CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS a sheikh, the King of Suliyam, a small nation sitting on an incredible deposit of oil on the tip of the Bezerian Peninsula.
On top of that, he was tall, dark-haired, gray-eyed and gorgeous.
If you liked the type.
According to the tabloids and the TV celebrity-tell-all shows, most women did.
But Megan O’Connell wasn’t most women. Besides, tall, dark, handsome and disgustingly rich didn’t begin to make up for egotistical, self-centered, and arrogant.
Megan raised her coffee cup to her lips. Okay. Maybe that was superfluous. So what? Men like him were superfluous, too. What did the world need with penny-ante dictators who thought they were God’s gift to the female sex? To everybody on the planet, when you came down to it?
She’d never exchanged a word with the man but she didn’t have to, to know what he was like. Her boss—another egotistical jerk, though not a good-looking one—had transmitted the sheikh’s message to her this morning and it had been clear as glass.
She was a female. That made her a second-class citizen in his eyes. He, of course, was male. As if that weren’t enough, he was royalty.
Royalty. Megan’s lip curled with contempt. What he was, was a chauvinist pig. How come she was the only one who seemed to notice? She’d been watching him charm the little group at the other end of the boardroom for almost an hour, tilting his head when one of them spoke as if he really gave a damn what that person was saying.
If only they knew what an SOB like him could do to someone.
She had to admit, he seemed good at what he did. Holding the attention of a bunch of self-important partners and managers of a prestigious financial firm wasn’t easy but then, if you believed the Times, he was the leader of his nation’s cautious steps into modernity and development.
If you believed the Times. It seemed more logical to believe the tabloids. According to them, he was a playboy. A heartbreaker on three continents.
That, Megan thought, was undoubtedly closer to the truth.
The only thing she was sure of was that he was Qasim al Daud al Rashid, King of Suliyam since his father’s death and the Absolute Ruler of his People.
It was a title that would have gone over big a couple of generations ago. Too bad the sheikh didn’t seem to care that such nonsense was a joke now…though it didn’t seem a joke to what passed for the news media, or here in the Los Angeles offices of Tremont, Burnside and Macomb, Financial Advisors and Consultants.
Too bad she’d accepted the transfer from Boston, where nobody would have made this kind of fuss over a walking, talking anachronism.
“Oh, your highness,” a woman said, the words accompanied by a sigh that carried the length of the room.
His Highness, indeed. That was the proper way to address the king, according to the belly-crawling sycophants in his entourage. Megan drank the last of her coffee. No way would she ever call him that. If she had the misfortune to speak with the man—which she surely wouldn’t, after what had happened this morning—she’d sooner choke. His High and Mightiness was more like it. What else would you call a twenty-first century dictator leading a 16th century life? Someone who’d single-handedly set her career back five years?
The bastard.
To think she’d worked her tail off, researching and writing the proposal that had won him as a client. To think she’d spent days and evenings and weekends on the thing. To think she’d dreamed about what handling such a prestigious account would mean to her career, swallowed all those little hints that she’d be named a partner, believed they were soon to become reality.
Every bit of it had gone up in a puff of smoke this morning, when Simpson told her he was giving the Suliyam assignment to Frank Fisher instead of her.
Megan started to refill her cup, thought better of it—she was already flying on caffeine—and poured herself a Mimosa instead. The vintage Krug and fresh OJ were there because the sheikh supposedly liked an occasional Mimosa at brunch, thanks to the influence, some said, of the genes of his California-born mother.
He’d never know it but he was drinking them today, assuming he was drinking them, thanks to Megan’s research. She’d learned about the Mimosas and ordered the champagne and the orange juice.
If only she’d ordered strychnine instead.
Damn, she had to stop thinking this way. She had to stop thinking, period, or she’d say something, do something that would cost her her job.