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Her mother? Maybe hiding the picture wouldn’t save her from this discussion.
“My mother is British. Ginger, even,” Nira murmured, wariness seeping into her belly. How had they gotten round to this subject? “I know I look like I should know these things, but I grew up in a tiny village in the north of England, where everyone looked like she did, and no one looked like I...like we do.”
“Your father?”
Her father. Or the mystery that was her father. The wariness turned to lead. “I don’t know.”
Nira knew exactly three things about her father: what he looked like in the one and only picture she’d ever seen of him, currently face down beside her laptop; that he was from the Middle East somewhere; and that her mother refused to ever answer any questions about him. She had never allowed Nira to explore those aspects of her heritage.
She’d surmised their relationship had ended badly. But she wouldn’t be ashamed about it. So what if she didn’t know her father? Plenty of people didn’t.
Lifting her chin, she made herself look him in the eye. Being illegitimate was probably heavily frowned on here, and he could disapprove all he liked. Whatever nonsense had gone on with her parents had nothing to do with her capabilities.
“My point is I need information or the building will be as culturally clueless as I am. You want people to use the facility when it’s open, and so do I. The best way to ensure that is to make them feel at home there.”
The Prince nodded too slowly for her to read the meaning behind it, those dark eyes giving no hint of his opinion on her parentage. “We’re not so different here. People are still people, Nira. It doesn’t matter what they look like, or where they grew up.”
So maybe he didn’t care? Not that she should care either way, but right now navigating this place required she do a lot of guessing and reading between the lines. But his reaction was far enough from her expectations that she couldn’t decide if it could give her any clues for future interactions with other people here.
“They need to feel like they’ve not been tucked away somewhere and forgotten in a little waiting room, and they need to not feel like they’re lost in the crowd of a big waiting room.” He grabbed the pad of paper again, thought for a moment and then scribbled down some numbers beside a list of prioritized departments. “Use these numbers to rough out your footprint. I’ll get someone working on the equipment, hunt up a firm to handle the interior, and get some examples of facilities I like and want you to aim for. I’ll be back in two days.”
Two days. Nira nodded mutely. What else could she do?
He picked up his jacket and swung it on as he strode for the door.
She looked at all he’d written down—numbers, departments with arrows linking them up, which she could only interpret as clues as to where to locate them. One department was missing.
She called after him, “What about healers? Will they have their own department?”
“No healers. Doctors!” he answered, not even breaking stride.
* * *
Two days later a very tired Nira stood at the massive plotter and sorted out the drawings that had already fallen into the bin.
Any second now Dakan would blow in and she’d find out whether or not he thought she could handle the job, whether her ideas were up to snuff.
She shuffled another print to the drafting table and smoothed it out, trying to uncurl the sheet as the last drawing rolled off the plotter.
“You’re still wearing it?” Dakan said from behind her, chuckling as he made his way in.
“Wearing what?”
“The scarf.” He nodded to her head. “I figured you’d have abandoned it by now.”
Nira reached up and touched the colorful silk carefully. The housekeeper, Tahira, had helped her with her technique in the days since she’d seen him last. “I thought it would be respectful to your ways for me to wear a scarf. And...well, I just want to.”
“They’re not exactly my ways. My ways are a little more complicated, and honestly I miss England. Working with a British woman is a perk for me. Aside from that, we’re indoors now in your home, out of public view.”
“But you’re a stranger,” Nira countered. Anyone would hear the Gotcha! in her tone. She knew that much at least—a scarf should be worn in public or with strangers.
“Am I?” The shock in his voice couldn’t be anything but an act, but it still made her smile. “I’ll have to do something about that, then. You can get to know me over dinner, and tomorrow you won’t have that argument. And then you can tell me why you want to wear the scarf when you’re at home.”
With their rocky start, she’d assumed that same general tension would permeate all their interactions, but his mood had drastically improved today. He might even be flirting with her—how weird would that be?
“Call me Dakan because we’re friends now, at least in private. Right?”
Setting the colorful silk and clips on the side table, she smoothed her hands over her hair to make sure it wasn’t sticking up absurdly.
He smiled then, flashing that dastardly little dimple pitting his left cheek—undoubtedly designed to make her heart stutter.
Good grief, the man was still beautiful, and she’d spent a large part of the last two days trying to convince herself she’d just been fooled by her memory—it was pretty much all she’d been able to talk to herself about. And she’d been terribly convincing. Up to ten minutes ago she’d have sworn he’d only been that handsome in hindsight, and maybe through some kind of Cinderella story memory filter. But here he was, in the flesh, making her insides quiver...
And judging by the twinkle in his eye as he smiled, he was used to knocking women’s feet out from under them.
Well, her feet could just get back under her, charming, beautiful man or not. Her goals still mattered, and one of them was not to go to a foreign country and have an ill-advised romance. Those always ended badly, or, if she listened to Mum, sometimes worse than that.
He summoned Tahira, ordered dinner to be prepared, and then turned back to her drawings.
For the next hour they went over the different layouts she’d come up with—high-rises versus sprawling facilities with clusters of smaller buildings and parking structures. And finally settled on a layout that combined the best of both.
“Did you bring the examples you talked about?” she asked, after shuffling off the printouts that had been rejected and leaving his choices on the drafting table. “I’d like to look at them and get started.”
“After dinner.”
“Or during. We could have a working dinner, look at what you’ve brought.” She looked around him, expecting to see a bundle of prints somewhere. “Where are they?”
Dakan fished a DVD out of his jacket pocket, bumped the button on her laptop and loaded it into the tray. “I don’t want a working dinner. But I’ll set this up...” His words dried up as he caught sight of the framed photo beside her computer.
Attractive couple. Fair, freckled woman with red hair. Man with dark hair and tanned skin.
He picked it up to examine the photo more closely, and found himself looking at the frame, which was constructed of tiny gray bricks and mortar.
It was very well made, and obviously done by hand—there were just enough irregularities in the bricks to see small fingers had formed and smoothed them. The architect had spent hours constructing it to fit the photo—the one personal item on her desk.
“Are these your parents?” he asked, looking back at her as he did so.
There was wariness in her gaze again, like that he’d seen in her the other day when they’d spoken of her father.
The father she’d claimed to not know.
“I thought you didn’t know who your father was?”
“I don’t. Not his name or where he’s from—aside from a Middle Eastern country. All I have is this one picture.”
She carefully extracted the photo from his hand as if he might break it. Or like she’d saved that photo from being destroyed in the past...and now protected it with tiny bricks she’d made herself.
“He looks...” Familiar.
Familiar but grainy—the photo was old enough that he couldn’t be certain.
How likely was it for him to know her father anyway? Millions of people lived in “a Middle Eastern country...”
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_4aeb07dd-3be9-5f95-b5bf-6a3586548e32)
“HAPPY,” DAKAN SAID INSTEAD. “They both look happy. I’m guessing things went downhill after that picture if your mother isn’t giving you other information.”
“That’s my guess as well.”
His Big Emotion warning system started to become more insistent. She wouldn’t carry around her unidentified father’s picture for no reason, but continuing to poke at this situation—when he already knew nothing he could say would make it better for her—was a bad idea.
But the familiarity of the man bugged him.
“Do you know where that was taken?”
“No. She never told me what country she was in. I assume it was his country, but I really don’t know. Maybe he was living abroad.”
“So she came here somewhere, had a fling, got pregnant, and went home?”
“I guess.”
She grew stiffer the longer they spoke about it, no trace evident of the smile she’d returned earlier when he’d found himself flirting. Instead, her shoulders stretched this way and that as she spoke, trying to dispel tension.
“I’d like to tell you more, but I really don’t know anything.” She placed the photo back on the desk, though a little further back this time. “I used to ask her all the time, but she’d never answer. And she always shut down any attempts I made to learn about that aspect of my heritage when I was growing up. Burned a book or two, even! One was from the library...”
The housekeeper informed them dinner was ready, and Nira gestured to the guest bathroom. “Would you like to meet in the dining room?” She darted off like someone wanting to escape.
He really shouldn’t pry into her background. He liked people. He was good with people. But big, sticky emotions weren’t really his thing. Definitely Zahir’s territory. He’d know what to say to her to make her feel better—good leaders were like that—but he just didn’t.
There was one thing he could do very well, which he was pretty sure would make her feel better. Kissing her had been in his mind since he’d dragged her out of the market and marched her back home. Which was weird, and probably some kind of side-effect of being stuck where he usually avoided showing interest in women out of fear his father would start beating the marriage drum again. She might be British, but she looked like those princesses he and Zahir had been threatened with for years. So, exactly opposite from his type.
Dakan went for pretty much anything he could only really get abroad—blond or red hair, pale skin, pale eyes...
She had the eyes. Green and gorgeous, they stood out—not that she wouldn’t have otherwise. One thing the scarf always did wonderfully was focus attention on a woman’s face. Even without the long silky dark hair she’d been hiding, she was something to look at.
She didn’t belong in Mamlakat Almas, and theirs was a progressive kingdom if you ignored the archaic medical system.
When Zahir had rebelled and gone back to England to marry Adele, it’d been because of their father’s refusal to change, but somehow their father had given permission for the hospital project to continue as they desired—something he hadn’t even mustered the energy to ask about when he’d heard. He was still more than half-certain that whatever work they did on the hospital would be for nothing once the King strapped the sword back on. Another reason he needed Zahir to come home and take over, because if he managed to get a system set up that allowed for healers and then left his father to run it? Bad things would happen.
He was probably doing this all wrong anyway, but the project had been passed and even if he wasn’t the one born to lead, he had to make an effort. Taking his frustration and questions to Zahir would not only put pressure on his brother to come home and get on with leading before Dakan lost his mind, but it would also upset his brother’s newfound marital bliss and further prompt the King to start foisting brides and selection ceremonies onto him.
His problems couldn’t be fixed any time soon. Nira didn’t know how lucky she was with her background, despite feeling the absence of her father’s presence in her life. Dakan knew all about feeling trapped. Freedom was important, people often didn’t realize just how important it was until they no longer had it. And the only place he had it was in her country.
They both emerged from washing up at the same time and he waited for her to sit before joining her. “So, how is it you’ve become an expert in our architecture at your age when your mother burned your books?”
“She ignored the books on art and architecture, or maybe she didn’t realize they’d have chapters devoted to Middle Eastern art and architecture. Plus, they were from the library. After she had to replace that one book, she got a lot less fire-happy.”
He shouldn’t smile at that—really, who burned books these days? But the phrase “fire-happy” tickled him. “That’s the contraband you smuggled into your house as a teenager? Art books?”
“What did you smuggle in? Page Threes?”
Flirting. Sexy teasing, he loved sexy teasing, and the innocent look she gave him over her water glass brought an urge to escalate it. “I didn’t have to smuggle in anything. I was at an all-boys school. Others smuggled. I just enjoyed the fruits of their labor.”
“Lazy.”
“Smart,” Dakan countered. He could hardly keep from staring at the sexy architect but he forced his mind to focus. Stick with the facts. “Is your mother still living?”
She didn’t quite flinch, but a fleeting grimace told him the situation wasn’t good, whatever it was.
“She’s alive. Healthy. Very unhappy that I’m here.”
“Is she ringing you daily and demanding you come home?” He would be.
“We’ve moved past Official Anger Level. We’re now at the Not Speaking stage. I never pressed her too hard for information about my father—she didn’t want to talk about him and I knew it hurt her. But I haven’t had that same consideration from her. I email her daily so she knows I’m still alive—she has wild theories that I’ll be kidnapped and sold into some kind of sex slavery here. She probably thinks... Wait a minute, do you have a harem?” Her voice went up so comically at the end Dakan had to concentrate not to choke on his drink.
“It was disbanded before my mother and father married. One of mother’s stipulations to agree to the betrothal.”
“Good for her!” Nira relaxed after her near shout hadn’t drawn the servants, and settled down again. “But, sorry, no, we don’t actually exchange words.”
“Are you emailing pictures?”
“There’s a thought, but my emails or texts all say ‘Still alive.’ Probably pretty bratty of me to phrase it that way, but I’m kind of out of words where the situation is concerned.”
No matter the snappy way she described it, he could see the situation bothered her immensely. She fidgeted with her cutlery, pushed food around her plate... “Does she know you’d been learning Arabic prior to coming here?”
“She knows now. I didn’t tell her at the time.”
“More smuggled textbooks?”
Her smile returned, though only at half-strength, and she shook her head. “I only started learning Arabic after I left university, about a year and a half ago. I bought all the units of an immersion language system, but turns out it takes a long time to do a unit. You can’t just sit down and become fluent in a weekend.”
He switched over to his native tongue, testing her. “So you’ve learned how to say hello and ask for directions?”
She’d just taken a bite, but paused to listen as he spoke, not even allowing herself to chew before he’d finished speaking. Still at the extreme-attention-paying stage.
Her response was stilted, with many pauses and errors in pronunciation here and there that reminded him of the way children started learning to make certain sounds. They continued at a slow pace, but she mostly answered him in Arabic, with short dips into English when words failed her.
She wanted to explore her heritage, hence enjoying the scarves, and that’s what she’d do more of when the project was really going and it wouldn’t slow progress.
He felt a twinge of guilt. Time off was important, and no one knew that better than a doctor just finishing residency. “I know most people work about one-third of the day, and I’m asking more of you. You should really take some time to move around. There’s probably a gym somewhere in the building—I have no idea. But if not, I can have a machine of your choosing sent up. Sitting is the new cancer.”
“Do you just have equipment lying about?” The question went from Arabic to English then back again, but she had a solid enough foundation to leave him confident she’d get better the more she practiced.
“There’s a well-stocked gym at the palace. I can send over whatever you like, then take it back after you’re finished with it.”
“Elliptical?” English.
He nodded. “Done. And after we get going—after there is a plan in place for the initial building—I’ll make sure you get some time off to explore. Perhaps Dubai?”
