The bathroom was enormous. She’d thought her suite with Heather must be one of the best in the Cosmopolitan, but…she’d been wrong. The decor was largely the same, but this place was bigger than her apartment in Brooklyn. The lights brightened slowly, so as not to hurt her eyes, and she stepped to the sink to survey herself in the mirror. Two toothbrushes, still in plastic wrap, were perched on a holder near the sink. Appearance second. Teeth first.

  She brushed her teeth, took care of her bladder, and came back to the sink to wash her hands. Clem absently waved her right hand through the stream. Her hair was a mess. Heather had fussed over it the night before, curling it and then shaking out the curls until they were gentle waves. She’d had a new hairspray that she swore felt like nothing at all, and she’d been right. The look had held…well, for as long as Clem could remember. There had been that first drink with Samir, and then a second, and then things started to blur together.

  The water felt good against her skin, and she leaned down to wash her hands, dipping them both into the stream.

  That’s when she saw it.

  The ring.

  No—rings.

  Clem yanked her hand out of the water and held it up in front of her face. Not only was she wearing an enormous solitaire engagement ring, she was also wearing a wedding band.

  A. Wedding. Band.

  Her mind rushed back to the previous night. She hadn’t had it at the bar—of course not. That would have been insane. But Samir had said they’d only been dancing at the club. But he’d also said that he didn’t remember every detail of the last night. And they were in Vegas. They were in Las Vegas.

  Something white snagged in the corner of her vision. An envelope. It was made of thick paper and shoved into the corner of the bathroom counter. She snatched it up, and it fell open in her hands. The top portion was all elegant script in gold foil.

  And the bottom was a marriage certificate.

  The paper fell from her hands with a soft flutter as the scream tore from her throat.

  “We’re married?”

  4

  The scream made Samir fumble his phone, and he chased it into the comforter.

  “Samir?” Rashid said on the other end of the line. “Married? What was that? Am I hearing—”

  “I’ll call you back.” He dropped the phone again as Heather rushed out of the bathroom, naked and waving a paper at him. He sat up, putting one leg out from beneath the covers. He was naked, too. His muscles tensed—was she going to leap into the bed? Tackle him?

  “We got married?” Heather turned the paper around in her hands, squinting at the text. “This is a marriage certificate, Samir. It’s an official record of our marriage.” Her voice rose with every word until it was high and tight with panic. “This is real. It’s real. It’s not a printout. This is nice paper. This is nicer paper than I’ve ever printed anything on, and it says that we’re married.” She had come around to his side of the bed.

  Focus. Samir couldn’t get overtaken by the sight of her body—not in this moment. What has gotten into you? He knew the answer to that. Heather had. Howard Newell’s daughter had. “Here. Let me see.”

  She handed over the paper. Samir wasn’t an expert on American legal documents, but it looked legitimate enough to him. How had it happened? He rubbed his forehead. They had been at the bar. They had been at the club. And he hadn’t been lying when he told Heather that they’d come back to his room. They had.

  He wracked his brain, but he couldn’t come up with even the haziest memory of going outside. He had been somewhere with a bright light, but by morning he’d chalked it up to being in the hotel lobby, or maybe the elevator.

  The elevator.

  Heather had not been able to contain herself in the elevator. She’d grabbed his shirt with her fists and searched his eyes with hers, biting her lip in a way that he’d found irresistible. It had been a tough sell, getting her to wait to take his shirt off until they were actually in his hotel room. But that was the only clear memory he had. Her hands, his shirt…and those lips. She stood in front of him now, hip cocked to one side.

  “It appears we are married,” he said finally, and she started, seeming to realize only at that moment that she was naked.

  Heather covered her face with her hands, and then her head popped up. “All right,” she said. “Okay. I—” She shook her head. “Clothes. That’ll help.”

  Samir didn’t necessarily agree, but he wasn’t about to stop her while she hunted for her dress.

  “I can’t find my dress.” Heather bit her lip, and he was nearly undone. “Where is my dress?”

  “Here.” His shirt was on a chair next to the bed, and he stood up and tossed it to her. It felt valiant, doing this naked, but she didn’t seem to notice. She put her arms through the sleeves and buttoned the shirt, and Samir sat back down on the bed and tugged the comforter up to his waist. The sight of her naked had been one thing. The sight of her wearing his shirt? He clenched his teeth.

  Heather crossed her arms over her chest and paced. She went to the window, then came back to the bed, turned around, repeated it. “Married,” she said under her breath. “We’re married.”

  He picked up the documentation and looked at it again, forcing himself to read every word. There was the official seal of the State of Nevada, the imprint raised from the paper. Samir could not recall exchanging vows.

  “And where did you get this?” Heather brandished her rings from the foot of the bed, and the engagement ring got his attention. How could it not? The diamond was huge. So it hadn’t just been the bar and the club and a Vegas wedding chapel, then.

  It didn’t make much sense. Having no memory of a trip outside the Cosmopolitan seemed highly unlikely, even if he couldn’t remember his own wedding ceremony. A tendril of suspicion bloomed in his gut. Had Heather set all of this up? Her father seemed to want a “personal connection” between them badly enough to have remembered it for a year.

  But Heather’s face was pale. She looked…bewildered. And stricken. Not like a woman who was pretending to be shocked at the success of a secret plan.

  She didn’t need to be quite so shocked. Rashid might be the one assuming the throne in Omirabad, and his younger brother, Khalid, might be more charismatic, but he was successful, honest, passionate…in other words, a catch. Not that he expected such an argument to calm Heather.

  He folded the marriage certificate in his hands, then unfolded it again. She’d signed in the wrong spot, he noticed. Her name was in the witness box. But it didn’t seem like the best time to mention that.

  The situation wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it certainly didn’t thrill him. For one thing, Samir had always imagined being present at his own wedding. He wanted to remember the vows and the look in his bride’s eyes. He wanted his family to see him get married and fulfill all the royal traditions.

  His wedding day, though Samir would never admit it to anyone, would wash away everything that had happened with Tahlia.

  She was not the person he wanted to be thinking about right now. Not in this moment, with Heather wearing his shirt and pacing around his hotel suite. Tahlia was the reason he’d been so wary of getting romantically involved with anyone. He’d been young, when they were together, and she’d been…

  Well, she’d been more interested in Samir’s family than in Samir himself.

  But she was in the past. His apparent wedding was the present.

  “We can’t do this.”

  Samir sat up straight and let the marriage certificate fall to his lap. “Pardon?”

  “We can’t have gotten married.” Heather stood at the foot of the bed, his sleeves too long for her arms and the cuffs dangling. She still had her arms crossed protectively over her chest. His heart squeezed at the sight.

  “We did,” said Samir. His mind still raced through the past, from last night to the last night he’d spent with Tahlia. The pieces didn’t fit together. It nagged at him. “I’m not entirely sure how. Unless…” He leaned over and opened the bedside table. Inside was a leather folio with hotel information. Samir opened it and flipped to the hotel amenities.

  There it was—right there in front of him. Twenty-four-hour wedding chapel, one of the entries read. Fine jewelry.

  “Here’s how.” He turned the folio toward Heather and let her scan the page.

  Heather pulled the sleeve up her left hand and looked down at the rings. “I don’t remember any of it,” she said softly. “You’d think I’d remember my own wedding. I wasn’t…” She smiled ruefully. “I wasn’t sure I would ever get married. It’s not like I had a lot of time to imagine my wedding ceremony. Or my dress.” She chuckled, but the sound was sad. “It would have been a stretch to afford a dress, anyway.”

  A stretch to afford a dress, with Howard Newell as her father? That didn’t seem right. He had one of the largest distribution companies for high-end goods in the United States, and he’d wanted Samir to have drinks with her. Samir had the distinct impression that drinks were the minimum of what Howard had been hoping for. Heather looked up, and—was he imagining that her eyes were misty?

  There was no good way to pose any kind of question about what she’d just said. At best, he would seem to be prying into her family’s personal information, and at worst—

  Samir didn’t want to think about the worst-case scenario. He simply kept his mouth closed.

  “I just…” Heather took a deep breath, lifting her head to look him in the eye. “We can’t be married. We just can’t, Samir.” His name on her lips made another feeling kindle in his chest. Something deeper.

  “Why don’t you come and sit down?” He pulled the blanket tighter over his lap and patted the bed beside him. “We can talk this through.”

  There was a lot to talk about. Despite how much time he’d spent with Howard this week—too much, in his opinion—his daughter was a virtual stranger. Even if they went forward with the marriage, how could he ever trust her with his goals? With his life? There would be business advantages, of course—Howard had made that perfectly clear. But would a faster path to prosperity for the desert tribes be worth letting someone into his life? Would it be worth letting Heather into his life? They were so different.

  “All right,” Heather said, and at first he didn’t know what she was talking about. Then she clambered onto the bed and came to sit next to him, leaning her head against the headboard. “There’s no way you meant to marry me. You’re—” She waved a hand in the air, and her engagement ring—it really was astoundingly large, even to Samir’s eyes—glinted in the light from the table lamp. “You’re a prince.” She put her hand back in her lap. “And this ring…there’s no way I can keep it.”

  “Let’s keep it to one topic at a time, shall we?” Samir reached down to pat her leg, only realizing when his palm brushed her skin that his shirt had hiked up almost to her hip. Heather drew in a short little breath that made him glad to have the blanket up to his waist.

  He drew his hand away and folded it in his lap. “You object to the marriage.”

  “Don’t you?” Heather turned to look at him. “You’re a prince. Isn’t your wedding supposed to be…you know, televised? For all the world to see?”

  He laughed. “I supposed my brother’s wedding was televised. That doesn’t mean mine has to be. It’s slightly different for the second son.”

  “It can’t be so different that your family will be okay with you having a Vegas wedding.” Heather blushed. “A Vegas wedding for a prince…a sheikh.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the obstacle. My brother came back with his fiancée after he rescued her from her own wedding rehearsal.” Heather raised her eyebrows. “I’ll tell you the story, if you like, but I think for the moment we should concentrate on our current…situation.” Even now, he hesitated to call it a problem.

  “It’s not in my plan to be married. At least not right now,” she said in a rush. “Not that you’re not…ridiculously handsome. Because you are.” Her voice dropped to a whisper on her last few words, and she cleared her throat. “And I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t even be here.” She sat up from the headboard and crawled off the bed, tugging down the hem of the shirt with one hand. With her feet back on the floor, she moved away from the bed. “I should go. I—” Heather leaned down to pick up her purse. It was a folded clutch, black leather, and Samir could see from the bed that it was worn shiny in some places. She stepped into her shoes and seemed to give up on the dress she’d been wearing the night before.

  Heather faced him. “We need to figure this out. Get a divorce. Do something. But I can’t do anything else until I’ve had a chance to shower. And collect myself. Okay?” She gave a nod as if he’d agreed, then headed for the door. “We’ll meet later,” she called over her shoulder.

  It was only when she’d gone, the door closed behind her, that Samir realized he didn’t have her phone number.

  He laughed out loud. Married, with a wife, and he’d have to hunt down her father to send her a text. No, this convention had not gone as planned.

  5

  Clem hoped the stillness when she pushed open the door to her suite was due to Heather still being asleep, but it was later than she’d thought—almost ten a.m. The Cosmopolitan wasn’t playing around when it came to blackout curtains, and the first window she’d encountered in the hallway after leaving Samir’s room nearly blinded her. It had certainly illuminated the fact that she’d just walked out of a man’s hotel room wearing nothing but his button-down shirt. Nothing.

  Clem had rushed into the nearest elevator and prayed all the way down to their floor that nobody else would step on. Thankfully, the universe had graced her with one break after the chaos of the morning. Who woke up married and then stole her new husband’s shirt?

  Clementine, apparently.

  “Heather?” she called into the suite. There was no answer. She went to the door of the second bedroom. Heather had tugged the comforter over her bed, but not properly made it. She’d mentioned something the day before about a late checkout. Another small grace. At any other hotel, Clementine would have to rush to pack up her things and shower before she left. Now she had plenty of time to contemplate the mess she’d gotten herself into. The previous night was, without a doubt, the last time she’d ever have more than one or two drinks at a bar.

  Clem flipped open her purse and tugged out her phone. Thank God—the battery wasn’t dead. She speed dialed Heather. Normally she’d send a text, but under these circumstances…

  “Hey, you. You’re up!” Heather said on the first ring, a laugh in her voice.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at breakfast—I guess it’s brunch now—with Daddy. Come down when you’re ready, okay? We’re not in a rush.”

  “O-okay.” True—they didn’t have flights to catch. Heather and Clem had flown commercial into Vegas, but they’d be flying out on Howard’s six-seater plane.

  “Are you just getting up? Seriously, we’ve only had coffee so far. Make yourself beautiful and come on down. Just kidding. You’re always beautiful.” Heather laughed again. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  A shower—that’s what she needed. A shower would clear her head.

  The diamond on the engagement ring was so large that Clem was more than slightly afraid to take it off. Her heart raced at the thought of losing it. Then again, she didn’t want to wear it in the shower and get it tangled in her hair. She settled for putting it in the back corner of the bathroom counter, as far away from the sink as she could get it.

  Her thoughts circled like a carousel as she showered. The ring was the least of it. She was married. She’d gotten married without knowing she was doing it. How could it have happened? How could her brain not have one single image of speaking wedding vows?

  She’d been truthful when she told Samir she’d never dreamed about her wedding. Growing up in foster care, she’d been painfully aware of how far out of reach something like a wedding would be. Most of her foster parents had tried to give her the things she wanted, but they’d all been short on cash and long on stress. A wedding was far beyond a new pair of shoes or a dress for the dance.

  And she hadn’t married the boy next door. She’d married a sheikh. What did it mean, to be married to a sheikh? She didn’t know the first thing about the customs of Omirabad. She hadn’t heard anything about Samir’s brother getting married, even though it had been a royal wedding.

  What did it mean to get divorced from a sheikh? Was that kind of occasion televised, too? Would it make international news if she and Samir—when she and Samir—untied the knot?

  What did it make her, in the end?

  Screwed, that’s what.

  She might have been at the bar with Heather, in a dress from Heather’s wardrobe, but Clementine wasn’t a wealthy heiress to an import empire. She connected businesses with other businesses and helped them revamp their practices to be more environmentally friendly. The most she could claim to be was a middleman. A middlewoman. And not a runaway success. Not yet.

  Clementine turned toward the water and let it jet over her face. The job wasn’t the only thing. Her most serious college boyfriend had broken her heart. They’d been together almost two years. Right up until she’d found out he was cheating on her with his hometown girlfriend. She’d been the laughingstock of their circle, and no surprise. He’d played her for a fool, and she’d fallen for it. Clem did not relish finding herself in what could be a similar situation. Once Samir understood who she was…

  She shut off the shower and stepped out, head held high. There was nothing she could do about that now. What she could do was go to brunch. Once she’d blown out her hair, tugged on a clean outfit, and swiped on some mascara, she was good to go.

  Except for the ring.

  Could she really wear the ring to brunch?

  She couldn’t leave it here, out on the counter.

  Clem picked it up and slid it onto her finger. She’d just…keep her hand tucked away. Avoid all the questions.