‘A glass of water?’ Sharif enquired softly.
She passed an angry hand over her eyes, fighting for composure. She felt sick and faint from all the shocks her mind had been forced to accept. The structure of the business had changed—Tyr was involved, but he still wasn’t coming home. And mixed into all this were her feelings for this man. It was too much to take in all at once.
Thrusting her chair back, she stood.
Sharif stood too. ‘We want to keep you, Britt—’
‘I need time—’
‘The consortium could use your people skills as well as the mining expertise you have. At least promise me that you’ll think about what I’ve said.’
‘Ten minutes,’ she flashed, turning from the table. She had to get out of here—now.
One foot in front of the other—how hard could that be?
That might be easy if she didn’t know she had let everyone down. She allowed herself to become distracted and everything had changed. The company might have been thrust upon her, but she had given it all she’d got, and had intended to continue doing so for the rest of her working life. So much for that.
Bracing her arms against the sink in the restroom, she hung her head. She couldn’t bear to look at her reflection in the mirror. She couldn’t bear to see the longing for Sharif in her eyes. Everything he’d said made sense. He wasn’t even taking over and booting her out. They wanted her to stay on, he’d said. And she wanted Sharif in every way a woman could want a man. She wanted them to have a proper relationship that wasn’t just founded on sex. She had run the gamut of emotions with him, and had learned from it, but this was the hardest lesson of all: the man they called the Black Sheikh would stop at nothing to achieve his goal—even recruiting Britt’s long-lost brother, if that got him where he wanted to be. And Sharif didn’t even want the part of her she wanted to give, he wanted her people skills. The only way she could survive knowing that was to revert to being the Britt who didn’t feel anything.
Sluicing her face down in cold water, she reached for a towel and straightened up. Now she must face the cold man in the boardroom whom she loved more than life itself, and the only decision left for her to make was whether or not she could stay on here and work for Sharif.
She could stay on. She had to. She couldn’t abandon the people who worked here, or her sisters. And if that meant her badly bruised heart took another battering, so what? She would just have to return it to its default setting of stone.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BRITT RETURNED TO the boardroom to find Sharif pacing. Caught unawares, he looked like a man with the weight of the world on his back. For the blink of an eye she felt sorry for him. Who shared the load with Sharif? When did he get time off? And then she remembered their time in the desert and her heart closed again.
‘There is a problem,’ he said, holding her stony gaze trapped in his.
‘Oh?’ She felt for the wall behind her as wasted emotions dragged her down. She could fix her mind all she liked on being tough and determined, and utterly sure about where she wanted this to go, but when she saw him—when she saw those concerns she couldn’t know about furrowing his brow and drawing cruel lines down each side of his mouth—she wanted to reach out to him.
She wanted to help him, and, even more than that, she wanted to stand back to back with Sharif to solve every problem they came across, and she wanted him to feel the same way she did.
‘I’ve had to make some changes to my plans.’
‘Trouble in Kareshi?’ she guessed.
‘A troublesome relation who was banished from the kingdom has returned in my absence and is trying to rally support amongst the bullies who still remain. It’s a basic fight between a brighter modern future for all and a return to the dark days of the past when a privileged few exploited the majority. I must return. I promised my people that they would never be at the mercy of bullies again, and it’s a promise I intend to keep.’
Sharif really did have the weight of the world on his shoulders. ‘What can I do?’ Britt said. Whatever had led them to this place was irrelevant compared to so many lives in jeopardy.
‘I need your agreement to stay on here. I need you to do my job for me while I’m away. I need you to ease the transition so that no one worries about change unnecessarily. Will you do that for me, Britt?’
Sharif needed her. The people here needed her. And if he didn’t need her in the way she had hoped he would, she still couldn’t turn her back on him, let alone turn her back on the other people she cared about.