The Sheikh's Secret Son Read Online Free

the room grown so large?—but Ben spoke again, once more halting her in her tracks. “You will please tell Attorney Klinger and the others that His Highness has decided not to open Kharmistan to foreign investors. You might call them foreign devils, or infidels, if you think it will help prove that this ignorant Arab has no business sense, no concept of the fortune he is turning down.”
    Eden whirled back to face him, her blue eyes narrowed as her entire face pinched and blanched at the same time. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said, her heart pounding so loud she could barely hear herself speak.
    He turned to her slowly, his dark eyes cold, his face a mask of handsome, deeply tanned, unreadable flesh. “If you have done your research, Eden, and I am convinced you have, you will know that I currently hold the position of twenty-third richest man in the world. I do not have much time for such lists, but they do seem to impress Westerners. So you see, Eden, I do not need your clients. I never did. I would not be here today if I had not seen your name on one of the status reports the faithful Nadim placed on my desk six months ago. He did not rememberyour name. I, however, have it branded on my heart.”
    Eden refused to comment on his last statement. “Six…six months ago? You’ve been planning all of this? Negotiating with our clients for six long months? Putting us all through hoops, acting as if you wanted this deal—all so you could come here today to insult me? Embarrass me? Why? Do you plan to have me lose my job? Is that it? Are you that petty? You’ve ignored me for more than five years. How does that end up being my fault?”
    â€œSix o’clock, Eden.” He walked past her and put his hand on the doorknob. “Now, if you will excuse me? I have a meeting to postpone until tomorrow. It will only be postponed, will it not, Eden?”
    Eden chewed on the inside of her cheek, longing to tell him to go to hell, longing to tell him she didn’t give two snaps for the deal her firm had been working on for six long months. “Yes, that’s right. Only postponed, Your Highness,” she ground out at last, then exited the room ahead of him as he held open the door and graciously gestured that she should precede him.
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    Mary Ellen Fortune poured two cups of tea in the large kitchen of the contemporary Colonial house she and her late husband had built on Fortune land several years earlier.
    The house was only two miles from the original homestead that had been expanded to three or more times its size over the years. Not that Cameron had felt the huge, rambling house hadn’t been large enough for he and Mary Ellen to raise their family there, alongside the family of his brother, Ryan.
    Cameron had liked elegance, and size, and this house reflected his need for the overtly flamboyant and Mary Ellen’s equal need to make a comfortable and cozy home within the parameters her husband had set up. Now, with the children grown and gone, with Cameron gone, the house she loved was too big, too empty.
    â€œYou and Sawyer could come here for a while, darling,” Mary Ellen said as she carried the teacups to the wide butcher-block-topped kitchen table, placing one cup in front of Eden. “Security on the ranch is excellent, as you know. He couldn’t touch Sawyer here.”
    Eden ran a hand through her hair, pushing the thick, wavy mass back from her face. She’d driven directly to the ranch as soon as the meeting had broken up, which it had done rapidly once Sheikh Barakah Karif Ramir had regally begged the kind indulgence of those gathered and then departed the room without so much as a word of excuse, surrounded by his phalanx of guards.
    Eden had been so distracted that she couldn’teven remember what her boss had said to her, what he had asked her. She’d just sicced him on Jim Morris, and been the first person on the elevator when