The Sheikh's Online Bride - A Modern Mail Order Romance Read online

  But no miracle occurred. She simply cried until she had no tears left, and her whole body felt sore. Then she felt a numbness set in.

  The numbness finally made her calm enough to make it from the floor to the bed.

  She tried closing her eyes, but sleep was elusive. Every now and then, her body summoned up new tears that spilled out over her cheeks. She had no control over them. She had no control over anything.

  Finally, something resembling sleep came, but it was haunted by the strangest dreams. She saw a palace, and a woman wearing the very dress she had been clutching. But she couldn’t be sure if it was a memory or made up. And then Hakim was there, and they danced and laughed together.

  But there was something wrong through all of it.

  The edges of her vision began blurring black if she looked at anything too long, and the darkness began closing in. She had no choice but to keep running.

  Anita ran until she couldn’t anymore, and she found herself back in Hakim’s condo. Everything was perfect, just the way it had been when she had been there with him. There was even the chakchouka they had been eating, there on the table.

  But then she walked to the window and saw outside a nuclear wasteland, with mushroom clouds going off in the distance, and fires dancing on the roofs of Houston.

  Everything was broken. Nothing was going to be all right.

  When she woke, she felt relief for just a second; she’d been set free from such an awful dream. For a moment, she forgot what had caused it.

  And then she remembered. And she cried again. Her throat felt raw and dry, and her head was pounding, but still she sobbed. Her stomach called out for food, but she knew that if she were faced with it, she would have no appetite.

  She was drowning.

  And then she heard Fadi, rustling around in the living room.

  “Fadi!” she called out. Her voice was weak, but surely it would carry through the walls. “Fadi, please!”

  She heard the noise in the living room stop abruptly. After a moment, she heard the faucet in the kitchen turn on, then her father’s footsteps down the hall.

  He opened her door, a glass of water in his hand. When he saw her, his face fell. It wasn’t the anger she’d feared, only sadness for his daughter.

  He came to her, and sat on the side of the bed, holding the water out to her. She put it to her lips uncertainly, then downed the whole glass.

  When she had finished, he took the glass back from her, and set it on the nightstand, then took her hand in his.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  And the words came spilling out. She told him about how she had met Hakim. How she had seen him against Fadi’s wishes. A flash of anger crossed his face, but it only lasted the briefest of moments. He was more concerned with his daughter’s state than anything she had done to disobey him.

  She told him how she had discovered the truth about who she really was, and the terrible choice she had been forced to make.

  “I don’t know what I’ve done,” she said. “I feel like everything in me is broken. Everything hurts, Dad.”

  And then the sobbing began again, and she felt her father’s arms wrap around her. He held her until the tears were gone.

  “I’m sorry, Anita,” Fadi said, when at last she was calm again. “I could have spared you some of this.”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t angry with him anymore, and it hardly seemed right for him to apologize.

  “No, he insisted, “it’s true.”

  He sighed, and got a faraway look in his eye.

  “Daughter,” he said at last, “I should have told you years ago. Sometimes, it was all I could do not to tell you.”

  “What stopped you?

  He took her hand again. There was a smile on his face, now, even in the midst of all the emotion, the sadness and the regret.

  “Your parents. In a way. When we were fleeing…” he paused, uncertain.

  “Go on,” Anita urged.

  “They made me promise that if they didn’t make it, I would never tell you about what happened. They wanted you to be safe, far away from the violence. And so I honored their wishes. I told myself it was better that way. Even in the years after the coup, it was very dangerous to be a member of the Al-Dalian royal family. Your parents were good people, but they were maybe a bit too trusting. There were those that they trusted with certain things in the running of the country. And they did… terrible things. Your father tried to fix it when he found out what they had done, but it was too late.”

  Once Fadi got started, the words flowed out of him like water from a bottle that had been corked under pressure for twenty years.

  “We knew the rebels were going to be coming for the palace. Your parents gave you to me, hoping they would be able to follow afterwards. As far as the public was concerned, I was their chef, so I wouldn’t be suspected or searched too closely if I was caught leaving the palace. But unknown to most, I was also a member of their protection detail. Being both allowed me to accompany them even on trips where hosts would object to the presence of a bodyguard.”

  Anita nodded slowly—remembering how she’d been in awe of his strength.

  “They gave me their bags, too. Your father’s ring, and some gold and diamonds. Your mother’s most valuable possessions. Her jewelry.”

  At this Anita cut in. “Her dresses.”

  Fadi nodded. “Yes, her dresses. And I went to the place where we were to meet. But they never came. And then I saw on the news that the palace had been taken, and…”

  Fadi’s composure broke. “I wanted… I wanted to save you the sorrow of ever seeing them like that. So I honored the promise I made to your parents. We went overland, until I could get us somewhere where I could sell some of the gold and buy us new identities. They weren’t perfect, but they were good enough to get us into the States. And then I came here, and used the rest of the money—everything I had left—to start the restaurant so we could live.”

  He looked lighter, once he’d said it all. But Anita sensed there was something more.

  “You said you kept it a secret only partially because my parents asked you to. What did you mean by that?”

  He hesitated for a moment, but had already said too much to stop now. “I probably would have told you anyway, years ago. You deserved to know. But I guess… I was ashamed. As their bodyguard, I was supposed to protect your parents. And in that, I failed.”

  Anita laughed, in spite of the seriousness of the moment and her own aching heart. “There was a coup! Blaming you would be like blaming the gardener for a tornado that uprooted a tree!”

  He smiled, but there was a sadness in it. “That’s just the sort of thing your mother would have said.”

  The words warmed Anita. All her life, she had felt as though a part of her had been missing. Her parents had always been such a mystery to her, but now her memory of them was beginning to come to life.

  “You saved her dresses for me,” she said suddenly, remembering the realization she’d had the previous night.

  “Yes,” he said. “I saved the dresses, and the ring. It wasn’t much, but I wanted some part of them to always be with you.”

  In that instant, all the anger she had felt for Fadi faded. He’d done the best he could, under difficult circumstances. He could have left. He could have left her somewhere, taken the money, and run. But instead, he dedicated his life to fulfilling his promise. He’d given up a life for her.

  “I’m sorry I disobeyed you,” Anita said, but he waved his hand in the air.

  “Oh, no. Not that. Never that. I won’t have the daughter I chose regret falling in love! Not even if you know you can never be with the one you love. It is still a beautiful thing. Never let anyone tell you any different.”

  She wasn’t used to seeing Fadi like this. He was a stone. A playful stone, with her, sure. But anything to do with his personal life? Never.

  Anita had hoped that would change. He had always said that raising her was enough
bothering with women for him, and why would he need more? But the look in his eyes as he remembered his life in Al-Dali told a different story.

  “What was it like?” she asked.

  He didn’t even seem to mind that she’d changed subject so abruptly. He was too excited to tell her. He described their homeland—a beautiful place. They had more water, he said, than most other countries in the region, and they put it to good use. Bougainvillea trees everywhere, and great tall palms that lined all the major roads.

  He told her about the palace he had lived in, there with her parents and their staff. He told her about the marbled halls and endless gardens, and the parties they would throw.

  And he told her about the joy that greeted the announcement of her birth. There were parties in the streets for weeks. Anita was welcomed into the world with as much excitement as a small nation could muster. Green banners, the color of her eyes, were hung around the capital until they became too faded by the sun.

  “What were my parents like?”

  Here, the endless flow of words ceased. Fadi looked careful. Thoughtful. Sad, even.

  “Your father was a kind man, and a just one. He treated everyone with respect. If he had a flaw, it was only that he was too trusting, and he allowed the wrong people too much trust, and they abused it. I never had any problem with the man. He was a fine king.”

  It was a good thing for Fadi to say about her father. He spoke about him respectfully, but there was nothing in Fadi’s words that made Anita think they were close enough that her father would have entrusted his only child to him.

  “And my mother?”

  Here, Fadi hesitated for longer. It seemed like he had any number of things to say, but didn’t quite know how to say them.

  “Your mother was a gracious woman,” he said at last. “Kinder that someone who had been raised with everything had any right to be. She was a smart woman, who never hesitated to think things through. And beautiful! The first time I saw her, I was a young man. I thought she must be an angel. She was the kind of woman who made every commoner wish he had been born a king. Or, at least, that the world was a different place, so that things that might never be, could be.”

  Watching Fadi, Anita saw more emotion in him that she had ever seen before. He might have told her that she should never regret, but now, she saw regret in him.

  “The way things are today, you mean?” she asked.

  Fadi cocked an eyebrow. “I suppose. But it is a very different world, now. And Al-Dali is a very different place. The government formed by the people who rose up against your parents didn’t last long. It was corrupt and inefficient. It couldn’t last. And when it fell, it was replaced by a peaceful, democratic republic.”

  The day was beginning to get on. There would be work to be done soon, and Anita felt she’d put her father through enough.

  She tried to get back to normal. She tried to help him get the restaurant ready for service. She even went with him to the market, to pick out the food, as she used to do when she was younger. Friends she’d seen little of in the last week were beginning to send her worried texts, not used to being ignored by Anita the way they had been lately.

  But there was something that kept bothering her as she went about trying to reenter her old life. Something more than the deep, lingering pain at the idea of never seeing Hakim again. That would be with her for a long time, she thought, and it had no answer. No, it was something that still didn’t make sense in her mind.

  “Fadi,” she asked, in the swiftly closing window before the staff would begin filtering into the restaurant. “Do you regret any of it?”

  He seemed taken aback. “Do I regret what? What happened to your family? No, regret is not the right word. That was… There was nothing I could have done differently. I wish that were not how it was, and I still feel ashamed there was nothing I could do.”

  “No, not that. It seems like there’s something you regret. When you talk about it all, I can see it. When you talk about how things were before…”

  He was busy washing vegetables in one of the sinks, but at her words, he stopped, and sighed. “You are an observant one. You always have been.”

  “What is it?” Anita asked, her voice quivering. “It’s just… I’m afraid. I’m afraid that I’m going to regret the same thing.”

  Fadi went back to what he had been doing, as though burying himself in it would make it easier to say the words.

  “I regret not trying,” he said at last. “That is all you need to know.”

  There was a catch in Anita’s voice as she asked her next question.

  “Even if it was impossible?”

  He nodded, a faraway look in his eye. When he spoke, she heard the quiet burning of more than twenty years of regret.

  “Especially then.”

  Anita couldn’t say why, but the words unleashed a flood of emotions in her that she didn’t know she had. She’d been so concerned with the pain and the grief that had consumed her, but what awoke in her now was anger. It was unjust. It was cruel that things should be this way—that her own happiness should be decided by events that happened so long ago and so far away. It wasn’t fair.

  Fadi smiled. “There she is,” he said, even as Anita was taking off her apron. “There’s my Anita.”

  She barely heard him. She didn’t have much time; she had a gala to get to.

  FIFTEEN

  The gala was her only chance, Anita thought, as she made her way out of the restaurant and up to the apartment. It was the only time she would be able to get past security, and get to Hakim’s parents without him noticing. They’d never agree to see her if she gave them a choice in the matter.

  If she was going to stand a chance of blending in at the gala, Anita knew she would have to look the part. As soon as she got to her room, she pulled out all the dresses from the chest at the end of the bed. It had been years since she’d seen them all, and she’d forgotten how dated a few of them were. The nineties were not exactly a great time for fashion in Al-Dali, Anita surmised.

  At last, she found the dress she had been looking for. It was green, like her eyes, and it was a dress that would make her feel, more than anything, like the princess she apparently was.

  It was in a western style, though a little more modest, in line with the culture of her homeland. It had what looked like a corset, but with a delicate green lace covering the shoulders, set with a few tiny glimmering white gems that, Anita now realized, were probably real diamonds. The skirt was a little lighter, in a soft, fluffy fabric Anita couldn’t identify.

  She’d worn this one often, as a child. Though Fadi had refused to have any of the dresses altered, for reasons she only now understood, he’d given her a ribbon to tie it onto her, and she’d run around in it, holding up the soft mass of the skirt with her tiny arms.

  Now, it fit her perfectly, and Anita held her breath as she looked at herself in the mirror. She still didn’t know what her mother had looked like, but now, wearing her dress, Anita felt like she knew a bit of what she had looked like at least for one night of her life.

  She did her hair and makeup in a hurry. There was little she could do about the telltale signs that she hadn’t slept well, or that she’d been crying; that was too real to be hidden.

  Shoes were another problem. She should really be wearing elaborate heels with this kind of dress, but she didn’t have any. Flats would have to do—they were all she had in even a remotely coordinating color. And besides, it wasn’t impossible that at some point in the evening, she would need to do some running.

  She put them on, and did one final check in the mirror. They couldn’t be seen under the hem of her dress. Good enough.

  She grabbed a small clutch that she hoped wouldn’t look too obviously cheap, and headed out the door. She was already dreading driving in the dress—especially in her old beater, a manual that was about as likely to break down as it was to get her to the gala on time.

  But when she got downstairs, she saw
Fadi waiting outside for her in his own car. Instinctively, Anita looked to the sign at the front of the restaurant. The “open” sign was flipped to closed, and below it, Fadi had tacked on a little handwritten note that said “for the night.”

  Anita smiled broadly, and got in.

  “To the Da Vinci?” Fadi asked with a grin.

  “But how did you know about the gala?”

  “Please,” he scoffed. “I read the news. Give me some credit.”

  His driving now, in the heat of the moment, reminded her a little bit of Hakim’s... but only to a point. He had the speed right now, but he certainly didn’t have the control.