He dropped onto the couch and pulled off his shoes. It seemed like an incredible task, to take his clothes off and get into bed, and Raed sipped at the sparkling water and tried to steady himself. He had never felt so bleak and empty. All the life and warmth had been sucked out of him. All the drive.
What would it be like at the palace without Lise and Jake? What would it be like for them to be far away, out of his reach? His life wouldn’t be the same. He’d thought he could keep things separate. He’d thought he could keep his heart separate from his ambitions, and it was a horrible lie.
He put down the glass and stood up, his body aching. This was what Lise had chosen. She had wanted the job in London, and she’d deserved it, and she had taken it without a second glance.
No—that wasn’t true. And it was cowardly. He’d chosen it for them. He’d told her as much.
His phone buzzed with a message reminding him of the meeting in the morning. It was much too close for comfort and not enough time to truly lose himself in sleep, but Raed made his way to the bedroom anyway. He fell into the bed. For the first time, it felt vast—too vast. As if Lise should be sleeping beside him right now.
The next buzz from his phone seemed to happen only a minute later, and he swiped at where it sat on the bedside table. It fell to the floor, clattering under the bed, and he leaned down with his eyes still closed to get it. Who was texting him in the middle of the night? By the time the smooth glass met his palm, he was already hoping it would be Lise. It didn’t matter if he was in London and if she was packing. They could have a conversation.
But it was a message from Stephen, asking him if he was up. Whether he was dressed.
Raed tossed down the phone and swiped at his eyes, waiting to feel the familiar surge of adrenaline that usually accompanied business meetings like this.
It didn’t come.
He took himself to the shower and into a fresh set of clothes, as empty as he’d ever felt, and went down to the hotel’s luxury breakfast bar to meet Maria Castro-Martinez. Maria, in a bright red dress and blazer, looked like she’d been awake for hours. She probably had. At the conference they’d attended, she’d mentioned her habit of four a.m. workouts. She liked to get a head start on the day. Usually, Raed was that kind of person, too. Today, the briefcase felt heavy in his hands.
Maria had already finished eating by the time he took his place next to her at the bar, but the bartender was sliding a fresh cup of tea in front of her.
“Raed.” Her eyes lit up with her characteristic laser focus. “I’m glad you could make it. I was a little surprised when we couldn’t connect in Dubai, but obviously I was able to pull some strings.”
“I’m grateful for it.” Where was the adrenaline? Where was the energy? “Unfortunate circumstances.”
Maria sipped her tea, then flipped open a portfolio she’d brought with her. “I thought we would talk before you meet with Raoul. Sound good?”
“Perfect.” He slipped some papers from his briefcase and stacked them on the bar. Raed had been talking about the foundation and its goals for years, but now the words didn’t come. He scanned over the papers. Nothing written there particularly inspired him. It was as if the trip away from Lise had sapped him of his will.
Maria patiently sipped her tea.
The facts and figures rearranged themselves into something resembling a pitch for Raoul, and Raed cleared his throat. He could feel Maria’s energy. She was high-powered and thorough and never left anything to chance, hence this meeting. Hence everything. At one point, Raed had considered poaching her for the foundation. Maria even had the perfect look—attractive, bright-eyed, ideal. But flipping through these papers, he felt like a chasm had expanded between them.
He flipped one over, then the next, waiting for the right words to appear. They hung back.
“What’s that?” Maria tapped a fingernail on the back of one of the papers. “Did your assistant forget how to print clean copies?”
Raed’s face heated. The marks were in pen, but they were Jake’s big, looping circles. He didn’t have good control over writing instruments yet, but he’d been so enthusiastic about it, and when Lise had seen his drawing she’d been just as thrilled. She had found his drawings on the back of her papers, too, and had hung several up on the fridge. They fluttered in the breeze every time she opened the refrigerator door.
She had smiled at them every time.
And what had Raed done?
He’d smiled, too. When Jake played under his desk in his office and popped up with another masterpiece, Raed had added little drawings alongside his son’s. Even here, his notes were in the margins, leaving space for Jake’s curling swoops. And he was sitting at a luxury breakfast bar at seven in the morning. For a meeting.
Lise wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t have scheduled a thing until an hour after Jake’s wake-up time. There was always time for her son, even while she focused on her career.
A shiver moved over his skin. Raed had never been in the wrong place at the wrong time so definitively before. As a member of the royal family, wherever he went was the correct place for him to be. Now the world was off-balance, and he felt vaguely ill. Part of that was from the early hour, no doubt, but more than anything he wanted Lise.
He wanted her by his side. No—he wanted to be by her side. In a home they shared together. In a life they shared together. What mattered more than that? A meeting with a man who would only see his foundation for the prestige he might gain from it, not what it could do for people around the world? No.
Raed put the stack of papers down and pulled out his phone. Miguel Paredes had been the one to shadow him at the palace for that article, but the woman writing it—that was Solange Cipriani, one of the head writers at Tempo.
“Do you have a call at this hour?” Maria’s voice cut into his thoughts.
“No,” he answered. He didn’t have a call. It was still too early to get ahold of Solange, but he had to do something, and her name was the first one to come to mind. She was a member of the media. Her magazine would reach people all over the world. He wanted to tell everyone he could reach about how he felt for Lise.
Raed’s heart came back to life, beating painfully. There. There was the feeling he’d been searching for all morning. Blood coursed through his veins, chasing away the numbness, chasing after her. He wouldn’t be able to rest until he could see her again. Fine—he might be able to doze off here and there, but all of him cried out to be next to Lise. Every cell. Every nerve. He flexed his shoes on the barstool and tried to convince himself not to run for her.
Running wouldn’t do any good. Raed could run all he wanted, but until he had proof...
“Raed.”
“You’ll have to give me a moment.”
Maria shifted beside him, obviously unhappy. She put her hands around her teacup and assumed a relaxed position that reminded him more of a cobra pretending it wasn’t about to strike. “Should we reschedule? If you’re too busy to meet with Raoul—”
“A moment, Maria.” His thumbs flew over the screen of his phone. An urgent email would have to do. Waking Solange up in the middle of the night—he wasn’t even sure where in the US she was based, let alone what time it might be there—wouldn’t get him anywhere, but asking for her help at a reasonable hour would. He poured himself into the email, the story coming out in bursts—shortened, of course, but still true. It was the most vulnerable he’d ever been with the press.
And, Raed was surprised to find, it felt better than all the hiding.
The tension he’d felt when Miguel was doing background hadn’t been because Lise wasn’t right for him. It had been because he was in denial about her being perfect for him. He hadn’t known how to tell the world—how to admit to himself—that plans had changed. But plans did change. Lise proved that to him by working in the palace as an English instructor. She had pivoted to a new project right in front of him, and Raed had dismissed it as a convenience. He’d viewed himself as the
one doing her favors, but in fact it had been Lise who was teaching him.
And Jake.
How could he ever have gotten on that plane without trying to solve things with her? How could he ever have let her walk into that café with his son and not even squeezed them goodbye?
Raed stood up from the bar, and Maria followed him, eyes wide and disapproving. “Are you leaving?”
Think. Think. With more money, the foundation could pay for more projects in Qasha. He could pivot the whole presentation to focus on local investments. Make pilot projects out of more targeted plans for the city of Qasharouz and the surrounding countryside. He could truly look at the city and what it needed.
And it was still seven in the morning.
He sat back down.
“No,” he told Maria. “I’m not leaving. But things change.”
Her eyes brightened. Maria had come here to do a job, but last-minute repositioning was her forte. Whatever was going to happen in that meeting room, she needed to know about it.
And now that Raed finally knew, it would be easier to say it. Everything would be easier, now that the decision had been made and he wasn’t agonizing over wanting the wrong thing.
“Forget what I told you before. This is different.”
20
Lise sat in her mother’s office, watching her type furiously on the laptop perched on her desk. It was a brief visit, but it had stretched on because Ingeborg was always busy. “So I’ve come back here to do the interview,” she said.
The typing paused. “You’ve done very well for yourself,” her mother said, then resumed typing. “There were times when I thought you might not get over the blip of the last two years, but this promotion is a good thing. You’ll be able to get a live-in nanny and right-hand assistant like I had when you were growing up. Who’s Jake with now? Have you interviewed anyone yet?”
“He’s with Portia.” Lise named the cousin who had babysat Jake before, when they lived in London. More words crowded her tongue. Lise wanted to explain the lingering doubt that she felt about leaving the palace so suddenly, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the simplest sentence: I’m not sure I made the right choice. “And, you know, I’m not sure that would be the greatest—”
“It’ll be wonderful.” Ingeborg looked at her with tired eyes, and not for the first time Lise noticed how much the high-powered job and the constant work took out of her mother. No matter how much concealer her mother wore, Lise knew when she had bags under her eyes. “You’ll be able to have everything you’ve ever wanted.”
Was that what she wanted? Looking back on her own childhood, the nanny had coordinated everything about Lise’s life—and her brother’s. She had been the one to arrange sports practice and play dates and most bedtimes. Her mother had hired all that out. And Lise didn’t begrudge her that. Some women wanted a career like her mother’s. But maybe Lise didn’t want that. In fact, she knew she didn’t want that.
“I wanted what I had in Qasha,” she said lightly. “I loved seeing the pilot project come to life. There was change within the palace and better access to education. It just wasn’t on a multinational scale.”
And I got to see my son. Her son had been there in the mornings and the evenings, and she’d been able to hug him between classes and have lunch together. With the big promotion, that wouldn’t be on the table anymore. She’d have to leave him with the nanny all day and into the evening—that was just how it was at the office if she wanted to keep climbing.
And climbing and climbing and climbing. For what? “It would be magnified if the school in Qasha got its own premises,” Lise said over the sound of her mother’s typing. “More staff. A whole building, even. Really, I loved it there in Qasha. I loved the people that I met and how everyone loved Jake—”
“When’s your new start date?” Ingeborg said, stretching out her fingers and putting them back on the keyboard. “I’ve heard that the best nannies are booked far in advance, so if your date is soon, then I might need to pull some strings for you.” The phone on her desk rang. “Just a minute, honey.”
Lise stood up as her mother answered the call and paced toward the big windows in her corner office. There was still lots of time before the interview. Still plenty of time to look out over the city, which was gray and rainy, the way it always was in London except for a precious few weeks in high summer. Traffic rushed by below her mother’s building, the cars stopping and going and skidding up to one another and honking. The people on the street hurried this way and that, separated by the black expanses of their umbrellas.
None of them stopped to talk to each other.
That could be because of the rain, but it was always rainy in London. Here, people just didn’t connect with each other the way they did in Qasha. It had seemed real there in a way that Lise hadn’t felt in the UK. Real, because her days were not constrained by the mad dash from home to daycare to her office and back again. There had been time to take a breath, if not slow down. No, never slowing down. There was too much to do.
Especially with Raed.
Who hadn’t really given her the option to stay.
Lise watched a man cross the street at the crosswalk, his head bent against the rain. Sure, he had let her stay in the guest house, and he hadn’t put an end date on the pilot project. But there had been an end date, just as sure as anything else. A man like Raed didn’t enter into things without an exit strategy.
He’d never quite needed an exit strategy with Lise, had he? They hadn’t been together. Not officially. He had started to develop a relationship with his son, but he certainly hadn’t fought for it.
Not for the first time since she’d landed in London, tears made Lise’s throat ache. She’d had high hopes. Very high hopes. And no, she hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself or to anyone else. She had only allowed herself to sink into life in the palace with Raed’s mother and all the people who moved through their days with them. Lise had let herself picture the way a future might be, more than once, and that daydreaming hadn’t come to anything.
Daydreaming never did.
Only action amounted to anything. And now there were choices in front of her. The promotion or job hunting in London. Going back to Qasha wouldn’t happen for a long time, if it ever happened at all.
She felt a pang, thinking of keeping Jake from Nenet. Maybe they could figure out a middle ground—some meeting place halfway between their respective homes. Lise laughed a little, thinking of Nenet traveling so far away from home. The scene struggled to resolve. Nenet belonged in her palace, with her cats and her gardens. She didn’t belong to the rest of the world.
Lise shook herself out of those thoughts and gave her mother a wave goodbye. Ingeborg was still talking into the phone, her face animated but her eyes tired. She gave Lise a thumbs up as she went out.
Yes, she thought. Good job, Lise. You’re so happy to be here.
21
The relief Lise felt after the interview with her boss at Lafayette was as palpable as a summer breeze. She could feel the weight that had been lifted off her shoulders. Every breath felt easier, lighter. There was nothing she couldn’t do. And, for once, the clouds above London had broken open and sun spilled down onto the street.
She dug in her purse for her cell phone. Her mother would have to know first.
But before she could dial, a notification from her email app popped up.
Lise didn’t recognize the name, only the magazine: Tempo. The message was from an inbox within the company, not an advertisement.
Huh.
Curiosity got the better of her, and she stepped to the edge of the sidewalk nearest the building, tucking herself in in case someone wanted to pass by. Lise opened the message. It was a forward of a forward and a rough draft attached. Ah—Raed’s big interview. She hadn’t thought about it since she’d left Qasha. It was sure to be a bigger deal for him than for her, but then—why would they send it to her? She read the single line of text.
�
��Here’s a courtesy advance copy of the article, in which you are quoted. We hope you enjoy the read! –Miguel”
Lise opened the file and tapped her foot impatiently while she waited for the document to load. It had already been set into a layout, and she had to zoom in to read it. This wasn’t exactly a rough draft, but it was early—the images were mostly placeholders, and no advertisements had been put into the sidebars. Her heart clenched at the sight of his name. The one photo they were sure of was of Raed, sitting behind his desk and looking as powerful and handsome as he had the first time she’d seen him.
He had always seemed that way, even as one of her students.
She swallowed hard, not wanting to read the words he said, but not wanting to give them up, either. Lise tried to calm the wild beating of her heart as she scanned through the article. Pretend it’s just another news item. Yes. That’s it. Ignore that photo. Ignore the way his eyes leap from the page.
The first time she read it through, almost nothing registered, so Lise took a deep breath and started again.
And was shocked to find that it wasn’t the same language Raed had used to talk about his foundation at all.
It was a different story entirely.
He’d spoken with the head writer not long after the background research had been completed, and she wrote about her surprise at hearing the changes to his plans. Almost nothing matched up with what they’d learned in background. It had changed. Raed had changed.
Lise needed to sit down.
She moved down the block and dropped onto a bench, leaning over her phone to read more carefully.
The Sheikh’s Unexpected Son: The Blooming Desert Series Book Three Page 13