Page 2 of Royally Promoted

‘I don’t pay you handsomely to be chaotic.’

‘Point taken.’ She stood up, grimaced as she looked down at her wet outfit and told him that she’d be a minute, that the towel was a good idea and might warm her up.

‘Can I get you a coffee on my way back?’ she asked brightly.

‘Just get yourself dried off, and you might just as well wait for Julia to get back with whatever she’s got for you.’ He dismissed her with a wave of his hand but continued to look at her as she hustled out of his office, closing the door behind her with a smart click.

This was not how he had anticipated starting the morning. Indeed, the entire day had kicked off to an unpredictable and nightmarish start, with his mother calling him at a little after four in the morning to inform him that his father had been rushed to hospital with a heart attack.

As usual, she had delivered the news coolly, calmly and without emotion. The only hint as to what was going on beneath the surface was the slight tremor in her voice when, after a moment’s hesitation, she had told him that the doctors had been unable to confirm whether he would pull through. It was going to be a long night ahead.

‘I’ll come immediately,’ Malik had said, already thinking ahead to the repercussions of his father’s situation now staring him in the face.

They were not inconsiderable. Malik, at thirty-two, returned to his country of birth on a reasonably infrequent basis. Here in London, he ran the family house, where the vast wealth of his family was invested with military precision by a team of highly trained hedge-fund managers and investment bankers. He oversaw the lot of them, whilst handling his own pet projects: investments into green energy and property that would had made him a billionaire in his own right, regardless of his vast family fortune.

He liked it this way. Returning to Sarastan, where his parents lived in palatial splendour as dictated by their royal status, always came with the down side of their tacit disapproval about his marital status—or lack thereof. In their eyes, time was running out for him to continue the family name.

It was just the way it was.

Here in London, though, he could shove that inconvenient truth to the back of his mind. But now...?

He scowled as he waited for Lucy to return.

His father had been rushed to hospital and Malik knew exactly what that meant. His time for relaxing was over. Yes, he would still be able to live in London, with perhaps more frequent trips back to supervise the running of the various arms of the family businesses, and make sure the oil was still pumping and still being exported as it should be—not to mention all the other concerns that sheltered under the Al-Rashid umbrella. But the time to take a wife had come.

He wondered whether his mother would address the elephant in the room head-on, given the circumstances. She was a cold and regal woman, not inclined to indulge in conversations of a personal nature, always preferring him to get whatever message she wanted to convey via a combination of telling silence and disapproving asides.

His father was hardly any more communicative. Duty and obligation lay at the forefront of their rigidly controlled lives. With his father in hospital and facing an uncertain outcome, the weight of duty and obligation that they shouldered was bearing down fast on Malik, and he knew that he was stsanding at a crossroads, like it or not.

Lost in a sequence of unpleasant thoughts, he looked up to see his secretary framed in the doorway of his office, as dry as could be expected and in a different outfit: a thick grey skirt, a white blouse and a grey V-necked jumper.

Julia, he surmised, had been intentionally mischievous in the purchase and had managed to get hold of precisely the sort of clothes her friend would have made a point of shunning.

‘Sit.’

‘You’re not still annoyed over my late arrival, are you?’

Malik watched as she tugged at the skirt and shoved up the arms of the jumper.

‘Consider it forgotten, just so long as there isn’t a repeat performance. You might want to check if the Tube is running next time you decide to walk to work and, while you’re at it, you could also look at the weather forecast.’

‘I’ll definitely do the former but I won’t bother with the latter. As I told you, no one mentioned a storm, and I could have happily coped with a light shower. You have a point, though. I might invest in an umbrella.’

She sat down, settled her laptop on the desk so that they were facing one another, flipped it open and proceeded to scrutinise him over the lid.

She had truly amazing eyes, cornflower-blue and fringed by the thickest, darkest lashes that contrasted spectacularly with the vanilla-blonde of her hair. She was intensely pretty, an impression that was compounded by the generosity of her curves and the way she dimpled whenever she smiled.

‘You’ll be impressed to hear,’ she was saying now, ‘That not only have I sorted out all those back reports you gave me on Friday, but I’ve also managed to get through to the bio-fuel company you’re looking at reaching out to and persuaded them to forward me their latest balance of accounts. That’s in addition to the tech company you’re thinking of acquiring.’

‘You spent the weekend working?’

‘A couple of hours, that’s all. No need to thank me.’

Malik hesitated.

That was the first inkling Lucy had that the day was not going to go to plan.

Staring at him, at the sharp lines of his incredibly beautiful face, she felt momentarily disconcerted because hesitation really didn’t feature in his database.

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