Chapter 5

It was Farhad who came for her an hour later.

Selene had been sitting in the study, the blanket around her shoulders, watching the light change over the gardens. She hadn't slept—she was too awake now, too alert to the currents of the house—but she'd been somewhere else for a while, a quiet interior place where the events of the flight could arrange themselves in order.

The knock was soft. Then the door opened, and Farhad stood at the threshold.

"Madam," he said. "The sheikh has asked that you join him for dinner."

Selene straightened. "Dinner?"

"In the family dining room." He paused, and something in his face shifted—a small, carefully concealed flicker. "There are guests."

*Guests.* The word landed with a small, cold weight. "Who?"

Farhad was silent for a moment. Then he said, low, "His father. And a delegation from the Ministry."

Selene felt her stomach clench. She stood, folding the blanket and setting it carefully on the chair, and smoothed her dove-gray top with hands that were not entirely steady.

"Could you—" She stopped. "Is there time to change?"

"I believe," Farhad said carefully, "that the sheikh would want you to be comfortable."

*Comfortable.* What a strange word for it. Selene looked at herself in the dark glass of the window—the pale gray of her top, the charcoal trousers, the blonde-and-bronze waves that had been styled that morning and were now slightly flattened on one side from where she'd rested against her husband's shoulder. She didn't look like the wife of a Gulf magnate. She looked like a tired retail employee who had accidentally wandered into the wrong afternoon.

But she was married to raises. And if he'd asked for her, there was a reason.