Sheikh Obsessions - A Sheikh Romance Box Set (14 page)

But no sooner had she opened the book, then she saw Zach’s hand reach out across it, pulling it away from her.

“Arabic?” he shouted, above the whirr of the engines warming up. “But your Arabic is great!”

She couldn’t help herself.

“Did you just accidentally give me an actual, normal compliment?” she said incredulously.

She immediately regretted it. She was playing into his game. The back and forth. It was exactly what he wanted.

Luckily, they were interrupted by a besuited man insisting that they fasten their seatbelts and listen to a brief security demonstration.

And then they were climbing into the sky. Zach seemed almost bored with it all, but Lucie didn’t let that bring her down. She peered excitedly out the window, looking at the city fall away as a seemingly endless expanse of desert opened up beneath them.

She wasn’t going to let Zach ruin this trip for her. She wasn’t going to let
anyone
ruin this trip for her. This was what she’d been working towards her entire life, and, come hell or high water, she was going to make the most of it.

TWO

Lucie knew the duration of the flight was an hour, but as they prepared for landing, it felt as though it had been far shorter. She’d managed to get Zach to leave her alone so that she could revise the Arabic she so desperately needed, despite Zach’s insistence that everyone would speak English anyway.

When the plane came in to land, Lucie felt her pent-up excitement come bubbling to the surface. She’d been trying to hold it down for the last few weeks, ever since she had received confirmation that she was going to be coming here. She’d been trying not to get ahead of herself, and to keep her expectations low.

But now that she was here, she realized she needn’t have worried. It was incredible. It felt as though she had been transported through time. Yes, they were standing on an airfield, but it was dusty and remote, and basically just a flattened patch of earth. The nearest ramshackle building looked like it could have been built hundreds of years ago.

The crew of the plane, their job now done, were already making moves to get going again. They tossed Lucie and Zach’s bags unceremoniously on the ground and were on their way. The engines had barely shut down before they were starting up again, and the plane was taxiing off towards the makeshift runway.

Not that Lucie was sorry to see the shiny private plane go. It felt out of place here, where she could see more goats than vehicles.

In fact, scanning the world around her carefully, she only saw one car.

It was in the distance, and just looked like a dust-trail so far. She slipped on her sunglasses to protect her eyes against the harsh glare of the sun, but still had to squint to make it out.

“Are they really just going to leave us here?” Zach asked, and Lucie sensed just a hint of uncertainty in his voice.

“Oh, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” she said, the hint of a knowing grin on her lips. “Everyone speaks English, right?”

The car heading towards them turned out to be a jeep, loaded down with three archeologists who pulled up to the airfield and greeted them. Much to Lucie’s annoyance—and Zach’s barely contained joy—they did in fact speak perfect English.

“Did you have to leave the site to come get us?” Lucie asked, as she and Zach piled into the car. She was slightly dismayed at having interrupted their work.

The head archeologist, Professor Hasseb, was a kind-looking older Arab man with a silver mustache. He shook his head as he started up the jeep.

“We were just on our way back from town. There’s a possibility of storms later, and we wanted to make sure we’ve got everything we need at camp, in case the roads get blown out.”

At the mention of storms, Lucie saw Zach scan the horizon, as though he expected to see a great billowing dust cloud coming right at them. It was just like him, she thought, to get concerned about the weather.

All her life, Lucie had dreamed of being an archeologist. Her parents had been supportive, at first. Then, when she’d started devoting all her time to study, to the extent that she never got around to finding the man they expected her to marry or the grandchildren they expected her to produce, they’d gotten a little less supportive.

Everyone had always talked down to her, as though they thought she’d just watched
Indiana Jones
a few too many times as a kid and gotten a little obsessed.

She’d thought things would get better in academia, but they only marginally had. At Harvard, among those who spent their time writing papers on new interpretations of things already found in museums, her enthusiasm to get out into the field had largely been met with derision. She would learn, they’d told her. She would go out, and find that it wasn’t nearly so rosy as she had assumed. Not without a mountain of funding and a well-established team to make life easier, the implication always seemed to be.

But now, as she listened to the three researchers talk about the day-to-day running of the camp they’d built, and plans for how they would go about gridding out the north-eastern quadrant of the site, Lucie knew: she’d been right.

The archeologists were two Al-Brehonian men and one French woman, but they felt immediately like family to her. They talked excitedly about their work in a way Lucie had never heard anyone else do—other than herself. They talked about the people who had lived in the town that they were excavating as though they might have been their neighbors, or friends.

Lucie belonged. Finally, she found, she belonged.

But she didn’t get to bask in the warm feeling of having found her people for long. No sooner had they arrived at camp, and Professor Hasseb began introducing them to the other researchers working at the site, then an officious-looking little man in spectacles came up to Professor Hasseb and started speaking to him in quick, sharp Arabic.

“What’s he saying?” Zach asked quietly.

“Uh, he’s saying the storm is moving faster than they expected, and the weather report says it’s…”

She tried to focus. He was hard to understand.

“Something about categories. The sandstorm is a different category. Or something. He says the site’s going to be impossible to work with, and…”

Again, she lost the thread of the conversation and wished that she’d manage to get in a bit more study of Gulf States Arabic.

“Something about the city?”

“Town,” said the French woman, whose name had been crowded out of Lucie’s brain by the flurry of introductions she’d just made. Was it Christine? Christina?

“He said we’re all going to have to get out of here. The storm’s been picking up speed and it’s worse than we thought. We can’t wait it out here.”

Lucie felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. There was mounting rush of activity occurring around them, as Professor Hasseb was directing everyone to pack up, but it felt to Lucie like the world was standing still.

She only had a week here, and now it was being taken from her. She’d heard reports of storms shutting down sites for days, and rendering everything they left in their wake so hard to put back together that progress on site essentially stopped for weeks.

This was the only shot she was going to get at getting the information she needed for her dissertation. She’d extrapolated, based on the location of fragments, that this place was a previously unknown center for pottery production. But without access to the whole site, and the ability to help in excavating further fragments, how would she be able to prove it?

Zach was talking, but she tuned him out. She didn’t need to hear him right now.

Professor Hasseb mentioned that he was going to wait out the storm in a hotel in the nearest town, and offered to take them with him. Zach accepted immediately, but Lucie hesitated. It would be giving up.

Zach answered that Lucie would be coming, too, and the older man moved on. He was too busy to worry about a couple of students losing everything they’d been working towards.

“Why did you do that?” Lucie heard the words creak out of her. They sounded guttural. Angry.

She must have looked furious, because Zach seemed genuinely ill at ease. He stuttered, trying to find words to reply, but was interrupted when a luxury SUV pulled up next to them.

The rest of the people in the camp hardly seemed to notice. They were too busy packing up ahead of the encroaching storm.

The shiny black surface of the vehicle seemed out of place in the dusty, windy desert. Lucie’s attention was drawn by the figure of the driver climbing out. As out of place as the vehicle looked, this man only looked more so. Everyone else was wearing casual clothing. It was all khaki and T-shirts as far as the eye could see. But this man wore an official-looking uniform, with Arabic calligraphy on the epaulets, so ornate that Lucie couldn’t quite make it out.

“Miss Milligan, Mr. Millard?”

She sensed Zach nodding beside her as she found her voice.

“That’s us.”

The man gave a sharp nod, as though proud of himself for having correctly identified them in the hubbub of the camp.

“You’ll be coming with me.”

THREE

Lucie wanted to argue, but Zach beat her to it, telling the stranger that they would be going nowhere with anyone who did not identify themselves.

Zach was all hot air, and the man seemed to know it. He didn’t honor Zach’s indignation with a response—he simply opened the passenger door.

So bright was the sun that it was difficult to see inside. Lucie could just make out that the interior of the SUV appeared to be set up very much like the inside of a limo, with one set of seats facing backwards, and the outline of a figure sitting there.

The storm seemed to almost be upon them already, and it was making it uncomfortable to stand outside. The winds were picking up, and were much more noticeable now than when they’d landed, to the point that they were whipping around strands of Lucie’s blond hair, and she could feel the dust already coating her skin.

Let Zach argue, she thought. They were entirely at the mercy of the people in their host country, and it was unlikely that they would be able to tell the good from the bad in a hurried situation like this, anyway.

So she slid inside.

The air inside the car was much cooler than outside, and Lucie found that she suddenly seemed to be sweating much more than she had been out in the hot air. Sweating and dirty in this luxurious space, it felt uncomfortable and embarrassing.

She sat in one of the backwards-facing seats, giving a wide berth to the man elaborately dressed in traditional Middle-Eastern garb.

As she cast a glance at him, Lucie suddenly felt herself sweating for an entirely different reason.

“Sir…” she said, and then trailed off. Should she have said “Your Highness?”

“What’s going on?” she heard Zach ask as he slid in behind her, pulling the door shut. “Who is this?”

She wanted to answer, but in the moment wasn’t certain she’d get all of his titles right. Instead, she reached into her pocket and found some coins. The largest of them would do, she thought.

Lucie tossed Zach the coin and watched the look of bemusement on his face as the car pulled out of the camp. He didn’t seem to believe what he was seeing, and kept looking back and forth between the image on the coin and the man sitting in the car, as though the resemblance would disappear if he just kept comparing them.

With the door closed, and the world shut out by heavily-tinted windows, it was easy to forget the encroaching storm. It was quiet in here. Peaceful, even.

“So, you’re…” Zach began, but like Lucie had moments before, he trailed off.

“Yes,” the man replied. “I am Sheikh Abdul al Syed bin Rahji. I wanted to take the chance to welcome you both to my country, as well as to apologize for the weather and the delay it has caused to your planned studies. You’re the first Americans to participate in our academic partnership program, and we regret that your time here has gotten off to such a rough start.”

“Well, it’s not like you can control the weather.”

A perfect score on the SATs. Early admission to Yale, a 4.0 GPA and top of her class for all of her undergraduate career. All these things, Lucie had taken in her stride, but now, when she really needed her mind to perform, apparently
that
was the best she could do at cracking a joke. Lucie was mortified.

To her surprise, the Sheikh grinned.

“Well, not
yet
, anyway.”

And then he did the unthinkable: he winked.

Lucie heard herself let out a quick, sharp laugh, and the Sheikh’s face, which had a quality of being cast out of metal like it was on one of his coins, seemed to break as a smile spread across his, too.

And then he seemed to remember himself, and his demeanor became more serious.

“I want to invite you to wait out the storm at my palace. There’s plenty of room, and it will probably be a more enjoyable experience than trying to squeeze into the hotels in the nearest town. The archeologists already here will have booked them all by now, certainly.”

“Of course, we’d be honored.”

For the second time in the space of a minute, Lucie spoke without thinking. It earned her a harsh look from Zach, who seemed peeved at not having been consulted.

But Lucie was done with him—the big man on campus. All their advisors, all the students they taught on their work study programs… all of them seemed to think that something of the archeological godhood of his parents had rubbed off on him, despite the fact that he’d been at Harvard for two years before Lucie had even shown up. It seemed to bother no one that in all his time there, Zach had barely made any progress towards finishing his dissertation.

And now, he hadn’t even recognized the leader of the country they were both doing their dissertations on.

“Do you have something to say, Zach?”

Lucie addressed him directly, daring him to protest. He couldn’t, she knew. Not in front of a monarch.

“No, of course not,” he said, sounding wounded.

The Sheikh seemed to pick up on this.

“And you, I presume, are Zach Millard?” he said.

At being recognized, Zach seemed to find a little bit more of a comfortable place in the conversation.

“Ah, you’ve heard of my parents?”

The Sheikh nodded. “In researching who should be allowed access to our newly developing historical sites, I’ve been hearing about a great many archeologists. But I know you, of course, from your application to come and work here, with us, so that you may finish your dissertation. And what is it that your dissertation is on, again? If I may ask?”

Lucie wasn’t sure how to feel about this line of conversation. On the one hand, talking to the Sheikh had almost a high connected to it. He was the most powerful man in the country. Studying at Harvard, and at Yale before that, Lucie had come into contact with her fair share of important people. But she’d never come across a royal before. It was, it seemed, a completely different form of power.

The Sheikh moving his attention to Zach gave her the opportunity to catch her breath and consider this new development.

If anything Lucie had learned in her research on modern-day Al-Brehoni was correct, being invited to the Sheikh’s palace was extremely rare, if not unheard of. The building was centuries old, and the Al-Brehonian royal family had always had a healthy mistrust of letting others into it. Some scholars suspected that that wariness had stemmed from the slaughter of nearly the entire dynasty around 1130BCE, when they’d invited their neighboring kingdom’s rulers for a wedding feast.

Lucie let the sound of Zach waffling on about his dissertation cut through her hazy knowledge of the Al-Brehonian royal family. She couldn’t tell for sure whether Zach knew what his dissertation was supposed to be shaping up to be. There was no way it would pass the dissertation defense. Well, not unless the board took into account his family name…

She was getting sidetracked again. What she really needed was to see if she could get the Sheikh to agree to an interview; the opening of the country’s archeological sites after decades of being out of bounds was more interesting to more people than her dissertation could ever be. As far as Lucie had read—and she had read up on the matter pretty thoroughly—the Sheikh hadn’t yet given any account of his motivations for making such changes.

That would have to wait, though, as the Sheikh had apparently tired of hearing Zach spew forth the web of confusion that was his dissertation project. He was looking at Lucie, now.

“And as for you, Lucie... Have I said that right? Lucie?”

She nodded. “Yes, it’s spelled differently, but said the same. My parents wanted me to be unique, but not too unique.”

Again, that grin. The grin that made him look like he could be anyone except a king.

“That’s very like parents, I find.”

She regretted mentioning her parents almost immediately. The Sheikh’s face barely revealed it, but she could see a trace of sadness at the subject.

He pushed past it, moving back seamlessly to his original question.

“Your dissertation was to do with pottery, I believe?”

Lucie nodded, impressed that the Sheikh apparently took a personal role in vetting the candidates in his new program.

She outlined her theory the same way she’d done many times before, at parties, or small get-togethers. Whenever it came up that she’d spent nearly four years working on a single essay, people tended to be curious.

Still, the people who asked her about it were usually only interested for a minute or two, so Lucie had boiled her subject down to a few sentences on how there was evidence of a key trading and production hub for specialized pottery in the ancient Middle-East, and that this newly-opened dig in Al-Brehoni showed a lot of promise for being this mysterious site.

When she’d finished this short explanation, she was used to being greeted by a glib sentence about that being really interesting. Some people would ask her what she’d do if it turned out she was wrong and the last four years of her life had been spent trying to prove something that wasn’t true.

But the Sheikh didn’t say any of those things, nor did he look ready to move on.

“Go on,” he said, when it became clear that Lucie’s hesitance wasn’t going to clear any time soon.

“As in?”

“As in, what makes you think
this
is the site you’ve been seeing all this evidence for?”

She was not practiced at this next part. She had created a structure for her essay. The findings. What looked like an ancient version of the much-later-normalized maker’s marks on some shards of pottery. The abnormal proliferation of some dyes and firing methods. But she had never explained any of this to the layman. Her supervisor aside, no one had ever really been interested before.

Unsure where to start, she began with the first subject she explored in her dissertation. It was fresh in her mind, as she’d been editing it and re-editing it at length, almost like a nervous habit, as she had waited to hear whether she had been accepted to come to Al-Brehoni.

She watched his face carefully as she spoke, looking for any trace of boredom or confusion. But there was none. Either he was a talented actor, or he was genuinely interested and understood what she was talking about, nodding encouragingly for her to continue.

And she did. Once it was clear that the Sheikh wanted to hear more about her work, the words flowed from her like water. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized just how much she had wanted to say, and how deprived she’d felt at not having anyone who was actually interested in hearing about it.

She’d been talking for a while, she realized, as her voice began to grow a little hoarse. But the Sheikh kept nodding, even asking the odd question.

His questions had the exceptional quality of being both intelligent and knowledgeable. He was even raising possibilities that she’d been too close to the subject for too long to consider.

She found, the more she spoke, the less she spoke directly about her dissertation topic, and the more she wandered off into a general discussion about what she knew and what she was excited to learn about Al-Brehoni.

Lucie had been keeping as informed as possible with the archeological digs that had been allowed to begin in Al-Brehoni over the last three years. She had alerts set for any new articles published, and regularly scoured archeological journals for accounts of new discoveries within the country.

But the process of discovering, writing and finally publishing can often be a long one, and Lucie was painfully aware that there might be things happening that would not have made it anywhere near the journals yet. And there were always smaller, interesting but not-yet-explained findings that wouldn’t make it into the journals for some time—perhaps ever.