Chapter 21
COLIN
On my way out of my condo this morning, I was in such a rush that I nearly tripped over a package sitting outside my front door. As soon as I glanced down, I instantly recognized the handwriting on the large, taped-up box.
I stopped and picked it up, carrying it with me to my car, and by the time I reached Thayer headquarters, I couldn’t deny that I was fucking brimming with excitement. It was ridiculous, but Deja had possibly changed my life the day she’d suggested we do this.
It was old-fashioned and probably a little weird, but the anticipation made it so damn worth it. When I got up to my office, I shut the door behind me and set the box down on my desk, just smiling at it for a long beat before I tore it open.
The wrapping was immaculate, every layer folded and secured with such care that I could only assume Deja had packed it herself. Or that whoever she’d tasked to do it took gift-giving as seriously as diplomacy. Either way, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning.
The first thing I found was a letter, but there wasn’t only one. There were several sealed envelopes, stacked together in a tidy bundle that made my heart race. Good Lord, when did I become this guy?
I had absolutely no idea, but I did know that ever since I’d started waiting for the first letter from her, I’d felt more alive than I had in… possibly ever.
Setting the envelopes aside for now, I kept digging through the box, finding several bottles of cologne first. They seemed more elegant than anything I ever would’ve considered buying for myself, the bottles themselves made of heavy glass and the labels understated, but printed in a fancy, masculine, blocky kind of script.
Underneath the cologne, I found a variety of silk shirts, smooth and mostly in dark blue, green, and gray tones. At the bottom of the box was a stack of dozens of photographs, but just as I reached the first one, Isaac spoke up from behind me.
“Who’s that from?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin, spinning to see him sitting on one of the chairs at the conference table in the corner of my office. “Holy shit, you scared me.”
“Good morning to you too,” he said, standing up and coming to stand next to me at the desk to peer down at the gifts. “Are you going to tell me who it’s from, or should I just go ahead and guess?”
I glared at him. “When did you get in here?”
“About fifteen minutes ago.”
“You didn’t think to announce yourself when I walked in?”
He smirked. “You told me to stop by. I figured you’d notice me, but you were so out of it that I decided to see how long it’d take you instead.”
Unfortunately, he was right. “I forgot.”
“Clearly.”
I glanced back down at the open box. “I, uh, I was distracted.”
A slow grin spread over his face as he looked at the gifts spread out across the desk. “It’s from Deja, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Isaac abandoned any pretense of being here for work and moved around to my side of the desk, sorting through the package with me. He picked up one of the bottles of cologne, inspecting the packaging and the label before he frowned at me.
“What is this?”
“It’s cologne.”
“Yeah, I got that part. Thank you. I also completed elementary school. I think you might even have been there for my graduation. What I mean is why have I never seen this brand?”
“It’s theirs,” I said. “White Water Lily.”
He nodded slowly, then sprayed a sample strip. As he brought it to his nose, his eyes widened. “Why does this smell better than everything I’ve ever owned?”
“I don’t know.”
He sprayed another strip and inhaled again. “Maybe America is doing cologne wrong.”
“Or maybe Deja is just really good at her job.”
Isaac shrugged. “Either way, I’m serious. Smell this. It smells like someone who owns a yacht on every ocean.”
“We should get it for Alex for his birthday.”
Isaac laughed, moving on to another one of the bottles while I finally picked up the photographs.
There were landscapes, markets, and narrow streets lined with stone buildings.
Some featured scenes from what appeared to have been family gatherings and a cat popped up in at least four separate photographs.
My favorite shots, however, were those of Deja. They didn’t seem to be posed, just her laughing with her sister or taking selfies at the markets. She was stunning, her black hair shimmering with bronze in the mid-day sun and her smiles completely addictive.
“That’s dangerous,” Isaac said as I stared at a picture that only had her in it. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’re at risk of falling in love with this girl.”
I nearly dropped the photograph in my hand. “She might end up being my wife. I should hope she’s someone I could fall in love with.”
Isaac made a face at me that suggested he was about to be sick, but the guy was becoming a pretty notorious playboy. He had zero intentions of settling down and the mere idea of it always turned him a little green around the gills.
Evidently, seeing what our mom had gone through with our dad had affected us in different ways. For him, it’d made commitment seem like a trap, but the same wasn’t true for me.
Getting this package and seeing those pictures from Cairo was easily the best part of my week. Possibly even my whole month.
Isaac glanced at the pictures occasionally as I set one down to continue onto the next, but he mostly continued working his way through the colognes she’d sent. He didn’t stop until my entire office smelled like a luxury department store, but interestingly, I obviously wasn’t allergic to these.
That meant there had to be something specific in that perfume. Or it was still just seasonal allergies and I’d have to survive a few months a year on medication just to be able to get close to my wife. Shit.
“You know,” Isaac said, sniffing one of his sleeves. “If engineering doesn’t work out for me, I could probably make a killing reviewing fragrances.”
I snorted. “You’d last three days before you get bored.”
“Maybe, but they’d be a pretty awesome three days,” he shot back. “Seriously, these are amazing. When you get there, you have to convince them to send me some. All of these and whatever else they’ve got.”
“Sure. I’ll just walk into the home of one of the most powerful families in Egypt and start demanding free products for my brother. That’ll go down well.”
“It should,” he said easily, reaching for a small stack of pictures I’d set down. “Who knows? Maybe they’ll be so flattered that they send me the entire range every season from here on out.”
“You really are an optimist.”
He shrugged a shoulder before turning back to the image in his hand. “Someone in this family has to be and it’s worked out pretty well for me so far. Why change a winning recipe?”
Before I could say a word, he switched to the next picture and immediately groaned, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Well, hello there. Who are you?”
Regretting letting him look at the pictures at all, I leaned over to see who the unlucky lady was who’d captured his attention. He turned the picture toward me, revealing one I’d liked of Deja and her sister in front of a fountain, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“No.” I shook my head, looking him right in the eyes. “That’s Jasmine. Jasmine Saad. Deja’s younger sister.”
He grinned. “I might have to go to Egypt with you. Your flight is in, what, ten days?”
I rubbed a hand across my jaw and shook my head again. “You’re not coming.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s Basel’s daughter, Isaac.”
“So is Deja,” he countered. “Besides, I’m interested in international relations.”
“And by that, you mean having relations in a different country.”
He smirked, lifting his gaze to the window as he nodded slowly. “Unlike you, I happen to enjoy the advantages of being unattached.”
“You’re still not coming with me.”
“But—”
“No.”
Isaac chuckled, his head shaking as he finally let the photograph flutter back to the desk and sat down, his expression a little more serious when he looked up at me again. “I still can’t believe you’re going to Egypt. Do you actually even know yet how long you’re going to be there?”
“I don’t, but for what it’s worth, I can’t believe I’m going either.”
In ten more days, I would be boarding a plane and taking off to a country I’d never visited before, to meet the family of a woman I could be spending the rest of my life with, and I didn’t even know if she had an answer for me yet.
If she did, she definitely hadn’t given it to me. Despite all the letters, photographs, and gifts, I still didn’t know if she was actually going to go through with this. I’d been searching all her letters for the concrete answer I wanted, but so far, she’d been completely silent on that front.
“Are you ready?” Isaac asked.
I arched an eyebrow at him, finally moving around my desk and lowering myself into my chair as I considered the question. The honest answer was probably no, but no sane person could be ready for what I suspected was waiting for me.
Strangely, however, it wasn’t the thought of spending my life with Deja that was making me nervous. It was the knowledge of how closely everyone else would be watching.
All those traditions I’d read about surrounding Egyptian engagements? None of them involved the two of us spending much time alone together.
The events were all family and community-centric, and there were supposed to be chaperones if we did go out on a date or to run errands.
Traditionally, the couple didn’t really get any unsupervised time at all, which meant that possibly for the entire duration of my time there, we were going to be surrounded by her family and their friends.
“Yeah,” I finally said. “I think I am. I just, uh, I’m going to have to get creative if I want to actually even talk to my potential bride without a dozen other people listening in.”
Isaac groaned, picking up a few more photographs from my desk and looking through them. “Good luck with that. They do seem to be pretty close. There are almost always people with her in these pictures.”
When he moved onto another, he frowned, looked again, and then handed the photograph to me. “Who are they?”
I took it from him, realizing I must’ve missed this one before. It was a picture of five men sitting around a pool, and not one of them was smiling. They were all scowling at the camera, looking as tough as bouncers at an event attended by every A-lister known to man.
Large with broad shoulders and half-clenched fists even though they were apparently in a relaxed setting.
They did not look friendly, and these were the guys I was going to be spending the foreseeable future with. Khaled’s presence right in the middle of the pack confirmed it.
“They’re her brothers,” I said, glancing up at him and wondering if this was a mistake after all. “Also known as some of the chaperones who’ll be with me for every single step I’m going to take on Egyptian soil.”