Rita blinked, for a moment stunned by imagining it. Jag was right.
Princess.
She could probably charge even more.
But at the expense of the world knowing who she was.
It was part of the deal—he had mentioned it multiple times, in fact; she had just somehow not put two and two together.
“We can’t be more...discreetabout that?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
Seriousness coming to his stare, Jag gave the lightest of head shakes. “Absolutely not, Rita. Not for what I’m about to do, and certainly not for what you want to do. You just said you wanted to change the world. That’s not the kind of thing you do discreetly. This is your chance to jostle your place to the center of the world stage and sing as loud and strong as you can. People must know and love you if you have any hope of getting them to do what you say.”
“You don’t think it’s a little overrated? People? I mean, look at all I’ve accomplished so far with just the help of a few people along the way,” she said, gesturing around the cabin.
“You said you wanted to change the way the world drove, Rita. You don’t achieve that by taking the driver seat in every car.”
Again, he was right, though she only ceded the point with a nod.
She didn’t think she liked it when he was right, the idea triggering a memory of her mother saying the same thing about her father.
She had thought of her parents more in her short time with her new husband than she had in years.
But it made sense that they would be on her mind on the day she got married. Her getting married had been what set everything off, after all.
Just like everything Jag was saying to her made sense. She had been willing to sign up for a facade of a marriage for the sake of this goal. She would not let it be for nothing simply because she didn’t want to stand in the spotlight and speak.
And why, in all that was good and beautiful, did her mind keep coming back around to sex?
She knew it had to be because they had expressly established that they would not be having sex, but even in defiance it was out of character.
She never thought about sex. Her mother had drilled it into her that sex was a part of marriage and when marriage had been taken off the table for her, so too had sex.
And while others might have taken being shunned as freedom and permission to abandon the edicts and values that had been imposed upon them for the first eighteen years of life, Rita had not. Instead, she had clung to them as the only proof that she had ever had a family at all.
The fact that her family had been right—that she’d only ever been interested in cars—made it easier. It was easy to walk what was left of the line when she only noticed steel frames attached to wheels.
Rita wasn’t sure now if it was because she’d already started down the slippery slope of forgoing her morals and ethics by marrying him, or if it was just that she found herself sitting in the sky under the spell of some kind of stunning and wicked djinni, but for some reason, that wasn’t the case with Jag.
She was honestly having a hard timenotnoticing Jag.
They had made the right choice in committing to a marriage without physical intimacy. She was sure of it, even as areas of her mind and body were apparently in the process of waking from their twenty-seven-year slumber.
She did not care about sex, even with Jag—especiallywith Jag.
In fact, she hardly thought about either the opposite or same sex throughout the whole of her existence.
It had been one of the greater divides between herself and her peers all the way through school.
While early childhood friendships had flourished in the playground context of racing and chasing, as she had aged alongside other girls, her attention had remained fixed upon the interests that had driven her childhood explorations, while her peers became more and more interested in, well, each other.
Like all of her idiosyncrasies, Rita had assumed the difference was just part of how she was uniquely engineered. Her disinterest, in addition to the headscarf she had worn during that era of her life, had not exactly prevented her from making close friends, but certainly didn’t help her find common ground with anyone her age. Being the onlyhijabiat her school often meant that curiosity got in the way of friendliness, and none of her classmates liked cars the way she did.
But it hadn’t mattered to her.
Her parents’ opinions had been the only ones that mattered to her back then.
And after that, she had been matched and in school and occasionally meeting her intended for chaperoned outings, and then after that, all she’d had left were cars.