Sheikh's Stand In (16 page)

Aladdin's eyebrows went up and he whistled.

“Is it as bad as all that?”

“Oh it's probably much worse,” Mikal said cheerfully. “You remember what was supposed to happen today, right?”

Aladdin passed a weary hand over his eyes.

“No, but I'm sure you'll remind me....”

“Mother had today earmarked for your bridal promenade.”

“Oh for the love of...is she serious? Father never did that.”

“Yes, and apparently mother feels the lack of being chosen from the most beautiful women in the land.”

“This is ridiculous,” Aladdin growled. “She can't have missed the fact that we are living in the twenty-first century.”

“Well, she wants the best for you, and apparently what's good for you goes all the way back to the medieval era.”

The bridal promenade would consist of women from all corners of the emirate coming to present themselves to the man who would be sheikh. He would walk among them, and at the end, the one he chose would become his wife.

“She can't be serious.”

“Well, big brother, I think she is. After all, you haven't given her much hope for choosing a bride for yourself, so I suppose that she wants to step in and help you out.”

Aladdin gritted his teeth.

“I will marry when I am damned well and ready, and you can tell her that I have no interest in walking through a group of women as if they were the horses at a fair.”

Mikal laughed. It was all very well and good for him. He was the second son, and as he had joked more than once, the expectations placed on him were far fewer, and far less serious. For a brief moment, Aladdin seriously thought about abdicating and leaving it all to Mikal.

“If I were truly to step down and let you have the job that seems to be so funny to you right now, it would break their hearts.”

“It would,” Mikal agreed, serious now. “You are the firstborn, the light of their age and the future of the country. It has always been so. Aladdin, you can't run forever.”

Aladdin sighed.

“No, I can't run forever, but that doesn't mean that I need to come to heel like a trained dog whenever they want to tug my leash. I can rule after Father steps down, and I will find a wife. I just have no intention of doing so as if I were some camel drover choosing a prize racer.”

From across the world, he could hear his younger brother sigh. Sometimes, he had seriously wondered if Mikal would have been the better heir. His younger brother was dutiful and cared deeply about the country.

In the end, though, being sheikh was what he had been born to do, and he wouldn't give that up simply because it was inconvenient. It simply would have been nice to have the authority as well as the responsibilities.

They talked a little bit about lighter matters. Aladdin was almost ready to hang up before Mikal remembered something.

“So do you, by any chance, have a secret wife out in New York?”

Aladdin blinked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“That's what some of the gossip rags are saying. Father's been keeping it from Mother, but I have an idea that he's wondering, too. You've been out there for almost two months, and some people are wondering if it's more than just the Broadway shows that are keeping you out there.”

“No, you can reassure Father that I have not come to New York simply to do the thing that I don't want to do in Abu Dhabi,” he said, but even as he did, a pair of bright blue eyes and a confident smile flashed across his vision.

After he said good-bye to his brother, he headed for the shower. Soon he would call his parents and reassure them that he wasn't dead or straying into the kind of trouble they feared. However, before he did that, he had to think about Charlotte.

He had gone to Delmarr because he had been told it was wild in a retro kind of way—strange and historical and new all at once. Frankly, once he got there, he hadn't been overly impressed. A loud club full of people with more money than sense, after all, was hardly something exclusive to New York.

Aladdin had been on the verge of leaving when he saw a girl in blue walk by, holding a bottle as if it were a prize. It was like the moment he set eyes on her, he had triggered what came next. The bottle tumbled from her grasp, and acting on instinct in a move he was not sure he could repeat, he caught it for her.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting. Perhaps an impressed look at his skill, or maybe an awkward giggle and a number that he had no intention of calling. Instead, he had been challenged. He had never met a girl who was willing to make him dance on attendance before. She made it clear that she was the one who had to be pleased, who had to be impressed. She walked through the bar scene with a kind of pride and self-assurance that couldn't help but catch his eye. He saw her turn with a sharpness that was nearly martial, striding back to her friends like a conquering general.

He had been on the verge of leaving the bar, but he decided to stay after all. He ordered a drink, grinned when he saw her looking at him, and the rest...

Charlotte was a singular experience.

Under the hot spray of the shower, he wondered what kind of queen she would make. Even his mother had to admit that she was born to play the part.

He shook his head in admiration. He wondered what she would have done if he had offered her a crown. Would she have recoiled and stormed at him for getting above himself? Would she have made a face and dismissed him at once as being far too clingy?

Or perhaps...

Perhaps she would have said yes. Perhaps she would have looked at him with that same mischievous grin on her face, and agreed, deciding to see what they could do together.

Aladdin shook his head free of the fancy. She had his number. She could call, but she had already had her fun. He didn’t expect to hear from her again.

He finished his shower and was rubbing a towel through his hair when he realized that there was a message on his phone. Grimacing, he checked it.

Thanks. You're exactly what I wanted!

 For a moment, Aladdin didn't know what to say. He might have been offended by being offered the kind of review that someone might give to a product on an online discussion board. It might have enraged him, or left him seriously questioning what he was doing in New York.

Instead, he sat down on the bed and laughed until he could feel tears in his eyes. He was a prince on the run from the inevitable, and a man who couldn't seem to please his traditionalist parents, no matter what.

However, last night he had given Charlotte of New York exactly what she wanted—the woman with the sunny blond hair and the enormous cornflower-blue eyes.

He debated responding to her. Perhaps this was one of those things that you simply let go. He wasn't sure what the etiquette was, but suddenly he realized something about Charlotte that most people probably didn't see. She was making it up as she went along. She said things in that proud and assured way of hers, and because it was hers, others accepted it as law.

If she got to make the rules, so did he.

So glad you enjoyed it. If you ever care for a repeat performance, let me know!

There were other things that he wanted to say. He wanted to talk about how passionate she had been, giving him something he wasn't sure he had ever had with another woman before. He wanted to know what she was thinking. He longed to tell her how utterly beautiful she was, and not just when she was writhing with passion, but also when she was sleeping so trustingly in his arms.

She didn't know that he stayed up long after she drifted off, simply watching her. It felt like a rare and precious thing, something that few people got to see and that he wasn't sure he would see again.

Aladdin shook his head. He was new to the States, but he knew that when a woman as vibrant and direct as Charlotte wanted you, she would let you know.

***

Charlotte laughed a little at the text she got in return. After she sent her thank-you, she had been hit with an odd and foreign case of doubts. Her job was all about presenting the right picture, getting people to see what you wanted them to see, but right now, she felt like a wreck.

She sent the message, and then when she hadn't received a response in return, she set it aside and didn't think about it. At least, that's what she told herself she did. The truth was that she did some tidying around her apartment and answered a few work e-mails, all while periodically checking her messages.

When his response came back, she immediately opened it. She told herself that her heart was not pounding, was not eager to see what he had written back. She read the message, and then she read it again. She wasn't sure how to respond.

For a moment, Charlotte thought about contacting Viviana, but she could already imagine what her sister would say. She would say that a confusing text message was the least of what could have happened to her. She would say that if Charlotte were smart, she would delete the guy's number and pray that she never heard from him again.

Charlotte resolutely tossed her phone into her purse. She was Charlotte Johns, and she had far more important things to worry about than needing to get a random man's attention.

Still, he's not a random man, is he?

Charlotte shivered, remembering how he had touched her and made her feel. Regardless of how she tried to pass it off, she couldn't dismiss it.

It was Saturday, but as her employers said, the great eye of the public never slept. She was young and hungry in New York, and that meant that there was always work that she could be doing.

***

That evening, Charlotte found herself at a gallery opening, watching over another success story. The young artist who was showing that evening was a perpetually nervous man, one who had drifted in and out of rehab several times. He was brilliant, however, and it was through Charlotte's company's work that he was now seen as a good risk for conservative art buyers, rather than a loose cannon.

Her presence was more a formality than anything else, and she was having a good time just looking at the art. He was a watercolor artist, something that someone told her was rare for a man. He used greens and blues liberally on enormous canvases, creating a deep and murky world. They gave Charlotte the impression of lying at the bottom of a pool and looking up.

She was dressed conservatively that evening. There were some art galleries where she could dress as if she were going out for a hot night of clubbing, but this wasn't one of them. She chose a dress in demure black-and-gray florals, something that was cut high enough to hide her generous curves but hugged her body in a way that prevented her from feeling as if she were wearing a sack.

Charlotte was making the rounds when the young artist, a man by the name of St. James, called her over.

“Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte, come here,” called St. James. “There's a man here that you simply must meet.”

She expected to see another starving-artist type, or perhaps one of the men who owned the gallery. Instead, she suddenly found herself face to face with Aladdin, who looked just as shocked as she was.

St. James babbled on about Aladdin being a patron of the arts, and how it was such a priority in Abu Dhabi where Aladdin was from. Something dark passed over Aladdin's face, a fleeting emotion, and he turned to St. James.

“Is this the woman you were telling me about, the one who you said completely turned your career around?”

“Why yes, it is...”

“Good. Thank you for introducing us. Do you mind?”

“Oh not at all, not at all!” said St. James, pulling back. Charlotte looked after him longingly. She had been thinking of Aladdin over the last few hours, but now that he had appeared again, she had no idea what to do.

To his credit, Aladdin seemed capable of discretion. He tugged her into a narrow alcove formed by two gallery walls that were unusually positioned back to back. The space that they were in was further camouflaged by a sculpture at one end, giving them as much privacy as they could reasonably expect to get.

Charlotte was confused, and because she sometimes spoke before she thought, the first words that came out of her mouth surprised her.

“Are you following me?” she demanded.

Aladdin laughed.

“You know, I was ready to ask you the same question. No, I had no idea you were here until that artist started telling me how amazing his publicist was and how I had to meet her. From the way he was talking about you, I was picturing a combination of a mother bear and a fairy godmother. I was...much more pleased to see you.”

Charlotte chuckled.

“There are hundreds of thousands of people in this city, and somehow, after spending last night together, you're the one that I run into at a party that I didn't think I was going to be going to today. You really can't beat that kind of coincidence.”

“So it is a coincidence after all. Well, I had hoped....never mind.”

Charlotte looked up at Aladdin with confusion. He looked slightly abashed, shaking his head.

“What? What could you have hoped?”

“Well, when I replied to your message...”

For a moment, Charlotte had no idea what he was talking about. Then she remembered that he told her to come looking for him if she wanted to have a good time again, and she felt a blush rising up on her cheeks.

She felt the gentle touch of his hand against her cheek as he laughed lightly.

“Now this is a treat,” he mused quietly. “I didn't think the bold woman who confronted me last night even knew how to blush.”

“Can't always be the legend, I guess,” she muttered, glancing up at him.

His beauty struck her like a fist. Surrounded by works of art, a part of her responded to him as if he were a sculpture that caught her eye. The rest of her had far more on the mind than simple admiration.

Before she knew what she was doing, she cupped her hand around the back of his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. Perhaps she expected the kiss to be a light thing, something sweet and funny before they dived back in the party. Perhaps she thought that he would simply be so stunned that she could make her escape quickly.