Page 60 of Hired Husband

“Yet I’m the one you’ve been ignoring ever since.”

“I told you, I was busy.”

“Sure.” I snorted and killed the engine. “Let’s go with that.”

As I climbed out of the car, I could feel her glaring at me, but I didn’t look back. Frankly, I just wanted to get this little outing over with so I could go back to licking my wounds.

Unfortunately, as I strode away from the car, she caught up to me surprisingly fast. “It really isn’t about you, Isaac. This is about me and what I want for my future.”

“I know what you want for your future, so how is this about that? Why would you ignore me now over something that hasn’t even happened yet?”

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t give me a straight answer. “Right now, this is just what I need to do, okay? I won’t apologize for that.”

“Obviously.”

We marched ahead, but things just weren’t the same anymore. Something had changed after that conversation she’d had with Basel. Guarded Jasmine was back in full force, and worse than that, she was angry and distant too, her fuck-off shields ten feet high.

An elderly couple wandered up behind us when we joined the throng of people waiting to gain entry to the complex. Naturally, they took to us immediately, the woman beaming at Jasmine.

“Oh, you two make such a lovely couple,” she cooed, holding out her hand. “Would you like us to take a picture of you together? Trust me, you’ll want to look back on these memories in the future.”

“Excuse me?” Jasmine said flatly, her arms coming up to fold over her chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Norm and I used to be exactly the same,” she said, smiling up at her husband. “We bickered for our entire honeymoon, didn’t we, dear? But now, we’ve been married forty years and I still smile every time I look at those old photographs.”

I sighed but handed over my phone and managed a very weak smile while Jasmine just stared at the camera. Thankfully, we were inside the complex just a few seconds later and we broke away from the couple when they stopped to inspect the souvenirs on offer at a stall.

She glanced up at me, the defensiveness vanishing from her eyes for a moment as she sighed. “Do you think we really look like a married couple? I mean, that wasn’t the first time someone mistook us for it, obviously.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Where to first?”

She rolled her eyes, finally plucking her sunglasses off the top of her head and pushing them on before storming a few paces ahead. “Just follow me and keep up.”

“Aye aye, captain.” I blew out a heavy breath through my nose and wondered how the hell we’d even ended up here, in yet another dusty desert under the blazing hot sun when clearly she wasn’t in the mood for this right now either.

Although my mood had less to do with her than my irritation over the whole situation with David. If Joseph’s suspicions are true?

I shook my head, inhaling a deep breath as I tried to get a handle on myself. Jasmine was off, sure, and it might have to do with David, but she’d made it perfectly clear that none of those things were any of my business.

As much as I was annoyed and maybe a bit hurt about it all, she’d actually been right on the money about that. It wasn’t any of my business. She was nothing of mine and her father was my boss, which was why, despite the annoyance and the hurt, I mostly just felt like a fool for thinking this could be anything other than what it was.

A business arrangement.

That was why I’d come to Cairo in the first place and why Basel had asked Jasmine to act as my guide. He’d intended for her to show me around so I could get some inspiration for my designs, not my future wife.

I tightened my jaw and tried to remember that the only reason I was in Egypt was because Basel had hired me. The job was supposed to have been what I was focused on all along, and so I did my best to do that.

Here I was, at arguably one of the most famous sites on the face of the entire planet, and I was brooding about my client’s daughter instead of taking it in. Tourists milled about everywhere, the guides called out in at least half a dozen languages, and camels groaned under the weight of some of the people they were carrying.

This was what most people thought about when they heard Egypt.

They didn’t think about the Old Market in Sharm, or the Obelisk in Heliopolis, or the narrow, crooked little streets that characterized daily life in most of the older parts of Egyptian cities. They thought about this place. These structures.

If I was going to make our compound globally recognizable, this was where I should be drawing that inspiration from. When we rounded a rise, I finally managed to put my troubles aside. Fuck, I even forgot they existed for a moment.

Every photograph I’d ever seen of the Pyramids had lied. Not a single one of them had prepared me for the scale of those three ancient mountains of stone, each block painstakingly placed by human hands thousands of years ago.

Standing there, I couldn’t even comprehend it. The joints, the geometry, and the staggering precision were mind-blowing. I tipped my head farther back and then a little bit more, taking in the apex of one of the smaller Pyramids against the afternoon sunshine.