Challenging the Doctor Sheikh Read online

  It was a way of making herself invisible. There was power in eye contact, and this country—as much as she wanted to be here—still felt foreign to her. Being able to blend in was a kind of social invisibility she’d long coveted. The ability to not stand out. She could do that here if she figured out what was socially and culturally expected of her. Blending in wasn’t something she’d ever really done at home. She’d always looked different, felt different.

  By the time they got inside, Nira had picked up more of the Prince’s frustration, but the beautiful interior of the building helped her at least.

  Speaking might just help them both. Heavy silences made everything worse.

  “I love this building. It’s like they plucked the interior of some glorious old nineteen-twenties New York building and encased it in glass. I expected the flat to carry on the same style, but it’s completely modern. Floor-to-ceiling windows, clean, straight lines—gorgeous, but two completely different styles blended together.”

  Dakan stopped in front of the lift, pressed the button, then folded his arms. In the polished brass on the lift doors she met his reflected gaze and did the only sensible thing she could think of—she continued babbling.

  Maybe he just needed more encouragement to break the ice.

  “Take this lift door, for example. It’s definitely art nouveau.” She reached out to trace her fingers along the polished brass design, tracing the flowing curlicues symbolic of peacock feathers, “and I’d say it’s actually from the period—not a replica. The way the design is incised into the metal like a patterned window screen.”

  She looked directly at him again, and her stomach bottomed out once more as if she were in the lift already, all hope that he’d take the hint diminishing.

  Nothing but a slight lift of his dark brows came in response. Was that a sign of interest for her to continue, or some kind of hint for her to shut up?

  Probably to shut up.

  He checked that the button to summon the lift was still lit.

  Definitely to shut up.

  Had she really made him so angry by not waiting around, doing nothing, with no idea of when he might swing by? She’d left once to go to the bazaar close by, it wasn’t like she’d taken a desert trek by camel to skinny-dip at some oasis. And she wasn’t on the clock anyway. Her company had no billable code for sitting around, doing nothing.

  She should probably shut up.

  In a moment.

  “I’ve seen those cut screens in all of the admittedly few places I’ve been to here. The bedroom in the flat has the eastern wall of windows with these pliable die-cut screens that roll down from the ceiling like you might expect a window blind to do. It makes waking up a pleasure, softens the sunshine into little patches of light to ease you into the brightness of the day.”

  A bell pinged and the lift doors slid open.

  Still no response. And that was top-notch architectural geekery too, completely wasted on this man. Everyone at her firm would’ve been interested in her description of the building details. In fact, her fellow architect geeks had already flooded her daily social media posts with pictures of the building or skyline, always asking for more detail. Because it was interesting. And beautiful. And unexpected.

  He stepped into the lift, and she and her escort followed.

  Give it up. He was angry, and that was all there was to it. Once they got up there she was definitely going to be shouted at. She should probably be glad he hadn’t deigned to dress her down in public.

  She settled in between the men, far enough from each to avoid accidentally touching either, and folded her hands.

  Zahir was more personable.

  He probably would’ve liked her architectural geekery too.

  The lift stopped and as they exited, the flat door swung open, as if someone was simply standing there, waiting for his return. Probably the kind of deference the Princely One expected, for people to wait around to do things for him.

  If she wanted this job—and she really did—she had probably better figure out how to do that without screaming at him or stabbing him with her 9H pencils. She could sharpen those suckers to a deadly point, and they didn’t wear down fast. That made for the potential of lots of stabbing between sharpenings, so very few billable hours would need to be devoted to it. Was there a code for Stabbing the Client? She’d just have to use the handy old 999-MISC.

  Dakan strode through the monochrome penthouse, his black suit and shiny shoes perfectly complementing the gunmetal gray tile floors, pale gray walls, and the black and white accents. He stopped when he’d reached the work area she’d spent days rearranging while waiting for him to get there.

  Where the heck had Zahir gone?

  She trailed to the desk and opened her laptop. Might as well get this over with. She could at least have something to work on and he could leave her to it. Then she could schedule her hours off—one couldn’t work twenty-four hours a day—explore the city to satisfy her need to know, and still have a well-filled-in time sheet to show him later with far more than eight hours per day anyway.

  “I don’t know what instructions Prince Zahir gave—”

  “He didn’t give me instructions. That’s not how we operate,” Dakan said finally, as he grabbed a chair from the other side of the desk and joined her where he could best view the laptop.

  The laptop and the photo of her parents.

  Given the way their meeting had gone so far, providing him a hint she was in the country for more than professional reasons might be a mistake. She discreetly laid the frame down to cover their faces and went on.

  “Okay, then I don’t know what he told you about how we’d been working. I had done some proposals and pitched other ideas with rough sketches or animations—”

  “We’re starting over.” Dakan cut off her explanation as he settled behind her—which was at least better than him looming over her shoulder.

  Starting over. Right. She went about finding and opening the file for the rough animation she’d first thrown together for Zahir and opened it.

  “We started by talking time lines and construction methods so he could have some ideas on how long it’d take to have a fully functioning hospital with the different means of construction. There are a couple of ways to do this and I’ve prepared a sample time line for each.”

  “I want the shortest time.”

  Impatient. She fixed her eyes on the screen precisely because she wanted to turn around and speak to him.

  “The shortest time line to get full use of the building, of course, would be to build it all and then open it. But there’s an alternative, which would allow you to start getting use out of it much sooner but at a limited capacity. Given the current need, it might be worthwhile to have a staged opening.”

  “Staged?” Dakan said, and in his reflection she saw him shed his jacket and drop it on the table before leaning forward, elbows on knees. “Open different parts at different times?”

  “Yes.” The animation started to play as she spoke. “In a staged opening you start with one department—and here I started the animation with the original hospital because it’s already there. But basically you build one section at a time and finish it for use before moving on to the next part of the facility. That way you can open and just keep tacking on expansions as they become available.

  “They do this in smaller communities usually to make medical care available locally at the earliest possible time and start with, say, doctors’ offices. Open those and start seeing patients while they build the next section and maybe add an emergency department. Then testing facilities and outpatient surgery, then open fully with a number of beds and a children’s ward, add a proper obstetrics and surgical department, then add more beds. Like that.”

  Reflected Dakan nodded as he sat back. “I like that idea. Do that. But we
don’t really have the number of doctors required to staff a building of offices yet. I’d rather start with two different departments at a reduced scale that can be expanded on each side. The biggest part would be the emergency department with some very basic diagnostic equipment—X-ray and a lab—and then have a smaller area to the side where a couple of GPs could have offices in the guise of urgent care for less-than-life-threatening illnesses that still require immediate treatment.”

  As the conversation and planning started, the tension she’d felt in him drained away. He definitely seemed as eager to get started as Zahir had been, and as he spoke, the irritation that had saturated his voice during the bazaar confrontation earlier ebbed away.

  She could work with this man. It’d be different, but he was a doctor too. They had the same goal: get a facility up and running for the people.

  “We could do two different reduced-size units. Any time you split your building efforts, construction slows. So unless the extensions are staggered from one side to the other, you’re going to slow progress to open new units. Unless you really expand the crew.”

  “The size of the crew won’t be a problem. Will you be designing as we go too? Is that possible? I know it will take a long time to finish a full design, and I’d rather they break ground and get going sooner than later.”

  Nira gave up looking at his reflection and spun in her chair to face him, her eyes finding his immediately. He was still leaning forward, maybe that was why it suddenly felt so intimate. Even just talking shop, their eyes instantly connected and held just a beat too long for her comfort.

  Nira would never call herself shy, but this was all new terrain for her, and she didn’t want to make another mistake already. She shifted her gaze to the safety of the middle distance, a thinking point to keep her thoughts on track.

  She probably should put off some of her exploring until they got the first unit under way, devote as much time to this as she could now, show Dakan that his goal was her goal. Reflecting well on her firm and gaining a happy client who might ask for her again for later construction efforts would be a great thing for her career.

  Her quest could wait.

  She could wait.

  She’d waited twenty-six years to fill that void, and another few weeks wouldn’t kill her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I HADN’T CONSIDERED designing as we go,” Nira said. It seemed rude to sit with her back to him when she had no real reason to do so, aside from avoiding looking like a sex-crazed royal fan, which her reaction to him was starting to feel like.

  He might be a prince, but he was a prince who had not even responded slightly to her geekery. Being attracted to him—while entirely understandable—would be a really stupid idea to entertain.

  Keeping her goals in mind? Much more sensible than some overdeveloped Cinderella story. One-sided attraction should always be ignored, especially when the other side was a freaking prince. Stupid. Understandable, but stupid.

  There were other aspects of her heritage to explore without adding “Explore Arabic sensuality” to her list. Besides, Mum had already done that, with disastrous effects.

  Focus.

  “I suppose I could design in stages to an extent, but I’d need to block out the entire footprint first. You know—the general layout, decide the square footage of each department and the best flow of one department to another before I got started. But otherwise I don’t see why we couldn’t go in stages with the proper planning. It’ll be trickier, but designs are always done with specifications and constraints, so not that much trickier.”

  And by doing it in stages, she’d actually get to be here for part of the construction! She’d get to see the first building rise that truly came from her ideas. It made the whole job even more exciting for her.

  He gestured to a writing tablet lying at her side and Nira slid it over to him with a pen. “Okay, then, you’ll start with the split building we talked about. I’ll get someone else working on selecting good equipment so you’ll have equipment dimensions to work with in your plans.”

  Nira leaned slightly to get a glimpse of his writing. Not the chicken scratch she’d expected. “Did you take drafting classes?”

  “Drafting?” He stopped, an odd lift to his brows. “That’s not part of a medical curriculum.”

  “You write like you’ve done hours of board lettering.”

  Silence hung after her words, and suddenly Nira was reminded of the elevator. She’d said something wrong again. It wasn’t a stupid question—lots of people took drafting classes in secondary school. Probably. If they wanted to...draw things.

  Light crinkles appeared in the corners of his eyes just before he chuckled. “I have no idea what that means. Board lettering sounds like writing on wood.” Her shoulders relaxed when he laughed, and a dimple appeared in his left cheek that completely wiped the notion of royalty from his persona.

  “It’s a way of writing, back to Ye Olde Days of drafting when they tried to make everyone’s writing standardized so it would be universally legible. Most computers have a hackneyed font called Draft-something-or-other now approximating the style. I just meant your writing is very neat and uniform. I thought doctors were all scribblers.”

  “My first education was to write from right to left. When I learned English, it was hard to remember at first, so I learned to take care with my...lettering, was it? I want to be understood.”

  “Of course. I didn’t think about that. I should’ve, though. My attempts at writing anything in Arabic have been laughable. I drag my hand in the ink and smear it, or I drag my hand on the pencil and smear it. We won’t even talk about calligraphy nibs...” She shrugged and gestured back to the tablet. Stop derailing things. The man might be a doctor when he’s not prince-ing, but right now he was her client, and clients deserved not to be interrupted by nervous women trying not to notice how their dimple contrasts delightfully with their square jaw.

  “I need to know patient volumes we’re designing for. Do you want to start small until you get people used to the idea of the hospital?”

  He took the redirection with ease, not commenting on her failure not to smear her practice writing. Thank God.

  “No. I want to go big. Big enough it’s impossible for people to ignore it. Big and shiny enough to draw attention and bring people in. Starting small just means staying small. It will get the use it needs if we make it important by making it big.”

  That was a new tactic. Her career experience wasn’t yet expansive, but everyone she’d worked with had worked within a budget. But when your client ruled a country, he could probably do whatever he wanted with the budget.

  “I still need a target number of patients, because my idea of big and yours might be two different things. And I hate to ask this since I know how fast you want me to get started, but it would really be beneficial to me to see what sort of facilities people are currently using.”

  He laid the pen down and leaned back in his chair. “You want to go to the hospital? It’s barely functional. I’m not sure what you could get from going there besides tetanus. Though, on the upside, as far as hospital infections go, I doubt you could get MRSA.”

  “I’d like to avoid tetanus, so I won’t touch anything. I don’t know what MRSA is, so I’ll just be glad I can’t get it.”

  “Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It’s like staph on steroids, resistant to most antibiotics, really hard to get rid of. But since antibiotics so rarely make it to Mamlakat Almas, anyone who has it would likely have caught it from someone coming into the country. So, probably right before they died, or healed it themselves.”

  “Right. I’d like to avoid that.”

  Maybe going to the current treacherous hospital wasn’t the best idea. Except...

  “But we’re leaving the current building and adding on? Blending the
old and new?”

  That was why Zahir had hired her specifically, even without a CV loaded with practical experience. Also it was why the animation had started with the old building.

  Dakan scribbled a few more notes on the pad, then leaned back again. “No. It’s on a large piece of land. As we’re going to do it staged, we’ll leave the old hospital up and functioning—such as it is—and begin construction for the new facility in another area of the property. Maybe right beside it, then tear down the old when the new is up and running.”

  Definitely not blending the old with the new that way, not that the current hospital was exactly old—it had been built in the twentieth century if the old blueprints were accurate. He was probably exaggerating. Still, she could work with that. And who wouldn’t want a shiny new facility? But she had a point about visiting the hospital besides seeing what she was adding to.

  “It’s nothing to me if the old building is razed after the first unit is completed, but I still need to see the facility or visit a healing center. Zahir—I mean Prince Zahir—said there were a few bigger healing centers within the country. I need to see how the waiting and reception areas function, see what people expect so I can make sure the building feels familiar enough to be welcoming.”

  He fixed his gaze on her, and for a moment she thought he might finally yell at her, as she’d been expecting him to do in the lobby. But instead he paused for a considered moment and said calmly, “I know blending the old and the new is what you and Zahir discussed, but I really have no interest in that, Miss Hathaway.”

  With her not knowing what to call him, every time he said her name it made her a little more aware of their different positions. She’d address that first. “Please call me Nira. I don’t mind.”

  “All right, Nira. I’ve inherited the hospital project, and since I’ve had a few more days to think about it, I’ve decided to go a different route from Zahir’s old plans. I want a thoroughly modern hospital. None of that modern on the outside and quaint and nostalgic on the inside nonsense either. Modern. Something that would look at home if it was plunked in the middle of London, Sydney, or New York.”