The Sheikh's American Baby (The Sheikh's Every Wish Book 5) (6 page)

“Yes,” he said. “So much of life, when you’re young, is trying to prove your parents wrong. Finding out that they’re capable of being wrong seems like it should be a victory. But I’ve been learning more and more, these last few years, that it isn’t.”

There it was again, that vulnerability. He had this great big wall of secrecy around him, and it was taunting her. The Sheikh was confident and imposing, in so many ways, and yet there was this pain at the core of him that she could see him wanting to share with her, if only she could persuade him she was worth sharing it with.

As they eased gently toward the topic of his father, she felt as though he were letting her closer and closer to that place. She was certain they were just about to start speaking about him, when Abdul stood up, as though he had remembered something.

“I have something to show you,” he said, with a distant look about him.

EIGHT

Lucie hesitated as she looked at the Sheikh, buzzing slightly from the alcohol, comfortable and warm by the fire and beneath the stars.

But then he held his hand out, to help her up.

She melted. Her hand flew up, as though she had no say in it. She had no control over it at all: wherever he invited her, she would follow.

She tried not to think that way, as he led her out of the room and down the hall. She tried not to think about the way the fabric of his clothing revealed and then concealed his form underneath. She tried not to get a little distracted every time he looked back, and she saw his eyes light up in the glow of the chandeliers they passed.

He was bringing her through the palace. They had been up on the roof, and now he was taking her down, floor by floor. But it must have been a very indirect route, for they went down tiny back stairways, and through passageways that Lucie wasn’t sure were supposed to be known about. There were countless rooms; bedrooms, libraries, studies, but the Sheikh barely seemed to glance at them as they went further and further down.

He didn’t mention the portraits on the walls, either. He’d have seen them all his life, Lucie realized—he probably barely noticed them anymore. But to Lucie, they stuck out. There was a similarity to all the faces. They were all family, certainly. She could see Abdul’s cheekbones in one, his eyes in another.

They were mostly great big groups posing together. There were almost none that featured just one or two people. It was huge families, all looking like their lives were a little bit chaotic, but very full.

When they had been on the move for a while, Lucie began to notice that she was no longer catching glances of the night outside through the windows. The realization crept over her that they almost certainly had been going down further than eight stories.

Her suspicions were confirmed when they went through a final door, wedged secretively behind an old piano, that led to a tiny, winding staircase that brought them into the darkness below the palace.

“Oh!” Abdul said, barely visible in the dim light from the door at the top of the stairwell. “I’ve forgotten the light!”

As he started feeling his way around the walls, Lucie mentally said a little prayer of thanks to whatever ancient deity had given her pockets in this dress and fished out her phone, turning on the flashlight and helping him. It felt good, she thought, to be able to lend a hand. Especially when he flashed her a winning, grateful smile once the shock of the light spilling into the dark had worn off.

By the light of the phone, he found what he had been looking for: a torch laying on a stone shelf, complete with a lighter next to it.

Lucie realized that it would have been practical for him to leave a flashlight down here, not a torch. But then, coming down to a secret place under the palace wasn’t about practicalities.

It was about the sense of adventure.

And so, when the torch was lit, Lucie extinguished her flashlight and followed Abdul into the dark.

As they went, she made out the walls of a passageway in front of them. It was sometimes wider, sometimes narrower. She could see the stonework from the tools that had been used to cut the passageway out, and could tell by the markings that it had been here for a long time.

In the torch light, everything took on a mysterious, adventurous feel. It was still fairly dark outside the immediate vicinity of the fire, so Lucie found she had to cling to Abdul’s arm to keep herself from chancing a fall.

Not that she minded. In spite of her own better judgement, she enjoyed how it felt to touch him, here in the dark where she dared.

She got the sense, as they went, that they had gone a lot further forward that the walls of the palace above. They were no longer beneath the building—unless she’d drunk a lot more of the homemade honey liquor than she’d thought.

“What was this made for?” she asked, whispering in the dark, even though there was no chance of them being overheard.

“No one knows,” he whispered back. “My father showed it to me when I was a child. And his father before him.”

She didn’t need to ask him why he had not opened the tunnel to archaeologists or historians, the way he was doing with the rest of his country.

When they’d been walking for a few minutes, the Sheikh began to slow down.

“It’s somewhere around here...” he muttered to himself in Arabic, and Lucie was struck by how much fuller and smoother his voice sounded in his native language.

She didn’t have time to linger on that thought, though, as Abdul appeared to have found what he was looking for.

“Here!” he said. “Look at that.”

Lucie squinted, and looked at the wall. It was hard, at first, to make out what she was supposed to be seeing, but then the realization struck her.

“Trilobites!” she said, more loudly than the intended. The sound carried far, echoing off the hard stone walls of the corridor.

“Yes,” he said, quietly, amused by her joy.

They stood and looked at the fossils for a while. There must have been a great many in the area beneath the palace, Lucie thought, for whoever created the tunnel to have come across so many.

After a few minutes, growing tired of squinting in the dark light, they continued down the tunnel. Lucie thought they would go back, but the Sheikh just kept leading them forward, and there wasn’t even the slightest impulse in her to question why.

At long last, she began to notice the tunnel slowly curving up towards the surface. A gentle breeze from somewhere hit her face, and she could see it making the torchlight flicker.

Finally, they came up among an outcrop of rocks. Abdul had to push one aside to allow them to pass, and Lucie’s surprise at his strength much have been written on her face, because he assured her it wasn’t as heavy as it looked.

Lucie took stock of where they were. They’d gotten quite a way from the palace, though they didn’t feel separated from it, as the area where they had come up was connected to the grounds by long, meandering gardens. They were on the edge of the oasis, here, and Lucie could almost have forgotten that they were in a desert at all, with the water on one side, and the trees, flowering bushes, and palace on the other.

“Shall we head back?” the Sheikh asked, offering his arm.

Lucie hesitated. Down in the tunnel, in the light of the torch, taking his arm had seemed like the most natural thing to do. Now that they had joined back up with the real world, it no longer felt that way.

Up here, he was a king, and she a student. Going arm in arm through the gardens, illuminated only by the moonlight, seemed absurd.

She had to remember who she was. She had to remember that, for all the ways she had cracked into their world through sheer determination, she would never really be one of them.

He sensed her hesitation, and strode forward, confidently. Her misgivings at taking his arm didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest, although if wishful thinking could be indulged, Lucie thought she saw just the slightest tinge of disappointment on his face.

So she followed him, off into the moonlight.

“So, I think I know where your interest in archeology came from,” she said, when they had gone along for a while, engulfed by the sweet scents of the desert garden.

“Oh, yes,” he said, as though he’d already forgotten it. “The tunnel.”

Lucie laughed. “I was going to say Indiana Jones, actually, just based on the torch.”

Her laughter, joined quickly by his, carried out over the still night.

“I guess that’s fair. I can’t say that
wasn’t
what it was. I don’t remember all that much from early on. My early childhood is all a bit of a blur.”

He said the words simply, as though he didn’t recognize the minefield just beyond them. Lucie did, but she wandered in, anyway.

“Because of your mother?”

His stride drew a little slower, and a little closer to her.

“Yes. But not just her. It was… it was more than that. To lose her and my sister in the same day…”

Lucie nodded, though more for a lack of knowing what to do than because she understood what it must have been like. She didn’t think she
could
understand.

Lucie had never lost anyone important to her. In that way, she figured, she’d always been blessed. When she’d looked into the modern history of Al-Brehoni, she had come across an article about the queen and the only princess of the royal family having died of a quick-acting fever, some twenty-five years before she’d read about it. It had been a perfunctory article, written on the anniversary of their deaths. Just a remark on how much time had passed, and how the nation still mourned, etc. etc.

But meeting Abdul, the truth of those few sentences, read on a dreary afternoon, finally hit home.

“They wanted to have many children,” Abdul said, drawing still closer. “My father told me that once, when I’d asked why I didn’t have more brothers and sisters in such a big house. He said they were going to have them, but they were both so young. They thought they had time.”

They walked along towards the palace, their steps now very slow and in sync.

“It’s a beautiful home you have,” she said, looking up at him. “But it is very big.”

He nodded, and then directed his glance forward, back at the building ahead.

They went in silence for a while.

“It’s good to speak,” he said eventually. “It’s good to be able to talk.”

The words were simple, but Lucie thought back to how she had felt talking to him all that day and all that night, and she knew exactly what he meant.

They were so close, now, she could have sworn she had taken his arm back by the entrance to the tunnel after all, were it not for the electric tension she felt between his skin and hers. They were so close, and yet, held so far apart by the impossibility of connection.

She couldn’t touch him. It would be inappropriate. It would be unacceptable. If it ever came out, she’d be a laughing stock. She’d never be taken seriously in her career if she was seen as the type of girl who fell for the rulers of the countries she worked in.

She knew all of these things, and frantically held on to them in her mind, afraid that, if she didn’t, they would evaporate and leave her with no reason to keep herself from reaching out and slipping her arm through his, the way he had offered just a few minutes ago.

But then she felt his touch, his fingers grazing her forearm. It was a thoughtless, accidental movement, and he withdrew immediately as she froze in her tracks. But it was too late. It was like he had sent an electric shock straight from his fingers to her heart, which had begun beating wildly and out of control. Her palms felt wet and her face felt hot.

People like him got what they wanted. They always did. They got the houses, and the fame, and the fortune. Things were easy for them. She could never have what she wanted. Not really. Not with him.

But she could kiss him, just this once.

She stepped forward, already in shock of the boldness of her own impending action. But the wheels were in motion and she could not stop them. She raised up onto the tips of her toes, and put her hands firmly on his shoulders, leaning her whole body forwards and bringing her lips to his.

The same electricity that had run through her with the touch of his fingers ran through her again, only so much more. Her mind was consumed with the white-hot electricity of the connection, and when she closed her eyes, she swore she could see fireworks behind them.

And then, like the ballast on a balloon, the gravity of her actions weighed on her and brought her back to earth. The mantra she’d been repeating just moments before began yelling in her ears. She mumbled something. An apology, she meant it to be. But she could barely hear over the thumping of her heart and her own sickening regret.