Stars for the Sheikh_A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel

by Annabelle Winters

  Well, he’s more than attractive, he’s . . . he’s . . . OK stop, she told herself as she took in his strong jawline outlined by that dark, trimmed stubble, those cheekbones like ridges of smooth granite, thick black hair that fell in lazy waves that made her heart speed up, those dark red lips she could swear she’d tasted before, would taste again . . . oh, God you need to stop! Open your mouth and talk!

  “So are you a professor too, Di? You mentioned getting tenure,” Hilda said, taking a bite of her veggie-wrap and smiling with a full mouth, cursing herself for starting to talk right when she needed to chew. Could she be any less ladylike and attractive right now? Should she just burp and scratch her armpits while she was at it?

  “You’ve got something under your chin, dear,” said Di, barely looking at Hilda, only turning to face her when Rahaan turned away to take a gigantic bite out of his roast-beef sandwich. He smiled at Hilda as he chewed, giving her a quick wink that felt so familiar it almost made her choke. It was a look two playful lovers might pass to one another across a crowded room, a knowing look, a familiar wink, like they had an inside joke going, something between just the two of them.

  Which is impossible, Hilda told herself as she blinked and looked away from the Sheikh, directing her focus back to Di, if only for poor Professor Norm’s sake. “That’s actually another chin,” she said cheerfully, feeling light-headed and relaxed after that warm look from the Sheikh. “Another chin under my chin. Double chin. Get it?”

  Rahaan snorted through his sandwich, his green eyes dancing with delight as he stared at her. It took all of Hilda’s will to keep from turning back to him, and she could feel his eyes on her, his gaze taking in every feature of her smooth round face, her open hair, her full lips, the curve of her neck. And although her mouth was full and there were crumbs on her black top, the way the Sheikh was looking at her made Hilda feel attractive. She sat up a bit straighter, feeling her breasts rise in a way she could tell affected the Sheikh. It affected Di too, it seemed, whose jaw went tight and eyebrows seemed to cross for a fleeting moment as she turned to Hilda and forced a smile.

  “Sorry, you were asking me something. Yes, I am a professor. Actually I’m the only full professor right now—Norm’s still an associate. There’s a bit of a backlog in the physics department, and Norm's tenure has been pushed back. He won’t be called up for a couple more years,” Di said nonchalantly.

  “Next year, Di. You know that,” Norm said quietly, smiling at Hilda and nodding. “Yes, Di is a professor of history at UNM.”

  “Oh, really?” said Hilda. “What kind of history? European? U.S.? Asian? Af—”

  “Science, actually,” said Di, poking at her salad and putting her fork down without taking a bite. “The history of science. My research covers how science evolves through the ages, like how science now explains simple things that our ancestors would say were caused by ghosts or God or magic.” Di’s eyes lit up as she spoke, and Hilda could immediately see the woman was whip-smart and genuine when it came to her field. “From which it follows that phenomena we now consider to be unexplainable or perhaps even impossible, will eventually be explained by scientists of the future.”

  “Or scientists of the present,” said Norm, beaming as he looked at his wife and then at Hilda. “We’re writing a book together, Di and I. We’re taking the latest discoveries from quantum mechanics and applying it to ideas commonly thought of as impossible or even . . . well . . . magical.”

  “Magical? Like what?” said Hilda, still conscious of the way the Sheikh seemed to have eyes only for her. What was he up to? Why was he even here?

  “Well, like what you do,” Di said matter-of-factly, finally taking a bite of her salad. “Reading fortunes. Telling the future. Or pretending to.”

  “Di!” Norm said, frowning at his wife and then looking apologetically at Hilda.

  “No, it’s fine,” Hilda said quickly, noticing that the Sheikh was interested now too. “I get the point. It’s either fake or coincidence, right? Even if I really do predict a future event, we currently have no way to explain it except by one of those options. If I see the future and it’s not fake and it’s not coincidence, then science can’t explain it right now. It might as well be magic. Perfectly logical.”

  Norman narrowed his eyes like he was thinking, rubbing his mangy orange beard as he stared at Hilda. He turned to his wife now. “You know,” he said. “We should ask Hilda to read the manuscript. She’d be perfect, actually. She understands physics, but she hasn’t studied it at an advanced level. She’d be able to give us a sense of whether the book can reach both a scientific audience as well as the public.” He shrugged as he looked at Hilda. “The smart, intellectually curious public, of course. The ideas are still a little beyond, say, your average romance novel aficionado.”

  “You’d be surprised how sophisticated your average romance reader is, Professor,” said Hilda with a playful edge in her voice. “And as a scientist you shouldn’t be making assumptions that can be easily disproved. If you looked at the demographics and education-levels of romance readers, I assure you that—”

  “OK, OK, I take it back,” Norm said hurriedly, throwing his hands up in the air as he turned red. He exhaled when he saw Hilda relax and smile. “So will you do it? Read the manuscript and see if it makes sense to you?”

  Di shifted in her seat, glaring at Norm for a moment before finally nodding and shrugging and looking over at Hilda questioningly.

  “Sure,” said Hilda. “I’d be happy to. What’s the name of the book?”

  “Sideways Through Time,” said Norm, beaming again as he leaned back. “We’re focusing on a topic that’s always been fascinating to people. You see it in movies and books all the times. Science fiction. Romance novels even.”

  “Sideways through time,” Hilda repeated as she glanced quizzically at her veggie wrap and then slowly looked at the two professors staring her down while the Sheikh looked on. “You mean like time travel? You guys are writing a book that explains time travel?”

  Norm took a breath and blinked as he stared at his hands for a moment. “Technically, we’ve already written the book,” he said, his sharp little eyes gleaming as he glanced at his wife and then at Hilda.

  “What is the main idea?” said the Sheikh suddenly, breaking his silence, his face peaked with a strange excitement, an excitement that Hilda could feel rising in her as well. She couldn’t explain it, but she could sure as hell feel it. And that was Norm and Di’s point from earlier, wasn’t it? Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Oh. My. God.

  Di turned to Rahaan. “Well, ask any physicist about the science of time, and they’ll tell you that time is an illusion, that every single moment in the history of the universe actually exists right now—has always existed, in a way.”

  “And not just every moment we’ve experienced in the past or will experience in the future, but every possible moment as well,” said Norm, touching his nose even though it appeared he’d traded in his glasses for contacts.

  “Parallel universes,” the Sheikh said. “That is what you mean by every possible moment being in existence?”

  “Correct,” said Norm, glancing at the Sheikh in surprise, perhaps even envy, as if a man that rich and good-looking shouldn’t know anything about physics. “So at this very moment, there are a whole bunch of parallel universes out there which are similar to ours. And we actually exist in those parallel universes. In real flesh and bone, living real lives! Some of those worlds are almost identical. Others have tiny differences—like maybe you have green eyes in this world and blue eyes in another world. And—”

  “Wait, what?” Hilda said as she thought of Sabbath her green-eyed cat who’d looked very much like a red-eyed cat earlier that day.

  “So anyway,” said Di, ignoring Hilda and nodding furiously as she leaned forward, looking at the Sheikh. “These parallel w
orlds are real, and in fact the past and future are just parallel worlds too. It’s all parallel worlds, in a way. Which means that once we understand how to move forward and backward through time, we’ll also know how to move sideways through time!”

  Hilda blinked hard and took a breath. This was going over her head, and she couldn’t get that image of Sabbath and his new eyes out of her mind. “Sideways. You mean move from one of these parallel universes to another? Where you have green eyes your whole life and suddenly you wake up and your eyes are blue, but everything else is the same?”

  “Yes,” said Di, turning and looking into the Sheikh’s eyes. “Here, Rahaan. Let me see,” she whispered to him. “Still green. Damn. I’d hoped we had moved into a parallel world where—”

  Hilda stared wide-eyed as Di just about managed to stop herself from saying what was clearly on her mind, and the Sheikh frowned and looked away from Di, focusing on Hilda again. He seemed lost in thought, like he was somewhere else. Truth was, Hilda felt like she was somewhere else too, and she heard herself asking Di another question.

  “So how would that work,” Hilda said slowly. “This sort of sideways time-travel? Once the science gets sorted out, they’ll invent some machine in the future that allows us to—”

  “No machines,” said Norm firmly. “That’s the entire point of the book. That’s the biggest flaw in popular conceptions of time travel: that to travel through time we need to transport our bodies through time. It’s not going to work that way.”

  “No bodies. Then what? Are you saying it is just the mind that moves between times, moves between parallel universes?” said Rahaan.

  Di nodded. “The consciousness, more precisely. The secret is that there will never be a machine that transports our bodies through time. Think about it this way: If a scientist a hundred years from now invents a time-travel machine, then by now we would have clear, verifiable cases of people from the future coming back and explaining exactly how all of this works. The fact that we have no legitimate cases of humans from the future popping out of a phone booth or whatever means that we’re missing something in how we understand time travel.”

  Norm jumped in now. “And what we’re missing is that time travel is already happening! We’re already doing it, both when we’re awake and when we’re asleep.”

  “Asleep?” Hilda said, her voice almost a whisper. She couldn’t even look at the Sheikh right now. He’d see it all over her face—even though she couldn’t be sure what he’d see. “You mean in a dream?”

  “Yes,” said Di. “We haven’t worked all of it out yet, but we believe that in a dream state, the consciousness is disconnected from the body in a way that frees it. So the consciousness opens up and gives us glimpses of the other worlds and universes in which we’re living lives that are as real as this life—just one dimension backward, forward, or sideways from our current reality.”

  Norm nodded. “Most of the time we don’t actually remember these dreams—which could be a survival mechanism that has evolved in humans. After all, if we’re waking up every morning with clear, vivid memories of the other lives we’re living, it would be confusing as hell. So our brains just sensibly block those out from the waking mind so we don’t go insane.”

  “But you said our consciousness is doing this time travel when we are awake as well,” said the Sheikh, stroking his stubble as he leaned back, straightening his back and stretching his long, muscular arms out wide. The sleeves of his white linen shirt rode up over his bulging brown biceps, revealing a tattoo on the inside of his right arm. It looked like Arabic letters, but when Hilda squinted and tried to focus on them, she thought maybe they were some kind of symbols etched into his skin. Weird. Kinda sexy. OK stop.

  Norm nodded and exhaled. “Yes, it happens during the day when we are awake too. We travel between parallel universes every day, but most of these parallel universes are so close to our current reality, that there’s really no practical difference. The differences appear consistent and logical, and so we don’t notice.”

  “You mean like the green eyes to blue eyes thing?” said Hilda. “Um, I think I’d notice that.”

  Norm laughed. “Actually the green eyes to blue eyes would never happen, because a parallel universe where you have different color eyes would probably also have a few other things that would be different. So a universe where you have different color eyes would actually be several dimensions away from your current world. Almost zero chance your consciousness will pull you into that parallel reality. Too big of a jump.”

  “Almost zero chance, but not a zero chance?” said the Sheikh, asking the question on Hilda’s mind. “So it could happen?”

  Norm went quiet, and Di shifted in her chair and then pulled out her phone, frowning and putting the phone on the table before looking up and tossing her hair back. But she stayed quiet too, exhaling slowly and then picking at her salad.

  “Well? Could it happen?” said Hilda. “Or is this the cliffhanger part of the book? Trust me, the romance readers are gonna skewer you for this! They hate cliffhangers.”

  Norm grinned and nodded. “Scientifically speaking, it is possible. But practically speaking, it would never happen. The probability is just too low. Never gonna happen.”

  Di shifted again, her face tightening as she glanced at Norm and then folded her arms over her toned chest and looked up at the ceiling, smiling and shaking her head.

  Norm rolled his eyes. “In case you guys can’t tell, Di and I disagree on this one.”

  “Do tell, Ms. Diana,” said the Sheikh, and he turned and smiled at the redhead in a way that made Hilda’s neck-hairs bristle up. She narrowed her eyes at the Sheikh, relaxing a little when it hit her that God, he was totally faking that smile for her so she’d talk.

  Di softened and blinked at him, touching her hair and shrugging. “Well, Norm is right that the probability of passing between parallel worlds that far apart is pretty unlikely. But not as unlikely as he thinks. That’s where his scientific training is a disadvantage. But the philosopher in me can easily imagine it.”

  “Imagine what?” said Hilda.

  “OK,” said Di, leaning forward and shifting in her chair again. “I’ll try to explain. Remember how we said that time is actually an illusion, that all of time actually exists right now? That’s actually kinda hard to imagine for some people, right?”

  “Yes,” said Hilda. “Sure.”

  “So think of it this way. Think of time more like you think of space, like you think of geography or a world map. Just like New York and London both exist but are at different places on the map, all moments in time also co-exist but are simply in different places on a map. A cosmic map, if you will.”

  “Oooh,” said Hilda. “OK, wow, that’s . . . I mean please go on.”

  “So in other words, the different lives we’re living in different times are actually all being lived right now, just like London and New York both exist right now but at different spots. Our consciousness connects all these lives together, and Norm is right: As humans we block out any waking memory of these other lives or else we wouldn’t be able to function in our world. But at a subconscious level we are in fact aware of these lives. We do get glimpses of these other lives in dreams,” said Di.

  “Just so we’re clear, I agree with Di on all of this. That’s not where we disagree,” Norm interjected.

  Di smiled. “What we disagree on is the role of emotion in all of this. Science doesn’t have a way to deal with the power of emotion, and so Norm just ignores it. Whereas I think emotion can change the probabilities in dramatic, almost magical ways. I think strong emotions that are mirrored through several different dimensions can create strong ripples through time, perhaps even pull your waking consciousness into other realities that are quite different.”

  “Green eyes to blue eyes?” said Hilda, trying hard to smile nonchalantly even though she wanted to fain
t and wake up in a parallel life where she wasn’t pregnant and her cat didn’t look like Satan’s minion.

  “Yes,” said Di matter-of-factly nodding. “Perhaps even more, if there are deep emotions being experienced in several lives at once. You could see very strange, even impossible events occur in your life because the emotional ripples from other lives have pulled you into a different parallel world. I believe it absolutely can happen, and I believe it does happen. I just think that when it happens, most people can’t explain it so they pretend like it didn’t happen. For others, they may actually go insane or experience psychological problems including schizophrenia. No one would believe them, and eventually they stop believing themselves or get turned into medicated zombies and forced into social isolation. Extreme cases could lead to suicide, crime, maybe even murder. Who’s going to believe a psychotic killer with some crazy story that they swear is true?”

  Hilda’s mouth hung half open as she listened to all of it. She didn’t even want to start thinking about . . . ohgod, where would she start? The dreams? The pregnancy? Where?

  Start with him, came the answer from somewhere in her subconscious, and it sounded so clear that Hilda almost gasped in shock. Was she finally going to go insane? Were the voices finally coming?

  But there were no voices. Just feelings. Just emotions.

  Start with him, she thought as she glanced at the stranger across the table from her. Why was he here? What did he want?

  She nodded in a daze that made her feel like she was behind a veil, watching reality unfold, watching her life unfold, watching all her lives unfold. That dream from two months ago was hazy in her memory, but she saw that bumpy carriage on that mystical country road. She felt the excitement and fear of those teenagers on the run. She sensed the danger and tumult in the dream of the prince who gave up his kingdom after rejecting Princess Diamante for his true love.