Page 3 of Sheikh's Accidental Pregnancy

“You’ll learn soon enough. Trust me, you do not want to get on his bad side.”

Sara suspected that if Adiva was this flustered, everyone got on his bad side eventually. Surely she was a long-time, trusted employee. She shrugged to herself. Why fight it? From what Amir had said, and now Adiva, she expected Tariq to dislike her on sight.

“Amir said to ask you to show me my office.”

A moment later, she stood in the center of a room and looked around. It wasn’t as big as Amir’s, of course, but it seemed about the same size as her apartment living room. She had a desk, three chairs, a computer, small sofa, and a credenza. The windows opposite the door looked out over the city. They were ten stories up, on the top floor of the Botros building.

She sat behind the desk and took a deep breath.Oh God. I so do not belong here!How had she, a new university graduate, ended up in the executive suite of Botros Oil? It didn’t make any sense at all. She just prayed she wouldn’t flame out too fast.

For some reason, the desk had been placed not in front of the windows, but perpendicular to them, along the side of the office, so she wasn’t facing the door, but the sofa. The door was to her right, the windows to her left. Her gaze fastened on the gleaming domes and minarets of the skyline and stuck there.

This would not do. She’d spend all day staring out the window if she left the desk where it was. Could she move it? Well, it was worth a try. She kicked off her shoes and stood.

* * *

Tariq strode down the hall toward Amir’s office. He’d been away for a month, and though he and Amir had video conferenced at least three times a week and emailed multiple times a day, he felt out of touch and out of control of Botros Oil.

He didn’t trust his brother to keep things running in the same clockwork way he did. He’d come home early, with little warning, precisely because it wouldn’t give Amir time to tidy up his mess like a teenager left at home without his parents for a weekend. Take, for instance, the woman trying to push a desk across an office and making no headway whatsoever.

Tariq screeched to a halt and did an actual double take. Who the hell was this blonde? She was barefoot, and her skirt rode up well above her knees as she strained to push a solid-wood desk across the office. He looked for a nameplate, but the usual place on the wall beside the door was empty. This was where Amir’s assistant should—

Impossible. Impossible that he’d actually hired someone, and impossible that he’d hired someone so very uncouth. No, he corrected himself. It was actually extremely likely that Amir would hire a curvy blonde to be his assistant. Tariq just wanted it to be impossible.

“Excuse me,” he said in his best chairman-of-the-board voice. “Who are you?”

She spun and almost fell but managed to catch herself on the desk in question. “Oh, hello. I’m Sara Matthews, Amir’s new assistant.” She blinked, managing to look both innocent and seductive at the same time. She held out her hand to shake, but he didn’t enter the room.

“I thought as much. I knew better than to hope my brother would hire someone appropriate for our business.”

Her pink cheeks drained of color, and she dropped her hand.

“What exactly are you trying to do?”

“I wanted the desk to face the door.” She straightened. “So no one could surprise me by creeping up quietly.”

He felt her subtle dig and had to fight to keep his mouth in a firm line. A flare of something he didn’t want to think about too much surged inside him. It was anger or irritation, he tried to argue.Notattraction. Underlings and women were not supposed to talk to him that way, and they all knew it. Almost all.

“Call maintenance. Executive assistants do not do manual labor, and they do not take off their shoes in the office. And fix your skirt. I’ll be having a word with Amir.”

3

Tariq stalked down the hall and out of Sara’s sight. She sagged back against the desk and took her first deep breath in what felt like an hour but could only have been a couple minutes. She hadn’t even made it through the morning before pissing someone off. And not justsomeone.

Sheikh Tariq Botros, company chairman and near royalty.Shit.

What the hell had gotten into her, talking back like that?

All she could guess was that she’d been struck brainless by the man’s ridiculous good looks. If she’d thought he looked like a desert hero just from his headshot, the man himself, tall and broad-shouldered, perfectly chiseled face, and flashing eyes, gave off more of a demigod vibe in person.

And he’d been looking at her for all the wrong reasons.

She straightened her skirt and stepped back into her heels. Yes, seeing if there was a maintenance guy around who could help move the desk would probably have been the way to go in the first place. She shook her head and shut her office door, something she should have done when she decided to rearrange the room. Because attempting to push the desk herself had not only failed to move it a single inch, it might have also gotten her fired.

Sara sat at her desk looking through her email and Amir’s calendar, trying to get a handle on her job, just in case she wasn’t actually fired on her first day. She checked her notes from her meeting with Amir, and slowly things started to come together. She did not want to forget anything if he asked her. Her only hope now was that she could appear competent in every way possible.

Someone knocked on her door. “Come in,” she called without looking up from the document discussing next-stage oil exploration.

“You met my brother,” she heard Amir’s voice. He leaned in the doorway, a little smirk on his face, as if he thought coming to fire her was funny. Sara sighed.

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