Page 174 of The Skeikh's Games

She was a Westerner, British from the looks of it. Her eyes were tired and there was flour in her dark blond hair and her apron was a filthy mess, but she seemed happy as she curled her hair behind her ear and ticked off another box on her clipboard and went back to piping creamy stuff into miniature puff pastries. Two other men, who were very clearly waiters, came in, swapped their empty trays for full ones and backed out again. No wonder she thought he was a member of the staff—with his white shirt, black pants, no jacket or tie, he looked exactly like one of the caterers.

He found himself cracking a smile—he’d never been mistaken for a member of the staff before—and as he backed out of the door he could only imagine his father’s fury at him showing up with a tray, ready to serve snacks and drinks. It would probably be funny—he wondered how many of the people invited would recognize him with a tray in his hand.

He’d gone to enough of these functions to know what people with trays in their hands did: walk around, asking people if they wanted one, smiling politely as people swiped a canape or two. Nobody recognized him, which only confirmed what he’d suspected for a long time—nobody knew who he was, and nobody cared. Only Misha blinked out of surprise when he realized who was asking him if he’d like a piece of baklava—and then he saw the secretive smile, and he knew he had an ally in this matter, at least.

The only thing that he hadn’t expected was that it was too noisy to overhear any of the conversations. The fragments of conversation he was able to hear were mostly about weekend plans and worries about children—girls getting to that age where they should be married, boys not wanting to be married. A few of them even asked his advice. “I don’t know anything about this,” he said, smiling politely. “I obeyed my father.”

“You are a good son,” the guests said, beaming. He couldn’t help but wonder if it were

He wanted to find the king and see if his father would recognize him, but he ran out of canapes before he could make his way over to the king, who was sitting contentedly with Alya and chatting quietly with her, so he returned to the kitchen.

“OK, now these,” she said, without even looking up from what she was doing—stabbing skewers of meatballs and vegetables together. She’d pointed to the tray of filled puff pastries, all of them now dusted with a sprinkle of chives and shaved truffles. “Are they still serving tea?” she asked.

“I think I saw some people walking around with pots,” he said. “But they’ve mostly moved on to the lemonade.”

“Good,” she said. She looked up and frowned. “Are you new? I don’t remember hiring you.”

“I’m filling in,” he said, taking the tray and backing out, grinning.

What would she think if she knew that she’d been bossing around a prince? Guilty, he imagined. Or maybe just amused. Hard to say; Westerners had a weird sense of equality—the British Queen was gossiped about like so much schoolgirl drama fodder, but Kim Kardashian, someone he simply did not understand, was elevated to near-idolatry. So how long should he keep this going?

He found Miriam sitting by herself, texting furiously on her phone. She almost didn’t see him as she absent-mindedly picked up one of the canapes and popped it into her mouth. At the last second, though, she caught his eye and her eyes went wide. He grinned and pressed a finger to his lips.

“Bashir!” she whispered, but he turned away and offered some more puff-pastries to another couple before she could stand up to confront him. He saw her smiling despite her shock. There was a reason Miriam was his favorite sibling.

He liked serving the food. It was silly, but he liked the woman’s bossiness, the way she knew exactly what had to happen and when, and how she wanted things done. He liked that she knew stuff and wasn’t afraid to admit it. There was no false modesty about her, and she was easy to talk with, and as the evening went on, he found himself staying in the kitchen for progressively longer times.

He’d been right about her being a Brit: it turned out she’d grown up not too far from where he now lived. Her name was Melinda Doyle, and she had the pale skin and dark hair that was typical of Celts, as she put it. As he helped her clean up and stack the trays into her van, they talked—about the marriages that his father was always proposing, her about how hard it could be as a single woman living here. “So you’re not engaged or attached?” he asked, wondering how this could be. Her Arabic was pretty good, and men would line up for miles for a chance with an exotic girl. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something like that, he supposed—but there was something appealing about English girls, how polite but forceful they could be. There was a dangerous edge to their words—they could go from flatteringly polite to scathing with the slightest change of inflection.

“Nope,” she said. “Never met the right bloke. I never did understand the whole arranged-marriage business,” she added. They’d switched to English—she was probably homesick for her mother tongue, he supposed. “I mean, what if you really hate whoever it is your parents picked out for you?”

“You learn to live with it. So I’m told,” he said.

“But you’re trying to get out of one,” she guessed.

“I’m trying to keep my father from meddling in my life,” he said.

“Good luck,” she said. “Why do you think I’m here?”

“Don’t you miss England, though?”

She shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “But here—I don’t have anybody to tell me what kind of bloke to get with and to hurry up with the grandchildren already.”

“And then they volunteer to take you to fertility clinics?”

“Oh my God, yes!” she cried, laughing. “How did you—is that really a thing here, too?”

“Trust me, Bahrani parents take meddling to level eleven,” he said.

One last crate of equipment. He stacked it into the van for her, and then he walked her around to the driver’s side. “You fancy a lift?” she asked.

“Me?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t see your car here—”

“That’s because my car is in London.”

It was the first indication he’d given that he was more than a guy who’d stepped in to fill a catering job. He could see the mental walls going up in her mind, the wariness as she realized that she might be wading in dangerous waters. “You said you studied in England,” she said.

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