Sheikh's Ex-Girlfriend (Khayyam Sheikh Series #1) (8 page)

Nasim shook his head. “This deal is exactly what I thought it was going to be, my friend. It is a pain in the ass that is going through some seriously twisting and turning machinations, but in the end, it is going to be something that we are grateful for, and that perhaps even our children will be grateful for whenever we have them.”

Marid made a face. “Here we are having a fine time wrestling foreign policy, and you have to bring our legacy into it. I suppose your mother has been pressuring you to find more suitable girls lately?”

Nasim sat up, an uncomfortable feeling of surprise in his belly. “Not at all. Why would you say that?”

Marid raised an eyebrow at his friend. “Well, I have known you for years, and even after you became the sheikh, I have never heard you say a single word about needing to look ahead for your children. I honestly thought that that was perhaps your mother's doing …”

Nasim scowled. “If I have been thinking about it, it is not because of my mother. If anything, it is because of Ella.”

“The American?”

“
Yes,
the American,” Nasim snapped. “You do not have to speak like that when you are the one who happened to tell me that she was in Dalal and all but engineered a meeting between us.”

Marid grinned a little. “I wanted you to have a little fun, not to decide that you need to start looking at your dynasty and your bloodline. I take it that it's going well?”

“Ella is
not
a 'little fun,' damn you. She's the only woman I've been unable to stop thinking about for more than a handful of moments since I met her, and now that she is a part of my life again, I will not have you implying that she's some kind of fleeting pleasure!”

The teasing look fell off of Marid's face, and as Nasim glared at him, he looked over his friend more closely. “Nasim … this seems to have gotten a little more serious than I was aware of.”

“You're damn right it has,” Nasim said with a sigh, passing his hand over his face. Suddenly, he felt as if he were a hundred years old. He knew that life was never as easy as he would wish it to be, and sometimes, very rarely these days, he could put off thinking about it. Perhaps that was what he had been doing with Ella, but at the thought of anything else, his mind rebelled.

Marid came and sat down next to him, honest concern on his face. Sometimes it was strange to remember that he could be this serious or this worried.

“I know you have a good memory,” Marid started slowly. “I don't think you have forgotten what happened five years ago.”

“I cannot forget it,” Nasim growled. “It haunts me, and sometimes, when I see how it affects her to have been so rejected, it's like a pain I cannot escape from.”

“So what has changed?” Marid asked. “If anything, things are more complicated now. You're not just a third son who can mostly go his own way. You are the sheikh, and the responsibilities that keep us in check are such that you cannot simply do as you please.”

“Now who's talking like a matchmaking granny? You sound like an old hardliner who thinks we should close our gates to the world.”

“No, I'm being practical,” Marid said. “Look, we both know I like my fun, but at the end of the day, I know what my responsibilities are. Sometime in the next, oh, say five or ten years? I will find a good Aranai girl who comes from the right family and has the right connections. We'll have a highly publicized courtship, we'll marry, and she'll bear me a few probably adorable children.”

Nasim stared at him. “Sometimes I forget that you've been raised to be sheikh since the day you were born. You sound a little monstrous right now.”

Marid grinned. “Merely practical, my friend. But believe me, if you decide that you want to make Ella more than a little bit of fun? You need to be ready for the rest that comes with it, and that begins and ends with your family.”

At Nasim's pained look, he nodded.

“I see that you take my meaning. Your American is wonderful, my friend, and I have known this for years. She is brilliant, she is beautiful, and she makes you as happy as ever a man was. However, she is an American, and you are the sheikh of Khayyam. There is a rift between you as wide as the Black Sea.”

Nasim shook his head. He knew that everything his friend was saying to him was correct, but he didn't think he could stand to talk about it any longer.

“So what's stopping you from simply lying down in the harness?” he asked. “If you know that your life is going to lead straight to a good Aranai girl who will give you adorable children, why don't you get right on that?”

“Oh, unlike you, I don't mind having my little bit of fun. If I have to spend too long in stuffy protocol meetings, I don't want to come home to a prim miss who wants to talk about household matters all day. At the moment, I'm looking for a fling, someone passionate who will delight me and allow herself to be delighted in return.”

Nasim shook his head. “You are going to hurt someone else and get badly hurt yourself if you are not careful,” he said, but he knew that it was no use. Marid was like a juggernaut in some ways, and when he was intent on something, little in the world could stop him.

“I know what I want,” Marid responded. “At the moment, all I can hope is that you figure things out sooner rather than later.”

At that moment, Nasim's phone chimed at him. He had a text, and when he looked down, he realized with a pang how excited he could be simply seeing her name.

No problem at all, I just miss you a ton. Please take care of yourself, and let me know when you want to meet next!

He sighed, and though he might not have told Marid this, his friend was right. They were careening towards some inevitable ending, and if they were not cautious, someone was going to be hurt.

***

Hundreds of miles away, in her office in the Old Quarter, Ella hit send before she could add
I love you
to the message. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world, but perhaps it was too much?

Her relationship with Nasim was like a dream in some cases. They danced around the question of sexual intimacy as if it were a loaded gun, but everywhere else, they simply flowed towards each other, completing each other in ways that they didn't realize were missing. He was the first thing she thought of in the morning, and the last thing she thought of at night.

In between, she talked about her feelings with Emmaline, who seemed to be getting more and more nervous with every passing day.

I hope you know what you're doing,
her sister had written.
You tell me he's changed, but this is what I remember from New York. You were so happy. You were so in love, and then …

 And then she had run face first into the reality of his position. She had seen for herself that he wasn't just a single man. He was a man with a history rooted deep in a very traditional family. She had had slurs flung into her face by a man who couldn't look beyond her heritage to see what lay behind it. Sometimes, she could still picture Azim's face, and though she knew he was dead, she felt a little trickle of fear.

With just one well-timed tirade, he had ended everything that she had built her hopes on. The man was dead, but the world that built him was very much alive, and sometimes, she wondered when she was going to meet it again.

She sighed, putting her thoughts away, because after all, she was in Dalal to do a job. Today she had a series of manuscripts in front of her. Amira has pulled them out of the slush pile as having some serious promise, but even still, perhaps only one out of seventy would go on to be published. Perhaps one out of fifty after that would achieve some success.

Ella lost herself in the stories that were in front of her. In some ways, they were universal. People across the world wanted the same things. They wanted to be safe. They wanted to be acknowledged, and they wanted to be loved. Sometimes, they would do terrible things to keep what they had. Sometimes, they would allow terrible things to be done to them.

She dismissed two manuscripts fairly quickly, but the third seized her by the throat and would not let her go. It was a love story, one set some four hundred years ago in Khayyam. Ella couldn't help but think of the fortress that she and Nasim had visited just a few weeks ago, but here, instead of an empty and desolate ruin, it was a vivid and thriving place, the prize by conquest of a man who had carved a country out of sand and water.

Ella barely looked at the time as she kept on reading, and she realized very quickly that this was a story that they absolutely had to have. She could see herself as the protagonist, a young woman who had come to the stone fortress in a sea of sand to better herself, and she could see even more of Nasim in the man who had rose up from obscurity to create a better world than the one he had been born to.

The story was a dark one. She knew from the beginning that it could not have a happy ending, and if there was one, it would make the rest of the book feel like a cheat. Before she reached the end, she put the manuscript down, marking it with a note that said that this was one that must be kept.

Ella realized that she was shaking a little. The book would be stunning. As long as the writer had not done something extremely stupid in the last fifty pages, it was going to be a classic. It might be the pride of her career that she had found it. It was more than that, however.

Ella had never been a particularly suspicious woman. She had always been someone who was practical, down to earth. She didn't believe in signs, or at least, she hadn't until that moment. However, what the writer and the world seemed to be telling her was clear as day.

If you have love, love. It is truly that simple.

 She didn't know where she and Nasim would be in the future. She didn't know what they were going to do with each other or what they needed. She didn't know where they would end up or what would happen to them in the long run.

All she knew was how they felt today. All she knew was the love they had this moment, and from the core of her being stretching out to the tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet, she knew that was enough.

 Ella stepped carefully away from the manuscripts. If Nasim was going to be away for a few days, that gave her some time. She had work to do.

***

His plane had gotten in late enough that it wasn't really practical to go see Ella. A part of him protested that it wouldn't matter that much, that she would be pleased to see him, but he sternly reminded himself that she was an independent woman who likely would not enjoy being roused from her bed at three in the morning. Instead, he contented himself with a text telling her that he would see her first thing in the morning, and collapsed into his bed at the penthouse apartment he kept in Dalal.

He awoke just a handful of hours later, surprisingly alert and with a reply.

I'm looking forward to seeing you. There's no work I need to do today, so just come up to my apartment when you get here. There's no such thing as too early.

 Nasim blinked. She had been neck-deep in submissions when he had last spoken to her, but he supposed that publishing had its low and high tides like anything else. He showered, dressed, and dropped by their favorite bakery before he drove to her apartment.

There was something bittersweet about this kind of intimacy, he thought wryly. It was what you would expect out of a married couple, though perhaps not one where the male was the most powerful man in the country. Sometimes, it startled him how much he relished moments like this. Suddenly, he wasn't Sheikh Nasim Bakkal. He was simply a man who loved a woman and who wished to bring her baked goods.

The smells coming from the bag were warm and sweet, and as he ascended the steps to her apartment, he thought about what they might do that day. There were so many nooks and corners of Dalal that she had never been to, and he wanted nothing more than to explore them with her.

At his first knock, the door opened, and Nasim's jaw dropped. If he had been a man with lesser reflexes, he might have dropped the bakery bag entirely.

Ella stood in the doorway, and instead of the trousers and blouses she favored in New York, or the flowing tunics that she had come to enjoy in Dalal, she was dressed only in a sheer flowing robe of transparent white. The robe covered her from neck to knees, but through it, he was able to make out the traces of an embroidered bra and panties.

“Ella?”

“Please,” she said softly. “Won't you come in?”

***

Nasim looked as if he had been struck with a hammer on her doorstep. She would have laughed if there hadn't been a large number of butterflies fluttering in her stomach.

Never taking his eyes off of her, he stepped inside, closing the door, and locking it behind him without looking.

“Ella … I need to know exactly what you are doing.”

She felt a stab of disappointment. She looked down at the outfit, blushing hard. It had seemed like such a wonderful idea when she was at the lingerie store, but every day it had hung in her closet, she had felt herself getting shyer and more nervous. All of the confidence she had had disappeared like mist burned away in the sunlight. The feelings she had were still there, but all of the self-assurance she had felt like it was draining away by the moment.

“If it's not obvious, I think I need to go make a complaint at the lingerie store,” she joked lamely.

Before she could even get the words quite out of her mouth, Nasim had swept her up in his arms, crushing her to his chest with a strength that was just short of punishing. She could feel the tension vibrating through his body, and she could feel his erection pressed against her hip. There could be no doubt in the world that he wanted her.

“Stop,” he murmured. “Please. I need to know what is going through that delightful head of yours. You look like the sum of my heavenly rewards come to earth, and I need to know that you are real, that you are here with me. Please tell me what is on your mind.”

“It doesn't matter what's on my mind,” Ella said honestly. “What matters right now is in my heart, and what is in my heart is a pure need for you. All I want is you, Nasim. I don't want anything between us. I don't want us to pretend to be something that we are not. I have never stopped loving you, do you understand? I have never stopped.”