It was dark by the time she finished and was cleared to go home. Tracey stretched and rubbed her aching shoulders as she headed back to where she'd last seen Charlie and the Sheikh, playing on the floor of the Sheikh's office.
They were still there, the expensive model planes scattered across the floor between them, interspersed with Charlie's more colorful toy planes.
"This one can hold more than one hundred people," Adil said, holding up a plane. "That would take Godzilla at least two bites."
Tracey frowned a little, confused. Not because of the giant lizard, who was a favorite subject of Charlie's, but because for a moment Adil's accent had seemed to slip.
"No way! One bite!" Charlie insisted. "Nothing is too big for Godzilla! He'll just open his mouth bigger and swallow it!"
She shook her head, dismissing the odd slip of the tongue as her imagination.
"Sounds like you eating pizza," Tracey joked as she entered the room. "I'm all done. It's time to pack up and head home."
"Can we get pizza?" Charlie asked, his eyes brightening with delight.
Tracey contemplated her bank account, frowning.
"I'm not sure, hun..." she said, hating Charlie's crestfallen look.
"If you don't mind keeping me company a little longer," Adil said, surprising her, "I could tell the kitchens to prepare a pizza for us. Better than anything you could get from delivery, I promise."
"Please, Mom?" Charlie begged at once, running to tug at her sleeve beseechingly. "Please please please?"
Tracey sighed but, remembering the Sheikh's request from earlier, couldn't resist.
"All right," she agreed. "If it really isn't any trouble. I hate to inconvenience you."
"You never could," Adil said.
They headed down to the first-floor kitchen. The Sheikh's personal chef, a trim, athletic woman with auburn hair in a tailored white coat, was already prepping for dinner. The kitchen was huge and gleaming: white tile, terracotta, and copper shining warmly. There was an island bar in the center with tall bar stools so that guests could observe the chef working.
"Chef Ives, change of plans," the Sheikh called as they entered. "I'm in the mood for pizza tonight. Is that doable?"
"Of course, Sheikh Adil," the woman answered at once, looking surprised to see him. "I take it they are eating with you?"
She gave Tracey and her son a slightly confused look, but the Sheikh just smiled, an arm around Tracey's shoulder.
"Indeed," he said, ruffling Charlie's hair. "And I have a feeling this one is a big eater, so please go all out."
"Absolutely, sir," Chef Ives said, despite still looking a bit confused. She got to work at once while the Sheikh and his guests settled at the bar.
"Thank you again for this," Tracey said as they sat down.
"There's no need to thank me again," Adil said. "You've thanked me far too much today for things that hardly require thanks. Let us talk about something else instead."
"What's it like to be a prince?" Charlie chimed in, eager to help change the subject. "Do you have a crown? Do you have a princess?"
Adil laughed, leaning on the marble top of the bar.
"I am not really a prince, you know," he said. "A sheikh is something different. Every member of a royal house is a sheikh."
"Even the girls?" Charlie asked.
"They are sheikhas," Adil said. "It is a term of respect for nobility. It means leader, especially of a great family."
"So, do you have a sheikha then?" Charlie asked. Tracey covered her face with a hand, embarrassed.
"No, not yet," Adil said with a slightly wistful chuckle. "I have met a few sheikhas, but none that were right for me. I am waiting until I find the right one."
"But what if—" Charlie started to ask, but Tracey stopped him, worried he would ask another embarrassing question.
"So where did you grow up?" she asked instead. "The sheikh title is used all over Middle East, right?"
"Correct," he said, a little stiffly. "My title extends to a relatively obscure Persian Gulf nation. Small, but resource rich. You would not recognize the name, I promise."
Tracey laughed. "You'd be surprised. I was great at geography in school."
"It really is not important," Adil said with a dismissive gesture. "I grew up mostly in in the various estates of my parents across the world. There is no one place in particular I would say I grew up in."
"What were your parents like?" Tracey asked, confused by how uncomfortable he seemed with the direction of the conversation. "They must have been very interesting people."
"Oh, not really." Adil was leaning away from her now, his eyes on the copper fixtures. "They were very private people, hated to draw attention. And I rarely saw them regardless, as they were both always quite busy with business and affairs of state."
"That's sad," Charlie said, frowning. "I don't get to see my dad either."
Tracey's heart stung at the sadness in Charlie's voice, and Adil's obvious discomfort seemed to consume all of them at once. He cleared his throat and called out to the chef.
"How is the pizza coming, Chef Ives?"
"Shouldn't be long!" Ives replied cheerfully. "I had some pizza dough on hand. What are you all feeling for toppings?"
"Pepperoni!" Charlie shouted at once.
"I'm a fan of Margherita," Tracey said. "But I'll eat anything."
"I had the most amazing spinach and feta pizza last summer in Florence," Adil said. "I was there on business and we ate on a terrace overlooking a canal at sunset. It was an incredible sight. Have you ever been to Italy, Miss Anderson?"
Tracey accepted the change in subject eagerly, and, though she couldn't contribute much to a discussion of world travel as she'd never been outside the States, she loved listening to the Sheikh's stories of his adventures. He seemed to have been all over the world in the past few years, though she noticed none of his stories seemed much older than that.
Not much later, Chef Ives slid two huge, beautiful pizzas onto the counter in front of them, one covered with thin, crispy slices of imported salami and fresh-crushed tomatoes, the other a rich, bubbling mess of feta, spinach, and onion.
"This looks incredible," Tracey said, her mouth watering at the sight as the chef slid a slice onto a plate for her.
"She would not work for me if she wasn't world-class," Adil said with a playful wink.
Charlie tried to praise the chef as well, but his mouth was already too full of pizza for the words to be understood. Tracey laughed and took her own slice, quickly understanding Charlie's enthusiasm. It was the most incredible thing she'd ever tasted. Adil looked similarly thrilled with his. Curious, Tracey tried a slice of his once she'd finished her own and realized she'd discovered a new favorite kind of pizza.
They ate themselves silly, talking about anything that came to mind. Anything, Tracey noted, except the Sheikh's history. Whenever it came up he went stiff, answered as vaguely as possible, and quickly changed the topic. Tracey knew there was no good reason that should make her uneasy, but it did. They were practically strangers. There was no reason for him to share the intimacies of his embassy upbringing with her.
But she had shared her unhappy history with him.
Regardless, she had a wonderful evening. It was enough that Charlie was having a great time, eating enough pizza to down an elephant and then eagerly accepting ice cream when Chef Ives offered it for dessert. But it didn’t hurt that the Sheikh's attention never seemed to wander from her or seem forced. She knew she couldn't be that interesting to someone who had traveled the world and done the kind of things Adil had, but he seemed genuinely interested in everything she had to say anyway.
"So of course the whole hypothesis is based on the subjects’ territorial aggression toward each other," she was saying over their bowls of melted ice cream remains, Charlie dozing against her side. "But when they start the experiment, only one of the pairs of tom cats starts posturing at each other. Half of them ignore the food and each other, several of them just complete the task without even acknowledging the other cats, and a few actively worked together to get more food! The whole thing was a mess. You should have seen them trying to build a coherent research paper after—"
The sound of dishes clattering broke through the sound of Adil's amused laughter, and Tracey paused her story to look up. Chef Ives was almost done cleaning up. She'd boxed the leftover pizza for them, and it was growing cold on the counter. Tracey checked her watch and realized with a touch of embarrassment how late it was.
"We should get home," she said, gathering herself. "I'm so sorry for taking up so much of your time."
"Please." Adil shook his head, smiling. "I enjoyed it very much. Will you be safe getting home?"
"Of course," she said as she stood up, lifting Charlie, who was still asleep, into her arms. "I should clean up before we leave. Charlie made such a mess of your office—"
"Nonsense," Adil said quickly. "Please, go home and enjoy your weekend."
Tracey smiled, once again unsure how to respond to Adil's generosity.
"You're so kind to me," she said, the length of the day and the heaviness of the pizza inside her making her more direct than usual. "I never know what to do. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop."
Adil shook his head as he stood, reaching out to take her hand.
"Does my money really make us so different?" he asked. "Could it not just be that I want someone to talk to sometimes?"
Tracey looked away, embarrassed but pleased.
"Well, if that's the case," she said, "I'm happy to talk. Anytime."
Adil smiled. "In that case, I should be thanking you."
Tracey shook her head quickly at the absurdity of that, awkwardly taking the pizza boxes with her free hand.
"Good night, Sheikh Adil," she said, backing away a little reluctantly.
"Good night, Miss Anderson," he replied, smiling as he watched her go.
"You know," she said, delaying her departure a little longer, "if you wanted, you could call me Tracey."
His smiled brightened.
"Good night, Tracey," he said with a warmth that made Tracey's heart flutter. She muttered another good-bye, too flustered to linger, and hurried away to her car.
She lay Charlie in the backseat and drove home. For the first time in a long time, she noticed how dazzling the lights passing on either side of her car were. It was just the headlights of cars and the neon of advertisements and businesses and the reflective glimmer of road signs, but somehow it all seemed beautiful tonight. And the sky beyond it, once she was farther from downtown, was an impressionist painting full of crushed diamonds and a thousand shades of black and blue and purple.
It was enough to make her head spin. Her heart was racing and her skin tingled, and she knew the beauty of the night was a symptom, not the cause.
It was a foolish thing to encourage. She should be squashing this feeling, which grew like a tender seedling out of her heart, threatening to bloom, right now. It was a crush, albeit an easy to justify one. Handsome as he was, kind as he was, as much as he smiled when he looked at her, it would never be more than a crush. If she had any sense she would tear it out now before it sank its roots in too deep and hurt her.
But not tonight. For tonight at least, everything was beautiful. A rich, handsome man had been kind to her. He'd smiled at her and bought her pizza. If you were lucky enough to experience such a thing and didn't take a moment to enjoy it, what was the point of life at all?