“Technically I am a king, not a prince,” the Sheikh said, smiling as he tried to downplay the inexplicable sense of joy that whipped through him. Yes, of course. He could see it in Lora: That love of fantasy that had brought her to Johaar in the first place, to have a wedding in an exotic Eastern kingdom. And then she’d returned when her marriage failed . . . returned to him, even though she hated herself for doing it, even though it made her feel like a—
“And which one is she, princess or whore?” Amir asked, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at Carmen, her sudden expression of anger telling him everything he needed to know about Lora. She was all princess—and perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps that’s why she’d run.
“I’ll be the first to admit that all women have a bit of both those qualities in them,” Carmen said after taking a long breath as if she was trying to calm herself down. “But if anyone is all starry-eyed princess, it’s Lora Langhorne. I mean, she actually believed Mark would be faithful, that he’d be a good husband, a good father, a good . . . man.” She snorted and shook her head.
“And so perhaps whatever beliefs she has about me are equally naïve,” said Amir, folding his arms across his broad chest and strolling across the sprawling day-chambers towards the balcony. He turned away from Carmen, gazing across his kingdom and towards the rolling dunes in the distance. “After all, I assume the both of you have looked me up, read about my past. The Internet has a long memory.”
“You’ve clearly been around the block over the years,” Carmen said without skipping a beat. “But I will say that I haven’t seen even one gossip columnist or tabloid writer ever suggest that you cheated on a woman. Even those stories about you seeing multiple women at once make it clear that you weren’t lying to any of them, that each of them knew they were sharing you.”
Amir turned, his jaw tight, green eyes narrowed. “And yet you are here. Is that what you want for your friend? A man who will openly lay with many women?”
“Of course not. But those reports were from years ago, and you’ve never married. And since you’re free to take multiple wives, clearly that’s not what you want. You want Lora. I saw it in the way you kissed her three years ago, and I saw it in the way you kissed her three days ago.”
The Sheikh took a breath as his father’s words came rushing back to him. Still, he’d been wrong about a woman before. And this woman was now ten thousand miles away. “So what would you have me do? Chase her down in New Orleans?” He shook his head. “Three years ago I was not thinking clearly. As for three days ago . . . who knows. Who knows what I was thinking.”
“We all know what you were thinking when you kissed her three years ago,” Carmen said without batting an eyelid. “It was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. You wanted her. That’s it.” She paused and took a breath. “And she wanted you.”
The Sheikh laughed. “Of course I wanted her. As for what Lora wanted . . . well, that is for her to say.”
“Lora said it the only way she’ll ever say it. Despite what happened with you two at the hotel, she’ll deny it because she’s terrified of what it means. Or rather, of what it might mean.”
“And what does she think it might mean?”
Carmen sighed. “She thinks it might mean nothing. Or it might mean everything.” She shook her head slowly and smiled. “And either of those options are terrifying to her. She’s caught in that scary place where she isn’t sure if she’s a prostitute or a princess, and so she’s running for her life.”
The Sheikh turned away from Carmen once again, his jaw tightening as he gazed out across his capital city once more. The sun was getting lower as afternoon moved to evening, and the minarets and domes of Johaar were ablaze in fiery golden light. Amir thought for a moment, taking slow breaths as he did it. Then he turned back to Carmen.
“I cannot go after her,” he said quietly. “Lora may be as you say: All princess, all childlike innocence, all woman. But I have been wrong about women before. And I have made some poor decisions when following my impulses: The poorest of which might have been to invoke Sheikh’s Privilege with regard to your friend. Now she is not sure if she wants me for who I am or if she wants me for what I am, and I am not sure if I want her for who she is or if I simply feel the need to fulfill the expectations of the tradition.”
Carmen frowned, her left eyebrow rising. “Expectations of a tradition that hasn’t been invoked in a century? So whose expectations are these? Certainly your people aren’t waiting to pass judgment on you for not following up on that archaic tradition. In fact, I’d have to think they’d freak out a bit if you did follow up on it! Because then every man in Johaar is going to wonder if the king is about to claim his wife if he isn’t a perfect husband.” She frowned again, but this time there was a smile hidden inside. “Not a bad system, I’d say. But then not every woman thinks like I do.”
The Sheikh laughed and clapped his hands once. “All right,” he said. “So what is it you would have me do, Miss Carmen? You came here saying you had a plan.”
“I do have a plan. But it’s going to cost you.”
“How much?” said the Sheikh, matching Carmen’s smile with his own.
“Twenty-one million dollars.”
20
SIX WEEKS LATER
“You did what?”
“I did what you wouldn’t. What you couldn’t,” said Carmen, looking at her nails and frowning. “I got Mark’s payout from the Sheikh and handed it over to Luther the lawyer. It took almost a month to work out the details, but it’s done. And in return I got a signed and witnessed document from Mark saying he’s granting the divorce and giving up all custody rights to Damascus. You’re free from that piece of shit ex-husband.” She looked up, her face tight. “And so is your son. He’s now yours and yours only.”
Lora blinked about four hundred times before she was able to stand up off her old blue couch and walk to the window. She still couldn’t speak. She’d been back in New Orleans six weeks, and it had been the worst stretch of her life. She couldn’t stop thinking about Amir, about the evening they’d spent together, about what a fool she was for leaving. The attraction was real, she knew. It had always been real—from the very first kiss. She’d denied it three years ago, and she’d denied it a week ago. Even when she came from his touch, again and again, she’d denied it. She had to deny it. A princess doesn’t spread her legs and moan as she orgasms in an Arabian hotel room, does she?
So she’d flown back alone with her son, angry at herself, almost out of her mind with worry about how she’d find the money to fight Mark for custody. A part of her hated herself for not taking the Sheikh’s offer—after all, didn’t she owe it to Damascus to not subject him to a father who didn’t give a damn, who was using their son as a bargaining chip? But there was another part of her that was pleased with herself . . . stubbornly pleased. You’ve done the right thing, she’d told herself. You can’t let a man pay another man twenty-one million dollars on your behalf! That’s like selling yourself to him! How can you ever pay back that kind of debt . . . a debt that goes way beyond money!
But now Carmen had gone and put her foot in it, made a decision on Lora’s behalf. How dare she?! What gave her the right?! Was Carmen her pimp now? Her madam? What the hell!
The anger rose so quick in Lora that she almost choked as she turned and faced her best friend. She glanced into Carmen’s eyes, trying to hold back what was coming. She managed to hesitate for a moment when she saw something in Carmen’s eyes that told her there was more to this; but the anger was too much and the words finally came:
“Get out,” Lora said quietly, her voice almost a hiss. “Get out of my house. Get out of my life.”
Carmen’s face went white, but there was still that strange look in her eyes. “Lora, listen,” she started to say, but Lora cut her off again.
“You had no right to make that decision. Just get out,
OK? I can’t do this right now. I’ve got a hundred other things on my mind, and I just can’t deal with this right now. I can’t even . . .”
Carmen nodded and stood to leave, smiling at Damascus who was staring up at her from his crib. “OK,” she said. “But one of those hundred other things on your mind wouldn’t happen to be the fact that you’re late this month, is it?”
Lora felt all the color drain from her face, and she stumbled to the couch and sat down hard, feeling the air go out of the cheap cushions as she brought her weight down on it. She frowned as she cycled through the dates of her cycle . . . shit, yes, she was late. But how . . .
“How . . .” Lora started to say, but she shut up when she finally understood that look in her best friend’s eye.
“Honey, our cycles have been pretty close for years now. You know that,” Carmen said. “And the day after you left Johaar in a self-righteous huff, I realized that we were both about two weeks in—which means you were at the point of peak fertility when you and the Sheikh . . . made love.” She said the last two words firmly, and Lora wondered if Carmen was mocking her. “And usually in the months after delivering a child, a woman’s fertility is actually enhanced by her elevated hormone levels. So you were pretty close to the most fertile woman on Earth in that moment.”
Lora closed her eyes and took a breath. She’d missed that period two weeks after the encounter with the Sheikh, and she was still late. She’d had a missed period a couple of times back in grad school just from not eating right and not sleeping enough and stressing herself close to the point of insanity, and she knew it was a thing. Some women athletes missed their periods when they were training intensely, so yes, it was definitely a thing. And so she’d ignored it, pushing it to the back of her mind as she spent the days breastfeeding and browsing aimlessly on the Internet, wondering who was hiring librarians these days.
But now Carmen was here with that strange look in her eyes, talking about million-dollar payoffs and the chance she might be pregnant with a Sheikh’s baby.
“Did you say anything to Amir?” Lora asked quietly, her heart pumping so hard she could barely hear her own voice.
“Of course not. I had no way of knowing for sure if it would happen. I just thought it might. I mean, you are late, aren’t you?”
Lora closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes,” she said in that same quiet voice as the tears began to gather at the corners of her eyes. “But it could just be the stress. I don’t think you can get pregnant from just one time.” It took a moment for Lora to realize the silliness of what she’d just said, but for some reason it was comforting.
Carmen laughed so hard that Damascus squealed in delight from his crib. “Honey, I know you studied Library Science and not biology, but you do understand that by definition it takes just one time to get knocked up. It’s just one spermy-thing that needs to get in there and boom, you’re done.”
“Damn right I’m done,” Lora muttered, shaking her head slowly as she felt her hands move to her belly almost on their own. Could it be? Of course it could. “And you’ve done me in, Carmen.”
“Excuse me? I freed you, Lora! You needed to take that offer. Hell, the Sheikh started all of this, and it’s part of his tradition to fulfill his promise.”
“Privilege,” Lora said, still shaking her head slowly as she wondered how the hell she was going to raise two kids on her own.
“What?”
“Privilege, not promise. That tradition sounds all righteous and honorable on its face, but in the end it’s just another form of ownership. A powerful man claiming a woman.”
Carmen cocked her head and raised her left eyebrow. “Don’t tell the college-educated feminists I said this,” she whispered with a wink, “but that doesn’t sound so bad to me when the powerful man is a king with green eyes, a movie-star jawline, and abs you can count through his shirt.” She laughed and shook her head. “And anyway, I don’t think you need to be worried about being ‘claimed’ or whatever. Amir has no intention of tracking you down and taking you back to his kingdom in golden handcuffs. At least not until he finds out about his baby.”
Lora closed her eyes as a shudder passed through her. “Carmen,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t dare tell him. I swear to God I will—”
“You will what? Tell him yourself? Of course you will.”
“I will kill you, is what I was going to say,” Lora muttered. “You’ve already made a decision on my behalf—a decision you had no damned right to make. You’re not making another one. Not about this. Assuming I’m even pregnant. Which I’m not. I can’t be. It couldn’t have happened just from . . .”
But Lora trailed off when she realized she was rambling, her thoughts feeling as slurred as her speech. She felt drunk, high, stoned, insane, all at once. She wanted to throw up and lie down, punch the wall and kick the doors, smash the windows and burn the house down. She was pregnant, wasn’t she. With Amir’s child. All that talk about walking away from him with her self-respect because she was so scared of her own motives for being with him . . . well, now she was knocked up with a second child. Two kids from two different men! Was this what she thought she’d become when she grew up? Princess? Hah! Whore. Whore. Whore!
“Get out, Carmen,” she said again. “Please. I can’t look at you right now. I just can’t. Please go.”
21
Go after her, Amir. Go after her. Go now, before it is too late.
The Sheikh sat up in bed, startled awake by what he could have sworn was a voice. But of course he was alone, the swish of the silk curtains moving in the cool desert breeze the only sound in the vast chambers of his private bedroom. Slowly he swung his feet off the massive teakwood bed, taking deep breaths when he realized he was covered in cold perspiration.
Amir walked to the balcony and stood there bare-chested, looking out across his silent kingdom. The moon was bright in the sky, almost full but not quite. It made him uneasy, for some reason, like the moon was missing a piece. He tried to remember the dream he’d had, but it would not come back to him. Perhaps there hadn’t been a dream at all. Perhaps it was just his inner voice calling out to him, urging him to go after what he wanted, the woman he wanted.
“She will not come back,” he muttered aloud as he stared at the moon. “I saw it in her eyes. She will not be able to face herself if she comes back to me. She thinks I have made her a whore, a woman who can be bought. And she cannot accept that, even though a part of her knows it is not true, that it can never be true. I have made too many mistakes with her, and perhaps this last one—paying off her husband—is the biggest.”
Amir sighed as he thought back to that meeting with Carmen, Lora’s best friend. There was something about the way she’d presented herself that made her think she was holding something back—from both him and Lora. She was sharp, sly, scheming—everything Lora Langhorne was not. A good complement to Lora, the Sheikh thought with a smile.
But now it is done, the Sheikh told himself as he felt his breathing finally slow. Her husband is gone from her life. Her child is safe from his influence. And broadly speaking you have fulfilled the promise that you invoked with Sheikh’s Privilege three years ago. It is not the strict version of Sheikh's Privilege, but it is good enough. In time you will forget about Lora Langhorne, as indeed you must. After all, you have a country to run! A country that is in need of leadership at a time when the Middle East is heading towards both a financial crisis and a public-relations crisis.
Suddenly the Sheikh felt his mind snap into high gear, and he realized he’d been wasting time and energy thinking about a woman when he should be thinking about his goddamn duty to his people! The looming crisis in the Middle East was real: The price of oil was dropping as the world began to move to renewable energy, and at the same time the Middle East was looked upon as a breeding ground for terrorism and anti-Western sentiment. As king he needed to make decisions that would ta
ke Johaar into the new world, position it as a destination for foreign investment and international tourism. That had been his father’s vision, and it was a strategy that required commitment and resolve—from the people and their king. And it would have to start with the king.
The Sheikh sighed again as he faced the thought that had been lingering at the back of his mind ever since that meeting with Marissa, that businesslike marriage proposal that would bring two small kingdoms together in a way that would most certainly make the news in a dramatic fashion. And there was no doubt that the Sheikh and Marissa were a photogenic couple: During their engagement they’d been the darling of the tabloids from London to Los Angeles. If anything could raise the profile of Johaar in the West, it would be him and Marissa getting back together. After all, world culture these days was celebrity-driven, defined by iconic images and flashy snippets of video. And for those who looked deeper into the narrative, what better narrative than a Middle Eastern Sheikhdom forming an alliance with a European kingdom through the oldest strategy ever: Marriage! Tourism would skyrocket. Foreign corporations would be able to invest in Johaar with confidence, knowing that Johaar was not going to suddenly turn into an anti-West terrorist camp—not after its Sheikh had married a European princess!
As for that European princess . . . ya Allah, I can never love her after the decision she made about our unborn child four years ago, Amir thought as he began to pace through the dark bedroom, his bare feet silent on the smooth sandstone floors that were a hundred years old. But perhaps a king should not expect to love his queen in the way a common man loves his wife. After all, the choice of a queen is a public choice, and a king must make that choice based on the needs of the public, not his own. Is that not the truly responsible decision? Is that not something that perhaps you understood even when you were a teenager? Is that not why you never settled on one woman, never believed you could love one woman . . . perhaps never believed you could love any woman?
Privilege for the Sheikh Page 11