Page 49 of Royally Promoted

They’d done what they’d done, but they’d both set their parameters, and he wasn’t going to let a little physical weakness lead him astray.

‘Thanks a lot, Malik!’

Lucy began to spin away but he reached out and circled his hand around her wrist, stilling her.

‘You don’t understand what I mean by that,’ he said in a roughened undertone.

‘I know exactly what you mean! You mean that, alongside all these sophisticated beauties with pedigrees as long as your arm, I look like a fool!’

‘The opposite, for God’s sake!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know exactly what I mean, Lucy.’

‘No. I don’t!’

‘I mean you stand there and everyone else is in the shade! No one can miss you because you look sexy as hell!’

He whipped his hand away and stood back but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

He’d meant every word, but none of those words should have been spoken because none of them was appropriate, given the circumstances.

‘My mother is in the sitting area,’ he said unevenly. ‘Let me...let me take you there—introduce you to some of her friends...’

‘I’m fine,’ Lucy shot back, tilting her chin and taking two steps away from him. ‘You go and do what you have to do!’

Lucy knew how to mingle. Coming from a big family, where every event seemed to involve half the neighbourhood and so many extended family members that elbow room had to be fought for, mingling came naturally to her. Plus, she wanted to make sure that Malik didn’t see her skulking somewhere, nursing her hurt and her wounded heart.

No, not her wounded heart. Her utterly destroyed and broken heart. She comforted herself with what he’d said about her looking sexy, but then told herself that that meant nothing.

Out of the corner of her eye, she always seemed to have him in her line of vision, noticing the way people flocked to him, male and female.

This was his home, she thought miserably. This was where he belonged. London had just borrowed him for a moment in time and soon the beautiful woman who had done his bow tie, who seemed to be next to him whenever Lucy looked in his direction, would anchor him back in his heartland.

Her smile was glassy as she mingled with everyone. The food was exquisite, and she filled her plate and sat with a lovely group of people at one of the many circular tables, but she barely tasted a thing. She knew that she was operating on automatic. She heard herself laughing and asking interested questions. Champagne flowed in her direction until she was woozy...and more miserable.

And ever more aware of the young, smiling brunette with the fabulous slender body who had attached herself to Malik. Who knew what he thought about that situation? Was the brunette to be the one...while Lucy returned to his palace with her airline ticket waiting for her, all booked for two days’ time?

At the stroke of midnight, with reckless abandon, Lucy weaved her way to thank his parents for having her and, that duty under her belt, she headed towards Malik.

Of course, she should thank him for asking her along. He’d offered to be the solicitous host and it wasn’t his fault that she’d turned her back on that act of charity.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But thank him politely she would! She knew exactly when he spotted her because at that very moment the group around him, including the brunette, seemed to perform a convenient vanishing act.

One simple ‘thanks, and hope to see you before I leave the country’ and she’d be gone—out of his life for ever, with just one backward glance at a life left behind when she went to clear her stuff from the offices in London.

‘Lucy.’

His deep, dark, familiar, outrageously sexy voice brought the glaze of tears to her eyes.

‘You don’t have to...’ she heard herself say and, when he looked at her enquiringly, she added for good measure, ‘Marry someone you don’t want to marry. You don’t have to do that.’

And there it was—out in the open. All the love and longing she felt for him.

She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and, honest to the last, she breathed with heartfelt sincerity. ‘I love you, Malik.’

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