Page 80 of Earned Husband

I made out some of what she was saying in Arabic, but not much, simply waiting for her to finish talking to every other person we encountered with impatience burning in my veins. I didn’t let it show, but I desperately wanted to get back to the house. I’d been hoping to catch Deja tonight, but I couldn’t dothat while she was chatting with someone over pots of whatever was cooking on the street.

Eventually, she led me down to the waterfront and stopped at a restaurant overlooking the water. The old woman jerked her head toward the door when she looked at me again. “Go.”

“Go?”

She nodded. “Inside. Go on.”

I took a breath of air scented with grilled fish and salt, seriously not understanding what was going on here. “Aren’t you coming?”

She looked at me like she’d never heard a more ridiculous question in her life. “No, and don’t come home until after dark.”

With that, she turned away and strode into the crowd, surprisingly fast for someone her age. As I watched, she fell into another conversation, this time with a woman selling dates, and I shook my head but went into the restaurant.

It turned out to be a seafood cafe of sorts, with soft lighting and windows open to the sea, but I barely noticed any of it when I saw Deja.So I was right. Nanna did help me escape, but not so she could take her turn to interrogate me. She was helping her granddaughter.

Deja sat at a table near the terrace studying a menu. She looked up as I approached her, smiling when she saw me. “She got you out, huh? I wasn’t sure it would work.”

I sat down across from her and grinned. “How exactly did you make this happen?”

“Oh, I didn’t. It was all Nanna.”

“Wow. I’m not sure if I should feel honored or frightened.”

She laughed. “Probably both. I asked her for help this morning and she agreed.”

I leaned back in my chair, my eyes narrowing a little as I realized it probably hadn’t been that easy. “Has she told you yet what she wants in return?”

“I don’t think we want to know,” she said, her eyes sparkling with laughter. “It’ll probably be great-grandchildren.”

I laughed. “That sounds about right.”

Deja covered her mouth as she chuckled. “I told you that we probably don’t want to know.”

“I thought maybe she’d just ask me to renovate her garden,” I said, doing my best not to think about what we’d have to do to produce said great-grandchildren, but it was too late.

My mind had already gone there, and judging by the way Deja shifted a few times in her chair, her eyes suddenly not meeting mine, I was going to assume hers had gone to the same place. The mere mention of it had injected a very specific kind of tension into the air between us, but at this point, I was so used to it that I wasn’t about to let it derail the dinner we’d tried to have almost two months ago.

“Do you think there’s any chance she’ll just ask me to become fluent in Arabic by, like, next week?”

Deja’s cheeks had become a little bit flushed, but she finally brought her eyes back to mine and shook her head. “Nope. Sorry. She definitely won’t let you touch her garden either.”

“I don’t blame her. If my garden looked like that, I wouldn’t let me touch it either.”

She chuckled again, looking away from me only for a moment when the waitress came. We ordered drinks, then spent the next few minutes while we waited for them to arrive discussing Nanna and all the threats she’d made to her grandchildren over the years when they’d tried to make certain changes to her prized garden.

“Rami brought her some new herbs once,” Deja was saying when my beer and her glass of wine were delivered. “Nanna caught him trying to plant them as a surprise for her birthday. It was a disaster. She told him that she’d prepared that patchfor new tomatoes and made him dig out every single seed and seedling.”

I laughed. “Did he get them all?”

She smiled at me over the rim of her glass. “Nope. When they started coming up, she made him fly back here from Cairo to finish the job.”

“That’s intense.”

“That’s Nanna.”

The waitress came back to take our food order and Deja helped me figure out what I wanted once I realized I recognized almost nothing on the menu. After we’d decided on grilled seafood, warm bread, dips, roasted vegetables, and fragrant rice to share, we were left alone again.

“You’ve become much better at Arabic,” she said, her eyes holding mine from across the table. “Your pronunciation has really improved from those first few days.”