Challenging The Doctor Sheikh

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.