Sold To The Sheikh: His Indecent Proposal (An Interracial Sheikh Romance Novel) (13 page)

It took days for her rage
at Rami’s high-handed manipulation to ebb, and once Mia stopped
being so angry with him, she didn’t know what to do with herself.
She had enough money in the bank to last at least a few months,
even with her mother’s bills. If she had to, Mia knew she could go
back to working at the school. The semester was almost over but she
had heard more than once from the administration that they’d take
her back, no questions asked. And yet, the mere thought of going
back to the grind of grading papers, trying to inspire students who
in many cases had already given up on learning, made Mia’s heart
pound with dread.

Rami called her every day,
three times a day, the first week after their fight. Mia refused to
answer, letting the phone roll over to voicemail every time.
Initially, afraid of what he might have to say to her, she had
deleted his messages unheard. But after a week of avoiding him, her
curiosity won out. Rather than simply deleting the voicemail, Mia
listened to one that had been left at ten o’clock at night. “Mia, I
can’t tell you how sorry I am for what I did. I know—I know it was
the wrong thing to do, but I really, truly just wanted to protect
you. I know you’re angry, but I hope you still want to go through
with this. Please call me back.”

Mia stared at her phone in
shock. Rami wanted her to try again? After everything they’d been
through? After that fight? Her mind spun with questions: could she
trust him not to have her followed again? Could she handle
continuing the treatments, having her body full of artificial
chemicals to manipulate her cycle? Did she even want to have
anything to do with Rami anymore?

The next time he called,
she didn’t let it roll over to voicemail. She answered the phone,
boredom and exasperation making her brave. “Rami, I need time to
think. Please don’t leave any more messages on my phone, I won’t
listen to them.”

“Mia—can’t we just meet up
and talk about this in person?”

“Rami, I’m still
exhausted, and upset. I don’t know what I want to do. Give me more
time.” She hung up before Rami could say anything else.

One week became two, and
Rami no longer left any messages, but continued to call her three
times a day. Mia answered once every couple of days, and only to
tell him that she still needed time; that she
couldn’t—wouldn’t—meet up with him in person.
We’re supposed to be taking a break from treatment. I’m
supposed to be resting and relaxing, not stressing myself
out,
Mia thought resentfully, every time
Rami called.

Apart from visits to her
mom and the occasional trip to the grocery store—looking over her
shoulder all the time, trying to discern if someone was following
her—Mia basically didn’t leave her house for three weeks. The very
idea that Rami might still have someone on her tail, informing him
of her whereabouts and what she was doing, made it impossible for
her to feel comfortable. Even in her own home, where she knew no
one could be hiding in a convenient closet (she checked), or
sitting outside waiting for her to leave, she felt strangely
conspicuous. She told her mother that she and Rami had decided to
take some time off from the treatments, to give her body a chance
to build back up. Amie didn’t question the idea at all, and in fact
seemed almost relieved. When Mia checked her bank account and saw a
new deposit for one hundred thousand dollars, she nearly called the
bank to reverse it. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do
something that would so clearly sever what was left of her
relationship with Rami.

* * *

Mia sat in her living
room, pretending to watch TV, drinking an herbal concoction Dr.
Farber had told her would be safe to continue drinking throughout
her pregnancy—when and if that ever happened. She had liked the
taste so much that even though she no longer realistically thought
she would ever be pregnant, she had taken to drinking it when she
wanted something hot.

Without warning, Mia’s
heart started racing. She looked around the room; the walls felt so
much closer than they had only minutes before, her living room
seemed too quiet even with the TV on, and she had the sudden
suspicion that if she tried to leave the house, she would find the
doors locked from the outside. “I have to get out of here,” she
said, putting down her mug and standing up quickly. “If I stay in
this stupid house for even five minutes longer I’m going to lose my
mind completely.”

Mia went into her bedroom
and grabbed her jacket and purse. She unplugged her phone, slipped
it into the dark confines of her purse and hurried through the
hallway to the front door. For a terrifying moment, she was unable
to turn the deadbolt latch, and Mia’s heart beat faster and harder
inside of her at the thought that, ridiculous as it was, her
suspicion of being locked in from the outside was somehow accurate.
The next instant, the lock turned over and Mia pulled the door open
with a hard jerk. She locked the door behind her and darted down
the three steps to her car. Her keys clinked and clattered and
nearly fell from her anxious hands, but she managed to unlock the
driver’s side and get inside, buckling her seat belt in an
automatic movement.

On an impulse, Mia drove
out of her neighborhood and headed east on the main road, traveling
past the school without even sparing a glance to see if the PE
class was outside. She drove towards the ocean, to the piers; it
was the only place she could think of, the only place that would be
open enough, broad enough, and far enough away from her confining
house to give her the relief she craved. There was almost no one
there in the middle of the week, so she was able to find parking
with no problem.

Her heart started to slow
down to normal speed as she walked away from the parking lot and
out onto the pier itself, the wind blowing her hair back from her
face, the seagulls screaming to each other and at the few people
below, catching thermals to swoop and dive. Mia took a deep breath
and followed the walkway to the end of the pier. She looked out
over the water, towards the horizon, and leaned against one of the
pilings, letting the sheer openness of the scene in front of her
trickle through her brain, infecting her with a calm she hadn’t
felt in weeks.

As her panic cleared, Mia
started to think about her situation. “I can’t keep living like
this,” she said to herself quietly. “I can’t. It’s just too much.”
She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, imagining—for an
instant—that she was blowing the few, fluffy clouds gathered over
the ocean away from her. She had two choices, she thought. On the
one hand, she could go back to Rami on the basis that they keep
their relationship strictly professional; she could take his money
and refuse to go to lunch with him, or spend any time with him
which wasn’t directly related to her conceiving. She could just
make the whole arrangement nothing more than a business
transaction.

Or,
she thought, worrying at her bottom lip,
I could break it off completely. I could tell him to find
someone else, that obviously I’m not a good candidate to be the
mother of his child.
The money would
absolutely stop coming in if she did that, but Mia was less
concerned about money now than she would have ever thought she
could be when she had started the process. If she broke things off
with him entirely and refused to continue the contract, Mia knew
that she would never see Rami again. They’d part ways completely,
and she not only wouldn’t have a child to show for it, but she
would lose a man who she had come to consider something of a
friend. He had done so much for her, above and beyond what they’d
initially agreed. “I’d have to leave town,” Mia muttered to
herself. It wouldn’t be too difficult with the money she already
had in her account. She could go to a new town, pick up a new
teaching job, and just ask her mother to never again mention the
six months or more she had spent as someone’s unsuccessful
surrogate.

Catching a blur of
movement on the right-hand side of her peripheral vision, Mia
turned instinctively. She’d gotten so lost in her thoughts that she
hadn’t even seen the person approaching. As she turned completely
to confirm that it wasn’t anyone coming after her for some reason,
Mia saw—instead—that the figure was none other than Rami, dressed
down in jeans and a hoodie. Mia stared, for a moment unable to
process what she was seeing, begging her brain to discover that she
was mistaken. But in spite of the more modest-than-usual clothes,
she knew for certain this was her boss, her client, her friend; the
man who right at that particular moment, she least wanted to see of
anyone in the world.

ELEVEN

Mia’s shock dissipated with
a few heartbeats, and adrenaline surged through her body as she
remembered the reason why she had broken off her agreement with
Rami in the first place.
Son of a bitch
had me followed again!
Mia’s heart began
to pound not with panic but with anger, and she turned away from
the pier railing, watching as Rami took up a position off to the
side, leaning against another piling.

She strode towards him,
trembling with the anger that crackled through her veins,
determined to confront him about manipulating her. Wasn’t it enough
that he called her three times a day? That she felt like a prisoner
in her own house? Why couldn’t he just leave her alone? Mia gritted
her teeth, her hands tightening into fists as she advanced on him.
An impulse ran along her arm, to raise one of her hands and let it
fly at the back of Rami’s head, but she held back. Instead, Mia
took a breath and tapped him on the shoulder.

Rami turned around,
looking startled.

“What, were you just going
to pretend like you just happened to decide to come to the pier
too? Why are you still having someone follow me? Can’t you just
leave me alone to think about what I want to do, what I need?” Rami
threw his hands defensively, his eyes widening in the face of her
anger.

“No—no. I know you won’t
believe me, Mia, but I really, genuinely just came here on my own.
I know now that it was screwed up to have you followed; no one has
been watching you for weeks!”

“Why would you pick this
spot then?” Mia countered, not missing a beat.

“I just kind of always
liked it here. I’ve always come here when I needed to think,” Rami
said, shrugging. He let his hands fall to his sides. “Look, I know
I was wrong to have you followed. As soon as you went home that
night I told the guy I’d hired that I didn’t need his services any
longer.” Mia peered at Rami’s face intently. To her surprise, she
could see faint lines around his eyes, a puffiness to his face that
she hadn’t noticed before.

“Well okay, say I believe
you” Mia said uncertainly. “Why have you been calling me three
times a day, then?” Rami smiled weakly.

“Well first of all,
because I wanted to try and make amends,” he said. “You never gave
me a chance! But also, because I do still hope we can work things
out between us on the issue of having kids. I still want you to be
the mother of my child.” Mia shook her head.

“But what if I just can’t
conceive? You’d be wasting your money.”

Rami shrugged. “If you
can’t get pregnant this way, we can take some of the fertilized
eggs and just…I guess…put them in a surrogate. Or something. We
could go to another country and see a different doctor there.” Mia
considered the suggestion; with her mother’s condition still
uncertain, she wasn’t sure she could just up and leave the country.
But at the same time, she had been working so hard to become
pregnant, she wanted to try every possibility before she gave up on
it completely.

Even more than that,
seeing Rami in person made Mia realize that she had genuinely
missed being around him. The feeling of comfort she had being in
his company, the feeling of safety she had been missing, even in
her own home, once everything had gone so badly between them, was
something she didn’t want to lose. The feelings had crept up on her
so slowly that she hadn’t really given herself the space to examine
them; she had pushed them aside, so consumed was she with the need
to fulfill her obligation to Rami, so guilty over the money he had
paid, that she hadn’t let herself realize that she felt better, and
happier, just being around him than with any man she had ever
dated.

Acting on impulse, before
Rami could say anything else, Mia plunged forward. She closed the
short distance between them, throwing her arms around Rami, and
before she could even question what she was going to do, pressed
her lips to his. Rami stood very still, and Mia felt the first
stirrings of low dread start up in the pit of her stomach as she
realized she might have crossed an unforgiveable line. But then,
just when she would have pulled back and run away down the pier,
unable to face the disappointment of knowing for certain that Rami
didn’t return her feelings, Mia felt his arms coil tightly around
her waist, holding her close. He began to kiss her back, and Mia
relaxed against him, feeling the firm flesh of his lean body
through his clothes, the warmth of him.