Bought By The Sheikh Next Door Page 16

  It wasn’t true, of course. But it was nice to imagine it was.

  “I promise you, this is the last patient file I will look at. From here on out, my mind is only on the conference. Professional enrichment. All of that. But first…”

  A long pause on the line, and then a sigh.

  “Oh, all right. You better be telling me the truth, though. What patient was this again?”

  Kehlan went over the information again, and he could picture his colleague on the other end of the line, doing his thoughtful nod, complete with beard stroking.

  “I see, I see. That seems to make sense. But why would she lie about that? There is no room for vanity in healthcare. She ought to know that.”

  Kehlan shrugged, though no one was there to see him in the back seat of his expensive car.

  “Pride, I suppose. Some women just don’t want to admit they’re getting older. But you see how this changes things, right?”

  The other man agreed, and Kehlan spoke with him briefly about the woman’s care, and how it should change if he got her to admit that she had lied on the intake forms.

  “Okay,” Hakim said, with the same heavy sigh as he had earlier. “Thank you, Kehlan. But you really must go, now. Promise me this is the last time I’ll hear from you for the next three days.”

  Kehlan chuckled. He wondered if Hakim knew he enjoyed him hassling this way. He really seemed to lean into it, at times.

  “I will certainly try.”

  “I hope you do more than try, Your Highness,” his friend mock-grumbled, before wishing him a pleasant trip and hanging up.

  Kehlan smiled as he ended the call. Methodically, he tapped through the process of deleting the patient file from his tablet, consistent with the rules on patient confidentiality. He always made a point to himself of playing by the rules and fulfilling each and every obligation that any other doctor would need to, even though—as a member of the ruling family of Al-Derra—technically, there were very few rules that applied to him at all.

  After the files were deleted, he found himself still staring at the tablet. The mystery had been solved and the patient had been saved from her own pride getting in the way of her medical care, but still, Kehlan felt something bothering him about the case.

  And then, all on its own, something clicked.

  “Driver, change of plans. I’m stopping by the palace first.”

  “Son! This is a surprise!”

  His mother greeted him with all the exaggerated grace that she did everything, and Kehlan appreciated her consistency, if not the strange way it made all of their interactions more formal than they should have been. But it was her way, and he had never questioned it. The Sheikha didn’t stand for questioning; he knew that as well as he knew anything.

  “Yes, I had a patient that reminded me of you and I thought I should come see you before I left. Call it superstition, but I think when something reminds you of a loved one, it’s the universe telling you to go and see them.”

  His mother laughed, though her laugh seemed a little bit strained. Since Kehlan’s father had died, she’d always found it amusing when he would say things like that, in imitation of him. As a man of science, Kehlan didn’t agree with much of his late father’s superstitious beliefs, but remembering them to his mother made them grow on him all the same.

  “And are your patients still entertaining you?” his mother asked, settling into a chair. “What did this one do to remind you of me? Is she anyone I know?”

  Kehlan sighed and settled in across from her. He hadn’t meant this conversation to be long. His flight at the airport would wait for him—one of the advantages of having a private plane—but that didn’t mean that he wanted to delay it too long. The conference wouldn’t wait the way the plane would.

  But he was already starting to get a sense that this would apparently be one of those conversations, where his mother found a way of lacing her disapproval in between questions that he needed to answer to avoid him calling her on it and objecting, and them digging into the years-long disagreement they had over his choice of career.

  “No one you know,” he said curtly.

  “Oh? And how did she remind you of me?”

  Kehlan smiled and reached forward to squeeze his mother’s hand.

  “Her pride.”

  At that, his mother laughed, and Kehlan thought that they might just have left the sticky matter of his career go by. But just when he thought they’d moved on, his mother circled back to it.

  “I’m glad you’ve enjoyed this business at the hospital,” she said. “You know, we’ve always tried to give you everything, even if that everything is letting you entertain yourself in this way.”

  Kehlan raised a weary eyebrow.

  “It’s not really about enjoying it, mother. And it’s certainly not entertainment. I don’t think any of my patients would be happy to hear the management of their healthcare called entertainment.”

  The Sheikha shook her head and patted his hand.

  “Oh, no, of course it isn’t. I see you don’t believe that it is. But you do enjoy it, don’t you? After all, that’s why your father and I let you do it. Don’t tell me we allowed you all this for nothing.”

  Kehlan sighed. He wished his intuition hadn’t been right. He wished that they weren’t going to delve into this, especially not when he was wanting to leave as soon as possible. But here they were.

  “I don’t remember you and father allowing me to do much of anything.”

  The words sounded bitter coming out of his mouth, and he wished they hadn’t. But Kehlan wasn’t sure why she was guiding the conversation down this path so directly. It was a disagreement that they’d let sit in a sort of passive stalemate for years now, with just side comments and gentle mentions of the conflict going gently touched on and then left behind. Why would she upset that balance now?

  When Kehlan had first told his parents that he wanted to be a doctor, they had laughed. They had assumed that it was something so patently ridiculous that it wouldn’t last long, and they’d told him as much. They had assumed that as soon as he realized the sheer amount of work that would go into studying for that career, he would give up.

  But Kehlan didn’t give up. If anything, their doubt in his determination fueled him. He studied pre-med in college and then went to medical school. And yet still, his parents had assumed that when he was done studying, he would abandon the whole notion and go back to the easy life of luxury and ceremony that he had been born for. They’d assumed that their son, having played his little game, would at last follow the path of least resistance.

  He wasn’t sure what had made his parents so quick to assume that he would throw away years of his life in training if he wasn’t serious about becoming a full-time doctor, but when he’d applied for a residency in a hospital in France, their disapproval had come to a head. Those were tense days, full of shouted conversations and words that neither the parents nor their son had truly meant.

  When they’d finally reached the compromise they had come to—that Kehlan would return to work at the hospital in Al-Derra’s capital city, Sadifah, so that he could perform at least some of his royal duties and be close at hand—it was hard to say who had been more relieved. It had brought a fragile peace to the relationships between the three of them that time, and avoiding the subject as much as possible had strengthened into a basic agreement of their family life.

  And now, for seemingly no reason at all, his mother seemed intent on threatening that peace, in a way she rarely did.

  “Mother, what is bringing this up? You know I’m on my way out of town.”

  She waved her hand as though it were no big thing.

  “Oh, I just want you to be prepared, son. That’s all.”

  Concern began to grow in Kehlan’s chest. For the first time since coming in, he took a close look at his mother; she was as elegant as his earliest memories of her. Most of the family had been born to royal life, but she had married into it. She had chosen i
t. And the way she dressed and carried herself always seemed to Kehlan that it was the most natural decision that she had ever made.

  And yet, she had definitely lost weight since the last time Kehlan had seen her. She seemed frailer. Her age was a taboo topic to anyone in the press or the household, but all the same, Kehlan knew that she was getting older. She’d left having Kehlan until relatively late for an Al-Derran woman, and he was 34. She must be in her late sixties by now, and it looked as though she was beginning to feel it.

  “Mother,” he asked, his tone betraying his worry more than he would have liked it to. “Are you all right?”

  She laughed, and the peals of her laughter rang off the walls in a harsh, unrelenting way.

  “Oh, son, always the worrier. Maybe we should have found a way to drive that out of you when you were a boy. Maybe you would never have gone off to do your doctoring if we had done so. How much easier that would have been on all of us!”

  Kehlan gritted his teeth.

  “I understand you disapprove, Mother, but please answer the question.”

  Mother and son sat looking at each other for a long, heavy moment. To the bystander, perhaps, it wouldn’t have seemed sensible for Kehlan to have gone from casual to deeply concerned so quickly. But a bystander wouldn’t know his mother—wouldn’t know the way she had always held her cards so close to her chest, as though telling anyone anything that wasn’t strictly necessary were a fatal flaw.

  But Kehlan knew. And it was this knowledge that most worried him, and held his intent stare on her long after others would look away.

  In the end, it was the Sheikha who broke first, casually leaning back as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “No,” she said, “I’m perfectly all right. But I am planning to retire from my official duties.”

  A complex web of emotions greeted this news in Kehlan’s chest. First, there was frustration. She was freezing him out of whatever was actually going on with her. He knew better than most how dedicated to her duties his mother was. She wouldn’t be leaving them if there weren’t something seriously wrong. But here she was, refusing to tell him.

  Then, there was relief, that at least she had the good sense to slow down and deal with whatever it was, instead of running herself ragged trying to do everything while she was unwell.

  And then, there was the realization of why it was that she was bringing his career choice up, and the pit in his stomach that it opened up.

  “I am glad you’ll be getting more rest,” he said, doing his best to limit the harsh, clipped tone that came into his voice when his entire way of life was under threat.

  “Yes, I will be. Not that I need it, but a little more beauty sleep never goes unwanted. And, of course, I can rest easy in the knowledge that my one and only son, who I raised for this life, will be stepping up and taking over more of the duties he has been shirking for the entirety of his adulthood.”

  And there it was, the conflict between them laid bare. The concern, the worry and the relief all fell to the side as anger flooded through his body. Did she even stop for a moment to realize what she was asking? Did she realize that he would be giving up something that actually meant something to people, and for what? For running off to attend every new luxury hotel opening? To make an appearance on the yacht of the latest up-and-coming royal acolyte? To trade on some overblown image of the wealthy prince as a commodity?

  The hothead inside him that he had spent all of his early life learning to repress wanted to stand and shout these things at her. It wanted to jump over the table and tell her she was wrong, and that being royal meant that he didn’t have to listen to anyone, and so he would be ignoring her ridiculous demands.

  But he pushed this reaction down, kept his emotions under control, and answered in as calm a manner as he could manage.

  “It is my cousins who will rule. Not me. This is not my responsibility, no matter how much you want to pretend it is.”

  He had never seen a smile on his mother’s face so cold and entirely without mirth. He wasn’t surprised she was capable of it, but he was surprised that it was directed at him.

  “They may be directly in line for the throne, but ruling is a family effort. And whether you like it or not, you are part of this family. You certainly like it when you have servants to drive you around, and a private plane to shuttle you to your little conferences overseas.”

  Kehlan’s immediate impulse was to tell her she was crazy, and that he would never do what she asked of him. He wanted to rebuke her for belittling his career, and implying that the trip to Washington was anything but professional development that he was mandated to undergo. Now, with his anger somewhat subsided, he felt he could do so in an acceptably calm manner.

  But just as he was gearing up to tell her all this, and putting the words in order in his mind, he stopped.

  He looked at her again, and sized up the same reasons for concern that he had seen earlier, with the new knowledge that she was taking such a drastic step, and acting so uncharacteristically cruel with him.

  It was more than the fact that she had lost weight. She had always been such an imposing figure—his whole life, she had commanded every room she’d walked into. Something of that command was waning, and he didn’t know what. He only knew that the fact that it was fading was very bad news—worse news even than he had at first thought.

  He shelved his biting retorts. This was bigger than a family disagreement over his career. This would need to be handled carefully. He wasn’t going to leave his life, and the work he did that actually made a difference. But neither could he upset his mother in the state she was in, whether she was willing to tell him about it or not.

  He stood and leaned down to kiss his mother on the cheek. It was a familiar motion, but had never felt so rote and lifeless as it did now.

  “We will discuss this when I return from Washington.”

  As he walked out of the room, his mother’s voice followed him.

  “So commanding. So regal. You’ll do well at this job, son.”

  Chapter 3

  Paige

  When it rains, it pours. Not that it was actually raining in rural Washington—which was a nice change for spring—but no, her date cancelling and her son being out of town left Paige feeling lonely and empty. It didn’t help that on top of both of those things, the Coffee Cup was also uncharacteristically dead.

  It worried her more than it should have worried a waitress. But she’d spent enough time working there that it wasn’t exactly short-term gig while she looked for something better. It was her life’s work, like it or not. She had come to love this diner, and the people that came and went. The regulars. The out-of-towners. Alvin. Dale, the head waiter.

  So, on top of worrying about Dylan, and being annoyed at her cancelled date, and not having anything to occupy her mind, she also had to worry about the future of the establishment that was her life and livelihood. All morning, they’d had only a handful of customers, and about the only thing that had saved Paige from descending into a total funk was idly chatting to Alvin. And luckily, Alvin, if he was at all worried about the lack of customers, didn’t show it.

  Alvin had more reason that she did to feel invested in the future of the Coffee Cup—she couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t the cook there. It was comforting, Paige had always thought, to be able to rely on him being there. On everything being the same, even as everything else in the world seemed subject to change. And maybe the fact that he had worked there this long was comforting to him, too. Maybe it was why he seemed so even-keeled about the lack of customers—he’d been through enough dead days to know they didn’t last.

  She felt a sense of kinship with him. She was doing what he had done—spending her life at a diner in a small town. On a day with so much uncertainty and unhappiness, that was a nice touchstone. So, when Alvin told her that what she really needed to do was get out of town, she felt insulted in a way that probably wasn’t justified.
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br />   “But I love Stockton! Why would I leave?”

  Alvin shook his head.

  “Stockton is full of old fogeys like me. And you know everyone here. How are you going to meet someone new when you’re stuck with the past all the time?”

  Paige couldn’t help but feel defensive. She didn’t expect this today. Not from Alvin. He usually knew her better than to kick her when she was down.

  “I mean, there’s the dating site. I’m on that. It’s not like I’m not trying, and when you try with these things, they supposedly work. You know, eventually…”

  There were any number of things Alvin might have said about how well that had worked out for her so far, in light of the canceled date she’d told him about in one of their first bored conversations of the day. But to his credit, he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen how upset he’d already made her without meaning to and figured it was better to back off and let her come around to his opinion on her own. So, instead, he just looked at her knowingly until she brought it up herself.

  “Okay, so it didn’t work out great so far. But that doesn’t mean it won’t,” she hedged.

  Alvin shook his head.

  “That’s not meeting people. You need to meet them in person. To let them get to know you like we do. That’s the only way your life is going to move forward.”

  Okay, now she was insulted.

  “And who says my life isn’t moving forward?”

  Alvin put a liver-spotted hand on her shoulder.

  “I’m not trying to insult you. I just hate to see you stay here like this when you could have so much more.”

  Paige tried to stand down her offense. He meant well, she knew. It had just been a rough morning for her. She wasn’t exactly herself. She shouldn’t take it so personally. But still, she felt the need to defend herself.

  “I like my life just fine. Dylan is amazing. And my parents are here. All the people I’ve known my whole life—they’re all here.”

  “Except for all the young people. Don’t you ever wonder why that is?”