“Wow. This is not what I expected.”
“When we reach a good altitude, the staff will bring out our dinner.” Kade sat down, patting the seat next to him. “I’ve prepared a feast for you.”
Rafe snorted. She kind of loved it when he made the inelegant sound. It reminded her he wasn’t perfect.
She turned back to Kade. “You prepared the feast?”
He shrugged, a graceful movement of strong shoulders. “I told the chef what to cook.”
That was enough for her. Kade couldn’t know what the last couple of meals had meant to her. The difference between a homemade ham sandwich and a perfectly seared filet was infinite. “I appreciate it.”
His face lit up and he reached for her hand, pulling her down to sit with him. “It is my greatest pleasure. Now, tell me about your day. Did the movers finish?”
Rafe sat on her other side, both men far too close, but she felt so comfortable in the soft velvet, surrounded by their heat and the musky spice of their exotic scents. They seemed to like having her between them. Everywhere they went, they managed to maneuver her into the middle.
Piper smiled wryly at Kade’s question. The movers had been ruthlessly precise—and a little judgmental. “I don’t think they appreciated my design style. One of them asked if I wanted to throw it all away and just start over.”
Actually, they’d been completely horrified at her secondhand floral-print couch. She’d picked it up at a garage sale, telling herself that the extra stains were really just flourishes.
Kade froze, then jerked his phone from his pocket. “They were not paid to embarrass you.” He stood and walked toward the back of the plane, speaking in quick, angry-sounding Arabic.
Piper blinked. “What’s he doing?”
Rafe’s face had gone dark, his lips turning down. “He is taking care of the problem, habibti.” He settled back as a modestly dressed woman walked out of the back of the plane and set a tray with a bottle of wine and three glasses on the table.
“Your Highness, we will be taking off in twenty minutes. Please let me or the staff know if there is anything we can do for you or your guest.”
“Thank you,” Rafe replied while his brother continued to speak into the phone in what she thought of as hyper-drive Arabic, able to slay a man in a hundred syllables a minute.
“Enjoy your wine.” Rafe passed her a glass of the golden fluid. It had become very obvious to Piper over the last few days that the al Mussad brothers weren’t practicing Muslims. When she’d asked, she’d been surprised to discover that unlike the countries around them, Bezakistan wasn’t very religious. It was open to all forms of faith and enjoyed a strictly held constitution that prized secular government. But not everyone wanted it to stay that way.
She took the wine to soothe her nerves. Flying for the first time made her more than a bit apprehensive. A few feet away, Kade continued his tirade.
“Why is he so mad?”
Rafe’s head cocked slightly. “Surely you must know that he will not allow anyone to upset you, habibti.”
The more he spoke that word, the more it felt like an intimacy. She’d thought it was simply an offhanded endearment, but the way it rolled off his tongue felt so personal. “They didn’t.”
A lie, but she wasn’t going to let them know how much it hurt to have someone look down on her.
“Yes, they did. And it is not allowed.”
It must be nice to throw edicts around and expect them to be followed. “It wasn’t a big deal. I shouldn’t have complained. It’s stupid, I know. No one’s opinion should matter but mine, but it hurts when someone looks down on what I worked really hard for. I know that couch isn’t worth much, but we had to sell our ranch after my dad died and we were so far in debt that everything had to go. I managed to keep our clothes and some of Mindy’s things, but I agreed to auction off everything else. We went from a three bedroom house with acres and acres of land to a studio apartment with nothing but a suitcase each.”
“Your childhood things were sold?” He sounded horrified and more than a bit angry.
She soothed herself with a long drink. “I don’t miss most of it. Just one thing, really. I had a copy of Charlotte’s Web, but it was signed and it was a first edition, so the bank sold it.” She’d read that book a hundred times. Even long past childhood, she would turn to it, the story of a little runt pig who didn’t belong calling to her. She’d never fit in her small town. She hadn’t found her place in the city, either. She often wondered if there was anywhere she would belong.