Rahaan laughed again and lay down on the sand, placing his head on Hilda’s soft lap. The two of them watched their son make the most intricate designs with his pudgy little fingers: swirls and swishes, circles and waves, splashes and splotches.
“Am I a horrible person,” Hilda whispered as she looked down at her husband and then over at her son. “Are we both—”
But she stopped when she saw the Sheikh look up at her with those green eyes of his. They’d talked about this countless times over the years, ever since she’d returned from that last dream, screaming as she climaxed with her man on that balcony, violence and lust somehow seeming beautiful and magical as the sun rose and the moon set and the stars said goodnight. The opening ceremony had passed without incident, and later they realized that neither Alim nor Yusuf Iqbal had any conscious memory of Di or any of the madness. Alim had taken over as Sheikh briefly: just long enough to get a taste of the "real" world . . . and long enough to realize that as ruler he could simply issue an edict that struck away the outdated law about marrying a foreign woman from the code of Kolah. By the time the child was born, Rahaan was Sheikh again and Hilda was his queen, and just like that they were living the dream. The dream that both of them had killed for in other worlds!
How to make sense of it? How to live with it? We all like to think we are models of goodness and purity, shining beacons of light and charity. But just like there is no way to keep my son’s feet squeaky clean at all times, no human can be all good, all light, all pure. Perhaps that’s the curse of seeing behind the veil, is it not? After all, if all of time was laid bare before us, how many of this world’s priests might be another world’s predators? Could a previous life of dishonor and violence be the foundation on which a current life of charity and compassion is built? Is the universe not driven by the dance of opposites? And so perhaps it is indeed the burden of someone with our gifts, with our experiences, with our love, to be forced to live with the knowledge that we are many people in one, good and bad in one, light and dark in one. And perhaps that knowledge will lead us to live the best lives we can, raise the best son we can, be the best king and queen we can.
“Anything new from the investigators?” Hilda asked, running her fingers through the Sheikh’s thick black hair. “Have they found Di?”
The Sheikh grunted and shook his head. He’d never been particularly interested in tracking down Di, but still hired a team of investigators at Hilda’s insistence. There was a part of her that wanted to reach out to Di in this world, strange as that seemed.
Of course, what was stranger was that the University of New Mexico had no record of Di. Norm didn’t know who she was. And Hilda didn’t know her last name, so couldn’t get much further than a description of someone who was either a redhead or a blonde! Were they in a timeline where Di was never born? Was Di born as someone else, with a different name? Different colored hair? Who knew? And that was just one of the many questions they’d had after what happened three years ago . . .
“And still no tattoo,” she said, pushing up the Sheikh’s sleeve and glancing at the smooth brown skin. The tattoo had disappeared sometime that night on the rig, and they’d never quite figured out why. In fact, they’d never quite figured out why it had changed in the first place, or what the hell those weird childlike squiggles were!
Hilda watched her son play in the sand for several long moments before she felt an excitement bubbling up like the seawater through the rocks.
“Rahaan,” she muttered, grabbing a fistful of his hair so hard he grunted and sat up in annoyance. “Rahaan, look!”
He turned to see what she was pointing at, and his frown changed to a look of shared excitement. “By Allah,” he said. “That looks familiar.”
Now they both crawled over to the sandy masterpiece of finger-painting done by their son, and in an instant they both knew why it looked familiar.
“Take a picture,” Hilda said quietly. “And we’ll get it tattooed on your arm.”
The Sheikh nodded and pulled out his phone and snapped a few images. Then he looked into her eyes, his gaze saying so much. He leaned in and kissed her, and she almost cried in joy.
“It means we still write our own future,” she whispered to him. “I’m sure it means that. It’s a reminder that although our fates are written in the stars, perhaps it’s we that do the writing! That we’re in control even though we’re not. Does that make sense?”
“Of course not,” he grunted. “But it cannot make sense in any ordinary way. That’s the reason quantum mechanics is regarded as something mystical even by the most analytical of physicists.”
Hilda laughed and leaned her head back as she glanced towards the domes and minarets of Kolah in the distance. The sun was setting. It was time to go home.
“You know,” she said as the little royal family gathered their things even as white-clad attendants rushed in to help, “the downside of being in a world where Di and Norm never met is that nobody wrote that time travel book.”
The Sheikh shrugged as he hoisted his pup onto his broad shoulders, not caring about the boy’s grubby feet smearing sand and salt all over his fine white tunic. “Maybe someone else wrote it.” He looked at her and grinned. “Maybe it made its way into a cheesy romance novel, cloaked in fake marriages, secret babies, and second chances. Actually no. It is too complex for the simpleton readers of—”
“OK don’t push me,” she said, raising a finger as the Sheikh laughed and shut the hell up. Hilda laughed too, shaking her head as the caravan of silver Range Rovers pulled up on the golden sand, ready to take the royal family back to their fairy-tale castle. “It would be a pretty darn convoluted romance novel, I’ll give you that. But so long as there’s a happy ending, the romance readers will handle it. Don’t underestimate them.”
“So are we a happy ending?” the Sheikh said as they piled into the sprawling royal car, kid first, wife next, king last.
“This time we are,” she whispered to him as the heavy doors shut on the royal family and Sabbath the cat looked over from the front seat, his eyes the color of _____. “This time we are, my love.”
∞
EPILOGUE
LOCATION: GUANTANAMO BAY
TIME: WHO THE HELL KNOWS
Agent John Benson, head of the CIA’s Dubai Field Office, stared at his secured company cell phone and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. He’d just flown nonstop from Qatar to Cuba after getting a call from Homeland Security that his expertise was needed with a strange situation involving an inmate—an inmate who had seemingly showed up out of nowhere.
“That doesn’t make any goddamn sense,” Benson had said over the phone, annoyed that he was being asked to travel to Gitmo yet again. “Someone put her in a cell, didn’t they? Find out who did it and figure it out yourselves. This doesn’t concern me. I got shit to take care of in the Middle East, and—”
But they’d said this did concern the Middle East, and so Benson was forced to listen. Apparently a fire-blonde woman had been found in a solitary cell during the rounds the previous morning. She’d been frantically talking about Sheikhs and Kings, about someone murdering someone else, a Sheikh killing his brother, and on and on. It sounded like gibberish, but she mentioned the name of a Sheikh who was in fact a real person, though not on any CIA or DHS watchlist by any means. Then, when they tried to pull up records on this woman, they found nothing. They ran her prints and found nothing. Facial recognition turned up zilch. The woman was a ghost, they said. Was she CIA full dark, they asked?
“How the hell should I know?” thundered Benson even as he headed for the U.S. Airbase in Qatar to take a military flight to Cuba. “That’s the goddamn point of full dark, you fools! We don’t know, and if we did, we wouldn’t admit it!”
After landing Benson went straight to the interrogation room where the woman was being held. By now she’d calmed down, and in fact she’d clammed up. Gone
silent. Not a word. She didn’t ask for a lawyer. She didn’t proclaim her innocence. She didn’t even mention the Sheikh she’d been ranting about earlier.
“So I fly all the way here and you no longer want to talk? Come on. Now I’m curious. What’s your story?” Benson said, squinting as he tried to make eye contact with the strikingly beautiful blonde woman with the sharp, sand-colored eyes. “Hey, listen. You want your story to have a happy ending? Well, your only shot is to begin talking. Or else you’re gonna rot in a cell labeled Jane Doe. You’re in my world now, you understand? I’m the only one who can change the ending to your story, you hear? I’m the—”
“All right,” she said quietly, an almost unnerving look in her eye, like she knew something Benson didn’t. “But it’s a long story. How much time you got?”
∞
THE FORBIDDEN SCENES
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BY ANNABELLE WINTERS
THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (USA)
Curves for the Sheikh
Flames for the Sheikh
Hostage for the Sheikh
Single for the Sheikh
Stockings for the Sheikh
Untouched for the Sheikh
Surrogate for the Sheikh
THE CURVES FOR SHEIKHS SERIES (UK)
Curves for the Sheikh (UK)
Flames for the Sheikh (UK)
Hostage for the Sheikh (UK)
Single for the Sheikh (UK)
Stockings for the Sheikh (UK)
Untouched for the Sheikh (UK)
Surrogate for the Sheikh (UK)
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Stars for the Sheikh_A Royal Billionaire Romance Novel Page 24