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Still, with all this flirtation, Laine had to wonder. Amin had mentioned marriage, but that seemed to be the furthest thing from Aziz’s mind. Laine understood now that Aziz could not grab her passionately whenever he liked in his own country, where interaction between unmarried men and women was much more restricted—especially with family visiting. But as intense as their passion was, Aziz continued to treat their relationship as one long, ongoing fling. Laine hated to be the one getting so invested, while it seemed like for him their interlude was just another extravagant way to seize the day and take pleasure while they both had life in them. While his gifts and gestures were sweet, whenever pressed to speak of their relationship on more intimate terms, he tended to try to undress her with more than his eyes, or he grew quiet and left the room on “business” he needed to take care of. And it hurt.
Laine knew she could open up more. She’d tried, but not knowing where he stood on these things, and being unable to reliably get him to put away his capricious persona, she found it very hard to spill her soul to him, even if he’d told her something very important about himself.
Hadiya grabbed Laine’s hand just before she dumped salt into a cake instead of sugar. With a click of her tongue, Hadiya took over the bowl.
“You must learn to cook someday,” she chastised.
“I can cook,” Laine argued. “I made dinner for our family practically every day for six years. Baking? Not really in my wheelhouse.”
“It is the same,” Hadiya scolded. “How can you do one but not the other?”
“Cooking is art. Baking is science. And I got a C in chemistry.”
Hadiya rolled her eyes and pointed to the far counter. “How about you just sift my sugar over there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
***
After Hadiya’s afternoon tea with her friends, Laine went out to her garden to review her notes. With the roses as inspiration, she had focused her research for a few final designs around the concept of the resilient flora that naturally took root in the desert.
She’d almost immediately discarded the idea after the first search on her tablet only turned up a variety of cacti. Laine wouldn’t have gone with that kind of motif even in the American Southwest. With a little persistence, she found some good pictures of date palms that she could use for one of the conference rooms, since dates had once been a chief crop for the country. She’d spoken to the painter she’d contracted about how to balance the images in that room with a few lines from a Sumerian poem about Bahrain.
Now, she perused pictures that she’d found late last night, biting her lip as she wondered what she could do with the concept. A framed painting? A vase with the image on it? As she thought it over, she sensed a presence behind her and turned before Aziz reached her.
“Did you enjoy the girls?” He asked, strolling up to her.
“They were very welcoming.”
Aziz peered over her shoulder. “Ah…I thought that we might go see this, if you were interested. It really is just a trip out to the desert, but I cannot resist the symbolism.”
“You are a sucker for symbols and gestures,” Laine said dryly. “Could we go? Aren’t you too busy with your business to go out and look at plants in the desert with me?”
Aziz’s eyes flickered, and then his hand slipped down her shirt and into her bra. “I could arrange for an opening.”
Laine didn’t really believe Aziz had an English problem, but she did love his sense of humor.
A few days later, Laine stood in front of the Tree of Life, a gorgeous, tenacious tree that continued to grow in the middle of the desert of Bahrain. The pictures she’d seen didn’t do it justice. It was just a tree, after all, but at the same time it was so tremendously large—it spread out to practically the width of a house. The branches were so long that they dragged along the ground on one side.
Aziz’s large hand rested on her back, and her heart caught in her throat. The sheer gall of this tree struck her. Its bark was pale, but it stretched high into the sky, a proud and defiant gesture against the ruthless desert.
“God, I can’t believe I thought I could just work from a photo of this.” Laine approached the tree, treading carefully on the sand. “I always loved the Gustav Klimt painting, but being here…”
“It defies words, doesn’t it?” Aziz kissed the back of her neck and rubbed her shoulders. “Words fail me sometimes, too.”
Laine nodded and touched one of his hands. “How does it…? I mean, it even has green leaves.”
“How does it survive? It is a miracle.”
