Stealing From The Sheikh by Holly Rayner
“Right over there,” Mansour said, pointing to a door off to the side of the entryway. “There are two more—one attached to the guest bedroom, and one attached to my room—but that one is the easiest to get to.”
“Do you mind if I wander around a bit?” Riley tried to look as innocent as possible. “Since you’re going to be busy cooking dinner, and much as I’d like to think I could be happy just lying around drinking wine…”
“Make yourself at home,” Mansour said with a smile.
Riley smiled back at him, her heart aching with the knowledge of what she was about to do.
Riley waited for a few moments, until she thought that Mansour was settled into the task of cooking their dinner. She took a long sip of the wine he’d poured her and stood, walking towards the bathroom that Mansour had pointed out. Instead of using the restroom, however, Riley looked around at the other doors leading out of the living room; she opened one to find a closet—stuffed with coats and random objects she didn’t take the time to identify. Another one was the restroom that Mansour had told her she could use. The third door she tried opened into an office: cluttered but not quite messy. Riley saw stacks of binders and paperwork piled neatly on desks and filing cabinets, but there was no sign of trash hanging around. Riley glanced back towards the kitchen and then darted into the office, pulling the door to behind her, but not quite closing it.
If I had one of the only three full copies of a blockbuster script, where would I keep it? Riley turned to the desk and opened each of the drawers in turn. In the bottom drawer, nestled amongst invoices and pens, she saw the script, held together by a binder clip. Riley took a deep breath. Her hands trembled, and her heart beat rabbit-fast in her chest at the thought of what she was about to do.
She took a deep breath, remembering Alex’s threats, and took the script out of the drawer. Riley opened her purse and started to slide the thick stack of pages into it, grateful that her bag was big enough to hold it.
Just as she tried to push the last inch of the printed sheets into her purse, Riley paused. If I do this, I’m going to destroy Mansour’s career, or at the very least, seriously harm it. I’d destroy everything he’s been working towards for so long.
Riley pressed her lips together and started to pull the script out of her bag. She couldn’t do it; she couldn’t betray Mansour so deeply—no matter what Alex did to her. Mansour had been too good to her, too kind, and she cared about him too much. Riley sighed and opened the drawer to put the script back in.
As she started to slide the stack of paper back into its place in the drawer, Riley heard the door hinges creak behind her. Starting at the sound, she nearly dropped the script entirely, and turned to look, hoping against hope that it was just a random movement.
“What are you doing?”
Riley’s heart sank at the sound of Mansour’s voice. She turned around and saw him standing in the doorway to the office. For a long moment, her brain felt frozen—no matter how desperately she tried to come up with something to say, nothing came to mind. As the silence stretched out, Riley saw realization dawn on Mansour’s face; saw the sadness anger showing in his eyes.
“So that’s why you agreed to go out with me,” Mansour said quietly. The sound of his voice—the grief, the resignation—made Riley’s heart ache.
“No!” she said quickly. “I—I agreed to go out with you because I liked you and then— There’s this guy…”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Mansour said. He sounded exhausted. “I should have known better.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to know who hired you, or what they’re paying you. I just want you to get out of my house right now.”
Riley’s eyes stung as her tears began to flow; for a moment she considered trying to explain—trying to convince Mansour to listen to her, if just for a few minutes, to hear her out. But she knew that the man she loved was right to feel betrayed.
“Okay,” she said quietly, closing the drawer and shifting her purse on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Mansour. I really am.”
Riley swallowed the lump in her throat, closing her eyes to push down the tears she could feel rising up. She walked past Mansour, slipping her shoes on at the front door, and left the apartment without looking back. She maintained her composure as she took the elevator down to the lobby, and as she walked past the front desk. She closed her eyes again when she reached her car and took a deep breath; there was only one thing left to do.
She climbed into the driver’s seat and closed the door behind her, reaching into her purse to find her phone. Riley pulled up Alex’s number and tapped the ‘call’ icon.
“That was fast,” Alex said, sounding approving. “When do you want to meet with me to give me the script?”
“I don’t have it,” Riley said.
“What?” Alex sounded incredulous.
“I don’t have it,” Riley repeated. “Mansour caught me. Just like I said.”
Riley pressed her lips together to keep from admitting that she’d been in the process of returning the script to the drawer when Mansour had walked in on her—Alex didn’t deserve to know that.
“You idiot!” Alex’s voice was tight with barely contained fury. “You idiot. I gave you one simple task and you screwed it up. I can’t believe this! Did he fire you?”
“Not—not in so many words,” Riley said, sighing. “He just told me to leave.”
“Shit. Dammit, Riley—what the hell is wrong with you?”
“If you wanted a thief you should have hired one!” Riley felt her throat tightening, her eyes burning with tears she was struggling not to shed. “I told you I wasn’t going to be able to do the job you wanted, and you didn’t believe me. Well guess what, Alex? I was right.”
She ended the call and threw the phone into the passenger seat, turning the key in her ignition and pulling out of the parking spot as quickly as she could.
SEVENTEEN
Mansour
Mansour stared at his computer screen, trying to focus on the report he’d opened up several minutes before. He reached blindly for his coffee, sitting back in his chair with a frown. It had been three days since he’d discovered Riley in the very same office, his copy of the Galaxy Wars script in her hands.
He sighed deeply, taking a sip of his coffee and scrubbing at his face with his free hand. In spite of the evidence in front of his own eyes, he still couldn’t quite believe that Riley could be so cold-blooded; she had seemed so genuinely sweet, so natural and caring. Mansour shook his head; whatever pain he felt at Riley’s betrayal, he couldn’t let it overwhelm the goals and ambition he had for his career. There were more important things in life than thwarted love.
He set his coffee cup down and turned his attention back onto the screen, intent on actually focusing on the report; he needed to make a decision—and it had to be done quickly.
The swoosh-beep sound of a new email hitting his inbox broke through Mansour’s fragile concentration and he switched over to his email account, more interested in a new distraction than in the report in front of him. Mansour frowned as he read the subject line. Riley Townsend: What You Need to Know. The address it came from was unhelpful in identifying the sender—just a string of numbers and letters from a Hotmail account. Mansour’s curiosity was piqued, but he knew better than to blindly open an email—particularly one with a large attachment.
Mansour opened up his antivirus system—developed by one of his classmates at Yale for private use, and better than anything available on the commercial market. He scanned the email and waited; the program declared it free of viruses or worms, and Mansour clicked open to find a brief message: Please find attached information that is vitally important to the success of your current project. The attachment was an audio file, and since the antivirus had declared it clean, Mansour opened it.
It began with a distorted voice, and a few seconds later, Mansour heard Riley’s voice—clear as a bell. He inhaled sharply. As the recording progressed, it became obvious tha
“Hmm.” Mansour considered. He had told Riley that he didn’t want to know who had hired her; but there was something about the recording that set off alarm bells in his mind—not the least of which was the fact that it had been sent to him in the first place, when he already knew that Riley had betrayed him.
Mansour called up another program his friend had developed. It was an advanced sound processing system, and Mansour thought that it would do the job nicely. He opened the audio file in the program and worked on it for a few moments, breaking up the distortion, playing it back until the disguised voice came through as clearly as Riley’s had before.
Mansour smiled to himself as he recognized the first person speaking. “This is what happens when you outsource your tech to the lowest bidder, Alex,” Mansour said quietly.
He shook his head, sitting back in his chair and considering the import of what he had discovered. Mansour remembered Alex well; he’d met him for a business dinner months before production had started on Galaxy Wars. They’d gone to Le Roi and discussed business over steak and cocktails. Mansour seemed to remember that Alex was doing his slimy best to suck up to him, in the hope of landing himself a job at Wonder Studios. While Mansour had forgotten many of the details of what had proved to be a fruitless evening out, his experience of dining with Alex had stuck irrevocably in his mind.
Mansour had decided within fifteen minutes of the dinner that he wanted nothing to do with Alex; an impression that was doubly confirmed when Alex made a few casual, crass comments about some of the waitresses in the restaurant. Calling the details of the evening up in his mind, Mansour remembered what Alex had said about one of the waitresses in particular: “I dated that one a while back; I don’t miss her but I definitely miss the sex. Does yoga every day, if you know what I mean.”
Mansour shook his head again. He pressed his lips together and pulled up the email again, wanting to double check his instinct about the voice on the recording. Within a few moments, he managed to trace the IP address; it had been sent from the offices of Empire State Productions.
“Ahh.” Mansour nodded to himself. Everything was falling into place; suddenly a picture formed in his mind of what had happened, and why Riley did what she did.
EIGHTEEN
Riley
Riley heard the sound of a knock at her door and frowned. She’d been drowning her sorrows with ice cream and chocolate since the day after Mansour had told her to leave; she had counted herself lucky that Monday’s shooting had been canceled, keeping her for just one day longer from the humiliation that she knew would come when Mansour denounced her and had her fired on the spot. She hadn’t told anyone other than Alex about what had happened, and she doubted very much that he would take the time to come and see her.
Another knock at the door and curiosity won out over Riley’s depression. She stood quickly and strode towards the door. Probably the landlord—just what I need right now, she thought bleakly. Riley took a quick breath and told herself to be patient with whoever it was; it wasn’t their fault that she was in a terrible mood.
Riley opened the door and for a moment thought that she had to be hallucinating; the figure standing on her doorstep was not Alex, nor the landlord, or even one of her friends. It was Mansour. Riley opened her mouth, realized that she couldn’t think of anything to say, and closed it once more.
“Riley?” Mansour didn’t look angry; he didn’t even look upset. His brow was furrowed in concern.
“Wh-what are you doing here?” Riley gave herself a shake, trying to believe the evidence before her eyes.
“Can I come in?” Mansour said.
Riley hesitated, dread sinking into her stomach. “Okay,” she said, stepping back from the door.
Mansour stepped into her apartment and Riley closed the door behind him.
“I got an email this afternoon, from an anonymous account; attached to it was an audio file,” Mansour told her.
Riley closed her eyes; she knew without him having to tell her what that audio file had been.
“I can explain, just hear me out, please…” she started, opening her eyes again as tears began to form in them.
“You don’t have to,” Mansour told her, smiling slightly. “I already figured out the other voice on the recording was Alex’s.”
“You did?” Riley stared and Mansour in shock.
“I did,” Mansour said, nodding quickly. “I don’t know all the details yet, but I have to assume that if the person you made the agreement with sent me an email with a recording of you making the agreement…” Mansour shrugged. “That sounds like a plot against you.” He held her gaze for a long moment. “I understand that your hands were tied. I forgive you, Riley.”