Royally Promoted

Chapter One

‘YOU’REWET.WHY? Why are you soaking wet? You’re also late.’

The door to Malik’s office had been pushed open with its usual vigour and there she was, dripping on his pale-grey carpet, her blonde hair clinging to her in strands as she did her best to wring it out into semi-dried submission. He sat back in the leather chair, steepled his fingers and looked at his secretary with his head tilted to one side.

Lucy Walker, who had been working for him for a little over three years, was a force of nature. She was petite and curvy, with curly, bright blonde hair that had a will of its own, and a dimpled smile that had a disconcerting tendency to throw Malik off-track when he was taking her to task.

Right now was an excellent example.

Malik had long stopped asking himself how it was that she had stayed the course for as long as she had when, in every way, shape and form, she was precisely the sort of PA who normally wouldn’t come close to being shortlisted for the high-powered role she occupied.

But she had shown up for the interview, impressed him with her in-depth knowledge of negotiating the stock market, informed him that there was nothing she couldn’t turn her hand to, smiled that dimpled smile and challenged him to set any task so that she could prove her worth.

Malik had duly given her ten minutes to work out projections for investing several million over several companies. She’d proven her worth in half the time. She was outspoken to a fault and was impressively immune to what, Malik knew, was a forbidding side to him that made most people think twice about saying anything of which he might disapprove. In every single walk of life, he was respected and feared in equal measure. But not by her.

She rid herself of her waterproof, which she dumped on the chair she occupied when in his office. The coat, too, was dripping onto his expensive carpet.

‘Can you believe this weather, Malik? It’s a disgrace. Why don’t those overpaid people ever get the forecast right? No mention of a storm this morning when I switched on the telly—sunshine and showers!’

‘Perhaps you should have paid more attention to the showers part of the weather report. It’s after nine-thirty.’

‘I would have texted, but my phone was low on juice. Still, I’m here now and ready to go! Lots of thoughts about that IT company you’re looking to get hold of, by the way.’

‘You need to go and get into some dry clothes.’

Lucy grimaced. ‘That would involve a trip to the shops. I took the spare stuff I keep here back with me a couple of weeks ago and I completely forgot to replace them. I was bored of blues and greys. I thought that, with Christmas just round the corner, more festive colours might be in order.’

‘We’re in September.’ Malik sighed heavily and sat back in the chair to look at her in brooding silence, before buzzing through to one of his other employees, who scuttled in at speed to stare with badly disguised laughter at his dripping secretary.

‘Sir?’

‘You need to go and get some dry clothes for Lucy,’ he said, looking at Julia, who was secretary to one of the guys who worked for him. ‘I don’t care where. Put it on Robert’s company card and be quick.’

‘Malik...’

Malik looked at Lucy with an impatient frown. ‘I need you here right now. I can’t spare you for an hour hunting down a replacement outfit.’

‘Duly noted.’

‘Get one of the towels from the cloakroom and wrap it around you. I can’t afford to have you off work with flu.’

‘Trust me, flu is the last thing I want to have.’

Julia had hurried out, breathlessly promising to be back in under half an hour, which made Malik wonder how it was that his own secretary could be as stubborn as a mule when a snap of his fingers had every other person on the face of the earth jumping to attention.

‘Off you go, Lucy. I have things to discuss with you of some importance, and time’s moving along.’

Lucy ignored him to sit on the chair, causally pushing the wet waterproof off it and onto the ground.

‘First, you deserve an explanation or else you’re going to be in a grumpy mood with me all day.’ She dimpled. ‘I thought I’d walk in this morning. It was so lovely and sunny, not a hint of those showers Carol on the telly mentioned at seven when I left home—and, actually, I need the exercise, if I’m honest with myself. I don’t get nearly enough fresh air these days and—’

‘Cut to the chase, Lucy.’

‘So I headed off. Normally, it would have taken forty-five minutes, but then it clouded over, and forget about showers; this was a deluge. To top it all, the Tube drivers are on strike, which meant no Tube, and the buses were all packed out. Wasted nearly half an hour waiting at the bus stop. In the end, I had no option but to try and be as quick as I could on foot, but with the aforementioned deluge... You want to see the streets out there, Malik. They’ve turned into canals. We could be in Venice.’

‘Did it occur to you at all to buy an umbrella?’ He sincerely did not want to be amused.

‘Not really, no. I kept thinking it would blow over. Anyway, it was all a bit chaotic.’

‘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.

She had been working for him for three years and she could say, in all honesty, that she had never met anyone as focused, as single-minded, as crazily sharp or as utterly self-assured as the guy sitting opposite her. He could be ruthless, forbidding and cold but, for Lucy, those traits were eclipsed by other, more compelling ones.

She knew that he scared a lot of people but, oddly, he didn’t intimidate her and he never had—even when she had walked into his office all those years ago, having made it through the gruelling preliminary interviews, to face the final hurdle for the job she had hoped to secure.

He had thrown her a challenge, something to do with the stock market, and she had met the challenge in half the allotted time, tempted to ask him if he had anything harder up his sleeve. Just as she was leaving, he’d asked her why she thought she deserved the job when there were more qualified candidates desperate for it. She hadn’t batted an eyelid. She’d smiled and told him that that was a question that wouldn’t even cross his mind in a year’s time because she would have long since proved herself.

Lucy knew that, whether he would ever agree with her or not, her ability to answer him back and speak her mind went a long way to earning his respect...whether she had a university degree or not.

Speaking her mind was something that came naturally to her. Sandwiched between four sisters, speaking her mind was the only tool she’d had ever been able to use to get heard.

As the only non-graduate in her entire family, and that included her parents, she’d had to find her voice from very early on to make sure she wasn’t squashed by her much more academic sisters with their strident opinions, all of whom wanted to be one step ahead of the others.

A sprawling family of girls had come with other disadvantages, along with the amazing up sides, but being invisible had never been one of those disadvantages.

‘You’re looking at me as though you want to tell me something but can’t figure out how,’ she said now, direct as always, even though just voicing those thoughts made her feel a little uneasy. ‘You’re not about to sack me, are you?’

‘I’m not about to sack you.’

‘Thank goodness. I couldn’t face jumping back into the job market. It’s a shark pit out there.’

‘I had a call very early this morning, Lucy. My mother telephoned to tell me that my father has been rushed to hospital—his heart. He’s had a triple bypass, and they’re waiting overnight to see whether the operation has been successful.’

‘Oh. My. Goodness...’ She half-stood, hesitated, then sat back down. She knew that she was emotional, but her boss was not, and a hug was the last thing he would welcome.

Thinking about it, hugging him was also something that made a curious tingle feather up and down her spine.

‘I’m so sorry, Malik,’ she said with genuine sympathy. ‘You must be devastated. How is your mother taking it?’

‘As well as can be expected.’

‘You’ll want to think about going over, I suppose. Do you want me to arrange a flight for you?’ Her voice was uncharacteristically subdued.

‘Yes. I’ll have to return, and possibly for a matter of several weeks. I’ll have to see how the land lies, and naturally I’ll be returning to London, but in the interim arrangements will have to be put in place while my father recuperates—and that is if there’s no worst-case scenario.’

‘Worst-case scenario?’

‘If he doesn’t pull through,’ Malik said bluntly and was unsurprised when she paled.

She was as transparent as a pane of glass and generous when it came to expressing her feelings. After months spent dissuading her from that weakness, because emotionalism frankly got on his nerves, he had now given up. Maybe he’d just got used to it, but it didn’t get on his nerves in her case.

‘Oh, don’t even think of going there, Malik. The most important thing you can do now is remain positive. It’s called the laws of attraction. At least, I think that’s what it’s called. It’s all about positivity making good outcomes. What can I do? I’m so, so sorry.’

‘These things happen, Lucy,’ he said flatly. ‘And, for the record, I’ll dispense with the mumbo-jumbo nonsense. I’m a realist and I know that preparations will have to be made for all eventualities. However, we won’t dwell on that. Let’s return to the fact that I’m going to be out of the country for quite some time.’

‘Yes, let’s.’ Lucy was trying to work out how the place would run without him there but, then again, he was a master at delegation and had the sort of well-oiled, high-level team that could march onwards without supervision, such was their level of excellence and the depth of their loyalty to their paymaster.

Which begged the question...where did she fit in to all of this?

Which instantly brought her back to that moment of hesitation she had seen shadow his face earlier. He might not be sacking her, but was he going to give her a little reduced-pay time off? Lucy sincerely hoped not. Despite being surrounded by high powered sisters, she was on a par with them earnings-wise, and had been furiously putting money aside to get her own place.

She knew she was proving a point because she had no degree. Proving that she could be a success at what she did, because everyone had had their say when she’d ditched university without warning. One minute her bags had been packed for Durham, and the next minute they’d been unpacked and she’d turned her back on what her entire family had expected of her. Goodbye maths and economics course, hello technical college in Exeter, as far from the family home in leafy Surrey as she’d been able to get.

No one could fathom the reason why, and she hadn’t confided, because she had never been more alone than at that very point in time in her lovely, noisy family.

How could she have told any of them about the fool she had been? How could she have admitted that she had fallen head over heels for a smooth-talking charmer who had turned her head, strung her along and then ditched her the minute she’d told him that they’d made a very costly mistake?

How could she ever have borne the mortification of telling any of the family that she had accidentally fallen pregnant? Two of her sisters were married with kids. Their pregnancies had been meticulously planned. Noisy debates had abounded over the years about girls who had unplanned pregnancies.

How on earth did that happen?

How hard was it to get hold of the pill?

A week after she’d been ditched, she had miscarried. She’d barely been pregnant and yet the pain had been immense. She’d turned her back on all the expectations lying on her shoulders and she’d started walking down a different road. She hadn’t regretted it. It had led her to the most interesting job imaginable, working for the most interesting man imaginable, with a stupendous pay cheque and none of the constant stress her sisters seemed to face in their chosen fields of medicine and law.

A pay cheque she had grown accustomed to. At the moment she rented, which was very expensive to do in London, even where she lived in her small box on the third floor of a mansion block, the saving grace being the fact that it was in an okay part of North London.

So, with Malik departing for faraway shores for an indeterminate length of time... Well, from where she was sitting, the future was beginning to look far from rosy. All the managers there had their own dedicated secretaries. The intense nature of their jobs demanded it. Was she about to be tacked on to someone else’s desk, fetching cups of coffee while Malik disappeared on a one-way ticket to Sarastan?

She was highly imaginative and now, as she stared at him, for once in complete silence, her imagination was hurtling in free fall. She was further dismayed by that hesitation on his face again and, instead of doing what she would normally have done, instead of flatly asking him what was going on, she found herself biting her lip. Sometimes to ask a question risked getting an answer you didn’t particularly want to hear.

‘It’s inevitable, I’m afraid, and not at all welcome.’

‘I can imagine, although I’m sure your parents will really enjoy having you back with them. I’m confident your dad will be released from hospital and be fighting fit in no time at all.’ She wondered what it would be like, not waking in the morning to the thought of going in to work, where Malik would be waiting with a list as long as his arm of things for her to do. Her heart skipped a beat at a sudden sense of loss.

Malik raised his eyebrows. ‘Positivity, yes. I got it the first time. No need to revisit the theme. You’ll no doubt be wondering where you fit into this picture.’

Lucy reddened. ‘It’s a tough time for you,’ she said gruffly, ‘And where I fit in isn’t important. The most important thing is for you to be out there for your family. They need you.’

‘A generous sentiment. Here’s where you fit in—I will have a great deal of work to do out there. Naturally, I’ll make sure that everything is in place here to cover my absence, and remote work is largely trouble-free, but I will still have to devote considerable time to making sure everything over here ticks along without any hitches. Not just this office, but as you know there are a lot of ongoing deals at the moment, and taking my eye off the ball isn’t going to do.’

‘I suppose not, although...’

‘Although...?’

‘I could do my best to keep things ticking over if you assign someone to temporarily take your place. You know how good I am at self-motivating and I know most of those deals going through like the back of my hand. Ask me any question about any of them and I’ll be able to give you an answer. I’m obviously not saying that as a long-term solution it would work—that would be crazy. But in the short term, I could do my best.’

‘I hate to break this to you, Lucy, but, good as you are, I am irreplaceable.’

Lucy’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You have a very high opinion of yourself.’ She dimpled and Malik returned the smile with raised eyebrows and one of his own.

He’d been wired since his mother had called him. Yes, he was concerned for his father’s health, but beyond that the unravelling ramifications of what had happened had initiated a series of conclusions, none of which were particularly pleasant and all of which would have to be dealt with.

But here, with Lucy, he felt himself relax. The woman was a tonic, with her breezy irreverence. That was something he reluctantly had to concede.

‘How well you know me,’ Malik drawled but the half-smile left his lips as quickly as it had appeared and he stood up and strolled towards the window.

Lucy’s eyes followed him.

He was a thing of beauty, she mused. It never failed to impress her. Everything about him was stunning, from the chiselled perfection of his harsh, arrogant features to the grace and symmetry of his long, muscular body.

He was six-four and there was not an ounce of wasted fat to be seen. He was all sinew, muscle and well-honed physical perfection. If all else failed, a career in modelling awaited.

He was intensely private and, despite the fact that Lucy had worked for him for over three years, she had in fact only ever met one of his girlfriends, a judge, and, she had later learnt, the youngest woman ever to have taken silk.

From that one encounter, Lucy had formed a picture in her head of the sort of women he favoured: tall, elegant, career-driven beauties who had powerful jobs and dressed in snappy, sharp designer clothes that were immaculately tailored and never prone to mundane things like creasing or the occasional coffee stain. Women who definitely wouldn’t go with festive colours in September.

He was a guy who liked sophistication, beauty and could easily get both. Why had he never married? She had no idea, but rich guys played the field...didn’t they? And he wasn’t old by any means, so he had years left in him to play in whatever fields took his fancy.

He might be a million light years away from the nightmare she had once dated, but Lucy knew that, however seriously sexy he was, and however often her disobedient eyes were inclined to stray in his direction, she could never consider him anything other than her gorgeous boss, because he was a guy who couldn’t commit.

Heartbreak, and the loneliness and disillusionment that had come with it, had taught her that the one thing in life she wanted in a man was commitment. She didn’t care about anything else because nothing else mattered. The guy who was willing to commit was the guy who was willing to give his heart, and without that what was left was some chump happy to use a woman for as long as it suited him before dumping her by text.

That would never be Malik’s style. She knew him well enough by now to know that. But he still wasn’t into long-term commitment. So she allowed her eyes to stray, and now and again her imagination went for the ride, but that was as far as it would ever get.

Which was all moot anyway, because he would never spare a glance her way. She idly thought of her friend Helen, now happily married to her billionaire boss and just expecting their first baby, and had to reluctantly concede that at times the exception proved the rule.

Her mind drifted. Helen was contained and mysterious. They had been out many times together, and Lucy had always noticed the way guys had surreptitiously glanced at her friend, sizing her up and taking her in. Of course, Helen never seemed to notice, but at first she had still been wrapped up in memories of George and her own disappointment there, and then without even realising it wrapped up in the whole business of falling for her boss.

Unlike her friend, Lucy was the opposite of mysterious. There was no room for mystery when she’d grown up in a family of vocal, assertive people. Mystery, in the environment in which she had grown up, would have been the equivalent of disappearing. Her dad often joked that he had to make an appointment to get a word in edgeways, which made her think of Malik and his dad, and how calmly and coolly he’d relayed the facts about his hospitalisation.

‘Are you paying a scrap of attention to what I am saying, Lucy?’

Lucy blinked and surfaced to find her boss frowning at her. He was backlit by the thin, fading, last-of-the-summer sun filtering through the windows, a dark, looming silhouette that momentarily took her breath away.

‘Sorry, I was a million miles away.’

‘You need to focus. I’m talking about your immediate future and how what’s happened is going to have an impact on you.’

Lucy straightened, suddenly tense. She tucked her unruly blonde hair behind her ears and stared down at the desperately boring clothes her work colleague had decided to choose for her. She liked bright colours. It seemed appropriate that she was now wearing drab-as-dishwater clothes for an occasion like this, one in which she was obviously going to find the comfortable course of her life thrown off-course for reasons that had nothing to do with her.

‘I’m focused,’ she said quietly. ‘You know I’m good at focusing even if it may not always seem that way.’

‘I will have to leave immediately—probably by tomorrow evening. I’ve arranged a board meeting with my ten top guys to fill them in.’

‘And me?’

‘This is where it may be a bit tricky.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and again that off-putting hesitation was back on his face.

‘I wish you’d just say what you have to say,’ Lucy finally said with her customary forthrightness. ‘Since when do you make a habit of holding back? I’m a grown woman. I can take it. You told me I’m not going to get the sack because you have to return to Sarastan, so where does that leave me? Am I about to be demoted to office junior, is that it? Wearing a uniform, sweeping the floors and making sure the place is locked last thing?’

Malik ignored her flight of imagination, which he was used to. ‘The favoured option is for you to accompany me, Lucy. I won’t be able to get hold of anyone who will be able to work as efficiently alongside me as you. You’re familiar with multiple takeovers, and you know the ropes when it comes to dealing with clients.’

‘You want me to come with you?’

Malik tilted his head to one side and strolled back towards his desk.

‘I appreciate,’ he said gravely, ‘that this is going to be massively inconvenient for you, and I’ll naturally ensure that you are compensated accordingly.’

Lucy stared at him in silence as her brain shifted gear and began travelling down an altogether different route.

‘You said you had no idea how long you would be away,’ she reminded him slowly.

‘It’s a tough call. My father, presuming he pulls through this, might recover quickly or it might go slower than expected. I can’t put a timeline on it for obvious reasons, which makes it even more inconvenient for you. I’ve given this thought, and I’ll formally sign a contract that allows you to bail should you find the conditions onerous.’

‘Conditions onerous... The mind boggles.’

‘You have an active life here,’ Malik said bluntly. ‘You’ll lose that immediately should you accept my offer.’ He paused. ‘I’m not entirely sure whether that active life involves a boyfriend,’ he mused, narrowing his eyes and staring at her. ‘Does it? And, if so, would that be a temporary loss you would be willing to endure? Like I said, I don’t know for sure how long my presence will be required in Sarastan. It’s not just being there while my father recovers but in terms of sorting out my family’s business affairs. I’m hoping it’s weeks rather than months, and of course I’ll be going to and from London, I imagine, but I can’t give you a precise timeline. Right now, everything is up in the air.’

‘I... I...’

‘I’d like to give you time to consider my proposition, Lucy. I know this has been thrown at you out of the blue. But, in this instance, time is of the essence. I would propose you make arrangements to join me within the week.’

‘Within the week?’

‘If you rent, all rent would be covered until you return so that you don’t jeopardise where you live. If you own, all mortgage payments will be handled. All bills will be met. Additionally, as compensation, I’ll treble your pay for the duration of your time in my country.’

‘Treble?’

‘You’re parroting me.’

‘Can you blame me? My thoughts are all over the place.’

‘Moving along, you’ll also find your bank account substantially increased to cover incidentals such as appropriate clothing, shopping, beauty treatments...or whatever else it is that you do with your money.’

‘Does it look as though I spend lots of money on beauty treatments?’ Lucy said absently, while her mind continued to somersault. ‘If I did, my hair would know how to do what it was told.’

‘You haven’t answered my question, Lucy. Is there a man in your life? Someone who might prevent you from disrupting your routine here?’

‘Possibly,’ she said airily. ‘However, I should say that, were there such a man, I would never allow him to dictate how I chose to handle my life.’

‘Patient guy, were such a man to be in your life.’

‘In this day and age, Malik, men don’t decide what women do. It’s all about equal partnership.’ She saw that he was smiling, amused, yet something in her shivered at the thought of this big, powerful man being protective of his woman. ‘What if I choose not to go out there?’

‘Naturally, your job would be safe,’ Malik said briskly. ‘But in all honesty there wouldn’t be much for you to do here, as this is an intense group of people with dedicated PAs. Of course, you could while away the hours sweeping floors, as you say, but actually you would be put on temporary leave of absence until such time as I returned to London. Obviously, after a certain period of time full pay may no longer be appropriate, which we can discuss, but you would still be compensated adequately and your job would be held for you, unless I decide to limit my time in London and take up full residence in Sarastan.’

‘What’s the likelihood of that?’ She paled as a void opened up at her feet.

‘Who knows?’ Malik shrugged. ‘I can speculate but there’s no reliable crystal ball to hand.’

There was an ominous note to that suggestion that sent chills down Lucy’s spine. She knew that she got away with a lot when it came to her brilliant, charismatic boss but the truth was, there was an iron fist concealed within the velvet glove, and she was getting the uneasy impression that there were definite limits to how much he would indulge her.

Theirs was a healthy trade-off. He allowed her outspoken irreverence and, in return, she gave him the benefit of her amazing talent, which involved not only the number-crunching she was exceptionally good at but a real gift at communicating with people, so that he could leave many jobs involving important clients for her to handle at her discretion. She worked very hard, not to mention over and beyond without question.

Trade-offs, however, were not set in stone. And what would she be sacrificing if she accompanied him to his country for a few weeks? Lots of stuff with her family...movies, dinners out and pub lunches now and again with her friends...

‘But where would I stay?’ she asked with genuine curiosity. ‘Would there be some sort of routine there? How would it all work? What would I do in my spare time?’

‘A routine will be established when we get there. On the work front, with some disturbances given the situation, things will mirror what happens here. The scenery might change, Lucy, but the job will remain the same.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Trust me, Sarastan is an extremely wealthy country and I am an extremely wealthy man within it. I’d go so far as to say that my family are...of much elevated status. As such, you will find that your life will lack nothing when it comes to creature comforts.’

‘Much elevated status? What does that mean?’

‘Of royal lineage,’ Malik expanded. ‘On a more practical front, you may have to adapt your dress code to accommodate the heat and...’ he paused ‘...you might find that my family...my parents...are painfully reserved. It may take a while for them to become accustomed to your, er, ebullience...’

Lucy got the message loud and clear and she burst out laughing...because fair was fair.

‘I’ll do my best to curb my enthusiasm.’ She grinned.

‘You can be your usual exuberant self when you’re with me,’ Malik conceded wryly. ‘In fact, it would be odd dealing with a quiet you. So, what’s it to be, Lucy?’

‘Okay. I’ll come. Is that all there is I need to know?’

Now that she had made her decision, she was already thinking ahead to what would be a wonderful adventure, a few weeks away from the pleasant predictability of her life. She wouldn’t start extrapolating to anything beyond that. There was no point trying to cross bridges that weren’t even on the horizon yet.

‘I’ll email you with the details of what you’ll need to know, pack, and expect, for that matter.’ He frowned and then, as he was about to return to the business of work, said, ‘Just one more thing I suppose you should know...’

‘What’s that?’

‘The time has come for me to marry. Finding a wife will probably be something else on the agenda whilst I am over there.’