ROMANCE: THE SHEIKH'S GAMES: A Sheikh Romance (70 page)

For the second time, he was tempted to ask her what she meant, with bad memories. But he didn’t want to push his luck just yet. “Well, we can make new ones, together. Drive them out.”

Melinda offered him a cup of tea, but they both knew that it was just a polite gesture at this time of night. He would have to go back, now—he might be a man of twenty-eight but he did need to return his father’s car and reassure the man that he had not been out whoring and drinking.
It was strange
, he thought as he got back in the car, how whoring and drinking seemed almost inconsequential in Amsterdam, but when he was with Melinda, it felt like an insult to call it merely “whoring and drinking”. They’d shared something real, a connection. It wasn’t just sex anymore. It was—

“Love,” he breathed, as he drove back to the royal palace.

The valet nearly wet himself with relief when he showed up at the garage with the Bugatti—intact, without a scratch, as he’d promised. He could understand why the man had been so nervous: some twenty years ago, his older brother Malakar had taken their father’s new Ferrari 360 for a ride. Malakar had driven the older Ferrari Datyona—the one with “only” 350 peak horsepower—without incident several times and he’d assumed that the newer one was much the same. The car had not ended well—and neither had Malakar, who’d been forced to buy their father a new one. It meant that Malakar had had to go for three years with just half of his trust money.

Bashir couldn’t help but grin as he recalled the years Malakar had spent grumbling about having to pay their father back. He’d had to chauffeur his brother around during most of those three years, and they’d become close. There was something about driving that invited them to open their hearts to each other. It was during these rides that he’d first heard about love and duty, honor and loyalty—not as part of a lecture being given by his father, but from one brother being “requested” to marry someone he barely knew to another. Bashir would have shared the same fate except for the fact that he was the baby and his mother had insisted that he be free to choose who he wanted to marry—a fact that no doubt rankled his older siblings.

At that time, it’d seemed fair to him—he was so far down the chain of succession, and his portion of the trust fund was the smallest, by far. The only luxury he’d been afforded was having Misha with him in London, and that was mostly because his father wished to “protect his investment”, which was what he considered Bahshir’s degree.

But now, now that he’d fallen head-over-heels in love with Melinda, he finally understood the enormity of the privilege that had been extended to him. He could go on dates with her, get to know her without the legal confines of marriage, have a chance to discover what made him happy. For someone whose life so far had been muddling along, doing stuff because he could and because it seemed interesting, to suddenly have a chance to discover who he truly was inside was like waking up one day to discover that the sun rose in the west.

He needed to talk about this. He wanted to find Miriam and ask her what she thought of it all—but he didn’t think she’d be willing to see him after he told her that he’d been out on a date with a caterer. His father—well, he could forget talking with him. Marrying the woman who’d once threatened to destroy their family was not indicative of sound judgment in matters of the heart.

Bashir took off his shoes and crept through the house silently in his socks. He didn’t want to run into his father or Alya, and Miriam would probably be asleep by now. The only people that were awake at this hour were the guards, and he didn’t need one of them accidentally sounding the alarms.

He made it to his suite unnoticed, and stepped inside, sighing with relief. He turned on the lights—

“You’re late,” said Misha.

Bashir jumped. He had not expected to see
him
in his suite, but there was the bodyguard, as immovable and as stone-like as ever.
Has he been sitting in the dark, waiting for me to come home?
Bashir hung up his jacket. “Didn’t one of the servants set you up in the guest quarters?” he asked.

“Yes, and it’s quite nice,” Misha said. “But your father was worried about you.”

“So worried he sent you to ask if I was all right?” Bashir asked, pointedly, wondering why his father seemed to think that Misha was apparently better at being a father than he was.

“You’ve made it clear to him that you want nothing to do with him,” said Misha. “He’s acceded to your wishes, and so sends me instead.”

Bashir felt the flush of humiliation burning hot in his cheeks. He’d been caught in a trap of his own making. “Well, I’m late, then,” he said. “Weren’t you following me? Surely you knew what I was doing.”
And I hope you enjoyed the show, jerk
.

“Whether I know what you were up to isn’t the point,” Misha said, confirming Bashir’s suspicions that he’d been followed. He had to admire the fact that Misha had somehow managed to follow him all the way to Manama and then to Jaffa without being seen, or raising suspicions. “The point is that you were out and your father was worried.”

“If he worried about me he should have made a better choice of his second wife,” Bashir grumbled. “What’s it to you, anyway, how I spend my time? You’re still getting paid, and I still cover most of the costs you incur. Why do you care so much? Why do the people who care so much about my happiness despise me for spending my one day in Bahrain with the one woman who makes me happy?”

Misha stood up, ominously silent. He headed for the door, and then stopped and said, “We don’t despise you, sir. We envy you.” And before Bashir could say anything, he left, closing the door behind him.

Bashir undressed and sank into his bed, falling into an uneasy sleep, full of weird dream fragments: his father, standing over him, while Melinda laughed at him from below. Miriam saying, “I’m so happy for you,” while holding a beating heart, her hands covered in blood. Malakar stepping out of a smoldering wreck of a car, his clothes burned and tattered, blackness and emptiness where his eyes should have been. Bashir woke with a start at 5 am, wondering what, if anything it all meant—feeling guilty, for the first time, about how he’d treated his father.

Their flight back to London was at 8 that night, so he had twelve hours to settle everything before he returned back to his life of reading legal briefs, drinking and whoring. He got up, restless, uncomfortable with the understanding that if he wanted his father to approve of Melinda he’d need to accept Alya—not sure if he was willing to do that, but knowing that he’d have to try.

He went to the kitchen to brew himself a pot of tea. The servants wouldn’t be awake yet, and anyway there were some little rituals that were better when they were done by himself: fussing with the glasses, measuring out the tea in the strainer, finding the perfectly-sized lump of rock sugar. He liked to put the sugar under the tea leaves, so that it would sweeten the tea as he poured the water over it.

He found a tin of butter cookies—the ones that were supposedly Danish but he’d never seen them when he’d gone to Copenhagen—and he took two and went to sit by the pool. In the east, the sky was lightening, the blue-black of the night fading into the red-gray of the desert dawn. The air was cool, and for a moment he could imagine himself back in London, in his apartment, in the hours before he had to run for his classes and work on writing up his thesis.

He jumped when he realized that there was someone else sitting by the pool. It was his father. At first he thought the king had fallen asleep in the chair, but then his father turned to him, smiling sadly. “Bashir. Come, sit.”

I’m not a dog
, Bashir thought, but he took the next chair. “What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing,” his father said. “Nothing important, at any rate.”

“Then why do you want me to sit with you?” he asked.

“Can a father not enjoy the company of his son?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, broken only by the chirping of the birds and the squeaking of the last of the night’s bats, while Bashir settled into his chair and resumed sipping at his tea. “You were out with a woman,” his father said, making a guess. Bashir didn’t deny it.

“Your mother didn’t want me to arrange a marriage for you,” the king said.

“It didn’t stop you from trying,” Bashir retorted.

“No,” the king agreed. “But that was before I realized that I’d never been out of love with Alya. The heart does what it wants, you know?”

It was true, that the marriage proposals that he’d occasionally receive in his email had stopped a few years ago. But Bashir had thought that that was because his father had finally gotten the message: he wasn’t interested in getting married.

“Your mother and I—we respected each other, and yes, we grew to love each other,” the king continued. “Your brothers will say the same thing of their wives, and your sisters will say the same thing of their husbands. But your mother was adamant that we leave you be, to find your own path and your own wife. I thought for sure that it was a bad idea. I thought you’d go off with the first whore that you met—”

“I did,” said Bashir.

“But you didn’t marry her,” his father said, “and I’m certain that I taught you to pay her well for her time. I was afraid that you’d have all these silly ideas of what it means to fall in love and that you’d choose a common woman who was only interested in your money.”

“Melinda is not like that,” Bashir said.

“Maybe, maybe not. Who knows?” the king said. “You love her, though. And that’s what I discovered when I first fell for Alya, even though I was betrothed to your mother: the heart wants what it wants.”

Was his father actually granting him his blessing to go ahead with Melinda? For a moment Bashir wondered if someone had spiked the tea with hashish or something. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked, instead. “Or am I hearing things?”

The king snorted. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’ll never be the king or in charge of the money from the family investments.”

Bashir grinned ruefully. “That’s all right. I’m a terrible investor, anyway.”

“What are you studying in Oxford, then?” the king asked. “I don’t remember what you told me.”

“That’s because you never asked,” Bashir said, and almost immediately he regretted it. He hadn’t meant to sound petty. His father had five children, and the year he started at Oxford, two of them were getting married and the pro-democracy advocates were rioting. His studies were trivial in comparison to the state of the realm, and he accepted that.

But that didn’t mean that some acknowledgment wasn’t appreciated. “I’m studying international law,” he said. “When I graduate I’ve got a few offers from multinationals and one from the UN.”

“The UN are a bunch of hypocritical bastards,” muttered the king.

“Maybe, but at least they pay well. And it’s a good position,” Bashir said, “mostly writing contracts and treaties. It’s interesting work, believe it or not.”

“You really are making your own way,” the king said, smiling. Bashir thought he saw a hint of pride in the way his father looked at him.
Pride? No, that can’t be
, he thought. His father, who’d only ever treated him like an afterthought, being proud of his last son?

And yet, as the king pulled himself to his feet, Bashir caught a subtle nod from his father. It was hard to be certain whether it was real or just an effect of the rapidly brightening sky. But in either case, he felt only ecstasy—his father would not interfere with Melinda.

Now it was just a matter of convincing her to go to England with him. And somehow, he had the feeling that this was going to be a lot harder.

***

He borrowed his father’s sedan for this trip to Melinda’s—a simple BMW, elegant but common. He didn’t have to make a statement this time. He didn’t want to play the rich guy with too much money and no common sense, but he was aware of the irony that he was rich enough to pick and choose a car to match his mood, much the same way most other people decided what to wear.

Well, why shouldn’t I?
He’d always felt vaguely guilty about the money in his family, aware that it was all because Bahrain had billions of barrels of oil just offshore and not because his father or grandfather had been especially intelligent or insightful. In fact, until the 1960s, Bahrain was considered a backwater country, a country that nobody could wait to get out of. Then oil was discovered, and money came pouring in—just as his grandfather seized power. It was an incredible stroke of luck that had made his family rich and his life of privilege possible. It’d taken years of therapy and philosophical debates with his friends at Oxford to come to the conclusion that he couldn’t help being born rich, just as he couldn’t help those who’d been born poor—the only thing that was to be done was to use the money well, and part of that was enjoying his life.

He drove to her catering company this time, having gotten the information from the cook who’d hired Melinda. Her catering company was located on the outskirts of Manama, in a small, unassuming building that was shared with a laundromat. It didn’t look very impressive at all—the lettering on the sign was elegant enough, but the pictures of the dishes in the window were faded from the sun and there was no “open” sign on the door. When he stepped out of the car the air was an odd perfume of Ras-al-hanout and dryer sheets.

A bell announced his presence, but there was nobody to greet him. The inside of her company was just as strictly-business as she was. There was her desk, neat and spare, with her computer that was locked to her the desk, a cup with three pens, and a thick planner, filled with scribbled notes. The floor was thin, industrial carpet, in that dark gray that never seemed to match anything. The sofa and chairs her customers sat in were mismatched. Behind the desk was a wall, with a single door, through which he could hear her barking orders in her oddly-accented Arabic: stir this, chop that, I needed this done yesterday.

She came out suddenly—the door sighed a breath of moist air perfumed with spices and roasting meat—saying, “Sorry about that. We’ve been very—Bashir—I mean, your Highness—I mean—”