She’d screwed everything up. “We’ll just explain that there’s been a mistake.”
“That would be a much greater scandal, habibti. And I personally have no interest in correcting anything. I’m crazy about you, Piper.” He got his hands on her hips, pulling her close.
Tal finally tore through the curtains, his face flushed. “There is no mistake, Piper. We are going to marry you. I would never have taken your virginity had I not been prepared to marry you. This is not at all how I intended to start our lives together, but we must deal with this fiasco now. The press is here, and they are wondering why the hell my concubine is hiding.”
Piper heard their words, but they weren’t computing. They couldn’t be. Because everything they said made almost no sense. They couldn’t possibly be saying what she thought they were saying. “But…there must be a mistake. You didn’t ask me to marry you.”
Talib’s face tightened, his jaw a hard line. “Piper, will you marry me?”
“Oh, no, I can’t do that.” No way. No how. It would be a horrible mistake. She wasn’t queen material. She had important work to do, and they needed someone far more polished and pretty to fill that role.
He huffed, his eyes rolling. “And now you see why I did not ask. Could you please stop hiding in the curtains? Every moment you hide, the press writes something about your unsuitability. You’re an economist, darling. What is this little episode doing to our stock?”
Who cared about stock? Except that Bezakistan made an enormous amount of its money off stock and so did Black Oak Oil. And Black Oak was heavily invested in Bezakistan. Her mind rattled off numbers. Tal was the head of the country. The country was dependent on stocks and oil futures. If the future wife of the sheikh was a complete idiot, the stock might fall.
And they had lied.
“I don’t understand any of this.”
Kade leaned in, his face close to hers. “I know. I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Please come out and smile and wave for the citizens and the press. Once we’ve done that, we can sit down and I will explain everything to you. Piper, I don’t want this to come between us.”
The enormity of what they had done slammed her squarely in the chest. “You lied.”
He shook his head. “Not really. I just didn’t tell you everything.”
“Are we married?”
“Not yet,” Tal said, his voice clipped. “You now have a month to decide. But you should understand that we only have a few months before the crown reverts to Khalil, who will bring in radicals and change the face of this country forever. He’s counting on you to run. He’s the one who brought the press down on our heads.”
She didn’t understand a darn thing except that they had kept her in the dark about something that affected the rest of her life. And still, there was a lot riding on her. She had made friends here. She cared about Black Oak Oil. She couldn’t let them down. “What should I do?”
She asked the question of Kade. She couldn’t look at Tal yet. Some events that had made her scratch her head over the past few days now snapped into place and made sense, including the reason Rafe and Kade had refused to sleep with her on their journey to Bezakistan. Her virginity had belonged to Talib. To her future husband.
Together, the three of them had colluded to marry her to a man she didn’t really know. Because the Tal who had been her co-worker had been nothing but a pretense, just like their entire reason for bringing her here.
Tal didn’t seem to care that she was talking to Kade. “I need you to walk out with me, hold my hand, and smile.” Tal said the word smile, but he was frowning. “If you don’t, they will assume you have already rejected us. If that happens, Khalil will be meeting with his lawyers to challenge us and our claim to the throne within the hour.”
Her head was spinning, and all the ramifications of their deception swirled in her head. But the stakes were terribly high, too. The decisions she made now would affect their futures—and hers. Even if she didn’t remain their concubine, if Khalil overtook the country, all her work would go down the toilet. “Can’t I get dressed first?”
Tal’s frown deepened. “Rafe is talking to the press. He’s going to schedule some photo shoots for later this afternoon. You will look your best then, and those are the photos we will circulate. For now, Khalil has left us with no choice but to put you on display. If you would just walk out onto the balcony and allow me to kiss you, I believe we can stem the tide of scandal.”
She laughed, a little hysteria tingeing the sound. “I can stem the tide of scandal if I walk out half naked and kiss a man in front of a bunch of cameras?”