Page 47 of Royally Promoted

Was he relaxing? He sipped his champagne. From where he was standing, back to one of the walls, he had a wide-angled view. The ballroom led off to various other rooms, all buzzing. There were ample, plush seating areas. There were two billiard tables in another room, with a groaning bar behind which several uniformed waiters were ready and eager to pour drinks, and there were ornately dressed tables laden with the finest food money could buy, served by an army of waiters.

He’d been introduced to several women. To a fault, they had demurely pretended that theirs was a polite, perfunctory introduction rather than a targeted meet-and-greet that could lead to matrimony with the kingdom’s most eligible bachelor. They were all dressed traditionally and ornately in silks of quiet, restrained colours, abundant amounts of jewellery, lavish but cleverly applied make-up and were groomed beautifully to within an inch of their lives.

They were beautiful, subservient women who would all make a fantastic wife for a man like him: powerful, wealthy, leading a high-octane, high-stress life laden with responsibilities. A man who would require a subservient wife, a wife whose soothing personality would ease away the tensions of the day.

Additionally, of course, a wife who would know the ropes because it would be what she had grown up with. Someone who would realise that his workload would always come first, be they in London or Sarastan, because much of it involved the livelihoods of many other people, employees in the hundreds who worked in the factories and businesses owned and run by the Al-Rashid family. She would not expect declarations of love or the heady excitement of romantic gestures.

Whoever he chose would be like his parents: practicality before impulse, head before heart. In short, the ideal woman would know that unreasonable demands would not be in the picture.

Malik wondered where the hell Lucy was. He didn’t realise that his eyes were trained on the door until he saw her and then he straightened and sucked in his breath. For a few wild seconds, his thoughts were all over the place, making a mockery of the very reason he was at this event: to find a suitable wife with characteristics and traits he had already painstakingly bullet-pointed in his head only moments before.

She looked extravagantly pretty. Next to the highly polished perfection of the women he had met, she looked so natural that it took his breath away.

Her hair was a tumble of blonde curls, some of it tied back but still falling around her heart-shaped face. Her face was smooth, with just a bit of colour on her cheeks and her perfect, full mouth. The colour on her cheeks might have been accentuated by her clear discomfort as she stood still, looking around her hesitantly and clutching a small blue-and-gold bag with a chain strap.

Malik couldn’t quite get himself to move as he continued to look at her. The dress was magnificent. She’d taken herself off shopping, laughing when he’d offered to go with her, telling him that she was actually clever enough to make her way through some shops and whether or not he liked what she tried on wouldn’t determine what she bought. The dress was a gentle swirl of blues and greens and outlined the generous rounded breasts that he had only recently lost himself in. Her curves were lovingly outlined by the sheer fabric.

She looked like a goddess and, as fast as his libido started rising at speed, he told himself that this was not appropriate. Their time was at an end. This was always going to be nothing more than a fling. Her appearance here was the final piece of a jigsaw that should never have been started. But he would never bring himself to regret it.

He pushed himself from the wall and began weaving his way towards her, only stopping halfway when he felt a gentle hand on his arm and looked down to see one of the women he had previously chatted to smiling up at him.

What was her name... Irena?

‘There’s going to be dancing, Malik.’

‘Huh?’ Malik tugged the bow-tie looser and then frowned when she straightened it back into position.

‘Dancing, in the conservatory. The band’s going to be setting up in an hour.’

‘Terrific.’

He smiled to be polite, but he was impatient to rescue Lucy from her awkward dithering at the edge of the crowd.

She usually appeared so confident, even though he had learned from knowing her that the confidence was usually only skin-deep. Right now, it was clear that she couldn’t even muster up the skin-deep veneer of confidence.

It was his duty to rescue her. They might have said goodbye to their brief liaison but he was still her employer, still responsible for her and, it might be said, still caring and thoughtful enough to want to make her feel less ill at ease amongst this glamorous crowd of people.

Boosted by that positive thought, yet not wishing to offend anyone—least of all this very attractive girl who was gazing up at him with expectation—Malik murmured something and nothing at her coy request that he save the first dance for her.

‘Isn’t it the last dance that’s supposed to be saved, according to the song?’

She gave him look, polite, still smiling but puzzled, and he agreed to do just that before hurriedly moving away before Lucy could do something stupid like take flight and disappear.

From across the room—trying hard not to look as though she was looking around her, because she was lost and wanted to turn tail and flee—Lucy’s gaze finally alighted on Malik.

She stilled and could feel the slow burn of colour creeping into her cheeks. This was exactly what she wanted and needed, wasn’t it? Just what she’d told herself was necessary—ripping those damn rose-tinted specs from her eyes. Seeing him in action at this event where his bride would be chosen.

Yet, her heart constricted and she wanted the ground to open up and swallow her. Love was a steady, painful thump inside her and she blinked, only to see that he had broken up talking to someone so that he could dutifully wend his way towards her.

Was the woman one of the many hopefuls? Even a quick glance around her was enough to tell her that the place was teeming with hopefuls, and the hopefuls were all so staggeringly beautiful that he would have to have been a fool not to find someone here that fitted the bill.

What fitting the bill might entail, exactly, she had no idea because it was a topic that had been very firmly on the list of things that were forbidden to talk about.

The woman in question was tall and slender and looked to be in her early twenties, with raven-dark hair artfully swept up into something very clever that was threaded with lovely glittering jewels. Her dress was a simple black-and-gold affair. And her skin was flawless.

Lucy wished she had had the foresight to apply some fake tan for the occasion, then told herself not to be utterly ridiculous.

‘Lucy.’

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