6. Keira
CHAPTER 6
KEIRA
“ Y ou’re joking .”
Allie had been tightening a lug nut, but now she dropped the wrench she’d been holding and stared at Keira, wide-eyed. “That guy wants to marry you?”
“It’s not like that,” Keira said. “I explained it to you. It’s not like he wants to marry me. It’s just a way of dodging his father, and it would be strictly temporary.”
“You’re talking about a handsome prince who wants to marry you and move you into his palace.”
“He’s a sheikh, not a prince.”
“That’s the same thing! His father’s a king, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“Prince!”
“You’re being dramatic.
“Why aren’t you being dramatic?” Allie demanded. “This is a dramatic situation, Keira. At times like these, drama is called for.” She held up a hand. “Wait a minute. Is there going to be a royal wedding?” She gasped. “Am I going to be the maid of honor in a royal wedding?”
“No, we’re not doing that,” Keira said. “If anything, we’ll go over to the Chapel of Love or something.”
“Oh my God, tell me you’re joking. You’re going to take the Sheikh of Qalmar to the Chapel of Love and marry him with piped-in elevator music and a rented internet priest? You cannot do that, Keira.”
“If we do a big royal wedding, everyone will take it too seriously,” Keira said. “The idea is to get the royal family to believe that we did something spontaneous and irresponsible, not that we made a well-thought-out choice. Besides, weddings like the kind you’re talking about take months to plan. We need to get this over with quickly so that we can focus on what really matters.”
“Which is creating a racing event in Qalmar.”
“Right.”
“You do get how crazy this all is, right?” Allie said.
Keira sighed. “I know. Do you think I shouldn’t do it?”
“I didn’t say that.” Allie picked up her wrench and resumed work on the lug nut. “I just wanted to make sure you knew you were being crazy. You’re kind of freaking me out, you know?”
“Why? It’s not like you’ve never done anything crazy.”
“Yeah, exactly. Of the two of us, I’m the one you’d expect to find getting married at the Chapel of Love. I almost did that one time, remember?”
“I’ll never forget,” Keira chuckled. “You called me and woke me up at four in the morning so I could come down and be your witness.”
“And you came racing over to talk me out of it,” Allie recalled, a fond smile on her face.
“By the time I got there, the guy had wandered off and you were playing Princess Slots as if nothing at all had happened.”
“So you can see how it would worry me to see you acting like this, right?” Allie asked. “I’m supposed to be the irresponsible one of the two of us. You’re supposed to be the one who’s on top of things. The one who makes good choices.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure this is irresponsible,” Keira said. “It’s not like I’m getting married because I think it’s going to lead to some kind of happily ever after. You have to think of it as a business investment. I fly to Qalmar, spend a few weeks playing happy housewife to this man, and then we end the marriage and sign divorce papers and I fly back home, simple as that. Except that when I get back, I’ll be set up for the next phase of my career. It really is a perfect opportunity.”
“Keira, you already have a great career,” Allie pointed out. “You oversee three different racing events. Do you know how rare it is for a woman to be in charge of one ?”
“Of course I know,” Keira said. “It was hard enough for me to break into this, even with family connections on my side. But with the money I could get working with Kareem, I could take the ProBar cup to the next level. I could make it international. Could you imagine, bringing in top female drivers from all over the world? I could make it the biggest women-only race anywhere — a real headliner of global motorsports.”
“And that’s the reason you’re doing this?”
“Why else?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Allie scrunched up her mouth in the way she did when she was pretending to think hard about something. “Maybe because this guy is a real-life handsome prince ? Maybe because being swept off to a foreign country by a handsome prince is literally the thing we’ve dreamed about since we were little girls?”
Keira laughed. “It’s what you dreamed about,” she said.
“True,” Allie agreed. “Well, that and fixing cars.”
“I never dreamed about handsome princes.”
“Which makes it all the more wild that you’re the one this is happening to!” Allie sighed. “Keira, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ll ever forgive you if you walk away from this.”
“I thought you thought I was making a rash decision!”
“I do think that,” Allie said. “I also think making rash decisions every once in a while would be good for you. You play things way too safe, and I think it would be to your benefit to take advantage of an opportunity like this one.”
“You also think it’s good for my career, then?” Keira asked.
“I mean, maybe it is, but that’s not why I’m saying this. Hand me the pressure gauge, will you?”
Keira picked up the tire pressure gauge that lay on the floor and passed it to Allie. “Don’t overfill those tires.”
“You think this is my first time? I know you’re a hotshot event coordinator, Keira, and you might be marrying a prince?—”
“A sheikh. If I marry him, you’re going to have to start getting that right, Allie.”
“Well, prince or sheikh, I still know more about car maintenance than you do.” Allie’s eyebrows shot up. “Hey, wait. If you marry a sheikh, what will that make you?”
“A sheikha,” Keira said. “I looked it up.”
“Wow. My best friend, a sheikha.”
“Don’t get excited. Remember, it would only be temporary. Only until we ended the marriage and came home. Then I would go back to being just regular old Keira.”
“But this would always be part of your story,” Allie said dreamily. “You would always know that for a few weeks, you had been a princess.” She caught Keira’s eye and sobered up slightly. “Or a sheikha. Whatever. But the point stands, right?”
“And here you were just telling me I was being crazy.”
“I support it,” Allie said firmly. “I encourage it. Be crazy. I really can’t convince you to have a royal wedding?”
“I’m kind of on a timeline here,” Keira laughed. “If we do this, we do need to do it quickly. But I’ll let you come down to the Chapel of Love with us. You can be my bridesmaid there.”
“Well, that’s every girl’s dream.”
“And you can wear anything you want. My treat. We’ll go shopping and pick you out the most gorgeous dress imaginable, and because it’s the Chapel of Love, you won’t have to worry about being inappropriate or anything. You can get something totally sexy. How’s that?”
“Well, I hope you’ll bring me to Qalmar to see the palace before this is all over!”
“I’m not going to be living in a palace,” Keira said. “I’m going to be living in his estate. The palace is where the king lives.”
“You’re going to meet a king,” Allie said, her voice breathless. “Can you believe it?”
“He’s not going to like me,” Keira said. “That’s a part of all this. We know he won’t like me. We’re planning for him to not like me.”
“You might be able to win him over,” Allie said bracingly. “And by the way, Keira, I don’t know whether you noticed, but you’ve decided to do this. You’re talking about it like it’s something that’s going to happen, not like it’s a crazy idea that you want to be talked out of. You’ve made up your mind. It’s a good think you know what you want, isn’t it?”
Keira hadn’t even been aware of the shift in the way she was speaking, but now that Allie drew attention to it, she saw that her friend was right. What was more, the difference was there in her thoughts as well. She had made up her mind.
She was going to do this. She was going to marry Kareem and go to Qalmar with him.
“Oh my God,” she realized. “I’ve been so worried about what his father is going to think that I almost forgot about my own family.”
Allie burst out laughing. “Kevin is going to freak ,” she said. “He’s going to absolutely lose his mind, Keira. He still thinks you’re his assistant.”
Keira nodded. She had worked in that capacity for exactly three months, when she and Kevin had both gotten their start on the racing scene, before accepting a marketing job that had eventually led to her current position. But the intervening years hadn’t prevented Kevin from treating her as if she lived to serve him. “You’re right,” she said. “He’s probably going to try to forbid me from going or something. As if he could.”
“It’ll be worth it for that alone,” Allie said. “Just for the moment he tries to tell you that you can’t go and has to deal with the fact that it’s not up to him. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when you have that conversation. Do you think you’re going to tell your family that you’re getting married?”
“No, I can’t see how that would do any good,” Keira said. “It is a pretty crazy move, and if I tell them that they’ll probably think they have a good argument for trying to stop me. It’s better if I just tell them it’s a business opportunity and handle the rest of it without involving them at all. After all, the marriage will end before it could possibly be relevant to them, so there’s no reason they need to know about it.”
Allie nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “And I think that’s the right decision. I promise, they won’t hear a word about it from me.”
“Because they’re definitely going to come to you for answers once they realize I’ve skipped the country, even when I do tell them I’m trying to establish a race in Qalmar,” Keira said. “They’ll know something’s up. They’re not used to me doing things like this — being so spontaneous.”
“That’s true,” Allie said. “Ordinarily, if you were going to go to Qalmar, you would have planned it out for months in advance. If we weren’t having this conversation about it right now and I found out you had gone, I would be worried. If your family asks me, I’ll just say I don’t know any more about it than they do.”
“Good,” Keira agreed. “That won’t satisfy them, but at least it will make them come to me for answers instead of bugging you about it.”
“So you’re really going to do this, Keira?”
“I really am.” Keira could hardly believe the words were coming out of her mouth, and yet she knew as she said them that they were true. “I’m going to marry the sheikh.”