Sheikh Obsessions - A Sheikh Romance Box Set (23 page)

When Lucie was clean again, and as prepared as she would ever be for the confrontation, the two women got on the road. The stars were just starting to peek out of the sky, and the day was cooling swiftly into a cold desert night.

So far, all of her trips to the palace had been in the back of an expensive car—relatively smooth, and shielded from the elements. Not so in the jeep.

But it felt good. The feeling of being jostled around by every bump in the road kept her from getting too lost in the thoughts she’d already exhausted during the day.

If everything did go wrong, she knew she would have to find another desert country to work in. She couldn’t give up on a night like this. It was too magical.

To Lucie’s relief, Calista didn’t try to make conversation on the way over. She drove in silence, her dark eyes fixed on the road ahead. She slowed slightly as the palace came into view.

Lucie’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t seen it from the approach before; a single shape, so alone and stark against the desert landscape. The way it went from a speck in the distance to a towering presence up close made it seem all the more intimidating.

It certainly didn’t help Lucie’s nerves.

Calista turned off the engine, and Lucie realized that they hadn’t been stopped by anyone their whole way here. She hadn’t seen any security in the palace grounds, but there was no doubt in her mind that they were there. The Sheikh must know she was here, and he had let her through.

“
Bonne chance
,” Calista said, smiling slightly.

Though she wasn’t usually much of one for hugs, Lucie gave her one. She’d needed the reassurance, and she couldn’t have been more grateful to Calista for providing it.

Then she took a deep breath and got out of the jeep. It was time.

SEVENTEEN

She walked up the stairs into the palace slowly, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. She’d spent the whole day collecting her thoughts, and yet they still felt scattered.

When she reached it, the front door slid open. For the life of her, she couldn’t see anyone there, until a man emerged from the shadows.

“Go to the roof,” the man said, in heavily accented English. “He’s waiting for you there.”

She did as she was told, taking the main staircase up. Now was not the time to bother with secret passageways.

As she stepped out again into the evening breeze, she found herself on the opposite side of the palace to where she and the Sheikh had stargazed from his sitting room.

On this side, the ramparts weren’t damaged, and it looked and felt very much like the kind of castle that she’d read about in story books when she was a child. It seemed a fitting place to have a final conversation, if it was to be that.

The Sheikh was standing there, his back to her.

Her heart pounded. It was now or never. But she couldn’t remember the opening phrase she had planned to say. The magic of the night air pulled her so swiftly back to the time when they had drunk honey liquor and gone walking together through tunnels and gardens. And, so lost in her memory, she could not find her tongue.

Before she could figure out how to speak, he turned. He’d been looking out across the desert in what she’d deemed to be anger, but when she saw his face she realized she’d been wrong.

She’d been wrong about everything.

“I’m sorry,” he said, stepping towards her and reaching out his arms. “I’m so sorry, Lucie. I should never have suspected you.”

She stumbled forward, everything in her wanting to find her way into his arms, in spite of how confused she was.

“It wasn’t me,” she said weakly, still trying to follow the script she’d worked out over the course of the day.

Another few steps forward. A few steps closer.

“I know. The paper listed a source. Once I read it fully, I realized it wasn’t you. Of course it wasn’t you!”

Another step. She was so close to him now that she could see the worry written all over his face.

It nearly made her laugh. She’d been waiting the whole day for him to settle down enough for her to make her case. And yet, here he had obviously been, doing the same. Hoping for her to return.

She suddenly felt exhausted. The work she had done, and the lack of food caught up with her. With the adrenaline in her system beginning to die down, she felt herself falling forward.

And then she felt him catching her, his arms wrapping around her.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s no excuse, but I was still so shaken. The whole thing, everything between us…”

Lucie nodded, sensing where he was going.

“It should have been simple,” she completed for him.

“It shouldn’t have been secret in the first place. I should have just reached out to you, without a care for what anyone might have thought. I shouldn’t have given Zach that ammunition in the first place.”

Slowly, as one, the entwined lovers found their way to a sitting position on the ramparts. It was a little colder here, without the fireplace and glass dome that encased the other side of the roof. But they had each other for warmth.

At Zach’s name, Lucie came down to earth slightly.

“I gave him quite the lecture, earlier,” she said, in Arabic. She couldn’t put her finger on why, but it felt more intimate, somehow, to talk to him this way. She was a little afraid he would answer her in English.

But he didn’t. A string of his soft, rich Arabic answered her.

“I did the same—and so did my head of security. Tomorrow he will be filming an apology, to be broadcast on national TV, for spreading lies about the nature of my relationship with you.”

Lucie’s heart began beating more quickly again. She could feel her adrenaline kicking back in.

“Right,” she said. “Only I thought…”

The Sheikh shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean that he should deny that we are together. Let him say that he got that part right. But let him say that he misrepresented it, and that it certainly wasn’t his place to announce it to the entire country.”

Even the crescent moon gave enough light to glint in Abdul’s eyes.

“I don’t want any more secrets. Not between us, and not in front of my people.”

Relief and guilt flooded through Lucie in equal measure.

“In the spirit of not keeping secrets,” she began, her voice wavering slightly, “I have something I need to tell you.”

With all that had happened between them, the Sheikh could be forgiven for being a bit nervous at this. But if he was, he didn’t show it.

“What is it?”

There was no way to say it but to say it.

“I’m pregnant.”

There was a long pause. All Lucie could hear was the sound of the breeze.

“Really?”

She couldn’t read his face. It was either complete joy, or complete shock. She was in agony, trying to tell between them.

And then she felt his arms around her again.

“My sweet Lucie,” he said, “you have made me the happiest man.”

She wanted to say that he had made her the happiest woman, but her heart was too full of joy to speak. She only sat there, wrapped in his warm embrace, with a huge smile on her lips.

Then, suddenly, he pulled back.

“But you must marry me!”

She laughed.

“That wasn’t very romantic, was it?” he said to the bright chorus of her laughter.

“Any way of saying that you want to spend your life with me would be romantic. I’m just surprised. I’ve been dreading this moment… wondering and fretting over what you might say. And now that it’s here, it’s better than I ever dared hope it would be.”

He cupped her cheek in his hand, and she let the weight of her head sink gently into it, loving the way it felt to be held by him.

“We do a lot of thinking,” he said. “You and I. Perhaps we should think a bit less. Maybe we’d be happier.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “I love you for your mind, just as much as I love you for your heart. I couldn’t bear it if you stopped.”

He smiled. “Then I’ll never stop thinking. But I will think of the best version of things, not the worst.”

She blinked slowly, her eyelids feeling heavy. “Then so will I. And I think there will be a lot of good things for you and I to think about.”

Lucie had always thought that being in love was for fools. And, indeed, it had always looked like it was a foolish thing.

But as she sat with Abdul, wrapped up in his arms, under the stars, murmuring the same kinds of words that would have seemed like platitudes to her mere months ago, she finally understood.

It wasn’t about the words. It wasn’t about what they said to each other—it was the feeling behind it. The feeling that she could only hear in the sound of his voice, not the meaning of the words. The feeling that she could sense in his touch, and in the warmth of his glances.

And it was that feeling that she knew she would trust, now and forever.

Epilogue

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

Lucie couldn’t believe little Nadiah was running already, but she couldn’t deny the evidence as she chased her around the palace. Not that she minded. She loved racing through the halls as much now as she had loved exploring them that first day with the man who was now her husband. And, besides, tonight would be an important night—it was good for little Nadiah to get out her energy before the guests arrived.

Were Abdul a stricter father, he likely would have insisted she be kept away somehow, so that she wouldn’t be underfoot while all the dignitaries, scientists and academic luminaries might be annoyed by a child in their midst. They would begin arriving at any moment, and in a household where children were to be seen and not heard, she would have been spirited away.

But theirs was not a very traditional household. They didn’t cling to the old, dusty ways of either of their families. But they did honor some traditions. They honored loyalty, and love, and a certain amount of blissful chaos. And, Lucie remembered, as she put her hand on her belly, soon they would be honoring the tradition of big, noisy families as well.

Not that they were waiting for the rest of their children to come to fill the palace with people. What had once been such an empty, lonely place now teemed with life. There was a certain inconvenience, maybe, to the garden being torn up. But living in an active dig site had made the inconvenience well worthwhile.

“The first guests from your alma mater are here,” her husband grinned at her. He was adjusting his tie on his way down to greet the guests, but on the whole he was much more prepared for the night ahead than Lucie was.

“Harvard or Yale?” she asked, though she was already moving on, lest she lose her daughter around a corner.

“Harvard!” she heard Abdul call from behind her as she continued the chase.

Life after finishing her PhD was better, certainly, than it had been before. Though she could hardly give all the credit to having completing her studies.

Living in Al-Brehoni had been an adjustment, but it had been one that she made quickly. Once she had realized that the center of pottery that she had theorized had once been on the site where the palace now stood, the rest of her dissertation practically wrote itself.

And, once the small matter of her achieving her lifelong dream and completing her doctorate was out of the way, she achieved the dream she never even knew she had, and married the love of her life.

And tonight, she would stand beside him, and announce a formal, permanent joint program between the newly-formed Al-Brehoni Archeological Trust and certain key American universities. The test program had certainly been a success—in more ways than one.

As Lucie caught her daughter, and scooped her up into her arms, she remembered the first time she had come to Al-Brehoni. She’d known so little, then, about what an impact the trip would have on her life. She’d thought she had, but she’d been clueless. And, in the end, though there was much confusion, and anger, and unhappiness along the way, she knew she’d do it all again in a flash. She’d go through anything again to end up with the life she had now: living and working in a place she loved, with a man she loved, and the family she didn’t know she had so badly needed. Finally, she was home.

The End

Holly Rayner