The Royal's American Love (9 page)
Read The Royal's American Love Online
Authors: Sophia Lynn
Marianna simply knew that she could not live with herself
if she did not come forward. What she did not know is whether she would survive
the result.
Nikolos opened his eyes, smiling at her sweetly.
“Come back to bed, darling. We have the whole day in front
of us before we need to go back tomorrow morning.”
“I can’t,” she said softly. “Please, can I show you
something?”
She could tell he sensed the seriousness of her plea. He
sat up immediately, letting the sheet fall down to his hips.
“What is it, darling?”
She unlocked her phone and pulled up the files. They were
backed up in another location, so she did’t minding handing them to him.
“Read this, please.”
Nikolos looked baffled, but he accepted her phone silently.
He started to read, his eyes flickering from line to line quickly.
Marianna realized she could not stand to stay and watch
him. Instead, she walked to the living room, taking a seat on the couch and
looking out over the ocean. The sun was coming up, turning the water to fire.
She simply sat and soaked in the beauty, letting it soothe her as much as she
could be soothed.
She had no idea what was going to happen, but she knew now
that it was out of her hands. All she could do was wait.
In less time that she would have thought, Nikolos appeared
in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing only a silk robe wrapped around his body
“Do you know where I can find the Bhandari family?” he
asked. “Any of the people who were driven out?”
“Why?” she asked. “She told me what she told me while under
confidence. She was really risking herself in doing this. I’m not going to give
over her information just because you ask.”
Nikolos looked horrified. “Surely you don’t think I would
harm her? Marianna, I had no idea that this happened, but I know who was behind
it.”
“What do you mean?”
Nikolos took a deep breath, coming to sit beside her on the
couch. He didn’t reach for her, but she could feel the pain that trembled
through his frame.
“A handful of years ago, I was…going through a rebellious
phase, let’s say. I wasn’t interested in attending to my duties at the Aurelian
corporation. I spent a lot of time shirking my responsibilities, and people
spent more time hunting me down to do my job than they spent doing their own
jobs. This was how Bryan Kieferland got his foot in the door.”
“Kieferland? I didn’t see his name.”
“You probably wouldn’t have. He moved fast, and he didn’t
have the authority for most of what he did. He took over properties quickly and
brutally before turning them over for a profit that went directly into his pockets.
“When I was told about Kieferland and his exploits, I took
action immediately, I swear. I got rid of him, I got him deported from the
country, and I started paying reparations to the people who were hurt. Many of
them ended up working for my family in one way shape or form. That is why I
need to talk to Satya. Somehow, it seems as if her family slipped through the
cracks.”
“Why didn’t she know that you were paying reparations?”
“We honestly wanted to keep it quiet. We thought we were
thorough enough when it came to tracking down Kieferland’s victims, but we
obviously were not. Please. Let me talk to Satya.”
In that moment, she saw the truth in his eyes. She threw
herself into his arms, tears filling her eyes.
“You’re real,” she whispered. “You’re real, you’re telling
the truth.”
“Yes, oh god, yes, beloved. I wouldn’t lie about this.”
She started crying hard then, but they were cleansing
tears.
“Oh god. Sweetheart, do not cry, please, I love you. I love
you so much, please don’t cry.”
His words stunned her.
“I… You love me?”
“Very much.”
His gaze was dark, and he held her close, as if he would
never let her go.
“Please,” he said, and she knew what he wanted without even
asking.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you...”
Marianna closed the magazine with satisfaction. Four months
later, her work on Nikolos had finally been published, and it was exactly what
she had wanted it to be. It started with meeting a casual, playful, spoiled
prince, and it ended with the discovery of a man who worked hard to make sure
that justice was done.
Now that the article was done, and his family had approved
it, she was well on her way to researching the dynasty from which her lover
came. The glittering diamond on her finger told of her vested interested in
finding new knowledge about Nikolos’s family, because it was now her family as
well.
At the moment, she and his whole family were at Ojo Azul.
Her research work, so hard to leave behind, was spread out on the table in
front of her. She could look beyond it to the white beach and the blue ocean.
Her future brother- and sisters-in-law were splashing in
the waves. As she watched, Nikolos rose out of the water like a god, shaking
salt water from his dark hair.
As if he could feel her eyes on him, he smiled at her, and
she couldn’t resist.
She stood, stretching out and closing her laptop. She had
learned that she could leave the work behind for a bit. It would keep.
Objectivity was not always the Holy Grail she had made it out to be.
She walked out of the house toward the beach, where she
knew the love of her life was waiting for her.
The End!
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Sheikh’s Assistant
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Sheikh’s Assistant
By: Sophia Lynn
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Rights Reserved. Copyright 2015-2016 Sophia Lynn
CHAPTER ONE
Estelle snapped awake. One moment, she was soundly asleep,
and the next she was as alert as if her alarm had gone off. For one brief and
dizzying moment, she had no idea where she was, but then her memory kicked in
and she smiled. She looked around the cabin at the other sleeping passengers,
and listened to the quiet roar of the engines.
The transatlantic flight from New York to Dubai was almost
fourteen hours long. She was traveling to the other side of the world, and she
barely stopped herself from squirming with happiness.
I can't believe this is really happening for me
.
I
can't believe that I'm really getting off the ground.
Out of instinct, she pulled her phone out of her bag to
check it and made a wry face at all the messages. Just because she was getting
off the ground didn't mean that there weren't some very worried, very concerned
people far below her.
The first message was from her mother, who hoped that she
was doing well on her flight, that she had packed everything that she needed,
and that she was doing the right thing.
I hope you have a good time out there, dear, but
remember that if anything happens or even if you get just a little bit
homesick, it's all right to come home! You know that your dad and I worry, and
that if anything happens at all, we'll be waiting for you with open arms.
Estelle could hear the concern and the love in her
mother's message, but she could also hear the worry and the confusion. Her
parents had spent their lives working hard, and they saw their move to the
suburbs as the end-all, be-all of what life should be. They didn't understand
why Estelle had fled to New York City as soon as she was ready for college, and
they definitely didn't understand why she had jumped on the job offer from
Kalil Enterprises.
Oh, they had smiled when she told them, and of course they
had been impressed when they heard about the standards for what PanVision
needed, but at the end, they didn't quite get it.
Roxy, on the other hand, got it perfectly. Estelle had two
older brothers who she loved dearly, but it was her little sister Roxy to whom
she felt the closest. They were a year apart in age, but most people thought
they were twins. Both sisters were short and voluptuous and had faintly elfin,
mischievous features that could make them look years younger than they really
were. They both had black hair that was given to frizz and curls, and green
eyes. Both had dark freckles across their nose, something they shared with
their mother.
It hadn't always been easy growing up biracial in the
suburbs, with a white father and a black mother, but they had always looked out
for each other.
Roxy had sent her the next message, and Estelle smiled when
she read it. Estelle was rather demure in her speech, but Roxy could be as
foul-mouthed as a sailor. The message that she had sent to Estelle was littered
with four letter words, but it was completely unequivocal in its support and
love.
Go get 'em, big sis, and if anyone gives you any crap,
just call me. I'll be on the first plane over.
Estelle sighed. Even her little sister was worried that she
wouldn't be able to handle herself overseas.
If she were honest with herself, she could see why they
were concerned. The move from the suburbs to New York City had been a big one,
and then she had been in the whirl of college. Despite the fact that she must
follow fifty travel bloggers online, she had never left the country before. Now
she was heading to Dubai.
It's not like I'm going to work for strangers
.
For the last two years, she had been working with Miller
& McKinley, a law firm in New York that handled the US affairs of many
Middle Eastern clients. She had been hired right out of college, and she was
excited to put her language credits in Arabic to good use.
Over the past eight months, she had been working nearly
exclusively with Kalil Enterprises, one of the biggest tech innovators in
Dubai. She had started with simply managing communications between Miller &
McKinley and the Kalil representatives, and a few months after that, she had
taken them on completely.
When Roxy had been impressed by her job, she had glowed
with her sister's praise, but she had remained practical.
“Frankly, I'm like a glorified secretary. There's just a
lot that can fall between the cracks when you're dealing with transatlantic
funds and mergers, and I just make sure that all of the pieces get popped back
into place.”
“Even if someone misplaces an entire email chain?” asked
Roxy, teasing.
“
Especially
if an entire email chain goes missing,”
she said with a grin.
The incident still gave her nightmares sometimes. Right
before a deal closed, she had found a particularly important email that had
somehow failed to be sent on to the Kalil executive coordinating the project.
It was all wrapped up, all ready to sign and seal, but Estelle had managed to
stop the whole thing in its tracks by simply sending the email off to Amir
Kalil and marking it as urgent.
It was just business as usual, but the first she had heard
about it was Henry Miller stomping into her office and demanding to know what
the hell she had done. He was so loud and aggressive that she wondered if she
should leave the room, but then what he was saying snapped into place.
Somehow, simply through sending that email along, she had
saved an entire branch of Kalil's electronics manufacturing. When Miller told
her that, she had felt a little light-headed. She knew that the Kalil account
was worth literally billions, but she didn't realize that it had anything to do
with her.
“I just can't believe that I did something so important,”
she said.
Miller grinned at her. “Well, get ready to keep on doing
what it is you do. Amir Kalil wants to make sure that you're working on their
accounts exclusively from now on.”
The position had come with a nice raise, an office of her
own rather than a desk in the middle of a large open room, and regular contact with
one Amir Kalil.
In addition to awarding her the account, he had sent her a
length of woven cloth of unbelievable softness and delicacy, composed of shades
of green, her favorite color. It kept her toasty warm during the harsh New York
winter.
From the formal tone of his messages and the sweet gift,
she imagined that Amir was an older gentleman, perhaps her father's age.
Certainly some of his messages had a certain protectiveness to them when he
told her to be careful walking home or when he asked after her health.
She quite liked Amir, and she strongly suspected that he
was the one who had pushed for her to be brought to Kalil Enterprises.
Just four weeks ago, Estelle had gotten the offer that
would change her life. It was a salary, room and board, and travel expenses to
go work with Kalil Enterprises. The only issue was that she would be working in
Dubai. She had a momentary pang of panic at the idea of leaving literally
everything she knew behind, but in less than an hour, she had called to let
Miller and McKinley know she had accepted.
“We wouldn't usually let you go so happily, but Mr. Kalil
was very persuasive,” said Miller, looking her over closely. “He's very happy
with the work that you've done for them, and I think they've been waiting for a
while for the chance to bring you on board.”
There was something a little suspicious about the way
Miller spoke, but she brushed it aside. She had always known that her time at
Miller and McKinley was limited, and she was right.
The last month had been a whirlwind of activity and
excitement as she spun into motion. She had found someone to take over her
lease, handed her duties at work over to her co-workers, had several difficult
conversations with her family, and attended the round of goodbye parties held in
her honor in New York.
“This is going to look very silly if I get all the way out
to Dubai and realize that it's not for me. Think of how embarrassing it would
be if I went all that way just come back!”
She had made that statement at the end of one of those
parties. She had had perhaps one more glass of wine than she needed, and so she
was simply sitting on the couch, watching her best friend Amy clean up.
“Are you really worried about that?” Amy asked, startled.
When Estelle nodded, Amy smiled at her.
“Well, I think you're wrong,” she said softly. “I think
that you have a soul that's made for adventure, and for you, this is just the
beginning.”
Impulsively, Estelle had reached for Amy, drawing her into
a tight warm hug. Amy had been her friend all through college, and they had
come to New York at the same time. Where Estelle had hitched her stars to legal
matters, Amy had taken advantage of the New York publishing scene, wading her
way through manuscripts and articles until she won a small standing for herself
as a woman with a good eye for the written word.
Where Estelle was a bright star, Amy was a soothing
twilight. She was quieter by far than Estelle, and sometimes, her slight
plumpness and her glasses made her shy.
“What am I going to do without you?” Estelle muttered,
burying her face in Amy's neck.
“I don't know, clean your own messes?” observed Amy drily.
As if the thoughts had summoned her, Estelle's phone
chirped, and a message from Amy appeared.
Knock 'em dead. I know you will.
Estelle felt unwanted tears choke her up. The woman next
to her stirred, and Estelle knuckled them away hurriedly.
Only a few more hours before she was going to land in
Dubai. Her excitement burbled up through her exhaustion and nervousness.
This is going to be amazing
.
*
Amir had made it to the airport early. Rashid, his driver,
had frowned when Amir mentioned that he was going to drive himself, but even
Rashid couldn't deny that Amir got himself there faster than Rashid would have
done.
He parked his sleek Mercedes in the tiny private lot
reserved for his family and made his way through the terminal. As he dodged the
wide variety of passengers passing through the airport, he had time to wonder
all over again about Estelle Waters.
She had first come to his attention during the Ellsford
deal. He still got a little headache whenever he thought back to that day.
Harold Ellsford had been playing exactly as fair as he was required to do, and
since they had worked together so many times before, Amir was inclined to take
the man at his word. Then that email happened to land in his inbox, and
everything had shut down as if smashed with a sledgehammer.
It was fine; people had tried to take advantage of the
Kalil family before, and they would try to do so again. Of course, the same
people never tried twice. There was mercy for one's enemies, and then there was
stupidity. He had made very sure that Ellsford would not be operating in this
area of the world ever again.
The only good thing to rise out of that horrible mess was
his acquaintance with Miss Waters. He had read her nearly painfully polite but
urgent note, and once he had dealt with Ellsford, he had returned to it. For
some reason, something about it tickled his fancy. He could imagine the woman
who wrote it as one of the gray-haired battleaxes from the old American movies
he had watched when he was very young. He imagined her sharp eyes catching the
discrepancy and sending it to him with complete confidence and an understanding
of what had to be made right.
When she sent him an actual thank you card for the pashmina
he sent her, he had been amused to see her round, even handwriting and a little
tickled by the old-fashioned courtesy of her response. Not long after that, he
decided that if he was going to work with Miller and McKinley, he was only
going to work with Miss Waters.
The decision had been a good one, and when he decided to
look for a personal assistant and general administrator with US experience for
Kalil Enterprises, hers was the first name he had chosen.
Bahir, his younger brother, had raised an eyebrow at the
choice.
“You're choosing a woman who might rather be knitting
booties for her grandchildren to act as your good right hand?”
Amir glared at his brother. Bahir was good-hearted, but
getting him in the office was always a chore. He was the real Dubai playboy;
Amir only looked the part.
“I think she's a widow,” he said. “She speaks of her
family, but she never brings up a husband. I would rather have her than a girl
who will leave as soon as she gets married.”
“Who knows, perhaps she will surprise you, brother,” said
Bahir with a grin. “Perhaps the two of you will fall in love.”
He had come out to meet Miss Waters on a whim. Typically,
Rashid would be the one to pick her up and take her to the apartments assigned
for her, but over the last few months, his interest in his correspondent had
grown. She was competent but very sweet, and after all, it would be good to
have a face to put to the name.
Amir had to admit that he didn't look much like a
businessman that day. He was dressed in fashionable slacks and light linen
shirt open to show his collarbones. He was tall, as were all the men of his
family, and like them, he was built lean. His father, when he was in one of his
more expansive moods, liked to talk about their family history as horsemen, how
they could ride for a week, simply switching off between a string of horses.
The intercom came on, announcing the arrival of Miss
Water's flight, and he made his way to the gate where she would come out. It
was a weekday, so the airport was busy but not overwhelmingly so, and he
started to look for Estelle Waters.