Read Suite Dubai (Arriving) for Free Online Page A

his eyes.  

    “Slipper,” she said glaring at him. “That, or say hello. What he did was rude. Where I come from...”

    “Do you have princes in America? Kings? Rachel, that’s the way they are. Some are much worse. Some--” He shook his head. “They don’t care about anything.” He made his way to the door then. “I’ll let you get back to work.”

    When he reached the it he turned to her. “He is the second most eligible bachelor in Dubai.” His smile was back, big as ever.  

      “Who’s the first?”  

      “Me, of course,” he said before he walked out and closed the door.

    ***

    Samantha arrived to the meeting last.  

    Rachel arrived first, almost ten minutes early. Then Hamid and Kritika came next. Rachel distributed copies of her draft timeline to each of the twelve chairs around the long conference table. This is a draft timeline , she planned to say, emphasizing the word “draft.”  

    She’d met Anaton Jensen, a lanky man who stooped through the doorway and continued the posture all the way to his seat. In spite of his height he looked delicate to her, the way his thinning hair still held the channels left by his comb, the way his cheeks flushed even in the cool conference room. “I come from the dark land of Norway and...the dark land of accounting,” he told her. She met Suki, the woman who’d interviewed her over the phone. And William, from the Philippines, who was in charge of “the pool and the grasses and trees.”  

    Samantha burst in like wind and told everyone Judith would be absent. “Something about a leaky loo on the 21st floor. Shall we get going? You’ve all met Rachel Lewis, the long awaited public relations person.”

    She gave Rachel a slight smile, the first almost-genuine smile.

    “She comes to us from America-r, the city of Atlanta? Atlanta, Georgia, is that right Rachel?”

    Rachel told her it was.

    “Shall we go around the room then, and tell about out own backgrounds, languages, hobbies, that kind of thing? I’m happy to start.”  

    Samantha said she worked for Harrods , in London. She started in the accessories department and worked her way up, all the way up to assistant manager of the whole store. She had a Masters of Business Administration with special emphasis in hotel management so she was happy to finally put that to use. She spoke fluent French which she'd learned while attending a Swiss boarding school. She also knew some Congolese. “Just enough to shop in the market,” she explained. “My father was a diplomat, mostly worked in Africa-r, Somalia, the Congo, that type of thing. Lots of travel.”

    Hamid, it turns out, had gone to Caltech and graduated with a Masters in Computer Science. He did a year internship at the United Nations in New York City where he helped modernize an outdated translation system. He spoke Pashtun, Arabic and English. He looked at Rachel, then put his hands in his pockets and sat down.  

    It got worse as they went around the room: Suki rode dressage. William directed a reforestation program in the Philippines. Kritika had worked at an office in British Parliament, spoke three languages, played the cello. In addition to working in Oslo and Shanghai (where he learned some Chinese), Anaton Jensen had gone to the Olympics for speed skating. “I took only the bronze medal,” he said, looking apologetic.

    Only a bronze? Rachel stopped listening and started searching her memory for something more significant than a degree in journalism. She’d written a few articles for her school newspaper, about the cafeteria’s switch from plastic to metal silverware. One about the rising squirrel population on campus. When her turn came she hoped for a natural disaster, an earthquake or a tsunami, to preempt her own.  

      “Go ahead,” Samantha urged. “Tell us a bit about yourself.”  

    “Yes,” she said. “I--”

    “Rachel,” Samantha said. “Please stand up so we can hear you?”

    She stood. “I