yezid Iqbal was the type.”
Hilda nodded as the Sheikh went quiet, and she kissed his cheek and touched his chest as she tried to understand what he was feeling.
“Yezid had
a son,” the Sheikh muttered, almost to himself as his body tensed up for a moment before his grip tightened on her thighs, his touch making her gasp. He smiled, face turned towards hers now, like he had finally decided to pay some attention to her. “A son around my age. He is also an engineer.”
42
The thought came through just as the Sheikh kissed Hilda hard on the lips, his body stiffening with a quickness that surprised him. Now he was suddenly conscious of how Hilda’s soft bottom was moving slowly on his lap, how her breathing had slowed to a deep, steady rhythm. Ya Allah, she was hot, was she not? And by God, so was he!
Somehow the thoughts kept coming as he clawed at her ample thighs through her jeans, unbuckling his seatbelt as he turned her and made her straddle him full. God, he wanted this right now. He wanted it with a goddamn vengeance!
His body stiffened as thoughts ebbed and flowed, and instead of trying to empty his mind he simply allowed it wander as his hands wandered all over her curves. He was intensely aware of Hilda, his body deeply connected to hers as he kissed her lips, squeezed her boobs, clawed at her ass as she bounced her heavy body on his rising erection.
Rahaan hadn’t been oblivious to the dark irony of his own involvement with Yusuf Iqbal. In a way that meeting a couple of weeks earlier had motivated the Sheikh to fly down to Albuquerque the next day with the fake marriage proposal. Of course, the moment he walked into that store and back into Hilda’s life, the Sheikh hadn’t had the time or space to think back to the meeting with Iqbal. But now . . . now it occurred to him how ridiculously strange that meeting had been. Was this also something to do with parallel worlds and unresolved emotions reaching across dimensions? Was it two fatherless sons subconsciously trying to recreate the most traumatic events in their own lives? Or was it just meaningless, everyday coincidence?
Stars for the Sheikh: A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel (Curves for Sheikhs Series Book 8) Page 16