The Sheikh's Scheming Sweetheart Read online

  The awful plan came to her just as she was about to drop the letter into the outgoing mailbox.

  Meroitic royalty were buried with all their finest possessions, their mummies covered in jewelry. If she discovered the tomb on a university-approved expedition, all the relics would be, rightfully, claimed by the government. But if she went herself, unofficially, then a few pieces might go missing without notice.

  It wouldn’t take much from a tomb of that age to eliminate her student loan debt and give her a comfortable cushion until she could find work. The thought made her stomach churn, to be perfectly honest. It wouldn’t just be stealing from the dead. It would be stealing the cultural heritage of the Kush and the Nubian people. And, it would be actively hampering the continued study of that history by removing what might be crucial pieces that could reveal unknown aspects of Kushite life and burial practice.

  She shook her head, slowly withdrawing the letter from the mailbox. She’d studied this culture for almost a decade. She could tell which pieces were important. And even if she sold a few pieces into private collections, was that such an enormous price to pay for an entire tomb’s worth of royal artifacts?

  She crammed the letter into her pocket and pulled her jacket on the rest of the way, guilt gnawing at her. To keep this from Abraham, of all people, was the worst part. He’d been looking for this tomb his entire life, meeting disappointment after disappointment. Most people in the field thought Amanirenas was one of the many unidentified rulers buried at Jebel Barkal, and that she and Abraham were fools for even looking for a separate tomb. He’d endured mocking dismissal of his work for decades.

  But this would fix all of that, she told herself as she hurried back towards the library. Sure, he wouldn’t be there for the moment it was uncovered, but he’d still get credit for all the work that had gone into the discovery, not to mention validation that he’d been right all along. He would understand.

  She rushed back towards her table in the library, already mentally cataloging which books she should bring, only to pull up short in surprise as she saw someone standing near her table. The tall, thin young man was instantly recognizable.

  “Peterson,” she said, suspicious.

  Terrance Peterson turned to face her, casually sliding his phone into the pocket of his navy blue pea coat.

  “Ah, Miss Hawkins,” he said brightly. “I was just looking for you. Professor Hayek and I were about to go to a late dinner with Dean Hardwell, and I thought, since your mentor is indisposed, you might like to come along.”

  “I appreciate the gesture,” Vanessa said stiffly. “But no, thank you.”

  Peterson smiled thinly. He hadn’t expected her to agree. He was just coming to brag, yet again, about his close personal relationship with the dean and his mentor, and rub in her face the continued absence of her own.

  He already had a position at Columbia all but guaranteed. He was old money and insufferably smug about it. He was also a biblical archaeologist, which made him doubly unbearable in Vanessa’s book. In her opinion, biblical archeology had no place in a real academic setting. It was loaded with bias from square one.

  When you went into any research looking for a specific conclusion, then that conclusion was all you would see. Biblical archeologists would ignore valid avenues of research to chase fancies and twist whatever evidence they needed to in order to make it conform to their narrative. Perhaps she was unfairly generalizing the entire field. And she certainly didn’t have anything against religious people in general.

  But Terrance Peterson absolutely fit the worst possible stereotype. A self-absorbed, holier-than-thou pedant smugly passing judgment on everyone struggling for a scrap of what had been handed to him at birth, unflinchingly confident that his world view was correct, both objectively and morally. There was no person on earth that Vanessa wanted to punch quite as much as him.

  “Still trying to rediscover a tomb that’s already been found?” Peterson asked, looking down at her work.

  “Still trying to prove there are men in the sky who can turn water into wine?” she countered, elbowing past him to begin gathering up her notes. “And no, actually. Translating Meroitic just isn’t possible without more bilingual sources. I’ve moved on to something else.”

  “You, giving up on Amanirenas?” Terrance laughed, leaning casually on the table to watch her. “I doubt it.”

  “I thought having faith in the absence of empirical evidence was your specialty, Terry.”

  Peterson scowled. He hated that name.

  “Well, if you truly intend to finally give up the wild goose chase,” he said. “I have a suggestion for what you might try next. Very in line with your current areas of study.”

  “Oh really?” Vanessa rolled her eyes, carefully picking up the glass-framed map and settling it into a cushioned wooden case. “And what’s that?”

  “I’m planning an expedition to locate Cush.”

  Vanessa closed the locks of the case with a snap and looked up at him, waiting to be impressed.

  “Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah of the infamous arc,” Peterson explained. “Founder of the Kingdom of Kush.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch,” Vanessa said with a snort, picking up her case and her valise full of notes. “And patently uninteresting to me. Why would you want me along anyway? It’s hardly a secret that you can’t stand me. I’m not an idiot.”

  “And neither am I.” Peterson planted a hand on the table near her, trying to keep her there. “You’re the foremost expert on Meroitic in the States, with a working knowledge of the hieratic and demotic scripts that preceded it. I would be a fool not to take advantage of your expertise in this.”

  “Then I will take special delight in saying no,” Vanessa said with a smile, pushing past him and walking away. “I’m not interested.”

  “Even if it would get you back into the Nubian desert?”

  She stopped abruptly, her back to him.

  “Right back to the spot you were searching for Amanirenas before,” Peterson continued, fixing her with a smug glare, convinced he’d already won. “You were forced to abandon the expedition early due to the storms, yes? Your mentor nearly bankrupted himself and the university just getting there, only to come out empty-handed. Wouldn’t you just give anything to try again, to prove you were right all along?”

  Vanessa turned slowly to look at him, her expression carefully polite.

  “I would rather walk across the Sahara alone,” she said in a calm, measured tone. “I would sell everything I own, camp out under a tarp, and excavate with nothing but my hands and a trowel before I would accept a single penny from you. In the very short, Mr. Peterson, I would not work with you if you had discovered the tomb of Sheba herself. Good night, Terry.”

  She turned sharply on her heel before he could reply and hurried out, anger a bristling knot in her chest.

  Chapter Three

  It took all her savings, but Vanessa was on a plane that night. The rest of this little informal expedition would have to be put on her credit card. She might be camping out under a tarp with a trowel after all. It would be worth it, she told herself, for even a shred of proof of Amanirenas. Not to mention the potential financial rewards…

  She left Newark at nine on Friday night, flew nearly eleven hours overnight to Lomé, Togo, where after an hour break she left for a five-and-a-half-hour flight to Addis Ababa. There, she twiddled her thumbs for two and half hours before her next flight, a two-hour puddle jump that put her in Khartoum at nearly two in the morning on Sunday. This was finally followed by an even smaller flight to a microstate sandwiched between Egypt and Sudan: Ksatta-Galan.

  The tiny, wealthy nation was on the opposite side of the Persian Gulf to Saudi Arabia, but nevertheless had strong economic and cultural ties to the Gulf States. Most importantly, its capital city was located incredibly close to the part of the Sahara she needed to explore.

  She’d already arranged lodging at a nearby hostel and after nearly twenty
-four hours total of flying, she barely had the energy to leave a message for Professor Van Rees before she collapsed into her bunk.

  She woke in the afternoon, groggy and jet-lagged, as a group of other travelers sharing the hostel room crashed in noisily, laughing and talking loudly in Dutch as they dumped their belongings. The urge to roll over and go back to sleep was strong, but Vanessa dragged herself out of bed.

  Her eyes felt like the Sahara had personally moved in and made itself at home, and her tongue felt like sandpaper. She shotgunned three cups of coffee to bring herself around, and once she’d made herself look basically presentable again, she found her way to the front desk to check for messages.

  “Yes, you have something here,” the handsome Australian man behind the desk said, smiling with perfect teeth. “From a Professor Van Rees?”

  “Perfect, thank you,” Vanessa said, accepting the note he handed her and privately wondering why every hostel she’d ever been to (and she’d visited a few) was run by Australians.

  She took the note out into the sunlight before she read it, finding a café and more coffee to help with her concentration.

  Very surprised to hear of your arrival! the note read. Charity ball tonight at which I would very much appreciate your company. Formal dress code. We have much to catch up on!

  The message was followed by an address for one of the several palaces in Ksatta-Galan’s capital. Vanessa was at first shocked that Abraham had gained an invitation to such a high-class event, and then exasperated as she realized she was going to have to find a dress to wear.

  That night, she emerged from a taxi outside of a glittering palace. She’d spent the ride there awed by the beauty of the ancient city, its buildings ornate pre-Islamic Arabian architecture, all intricate arches and geometric patterns in gold and blue and orange. But nothing compared to the palace itself, its domed towers shining with gold leaf, its towering minarets fluted and covered in intricate patterns like carousels, standing against the sunset horizon. Its silhouette was so majestic that Vanessa, in her store-bought dress, suddenly felt unworthy to even approach.

  She’d done her very best with her limited funds. The dove gray cape dress had a narrow sheath skirt rising to a lacy illusion collar from which the stately column of the cape draped dramatically. She’d thought it was quite lovely when she’d found it at the last moment off the sale rack of a dress store in town. But now, watching other guests glide past the fountains to the palace steps in their jewel-draped ball gowns and white-tie tuxedos, she felt pitifully underdressed.

  She looked ready for a daytime TV awards show, not a ball in which royalty was expected to be in attendance. Still, with what she was planning to do to Abraham, coming to meet him here was really the least she could do.

  Abraham was waiting for her on the palace steps, just as round and fatherly as she remembered, if a little older. His hair had started graying after the last disastrous expedition. It was all silver now and his face had more lines than it had just a few years ago. She’d underestimated the toll that years of fruitless searching had taken on him. But he also looked well fed and happy, and his cufflinks alone could have bought ten of Vanessa’s gown. She saw them glittering as he embraced her like a prodigal daughter.

  “It’s been too long!” he said warmly, clapping a hand on her shoulder as he held her at arm’s length. “You look wonderful, old girl!”

  “So do you, old man,” Vanessa said with a warm smile. “What have you been doing out here for a year? You could never have afforded that suit with what the university was paying you.”

  “Oh, just some private consultation work,” Abraham said, waving a hand to dismiss the matter. “Nothing interesting, I promise. Now, tell me, did the map arrive? Isn’t it glorious?”

  He guided her into the palace, which was even more beautiful inside than out. It boasted mosaic tiles and gold-painted, beautiful geometric patterns across the floor as well as lush inner courtyards bursting with greenery and flowers from behind cages of intricate screens. The air was full of music and the scent of spice and orange blossom. Vanessa was enchanted, almost as enraptured by the setting as by Abraham’s gripping tale of how he’d recovered the map from a lost city in the Congo.

  “It was among a half-dozen texts we rescued from an ancient library. The original inhabitants were wiped out in colonial wars, and most of their culture and writings were destroyed. But this library had been sealed against time and the jungle, air tight to preserve the texts within! And ferociously protected.

  “The earth was scattered with bones, though we couldn’t be sure if they were the bodies of warriors who had died defending the place, the men they’d killed, or the remains of ill-fated grave robbers caught in the fiendish traps they had laid. I nearly had a heart attack when we first opened the sealed chamber. We had to filter the air to keep the documents from crumbling on contact with the humid jungle atmosphere! And there, among the scrolls and tablets, was the map, waiting for me like a sign from the heavens!”

  She suspected he was elaborating for her benefit, and some of it sounded suspiciously like the plot of a movie, but Vanessa indulged him regardless, just happy to see him doing so well.

  Vanessa had recovered from the sharp blow of their failure in Nubia more determined than ever, but it had worn her mentor down immensely. Then he’d vanished on this long sabbatical, and she’d been half certain it was the end for him. To see him so alive and engaged now was more than reassuring. And it made her feel all the more guilty that she wasn’t sharing her discovery with him.

  She promised herself that she would make it up to him after everything was said and done.

  “So, what brings you to Ksatta-Galan so suddenly?” Abraham asked as they wandered the crowded ballroom, champagne in hand. “If I’d known you were coming, I might have at least met you at the airport.”

  “I didn’t want to trouble you,” Vanessa replied, trying not to look as flustered as she felt by the question. “It’s just a few last-minute findings I needed to verify personally. I didn’t even officially declare the time off. I just want to be certain I’ve actually found something worth bothering with before I make a big fuss about it, you know?”

  “Ah, yes, I understand,” Abraham agreed with a sage nod. “After what happened last time, I can hardly blame you. We were so certain…”

  “I was so certain,” Vanessa said, gripping the edge of her cape, guilt still there even after three years. “I convinced you to gamble everything on it. If it weren’t for me—”

  “Nonsense, girl,” Abraham said firmly. “You are my student, and the decision to go was mine. As was the decision to personally fund the expedition. Plus, we did learn one thing.”

  “What’s that?” Vanessa asked.

  “We know one more place the tomb definitely is not,” Abraham said with a chuckle.

  Vanessa laughed as well, but the guilt remained. She had been so sure it was there…

  “Ah, look there!” Abraham said suddenly.

  Vanessa followed his gaze to the top of the grand staircase, where a young man was descending. He looked to be about Vanessa’s age and was breathtakingly handsome. In a stylish, burnt orange thawb, its high collar unbuttoned against his strong, angular jaw, he looked at once more simply and yet more richly dressed than anyone else in the room.

  The watch almost hidden beneath the sleeve of his robe was the only glitter he wore—nothing in comparison to the woman on his arm who was dripping in so many diamonds that Vanessa was certain she must leave a trail of them behind her wherever she stepped.

  And yet, Vanessa couldn’t take her eyes off of him.

  “Who is that?” she asked Abraham.

  “That would be our host,” the professor explained. “Sheikh Ramin Al-Zand, the son of the ruling Sheikh of Ksatta-Galan. This is one of his palaces, and he’s transforming it into the nation’s largest history museum. This evening’s celebration is in honor of that.”

  “And the woman with him?”

>   “I couldn’t say,” Abraham said with a shrug. “They change as often as the weather. Sheikh Ramin is somewhat known as a heartbreaker.”

  Vanessa felt a momentary sting of disappointment which she quickly dismissed. She was here to work, not throw herself at playboy princes who could clearly do much better.

  “But don’t tell him I said that,” Abraham went on. “I’ve been working with him rather extensively lately. The Sheikh is an avid student of history. There hasn’t been an archeological development in this area he wasn’t involved in somehow.”

  “Well, that’s just not fair,” Vanessa said, still watching as Ramin descended the stairs to speak with his guests. “Gorgeous, a prince, and a historian as well? Next, you’ll be telling me he has two—”

  “Ah, one moment,” Abraham cut her off as he spotted someone through the crowd. “There’s someone I absolutely must speak to. Wait here; I’ll be back in just a moment.”

  He hurried away before she could respond, leaving her stranded in the middle of the crowded ballroom, feeling increasingly awkward as each moment passed. She couldn’t even follow him, having lost him almost at once amid the glittering gowns of all the guests.

  But as the minutes ticked by and the professor didn’t return, Vanessa became increasingly sure she would have to try. She took a deep breath, finished her champagne in a single swallow, and waded into the crowd in search of her escort.

  She hadn’t gone far at all before she bumped into someone and stumbled back, apologizing. Her apology died in her throat as she recognized the smug face looking down at her.

  “Peterson,” she said, somewhere between shock and dismay. “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he answered, raising an eyebrow. “Isn’t an affair like this a bit out of your price range?”

  “Judging by her dress,” said the woman standing next to Peterson, who was tall and dark haired and had a distinctly French accent, “that’s not the only thing that’s beyond her price range.”