Indebted To The Sheikh (You Can't Turn Down a Sheikh Book 5) Read online

  “Can’t we report these?” I had asked Garcia the first time a death threat had shown up in the comments.

  “They’re anonymous,” she’d said, “so there’s only so much we can do. We can’t block them. We can’t alert the FBI. For your own sanity, it might be best not to read them.”

  But I read them all with a morbid fascination, wondering what could possess someone to threaten the life of a stranger, someone they had never met, just for writing an article that offended them. I wondered if they would feel the same way if they’d been there, if they’d seen the conditions of the workers in that warehouse. Maybe not. They seemed very committed to their hate, and it was unlikely that even seeing the truth firsthand could change their minds.

  By the time I tore myself away from my phone screen and put it on airplane mode before we took off, I was feeling gloomy and brokenhearted. I knew I shouldn’t be offended by the ramblings of strangers, but I had to keep a thick skin to accomplish that. I was reminded of every friend I had lost, every person who had blocked me on social media because of my reporting.

  I sometimes wished my life was more than just journalism—that I had a husband to feed and fuss over or a couple of kids to wrangle—because maybe then, I wouldn’t get so irritated and upset over these petty rejections. I would have perspective.

  I watched a movie, slept for a few hours, and when I awoke, we were approaching French airspace after a fourteen-hour flight. It was nearly four p.m. in Paris. A thick rain was falling as I left Charles de Gaulle airport in a taxi bound for a hotel in the fifth arrondissement—the Latin Quarter.

  I hadn’t left Phoenix since last fall, and I had nearly forgotten how much I enjoyed traveling, once the inconvenience of packing and flying was factored out. My heart swelled as I gazed out the misted window at the department stores, kiosks, and hookah lounges on either side of us. A young woman in denim shorts and leggings was struggling to balance her textbooks in a basket as she navigated a bicycle along a pedestrian-crowded sidewalk shaded with chestnut trees. A small dog wearing a tartan pullover led its owner excitedly past the Musée d’Orsay, while behind them, houseboats floated lazily on the Seine.

  We were only just approaching the fifth arrondissement—I even loved how the word sounded in my mouth—when the driver came to an abrupt halt and signaled for me to get out. I didn’t know much French beyond what Aisha had taught me, but I gathered that he had taken me as far as he could.

  It didn’t take me long to see what the problem was: the streets here were so narrow, curved and crowded that only bikes and motorcycles could glide through them without difficulty. Every now and again, a car might work up the courage to try, but its driver would be mocked and hooted at for their efforts.

  I bought a large foldout map of Paris from a local vendor, and suitcase in hand, worked my way west to Boulevard Saint-Germain. With each step I took along the cobbled streets, my mood seemed to brighten. I loved traveling because it allowed me to float a little above the limitations of home and career, to indulge however briefly in the illusion that I could reinvent myself in some foreign land.

  I followed the bustling road, the map and my look of enchantment broadcasting the fact that this was my first time in the city. Open-door shops with burgundy-red awnings were selling bread and pastries, long hanging plants drooped artistically from baskets above storefronts, and a couple of women in matching turquoise dresses walked into a cosmetics shop carrying gelato, trailed by an exhalation of perfume.

  It occurred to me that I could have easily grown up here, speaking French as fluently as I spoke English and not taking any more notice of the marvels around me than one of the beret-wearing art students laboring under a pile of books and canvases.

  The rain had died down a little by the time I turned onto Rue Xavier Privas, a thin sliver of street wedged between art galleries and Greek restaurants with hardly enough sidewalk for walking.

  The street merged after a short walk of three or four minutes onto Rue Saint Severin, and from there, to Rue de la Harpe, which was secluded and brimming with small cafes, patio seating, and decorative wrought-iron railings. A surprising number of stores were closed, and I assumed that they had gone out of business—only later would I learn that their owners had gone on vacation for the summer, something that would have been unthinkable in the States.

  My thoughts drifted toward Aisha and what she might have had to say about this place. The Paris that she loved seemed to exist mostly in her imagination, and the real city with its constant hum of traffic and pedestrians showing their middle fingers to motorists would have only gotten in the way of the illusion. She’d have been disappointed to learn that you couldn’t actually see the Eiffel Tower from the window of every shop in Paris—in fact, it was about two miles away from where I stood at present.

  Still, there was a certain beauty to it. She had been right about that.

  Eventually, the rabbit’s warren of narrow, intersecting streets ended, opening out onto the broad Boulevard Saint-Michel. Here, where fountains and rain mingled and the sodden boughs of trees waved in a continuous susurrating song, the city seemed to reach a kind of apotheosis. Paris seemed most fully itself here—among the cigar shops and flower stalls and art supply stores.

  By now, the air of the city was beginning to infect me. I felt like I could rave about Paris as enthusiastically as Aisha could, and to better purpose. If it weren’t for the stares I would likely have attracted, I might have pulled out my phone and recorded my walk. I wanted someone else to see what I was seeing—the striped crosswalks, the yellow mailboxes, the slate roofs under a pearl-gray sky—and to be as enthralled by the spectacle as I was.

  My dad’s funeral was held on the following afternoon in a rainy corner of the ninth arrondissement. I stood under a tall aspen with a crowd of about eight or ten mourners—most of them business associates, judging from the way they had dressed—while a priest dressed all in black delivered a sermon I didn’t understand. A man in a pinstriped suit had a gold watch that he checked with growing impatience as the service wore on. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to be mad at him.

  I waited until after the service to view the body, and I wasn’t expecting to feel much. If anything, I thought with a pang of guilt, maybe it was good that he had died when he had, because now, I could stop waiting for the phone call or invitation that would never come.

  Still, a weird sense of disbelief enveloped me as I approached the coffin and it truly hit home that he was gone. Where was he now? No one on earth could answer that question with any certainty. And when I cried, I realized I wasn’t crying for him, but because of the relationship we would never have. Death had permanently swallowed up all my hopes of reconciliation.

  By the time the service ended, it was nearing dusk, and an indigo mist had steeped the city in its own cold colors. Wanting to treat myself after the ordeal of the funeral, I went for dinner at a corner restaurant on Rue Saint-Georges. Not having made a reservation and only knowing a few words of French, I approached the smiling hostess with trepidation.

  She asked me a question in French, but spoke too fast for me to catch any of the words. I nodded anxiously, not entirely sure what she was asking and just wanting to be seated. Perhaps it was just my imagination, but I could feel the stares of the people in line behind me, their growing impatience tangible.

  “Suivez-moi, s’il vous plait,” the hostess said.

  I followed along as she led me toward a corner booth with red velvet upholstery at the back of the room. Someone was already seated there: a bronze-skinned man in his mid-thirties with neatly trimmed black hair. He wore a dark blue expensive-looking suit and a pair of equally expensive-looking loafers.

  “This isn’t the right table,” I said to the hostess with a helpless feeling. “I wasn’t supposed to be meeting anyone.”

  She gesticulated frantically and said something else that I couldn’t understand. The man flashed his perfectly white teeth in a condescending smile. My insid
es shriveled in embarrassment. Here I was, in a foreign city with no understanding of the language, being pressed to eat with someone I had never met. I wished desperately that Aisha had come with me—not only because it would have been comforting to have her company, but also because she could speak the language fluently.

  The hostess asked another question in French. I glanced imploringly at the man seated opposite. To my surprise, he said in perfect English, “Is this your first time in the city?”

  I nodded, unable to bring myself to speak.

  “It seems like she really wants us to sit together.” He laughed. “But that’s fine. I don’t mind if you don’t.”

  My heart gave a nervous flutter. Was he really inviting me to sit with him? Or was my grasp of English suddenly as flawed as my comprehension of French?

  “I’m supposed to be meeting here with a business partner,” he said, reaching into his pocket for his phone, “but we can always postpone.” Dismissing my objection with a wave of his hand, he added, “It’s no trouble, really. I was just saying to my nephew, it gets lonely being stuck in the office all day. I’d love to meet more people but don’t even know where to begin.”

  He spoke a few words to the hostess in French, and she sauntered off. I watched her go with a feeling of relief. Despite the fact that I had only just met this man, his good humor and self-assurance immediately put me at ease.

  “You sure you don’t mind?” I asked.

  He shook his head, still texting. “I’ll be seeing him tomorrow morning, anyway. Whatever he wanted to say now, he can say then. Besides, you strike me as being much more amiable company.”

  I wondered what I could have possibly done to make him think that. It was slightly mortifying being seated with a stranger who had been expecting someone else. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had only invited me to join him because he felt sorry for me.

  Before I could broach the subject, the handsome man scoffed in annoyance. “He’s calling. I’m so sorry; this won’t take more than a minute.”

  I studied the backs of my hands with a surge of humiliation as he spoke to his partner. He locked eyes with me and shook his head as if eager to get off the phone and eat dinner with me.

  After a minute, the man hung up and returned his phone to his suit pocket.

  “He’s not happy, but he’ll get over it,” he said with a good-natured shrug. “In the meantime, there’s more important business to tend to. Good evening, distinguished table guest, my name is Salman. Now, what’s your name, where are you from, and what would you like to eat?”

  Chapter 4

  Cassie

  We introduced ourselves. Salman said he was a businessman and real estate developer with homes in Europe and the Middle Eastern nation of Qia—where he was from—who spent the warmest parts of the year in France to escape the infernal heat.

  “I just turned thirty-three, and one of my life goals is to climb the Matterhorn,” he finished.

  “The Matterhorn, really?” I asked in surprise.

  “I like to hike,” he said with a solemn nod.

  “Impressive.” Still unsure if he was single, I made a stab at finding out without making it too obvious that I was asking. “You mentioned having a nephew—how old is he?”

  “Fourteen,” Salman said. “I definitely enjoy being the fun uncle. And what do you do for a living, Cassie? I feel like I’ve told you all about myself, but I still know nothing about you.”

  “I work as a reporter for a newspaper in Phoenix.”

  “Really?” He raised a skeptical brow. “I sometimes forget people still do that.”

  “We do,” I snapped. My defenses instinctively flared whenever I felt my profession was being criticized. Recently, I had gone on a date with a man who’d informed me that writers and journalists needed to get “real jobs.” The date had ended quickly. “Do you not read the news?” I asked.

  “Mostly online,” said Salman. “It seems like print journalism is on its way out.”

  “And yet, we need it now, more than ever,” I countered. “If we ceded journalism to TV, there would be no reporting, just entertainment.”

  Salman smiled with a condescension that was somehow warm instead of infuriating. “I can see you feel very strongly about this.”

  “Well, it’s my vocation. I don’t do it for the money. I went into journalism because I felt there were wrongs in the world that needed to be exposed, and journalists are uniquely capable of doing that.”

  Salman went on smiling, and I paused, feeling flustered. It was hard to form an intelligent thought when he looked at me like that—like he wanted to come over and make out with me right in the middle of the restaurant.

  “You must feel very lucky to have found steady work.” He tugged at one of his sleeves’ cuffs, with its mother-of-pearl buttons. “I understand it’s very hard to secure a job in print media, these days.”

  “I do consider myself fortunate.” Recently, the staff at the newspaper had suffered through another round of layoffs. Some of my closest friends had been laid off and forced to find different jobs. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to do this forever. I’d like to. I’m good at what I do.”

  “And what do you do for fun?” There was a teasing intimacy in his voice, as if we were two friends who had run into each other after a long separation. “Or do you not have fun?”

  “No, I have fun sometimes,” I said with a laugh. “I don’t sleep at my desk.”

  “That is exactly what someone who sleeps at their desk would say.”

  “Guilty.” I raised my hands in surrender. “No, but in my free time I’ve been working on an academic book examining a twelfth-century book of Persian fairy tales. It’s called The Book of the Hundred White Doves, have you heard of it?”

  “Yeah, I grew up reading that!” Salman’s eyes gleamed with surprise. “It’s like the Arabian Nights.”

  “It is! Though a lot creepier, I think. I told my father that I’d been reading it and apparently, he kept a copy in his office. Isn’t that so funny? I’ve never really known this man, and yet his fingerprints are all over me.”

  “Why did you never know him?” he asked. When I became quiet, he was quick to add, “We don’t have to talk about it if it upsets you.”

  “It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does,” I said sadly. “How does one grieve for a person they barely knew?”

  “His death must have been recent. I’m sorry for your loss,” said Salman with a sincerity that almost redeemed the cliché phrase.

  I nodded, not wanting to tell him just how recent.

  “My own father died unexpectedly my first year of business school. He was crossing the street and got hit by a bus, poor man. I was in London at the time and had to fly straight home for the funeral. It was the first time I had really thought about death. Up until then, it had just been an abstraction, the sort of thing that happened to other people in other families. Not mine.”

  I nodded, remembering the moment of personal revelation that had occurred at my mother’s death. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. You must have been very close to your father.”

  Salman shrugged. “He was flawed, like all parents. Growing up, I barely saw him—he left most of the parenting to a nursemaid, who came to feel as close to me as a parent. He seemed to think his chief role as a father was getting me ready to take over the company once he was gone.” He laughed bitterly. “I sometimes feel like I was raised more by business textbooks than by him.”

  There was a quiver of frustration in his voice as he spoke of these old grievances which he still seemed to be holding onto. Something in his story resonated with my own experience of fathers, and I felt myself being moved with sympathy toward him.

  “Do you ever feel like maybe new parents should be required to take a class or something, on how not to hurt their kids?”

  “If there’s a class for driving, there ought to be a class for parents,” said Salman. “I think of parenting as sculptin
g a statue. If you don’t hold the chisel just right, you’ll end up doing some serious, perhaps irreparable damage.”

  “That’s a perfect way of putting it. Absent fathers sure can make a big impression, considering how little they’re actually around.”

  Outside of Aisha, it was rare for me to meet anyone who made me feel so understood, who I could open up to so quickly. I was beginning to feel very fortunate that I had accidentally taken this random seat. Perhaps there was something more than coincidence in it.

  “When he died, I realized I had wasted all this energy trying to get him to love me. And for what? I took a year off and moved to a slum in Kolkata, where I served the poor in a soup kitchen. The rest of the family thought I had lost my mind.”

  “What brought you back?” I asked.

  “Knowing that if I stayed any longer, my heart would be utterly broken, seeing the difficulties I did, day in and day out. Selfish, I know,” he said.

  “Sounds rough. I get that. Some of the articles I’ve written have been heart-breaking, and they’ve really gotten to me.”

  “And what about you? What brings you to Paris?”

  “A death in the family,” I said shyly.

  The funeral was far from my mind, like something that had happened in another life. Imperceptibly at first, I had been drawn into the life of a stranger. I wanted to go on watching him punctuate his sentences with a stab of his fork in the air and thoughtfully stroke his sharp jawline for the rest of the night.

  I wished there were more men like him in my own country—men who were perfectly confident in themselves and yet refreshingly free of any masculine posturing.

  And perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps I was emboldened by his story about his own father, but over the course of the next hour—in between sips of delicious merlot and bites of the best steak I’d ever had—I told him a little about my own family and how I had been taken in by my aunt after my mother’s death. Salman’s eyes gave a pained flicker at that, as though he yearned for that kind of closeness.