Page 41 of Royally Promoted

She tapped him reprovingly on the arm. Malik half-smiled at the absent-minded gesture and obeyed.

Things had changed between them and it wasn’t just because they were now lovers. Since he and Lucy had climbed into bed, free to enjoy one another in the most perfect, no-strings-attached situation he could ever have dreamt possible, everyone and everything that had been in the way of him touching her had been hard to bear.

Three days of having to go into the office to oversee complex transference of duties between various CEOs had been a pain. Looking at her as she’d dutifully done her job, head down, ignoring him, had made him fidget with impatience. He had found himself glancing at his watch even more than usual on his visits to his parents, counting the seconds until he could get back to his palace and bury himself in her body. He’d sit there, barely taking in things his mother was saying, surfacing only when it was time to go.

Right now, Lucy was waxing lyrical about camels.

‘Have you ever ridden one?’ she was asking.

Malik could feel her eager blue eyes on him. ‘When you grow up with desert all around, it ends up being inevitable.’ He smiled and glanced at her, wanting to let that glance linger, but the driving conditions were too hostile for that indulgence.

‘Very exciting.’

‘And occasionally smelly.’

She laughed and his smile widened. He enjoyed the sound of her laugh. Out of the blue, he wondered whether this was normal. Was it? Was it normal to miss someone the way he missed her whenever she happened to be somewhere else? Was it normal to think about her—not always think about the great sex they shared but instead to think about the pleasure of hearing her laugh?

Was he missing a trick here? Should alarm bells be sounding? No, surely not? She was as relaxed as he was, and no mention was ever made of when things would end between them. They were both living in the moment and of course there was nothing disturbing about that. He was accustomed to laying down ground rules with the women he dated. It was his comfort zone.

He decided that there was no cause for unease in this situation. Plans for the upcoming ball were moving quickly ahead. Malik knew that it was a subject he would have to raise with Lucy pretty soon but the back burner, for the moment, seemed a pretty good place on which to park those good intentions.

It was much more satisfying listening to her chat about this, that and nothing in particular while eagerly drinking in all the sights he showed her.

Such as right now: twilight, camels and sand dunes; what better? And she had no idea where he was taking her, so she was in for a pleasant surprise, and he couldn’t wait to see her face when they got there.

‘You still haven’t told me where we’re going.’

‘I want to surprise you.’

‘Who says you haven’t done that already?’

‘Have I?’ There was a wicked smile in his voice. ‘How? No...don’t tell me. I can guess. Your body tells me how much I surprise you every time I touch it.’

‘There’s more to life than pleasant surprises between the sheets.’

Malik burst out laughing.

‘You’re right and we’re heading to one of them right now. Look ahead—see those lights in the distance?’

Lucy followed his hand as the four-by-four gently contoured the dunes to approach the lights. They looked like stars twinkling against the black velvet of the night. Actually her mind was only half on the approaching sight which, as they got nearer, she realised was an elaborate set-up: a billowing tent, a small building and people busily tending to food, a table with white starched linen set for two.

An extravagant dining experience for the two of them. She should be fizzing with excitement but, somewhere inside, she felt flat. When she had told him how much he surprised her, she hadn’t been talking about the fantastic things he did to her body, the wonderful way he had of making it come to life under his skilful touch.

No, she had been talking about small stuff. He surprised her in the little confidences he shared without realising, such as when he’d told her about going to see the headmaster at his uber-expensive boarding school because one of his friends had been so desperately homesick Malik had been worried about his mental health. Or when he’d said wistfully that he’d always wanted a dog, but that had been comprehensively banned. Or the way he had of always making sure she was okay, always slowing down to accommodate her so that he never, ever strode ahead. In a thousand ways, he was so much more the man she had only ever glimpsed during office hours.

Her heartbeat quickened. She’d gone into this with her eyes wide open, knowing what she wanted and needed from it, and determined not to let the past determine the present.

But, now, she was in deep. One minute she’d been happily paddling around in the shallow end, the next minute she couldn’t see the bottom of the pool and, when she looked over her shoulder, there was nowhere safe to head to. The sides of the pool had disappeared, and she was floundering in an ocean of disaster. She’d fallen for this guy and just admitting it to herself made her whole body tingle with suffocating panic.

She was barely aware of the car rounding to a stop or the door being held open for her by one of the many staff there who were all dressed in identical white robes and sandals.

Malik joined her, neatly hooking her hand into the crook of his arm. ‘Tonight you’re going to be treated to the finest cuisine my country can offer, prepared and cooked by one of the top chefs in the kingdom.’

‘Dining under the stars,’ Lucy said, dutifully impressed, ‘I hope they won’t mind me taking a thousand pictures to send to my family. This is just the sort of thing they’d love.’

When had that happened and what was she going to do now?

‘Sit. Tonight is your night and I want you to savour every second of it.’

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