The Sheikh's Green Card Bride (19 page)

EIGHT

Juliette spent the bulk of her day making her final preparations to leave. It would be better when she was home and could put all this behind her, she thought. The day before, she’d anticipated that packing her bags would be a long, onerous process. But now, as she went through the motions, she only felt numb.

She settled her accounts with her roommates, and told them what she’d be leaving behind in the apartment, and that they were welcome to keep it. She said goodbye to them. They were still students, and she’d felt close to them during her time here. The day before she’d thought that she would end up crying when she said goodbye, but today, she couldn’t quite summon the emotion. These people were no longer the ones she would think of when she thought of her time in Italy.

And, again, she found herself hating Giancarlo; not for lying, this time, but for replacing everything she thought was going to be significant about her memories of this place. He didn’t deserve the primacy in her mind that she was giving him, nor did she think there was any way she would be able to take it away from him.

She went to lunch with a college friend, who was waxing nostalgic about her leaving. She checked and rechecked her flights, and did her online check-in. She performed all the little rituals of leaving.

And yet, somehow, when the time came to go to the airport, she still felt surprised that it was actually happening. She called a cab, and thanked the cab driver for helping her put her heavy suitcases in the back.

“Where to?” he asked her, in Italian, from the front.

She was about to tell him to go straight to the airport, but the words caught in her throat.

“To the Fountain of Neptune,” she said.

The driver shot her a curious glance, and Juliette realized it probably sounded odd that she would be packing up all her bags and not leaving.

“And then to the airport,” she added, with more sadness in her voice than she had expected.

The driver nodded, and pulled away.

This was more like the city as she remembered it: as one of the people, from a standard cab. Juliette drank in every detail of every building. The melancholy she had felt yesterday, after she’d turned in the last of her assignments, began to steal over her, and she once again began to regret that this chapter of her life was over.

When they reached the Fountain of Neptune, Juliette told the driver to slow down, and not to stop. She hunched down in her seat. She had her doubts, even now, that Giancarlo would show. If he was there, she didn’t want him to see her. It would be better that way. Easier for both of them.

When she didn’t see him, she was surprised by the rush of anger that coursed through her veins. She didn’t intend to meet him, and she’d given no indication to him, earlier, that she did. It was completely understandable that he would change his mind.

But the idea that he had changed his mind seemed wrong to her. It seemed insulting, in some way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. And it seemed, in that moment, like everything she had angrily thought about him since finding out about his lie to her had been confirmed.

“Do you want me to go around again?” the cab driver asked.

Juliette said yes without thinking, and then wished she hadn’t. More time spent looking at the fountain where the man she hadn’t thought she needed to see wouldn’t be wasn’t going to make it any better.

But then, just as they were completing the second drive-by, Juliette saw him.

He was dressed differently than he had been the day before. He was dressed more like she imagined a modern-day prince usually dressed. And when she managed to pull her eyes from him, to look at the people around him, she could see that he was drawing a great deal of attention. When he was pretending to be someone else, people thought they recognized him from somewhere, but couldn’t place him—just the way Juliette had.

But now, in his impeccably-tailored, bespoke suit, with an expensive watch and perfectly coiffed hair, he was unmistakably the man from the television and newspapers. He was royal, through and through, and the people around him caught onto it immediately. He was carrying a single purple flower; Juliette didn’t know the type.

She sat up in her seat and looked out the back window as the cab drove away. There was no chance of him seeing her now, she thought, though she could tell that he was looking. He was too busy with bystanders coming up to him. For the slightest moment, Juliette thought he might see her, even through the crowd, and the tiny back window of the cab. She thought she might see a smile on his lips…

In her mind, she willed the car to stop, even as she kept her lips firmly shut to keep herself from saying so. To her surprise, the cab stopped anyway.

“Do you want to get out?” he asked, apparently having seen her change in countenance and the scene at the fountain.

Juliette was torn. She wanted to tell him yes, and go and see the Prince. But as she watched him, and the people around him, she saw that his smile was for the people.

He was a prince, and she was an unemployed student from Wisconsin. In a week’s time, she’d be living in her old bedroom and sending off resumes. In a week’s time, he could be doing any number of things, and all of them would likely be more important than anything she was likely to do for the rest of her life.

“No,” she said, settling back into her seat and staring straight ahead at the seat in front of her. “I don’t want to miss my flight.”

***

At the airport, Juliette checked her bags. Everything seemed so easy, so effortless. Italy’s legendary inefficiency seemed to have taken a day off, just so that her departure would go easily.

Some part of her, deep down, wished it hadn’t. She wished there had been some snafu with her flight, or that there would be a cancellation, or that her passport would be wrong somehow; she wished for any one of the infinite things that could go wrong with an international trip. But, as she sat at her gate, waiting to board, nothing did.

Nothing went wrong as the plane taxied to the runway and took off. Nothing went wrong during her layover in Dublin. Nothing went wrong when she got off the plane in O’Hare and headed to her domestic flight to Milwaukie. And nothing went wrong as she put her passport on the customs desk, in front of a tired, middle-aged, but friendly-looking customs agent.

“And what was the purpose of your trip to Italy?” he asked her.

It had been a long journey, and Juliette was tired. So tired, that she almost teared up. The answer that leapt to her mind wasn’t the answer she wanted it to be. She didn’t want to think that the purpose had been meeting Giancarlo, but that was still the thought that leapt unbidden to her mind.

She cleared her throat.

“I was studying,” she said simply. “I’m a translator.”

The man nodded, stamped her passport, and handed it back to her. “Welcome home, Miss Combs,” he said, and called forth the next in line.

Home. She was home. Whatever that meant.

NINE

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER

Juliette kept a running count of resumes sent out in a spreadsheet on her computer. She’d heard stories that the numbers could get ridiculous, and she wanted to know how many she’d sent before she finally got hired. That way she could participate when people were telling horror stories about the economy at parties. She could relate to all the people she was feeling she had less and less in common with, since her time in Italy.

But the longer the spreadsheet got, the more depressing it got to put each entry down. And, with every doomed application she made to every uninteresting job, she imagined what would happen if she actually got the job she was applying for.

Even for the “good” jobs—the ones she thought would be the best match for her personality and education—that picture of her life going forward seemed depressing. The few interviews she got only made them more so. The buildings were invariably made in the ‘70s, and the people in them looked like they’d been in them since they were built. There was no sense of history—unless outdated technology and a few outdated ideas on gender roles in the workplace counted as history.

She missed Italy.

It was hard to talk about, with her mother and father both so unabashedly happy that she was around, and showering her with affection. It wasn’t just the buildings, the sense of history, and the constant music of the language surrounding her all the time. It was the little things, too. It was the market where she used to go to buy her food. It was the smell of the sea. It was the man that lived three doors down who used to whistle every time she went by, but never talked to her other than that.

And it was, unfortunately, Giancarlo.

Juliette had thought, when she’d left, that he’d ruined Italy for her. For the first week or so after she got back, that even seemed to be the case. She couldn’t think of Naples without him and the memory of the night they’d spent together coming up and making her sad and angry and embarrassed all at the same time.

But with the passage of a couple of weeks, those feelings started to change. The first hint of it came one morning when she was in the kitchen, making coffee before a long job-hunt session she had lined up. Her mother had come in, and asked why she was smiling, and she’d had to stop herself from telling her that she was thinking about Giancarlo.

At first she was perplexed. Why would she be smiling about him? But as time went on, she began to catch herself doing it more and more.

She’d forgiven him, without meaning to. A big part of it was recognizing that she’d lied, too, and she’d had even less of a reason to do so than he did. He should have told her that he was a prince, and that his family actually owned the palace they’d slept in, but that was all. It wasn’t so different, in the end. What he’d done and what she’d done.

She understood now, why she’d been so mad at the time. She’d been sad, on waking, that it was impossible to see him again. She’d been angry at how unfair it was all was; that she should get a taste of a sweet life with a gorgeous man, and only have one night to experience it.

And with that realization came shame. Shame that her emotions had gotten so twisted around, and that she’d been so cruel to him. And shame, most of all, that she hadn’t gone to him at the fountain.

The first night she dreamed of him, she could swear she smelled the sea when she woke up, the way she had that morning she’d woken in his arms. But in her dream, they weren’t at the palace. They were in her little apartment, close to the center of town, and they were just a normal couple, living a normal life.

It had been so sweet, even if it had been impossible, and it had taken her all day to shake it off. The next dream had been even harder to wake from. In that one, she’d been a part of his life, rather than him being a part of hers. They were at some glitzy event and she was dressed to the nines. They got separated, somehow, by a crowd of people, and he was getting pushed further and further away by the tide.

His arm was raised, reaching out towards her, and he was calling her name. And she wanted to move, to go to him and grab his hand. Instead, though, she found herself completely unable to move. She could only watch as she got further and further away.

The dream ended with Juliette waking, sad and confused in her bedroom. It was 6:30 am, earlier than she would normally rise, but there was no chance that she was going to get back to sleep. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him, again, his face twisted in desperation, his voice breaking as he screamed her name.

She went downstairs, figuring that, if she couldn’t go back to sleep, she might as well get a head start on her day.

Juliette began to make coffee only to find that the filters were out. She’d meant to buy more, but she’d forgotten. She slammed down the lid and leaned against the counter, tears in her eyes.

“Are you OK, sweetie?”

It was her mother, already dressed for work. She was a round, kind-faced woman, who had never really adapted to the idea that her daughter was no longer ten years old.

Wiping the tears from her eyes, Juliette tried to seem more together than she was. Best not to let her mother worry.

“I’m fine, Mom. Just had a bad dream.”

Usually, that would have been enough. She expected her mother to come over, and wrap an arm around her; to tell her that it was all right now, the dream was over. But, instead, her mother’s worried expression remained.

“Are you sure, honey? You’ve been acting a little…down, lately.”

How could she possibly tell her mother that she no longer felt like Wisconsin was where she belonged without breaking her heart? She tried to think of something to say, but her mother was already talking.

“You were crying over nothing the other day, too, and your appetite’s been all over the place. Is it, you know, your time?”

Juliette smiled at the way her mother lowered her voice and looked around. Three children, and the woman was apparently still of the opinion that anything to do with being a woman was best kept as private as possible.

“I wouldn’t ask, you know. It’s just, I don’t know if I should worry…”

As she tried to think of an answer to reassure her mother that everything was fine, Juliette felt her smile fade. No, it wasn’t her time of the month. But it should have been, nearly a week and a half ago, now.

“Sweetheart?”

The look of concern on her mother’s face only intensified, and Juliette was having a hard time figuring out what to say to her.

“I just… I miss Italy.”

The words ripped out of her, though she hadn’t meant to say them. But then she felt her mother’s arms around her and knew that she’d been a fool to worry about her reaction.

“I know, honey, I know. We’re glad to have you back, of course. But from your letters… I don’t know. I just wish you’d found a way to stay.”

They stood there for a little while, before her mother said she needed to get on the road to work. What she didn’t know was that she was leaving her daughter even more distraught than she thought she was, and over something completely different.

Juliette’s hands shook as she set aside her coffee cup and went upstairs. Mechanically, she showered, dressed, and went out to her car. She drove to the pharmacy, trying her best to think of anything other than what she was doing and why she was doing it.

The test was simple, and straightforward, but she still read the directions four times. And, when two lines showed up on the strip, she stared at it for five minutes before she grasped what it meant.

It had to be wrong. It had to be. But three more tests, all with the same result, made it seem less and less likely.

There’d only been one man. The baby had to be Giancarlo’s.

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