AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You rock, baby.”
She grinned at him and wriggled underneath him. “You rock my world, Shaw.”
He groaned. “That was the cheesiest line ever.” He chuckled as she wrapped her legs around his waist. “You know something, Miss Herd?”
“What’s that?”
“You are the love of my life and I never want to be without you.”
She pressed her lips to his. “You never will be, my darling, darling man.”
“You and me forever.”
As they began to make love, their eyes met and locked and soon they were tumbling and loving and gasping so intensely, they completely missed the announcement of Record of the Year…
Neither of them cared…least of all the three-time Grammy winner…
THE END
The Sheikh's Greed
One
“Ugggh,” said Carly Stanton, nervously, to the tall, dark, handsome and obviously Middle Eastern hunk in the thousand-dollar fitted suit standing next to her at the cappuccino machine. “I hate these cattle call investment presentations, don’t you?”
He turned to her as one might a bug he was about to squash and looked down his regal nose at her. “Of course not,” he said in clipped English that was obviously well-practiced and, she thought, honed to perfection so as to hide his Arabian upbringing. “I look at them as a challenge.”
Suddenly curious, Carly turned from the gurgling brass machine at her side and eyed her business rival more closely. “How so?” she posed even as her eyes traveled up and down his lean, hard body while he formed a clearly calculated response.
His black hair, so radiant and dark it had a sheen of its own, was short and clipped close to his head, barely concealing the copper colored skin beneath. He had fine, almost delicately noble features that were only enhanced by the trace of fine dark stubble that had probably appeared since he shaved that morning.
His suit was as midnight black as his hair, flattering the fitted maroon dress shirt and matching black and mauve striped tie beneath. Freshly polished dress shoes added an unnecessary inch or two to his already impressive height of over six feet, causing her to look up slightly to peer into his surprisingly soft, brown eyes.
He blinked, even softer eyelashes fluttering before his gaze grew steely and dismissive of her question. “Publicly doing what I do so well in private is merely a matter of, how do you Americans say… switching gears?”
Carly snorted at his bravado, but couldn’t deny his obvious charm as his accent slipped, slightly, when sneering at her American lineage with such obvious relish. “And what do they call it where you come from?” she teased, intrigued by the sexy stranger’s exotic looks and obvious disdain for Western culture – despite having adopted it so successfully.
His sneer grew more profound, hidden temporarily behind his small cup of espresso before he revealed it to proclaim, “Success.”
She nodded, shrugging casually. “Sometimes success and overconfidence can look oddly familiar,” she cautioned, unable – or perhaps merely unwilling – to leave his grating cockiness unanswered.
He arched one midnight black eyebrow before flaring his nostrils threateningly. “Overconfidence?” he sneered, voice deep and masculine like his endlessly radiant eyes. “Is there such a thing?”
“Only for those that don’t know any better,” she sighed aloud before muttering under her breath, “or simply don’t care.”
“Au contraire,” the sexy stranger corrected, clearly a master of more than two languages. “I know, and care, enough to embrace what you Americans so clearly fear.”
“Which is?” she asked, truly curious this time.
He made her wait for the answer, lifting the small cup effortlessly to his lips, as if wanting her to study his long, elegant fingers, manicured nails and the way his lips embraced the rim of the small cup. When he was through he lowered it just enough to smile, wink and say, “Change, my dear. Simply the ability to change and overcome.”
With that he handed her the empty espresso cup, as if she was the waitress merely there to do his bidding, and turned to another male competitor to laugh heartily at the slight. Carly turned as well, if only to set the rattling cup and saucer down on the break room counter beside her and hide the growing shame blushing across her face.
As one of the few women at Razor, the Miami investment firm where she worked, Carly was used to the daily sleights of a male-dominated world. But rarely were those sleights so obvious, derisive and outright dismissive.
The handsome stranger seemed to take great pleasure in treating her as a washer woman, or perhaps came from a culture that treated woman – businesswomen in particular – as second class citizens.
As her blush subsided, Carly heard rumblings behind her and turned, noting the half-dozen investment firm representatives that had gathered at the corporate HQ of PrimeTime being ushered into the conference room proper for their morning presentations.
