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Carly reeled from the affront, however innocently it was offered. “I beg your pardon!”
“Have you heard of live morphology technology?” Josh asked, catching her off guard. The silence that followed made it clear the question wasn’t rhetorical; that the brilliant young tech CEO – now multimillionaire – was waiting for an answer.
“The term sounds familiar—” she began before Josh interrupted her.
“It should,” Josh huffed. “It’s the wave of the future and, thanks to Mr. Farzik, SoundCloud will be a part of it. I can’t think of a better legacy than to share my technology with the world, and not just a narrow slice of it like Millennials. I’m sorry you couldn’t share the same broader version, Carly, but wish you the best.”
The dial tone that followed felt like a slap in the face and Carly sat, slumped in her chair, listening to it until she managed the strength to hang up the phone. Despite the shock she’d felt at pulling up the technology website’s front page story that morning, Carly had to admit that Josh was right. Her distraction with Rahm had cost her more than sleep, it had cost her opportunity. She’d been so wrapped up in whether or not he might call, in where he might be and where she might find him, to say nothing of what had happened when she finally did, that she’d let her work suffer.
“Live morphology technology?” she finally muttered to herself, straightening slightly to key the term into her favorite search engine. Five minutes of reading taught her more than she needed to know about the methodology of delivering high quality live sound for a fraction of the cost of recording it, facts which might have informed her discussions with Josh throughout the week.
Instead she’d acted like a petulant teen, mooning around her office half the day and tossing in her bed half the night, until she’d been a frazzled and, apparently, incompetent wreck of a woman. As she sat in her chair, staring blindly out the window at a beautiful horizon that no longer mattered to her, Carly realized that had been Rahm’s game from the beginning.
After losing the PrimeTime account to her after their first meeting, Rahm had clearly made it his mission to best her before she had the chance to return the favor. She realized that all of it, from the initial encounter at El Tropicale to the seduction back at his private penthouse, had been strategically planned down to the last detail.
She didn’t have to wonder how he’d done it. A man who could buy a company valued at less than five million for close to thirty clearly had more money than sense, and knew how to spend it. For all she knew Rahm had hired a private investigator to find out where she went on her off hours, what she drank, where she lived and which tech company she was interested in buying first. How else had he known about SoundCloud? And why else would a man like him be interested in a woman like her?
Carly sat, slumped and defeated, mentally licking her wounds as the sea reached the shore and kissed the brilliant blue sky beyond the glass wall of her corner office. She’d been a fool to fall for him; hook, line and sinker. To think even for a moment that it could work for them. He, the handsome, billionaire sheik and her, the redheaded analyst, as American as apple pie, baseball and capitalism!
And to think how she’d thrown herself at him there in his penthouse suite. Not even in his suite; outside of it, for all of South Beach to see, her half-naked and grinding against him like some lovesick teen the first weekend her parents went out of town!
She fumed from the recollection, blushing and shame-faced all over again. And yet, Carly decided as she turned back to her computer, fingers flying over the keyboard as she called up the file on TalentScount, her next tech investment, it was better to learn Rahm’s true nature now, after only a brief fling, than later – after she’d really fallen for him.
But even as she called up her usual stock valuations and intel, Carly knew it was already too late. It would be a long time before she got over Rahmad “Rahm” Farzik II.
If she ever did…
Sixteen
“Thank you, father,” Rahm said, bowing deferentially to the laptop camera. “I welcome and appreciate your praise.”
The sheik bowed as well, regal and stiff in his royal garb, his stately surroundings looking more like a museum than his own home office half a world away. “Yes, well, it’s good to see you triumph over the pesky bitch!”
“Father,” Rahm huffed, feeling more defensive about Carly than he should have.
“What?” the sheik asked, a man whose list of mistresses included starlets and supermodels, sluts and scientists. “How else to refer to your arch rival?”
“We don’t talk about women that way in the states,” Rahm said, trying to educate his dinosaur of a father.
“Then I’m glad I never took you up on your invitation to visit you there,” his father huffed, glaring intensely back into his own computer camera as Rahm endured their weekly video conference. “For a world in which men and women are equal is no place I’d tarry long.”
Rahm sighed, wondering if perhaps a little of his father hadn’t rubbed off on him before his sojourn to America. Had he not treated Carl like a “bitch,” even if he dared not call her such? Had he not considered her, as his father had called it, his arch rival? Had he not enjoyed the hunt as much as the triumph?
“Don’t tell me you have feelings for this woman?” his father scoffed, shaking his head so that the golden folds of his turban dragged across his shoulders.
“Of course not!” Rahm blurted, as much to himself as his father, the sheik. “I’m merely playing by the capitalist’s game and learning that, here in the west at least, women can be worthy competition.”
“Preposterous!” his father bellowed, licking his lips so that his tongue glanced across his thick, silken moustache. “Women are only good for two things, son, and never forget it: being mistresses or being mothers. Anything more than that is man’s work.”
“Yes, father,” Rahm said evenly, so eager to end the weekly video call that he would rather agree with arcane philosophy than try to correct his father again. And then, as if to smite the righteous gloat on the sheik’s face, he added, “I was only stating how we do it in the west.”
“We?” the sheik bellowed, and Rahm knew he’d used the wrong word choice. “We are rulers, son, and never forget it. We will own the west before too long, and they will do as we do, not the other way around.”
His father’s thick accent lingered in the air as he literally curled one tip of his moustache like an old timey villain. “Perhaps you’ve spent too long in your adopted land,” he said, chilling Rahm to the bone. “Perhaps it’s time you return to Hahmsuit and begin learning to take over the throne, instead of a desk chair.”
Rahm nodded deferentially, the fight gone out of him as he struggled to out-negotiate the master negotiator himself. “If that is your wish, sire,” he said, biting off each word as if chewing on moldy lemon peels. “However, there is still much work to do here if you see fit to allow me to do it.”
“Such as?” the sheik inquired, his greed at amassing new fortunes overtaking his fatherly duties.
