And the Sheikh wandered off, to somewhere in the depths of the house, leaving the two of them with a few servants to show them where they would be sleeping.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Zach said.
He was trying to act nonchalant, but despite the fact that Zach had doubtless seen many impressive things in his lifetime, Lucie didn’t buy for a moment that he had glimpsed anything even close to the opulent home they’d been granted access to.
Of all the things that annoyed her about Zach, this had to be top of the list. He’d been handed a life full of so many wonderful things. He’d been nearby when history had been made, time after time. He’d seen inside ruins that hadn’t seen the light of day for thousands of years. He’d been given a front row seat to the unraveling of the mystery of human innovation, and he never seemed impressed by any of it.
Instead of answering him, Lucie turned to one of the servants, asking if he would be so kind as to show her to where she would be staying, slipping from Zach’s grasp as she did.
As she walked away, following the servant’s quick clip, she cast a quick glance back at Zach. He seemed so small, so unimpressive standing there, surrounded by the palace and all its finery. She wondered if somewhere, deep inside, he knew it.
She hoped that he did.
FIVE
When she arrived at her suite, Lucie found it exceeded her expectations, whatever they had been.
It was gorgeous—nicer even than the luxury hotel she’d started the day out at. Like the rest of the palace, it had an effortlessness to it—everything just worked. Nothing looked like it was trying too hard, or had been designed to impress.
Like the hotel, all the basics were there: a luxurious bed, an exquisite bathroom, a sitting room. Bizarrely it felt like, here, she was home. It was like she had just stepped out for a few days, and somehow, in her brief time away, the whole life she’d lived up to now had happened.
Her things hadn’t just been brought in for her; they had also been taken out of her bags and put up in the closet. Her bags themselves were nowhere to be found.
If this had happened at a hotel, she would have felt violated. She would have wondered which faceless person had gotten into everything she owned and invaded her privacy in such a way. But here, it just seemed… normal. She trusted out of hand whoever it was who had done this. The Sheikh was not a foolish man, and she trusted his judgment enough to trust whoever he had chosen to have in his employ here, in this most private of spaces.
In addition to her own things in the closet, she found a robe. Her fingers ran across it by accident, when they were running over her clothes; at the feeling of the impossibly soft terry-cloth fabric, her touch had lingered.
She was very aware of the layer of dust that the day had put on her. She’d thought, when she’d been following along on the tour, that as soon as she got access to a bed she would flop down on it immediately. But now, with the grit and dust that had gotten all over her skin and in her hair, she was more anxious to feel clean again.
She’d shower now, she thought, as she slipped off her clothes. After all, it would be criminal if by some miracle the storm cleared up faster than expected, and she didn’t get to use the sleek marvel of a shower, with all its showerheads and rainfall-patterned glory.
When she was clean and wrapped up in the impossibly soft robe, she finally found her way to the bed her body had desperately needed for the last few hours. She slid between the sheets like there was nothing there but air, barely feeling the fine cotton against her skin.
She should be counting her lucky stars, she thought, that she’d gotten the opportunity to experience such luxury. If her life went the way she was planning, after all, she would be spending most of her time out on digs in remote locations, far from anything approaching the level of comfort she found here.
But that wasn’t what she thought about as she lay in bed, her eyelids moving slower and slower with every blink. Instead, she thought of Abdul. He was younger than she’d thought. Not in age… she’d known that he was thirty from her research. It was more the way he acted; she’d thought heads of state had to be severe, somehow. She’d expected that he would seem like an old man trapped in a young man’s body.
But Abdul, he seemed like he actually had a passion for things—for many of the same things Lucie did, actually. The way he’d talked about opening up his country, and changing the way things had been done under his father… it had been as though he was a kid who had suddenly been given the keys to the family car, and had all kinds of places he wanted to go, and was only concerned that he didn’t crash it.
But he wouldn’t crash it, Lucie thought. He didn’t seem capable of that kind of lack of judgment.
There was so much that still felt unexplained about him. She felt like she knew him, to a certain degree, from their conversation earlier. But why would a man who was so powerful invite two strangers into his home? Surely a ride to a hotel would have sufficed?
No, there was something else to him. And it piqued Lucie’s curiosity. And anything that piqued her curiosity had a way of holding her interest.
And so, as Lucie fell asleep, she didn’t see ruins, books and ancient treasures. She saw Abdul’s face, and heard his voice.
SIX
When Lucie awoke, it took her a moment to remember where she was. It had gotten dim outside, and the quiet of the palace was momentarily unsettling. But as she came to her senses, she felt a smile spread across her face.
She looked around the room. The tray that had held her uneaten lunch had been cleared away, and in its place an outfit from her own luggage had been laid out: a slim-cut violet and black dress.
She almost laughed. It was a suggestion, it seemed, from whatever ghost was looking after her. They thought she should be prepared for a somewhat formal dinner, it seemed.
It was a dress that she’d packed despite misgivings. She hadn’t really thought she was going to get a chance to wear it; it was designed for the kind of woman who lived a very different life than Lucie thought she ever would.
It was something like a cocktail dress, short and sweet, with just a touch of glitz. If she’d been the kind of woman who went out partying, she’d doubtless have worn it on the hunt for a man. But as it was, she’d only brought it along because her constant need to be over-prepared for every possibility demanded it.
And tonight that need had, apparently, paid off.
She slipped the lacy fabric over her head. Her skin felt so much softer than she was used to—a benefit of whatever was in the strange but sweet-smelling products stocked in the bathroom, she supposed. Regardless of what had caused it, she somehow felt very differently from any time she’d dressed up in the past.
Usually, she felt out of place. It wasn’t that she wasn’t attractive—her thin frame had always been a point of envy for her sister, and her blond hair behaved well enough whenever she put time and effort into taming it. It was just that she’d just always felt like she was trying to be someone else when she dressed for anything other than the library.
But tonight, looking in the mirror, and surrounded by this place that felt, quite surprisingly, like home, Lucie felt like she belonged in the dress. So, hungry from her lack of lunch and with a spring in her step, she headed downstairs, to dinner.
It took a bit of remembering to be able to find her way successfully to the dining room. The tour beforehand had been exhaustive, and there were enough halls and rooms and passages that if Lucie didn’t concentrate, they all ran together in her mind. They were to dine in the semi-formal dining area. It was one step above the cozy breakfast nook off the kitchen, and one step below the grand formal dining area with seats for 25 and a sense of being rarely used.
The smell hit her before she even got to the door. It was aromatic and savory, and it quickened her step without her consciously realizing it.
Zach and Abdul were both there already, sitting across each other. The table probably could have accommodated five or six, but t
here were only three chairs: the ones that the men sat in and one at the head of the table, reserved, apparently, for her.
As she sat down, she judged the expressions on their faces carefully. The room had a tension to it that she hadn’t been expecting, and the natural curiosity in her wanted to know why. Abdul looked content and in control, with perhaps just the slightest look of victory about him. Zach, on the other hand, had a very uncharacteristic unpleasant look to him, like he’d just been listening to something that didn’t sit well with his idea of the world.
Lucie wanted to ask, but she didn’t want to get bogged down in the details of it all. She’d half expected that Zach’s presence would spoil the research trip for her, but she was determined not to let him ruin this unexpected opportunity to spend time in the royal palace.
“Did you rest well?” Abdul asked as she sat down. The food was starting to appear at the doors, as though the staff had been waiting for precisely the moment she arrived to bring the dishes in.
“I did, yes. Thank you again, so much, for your hospitality.”
He nodded graciously. “Certainly. What kind of a host would I be if I didn’t make sure that the first Americans to accept my invitation weren’t well looked after?”
The questions that had occurred to Lucie earlier, about the oddness of his looking after them, reared their ugly heads again, but she stayed quiet. There was no way of asking him about it that wouldn’t have seemed ungrateful.
Besides, he was already moving on.
“And might I say, you look lovely. Not that being covered in dust didn’t suit you...”
Lucie noticed a trace of a smile on his lips. From Zach, that phrase would have been accompanied by a mocking tone. But from Abdul, it seemed more like a genuine sentiment.
“I don’t know,” Zach piped up from the other side of the table. “I like the gold dress better.”
The gold dress? She had no idea what he was talking about, at first. Then she remembered another PhD student who had worn a gold dress to a function. Even in trying to assert his familiarity, Zach had failed.
Or had he? Lucie sometimes wondered if he made little mistakes like that—attributing a dress to another girl, or forgetting a name—on purpose. She’d read somewhere that certain men did that sort of thing to set girls on edge, making themselves seem to have the upper hand.
She wondered whether or not to correct him. Usually, she wouldn’t. It wasn’t worth the aggravation to respond to half of the things that Zach said, generally. But then she remembered the tension she’d sensed in the room when she’d walked in, and decided to speak up.
“That was Jill,” she said, the three words silencing him for a moment.
“Oh, I only meant that the dress she wore would look better on you than this one.”
He hadn’t. She knew it. Abdul knew it. But now that she’d let him embarrass himself, and that slight air of victory had appeared again on Abdul’s face, it felt like it was time to move the conversation on.
The food was exquisite. There were no restaurants that served Al-Brehonian food in Illinois—where her family was from—or in Cambridge. While Lucie had tried to replicate some of the delicacies she’d read about at home, she’d never been much of a cook, and she saw now that her attempts at mimicking Al-Brehonian cuisine had been, at best, pale imitations.
Throughout the meal, she was continually surprised by the flavors. She’d eaten at a lot of restaurants that served food from the region at large, but there were flavors she was experiencing tonight that she never so much as tasted before.
She asked Abdul about it, and he smiled.
“There are a lot of advantages to opening up the country—that’s why I’m doing it, after all. But at the same time, there are some advantages, I find, to being a bit more… sheltered.”
Lucie wanted to respond. She’d been wondering for several years now about the work the Sheikh had been doing to open up his country. It had made a great difference to her, obviously, as it meant she was able to write her dissertation on Al-Brehoni—a subject so new to the archaeological community that her work was bound to contain some first-hand discovery.
Now would be the perfect time to ask, or at least to broach the subject and get a read on how welcome further questions might be. The trick would be to do it delicately, so it wouldn’t seem like she was looking a gift horse in the mouth.
But before she had put together what she wanted to say, Zach interrupted.
“Well, all I can say is that our country has benefitted from not being quite so isolationist.”
It was just like Zach to speak without thinking.