“Your highness?”
Khaled heard the voice and stopped eyeing the cute Indian woman he had been flirting with. He turned to face one of the members of the board of directors for the museum.
“Sheikh bin Mahmoud al Halam? We’re honored you could make it,” the man stuck his hand out to shake his hand.
“Please, call me Khaled. And the pleasure is all mine.”
“Your father was such a huge supporter of our work here. I’m so sorry for your loss. He will be greatly missed.”
Khaled’s brown eyes went black and he stiffened. The man kept talking, encouraging Khaled for further donations to the museum, but Khaled didn’t hear him. His thoughts were lost in a grief he hadn’t yet dealt with.
Khaled’s father had died just six months before, leaving a host of loose ends in the process. One being the benevolent work of the monarchy of Al-Zumayn, the Middle-Eastern country that Khaled was from. Khaled was a distant heir to the monarchy on his father’s side. His father had inherited an oil empire that was worth millions, and during his lifetime, he had grown it into the billions. When Khaled was old enough, he began to work for his father. But Khaled was spoiled. He didn’t have the desire to work in the business. He enjoyed partying too much.
In order to keep his son out of trouble, Khaled’s father decided to have him act in a sales capacity rather than in any principal role within the organization. But Khaled found a way around that, too. He flew to exotic destinations to drum up new business and rather than spending his time in stuffy board rooms or sales meetings, Khaled conducted business on yachts and in nightclubs.
When his father died, Khaled’s freestyle world had been turned upside down. He had spent his entire life being given everything and knew nothing about real work. The shock of losing his father, as distant as they might have been, was immense and Khaled had still not fully absorbed it. He had begun to tire of his playboy lifestyle and was eager to learn the business and make his father proud. But there was one thing he was still having a hard time dealing with.
Khaled’s father had left specific instructions in his will. One was that Khaled had to be married as, in his culture, unwed men were seen as immature and irresponsible. Khaled was already twenty-nine and the will stipulated that if Khaled wanted to inherit the business, he had to be married by the time he turned thirty.
The second condition was that his bride had to be of royal lineage. Khaled’s mother was now responsible for ensuring that the woman Khaled chose met this condition. Khaled trusted his mother completely, but wanted to select the woman himself. Even though he wasn’t really ready to settle down, Khaled knew that he must obey his parents’ wishes if he wanted to fulfill his business ambitions and take over the family oil empire.