He motioned to his driver to circle again. The plane wasn’t scheduled to land for another thirty minutes. Even with the business-class ticket and the high-level visa Olivia had, it would be a while before she entered the airport. He had insisted on making this journey himself. His secretary wasn’t convinced that it was necessary for the sheikh to greet the representative of MCI Oil personally at the airport, but Khaled didn’t care. He needed to speak to her alone before she arrived at the palace.
He sighed. That wasn’t quite true. He just needed to speak to her. To see her. To breathe the same air as her.
Since he had arrived in Saqat a week earlier, his life had been thrown up in the air and tossed around a hundred times, and he was no nearer making sense of it than he had been at the beginning. The emir was ill. Seriously ill. Khaled had been shocked to see the frailty in his father’s bearing and in his voice. When he had demanded to see the doctors for himself, he hadn’t liked what they had to say. The heart attack had been relatively minor, but while he was in hospital the doctors noticed he was jaundiced. CT scans showed that he had cancer of the bile duct.
How had this been missed? Why hadn’t the doctors found it before? Why hadn’t they treated it? Couldn’t they have cured it?
It was a disease with few symptoms, they explained, which meant that it often went undetected until it was well beyond the stage where surgical intervention was a possibility. On the positive side, the lack of symptoms meant his father had experienced minimal discomfort. There was no pain, the doctors assured him, and whatever came later they would ensure he didn’t suffer. He had to be grateful for that. It was the rest of it that terrified him, the other words that went round and round in his head like a ticker tape newsreel: rapid deterioration. Weeks. Months at most. Palliative care. Pain relief. Nothing else to be done.
Terminal.
He had restrained himself from ranting and raging at the medical men and women who had delivered their devastating verdicts, but in private he had longed to shout and scream and punch something hard. If only it would help. If only he could do something to save his father.
The only thing to be done was his duty. Always his duty.
It was his duty to remain calm. He spoke gently with his ailing father to assure him that he, Khaled, would shoulder the responsibilities of state. He would learn to put his people’s needs before his own. It was also his duty, the emir insisted, to marry.
On his second night back in Saqat, Khaled had been introduced to Aliya. Young, beautiful, and charming, Aliya was the perfect wife for the emir of Saqat. Her Saqati heritage was impeccable, her manners demure, her appearance modest. There was nothing anyone could object to about Aliya.
Except that she was not Olivia.
Khaled did not bother to mention this objection. It was irrelevant. Olivia was an impossible dream. She had only ever been intended as a temporary distraction, not as a potential bride for the ruler of Saqat. She wasn’t a Saqati woman. She wasn’t even a Muslim woman. She would be branded a kafir, an unbeliever. An infidel. She couldn’t be the woman who would stand beside him as he led his country. The Saqati people were more enlightened than many Arabs, but even so, he could not imagine them accepting a foreigner and a kafir as the wife of their leader.
Besides, he wasn’t the man she needed who would honor her ambitions and give her the freedom to succeed. So, that was it. He could not ask Olivia to marry him. The very thought was ludicrous. He didn’t know why it had even occurred to him, except that when his father had mentioned marriage, it was her sweet face with its pretty blush that shot into his mind. It was her sleep-filled eyes, begrudgingly smiling up at him when he’d woken her too early. Her reddened cheeks and bright eyes when they were together on the exposed deck of the rig.
One night and one morning. That’s all it had been. She shouldn’t have been able to get under his skin in such a short time. And yet here he was, waiting for her at the airport because he needed to see her again. He needed to talk to her. Not to kiss her, nor even take her hand in his. Not to smell her rose scent and gaze into her blue eyes once more. He had come simply to ensure that they would have a few moments of privacy in the back of his car before they arrived at the palace.
They had arrived at the VIP car park. Khaled checked his watch and nodded to his driver to wait. He ran a finger under his collar to loosen it and cleared his throat.
Olivia nodded politely to the customs officer and stepped into the airport, pulling her suitcase behind her. Khaled had assured her that a car would be sent to meet her, so she scanned the chauffeurs waiting with name cards upheld.
“Hello.”