The Boyfriend (The Boss 7)

As we reached the conservatory, I thought of the photos El-Mudad had sent us. The moment we walked through the doors, I knew immediately that the tall, slender girl with the same sand-gold skin and black hair as her father was Amal, and the girl with darker skin and long black hair down her back was Rashida. Amal wore a short, androgynous faux-hawk. Rashida had freckles across her nose and cheekbones. Amal looked more like her father, Rashida more like her mother. They spoke five languages. They played tennis. They also sat on the couch and binge-watched TV and rolled their eyes at El-Mudad’s dad jokes.

I knew so much about them already, but they were strangers.

El-Mudad watched us closely as we entered, and the scrutiny was almost too much to bear. “Rashida, Amal, I would like you to meet my friends, Neil and Sophie.”

I lifted my hand in an awkward half-wave. “Hello.”

Neil was either way more comfortable or way better at faking it. Of course, he’d parented a teenage girl before and probably wasn’t as interested in seeming cool and trying too hard. “We’re delighted to have you here. Your father—”

“Has told you so much about us, I’m sure,” Amal interrupted with cool, sophisticated boredom. It wasn’t aggressive or mean-spirited. Just cut straight to the point. It was very...European of her.

“And sent pictures.” I cringed internally at the Midwestern “cool mom” desperation in my voice. “He’s very proud of you both.”

“He brags about us,” Rashida said, beaming.

Neil chuckled. “That he does.”

“Shall we?” El-Mudad asked, motioning to the round, marble-and-wrought-iron table set up in the space where the conservatory’s paths converged. I tried very hard not to think of what had taken place there just a few nights before.

Neil and I sat beside each other, with Amal as his left and Rashida at my right. El-Mudad took the seat across from us, where he could carefully observe every interaction. I unfolded my napkin and spread it across my lap, building a mental bubble around myself to hopefully protect from the intense scrutiny of El-Mudad’s gaze.

“You’ve just come from France, haven’t you, girls?” Neil asked, reaching for his water glass.

Amal motioned for one of the servants. Without making eye contact, she said, “Champagne, please.”

People who are more sleek and polished than me for eight-hundred, Alex.

Neil blinked, but said nothing; I was sure he hadn’t been the type of father who would have been cool with Emma downing alcohol in the middle of the day in her teen years. But El-Mudad didn’t react as though this were strange at all.

Rashida answered Neil’s question. “We were in Nice with our mother. She loves Nice.”

“I don’t know why,” Amal said with a worldly sigh. “I begged her to take us to Monaco.”

“I’ve never been to Monaco,” I blurted, mentally scolding myself to shut up. These girls had probably traveled to space in Elon Musk’s private flying saucer or something. I couldn’t compete.

Why do you think you need to compete?

“You should go,” Amal said, animating suddenly. “The shopping alone—“

“Perhaps that’s why Bijou didn’t want to take you,” El-Mudad said with a laugh. “Amal can spend half a million in a day if you let her.”

And why shouldn’t they let her? Neil was rich. Bonkers level rich. But El-Mudad had so much more and stood to inherit an even vaster fortune from his father. These girls had grown up with indulgent, globe-trotting parents who likely gave them everything they wanted.

“And there are men in Monaco,” Rashida said casually. No matter how wealthy and well-brought-up siblings were, they would start shit with each other, apparently.

“Rashida!” Amal gasped, and El-Mudad’s eyes cut sharply to his daughter.

“And does your mother know about the men in Monaco?” he asked sternly. “How many times have I warned you—“

Amal rolled her eyes and replied to him in Arabic. He responded in kind, but I could recognize “do you want to wind up like me” in any language. I had heard it from my mother enough. And El-Mudad and his ex had started their family very young. He wasn’t even forty yet, and he had two teenagers.

We’d already heard the story of his relationship with Bijou. They’d met when he’d been at school in France, and when Amal had come along as a happy accident, El-Mudad and Bijou had married. The experience reflected Neil’s own with his daughter, though the relationship between Neil and Valerie had ended much earlier. El-Mudad had only divorced his wife a few years prior, though their marriage had been casually over before then.

Maybe that’s why his daughters were so reluctant to make friends with us. I knew that their mother had carried on an open affair with the woman she’d eventually left El-Mudad for. Maybe Amal sensed there was such a relationship between her father and us.

That struck me as kind of ooky, even though it was hypocritical to think so. I couldn’t be all gung-ho on the polyamorous life and judgmental about involving children in poly families. That was unfair.