RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS
50 Loving States, Hawaii
Theodora Taylor
Copyright © 2019 by Theodora Taylor
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Epilogue
STONE PREVIEW
Also by Theodora Taylor
About the Author
1
MIKA
“Princess! Princess! Over here, Princess!”
I don’t realize the men standing with cameras at the ballroom’s entrance are calling out to me until a man with a Jahwar Times lanyard scuttles over to me and my nine-year-old son, Albie, and asks in heavily accented English, “Are you Princess Jones of the reality show, Her Majesty?”
Albie snorts. And I resist the temptation to look over both shoulders like I’m in an 80s movie. I can’t believe the photographer from the Jahwar Times mistook me for the other bridesmaid in my bosses’ wedding, the former reality star turned lawyer, Princess Jones (though she insists everyone call her Prin these days).
I’ve been feeling out of place at the reception for my employers’ destination wedding, ever since we arrived in the three-story ballroom a few minutes ago. The festivities are taking place in the much more conservative United Arab Kingdoms emirate, Jahwar, which happens to be ruled by one of the groom’s best friends from boarding school. Unfortunately, I had misinterpreted the instruction to dress modestly for the reception after the wedding.
So while I’m wearing a simple blue jersey long-sleeved maxi dress I’d gotten on sale at TJ Maxx, pretty much every other woman in the glittering ballroom is wearing elegant, floor-sweeping gowns. Even the guy with the camera is dressed better than me in a well-tailored suit. Like attending luxurious weddings at the King of Jahwar’s outrageously opulent palace is something he did every day.
Well, it’s definitely not something I do every day. “Sorry, I’m not Prin. I’m Mika,” I tell the photographer. “Holt’s and Sylvie’s nanny.”
“A nanny…” The photog squints at me from under his slicked-back hair, suspicion simmering in his eyes. “So you are related to the nanny Holt Calson, the CEO of Cal-Mart, has decided to marry,” he concludes.
Another snort from Albie and I find myself smothering a laugh of my own as I let him know, “No, we’re not related. She’s the former nanny and I’m the current one. Total background. Nobody important, I promise you.”
He squints again. “Just the nanny? Not Princess Jones...?”
I think he’s trying to figure out if I’m lying and purposely making him miss his chance to photograph the only television-famous American attending this wedding.
“Seriously, I’m just a nanny,” I assure him. “Nothing to see here. You should totally move on to somebody way more important than me.”
As if cosigning my “not important at all” claim, a flurry of Arabic suddenly burst from the ballroom’s entrance, and all the other photographers gather around a couple entering with their daughter.
I don’t speak Arabic, but I do understand one word the photogs are calling out. “Sheikha...I think that means princess…” I tell Albie.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of the family being photographed were royalty. The father is tall and lean, and the mother is elegant and thin. They’re dressed way more appropriately than Albie and me for the wedding, but stand out just the same. Her in an intricately embroidered sari with a hajib, him in a long collarless suit coat. They’re both classically beautiful in ways anyone on both sides of the globe could agree equals super good looking. Her features are flower petal delicate and come together in a way that makes her seem to glow with ethereal beauty. He has kind, intelligent brown eyes, strong cheekbones, and a strong jawline underneath a well-trimmed beard. He looks like a Hollywood movie icon with a brown overlay.
And the little girl standing between them with a happy smile as the camera’s flash? She’s an amalgamation of them both. Cute as a button in a miniature version of her mother’s sari. Her hair is dark and wavy like her father’s, and hints of her mother’s ethereal beauty are already hanging out around her huge eyes, which are wide like her mother’s, but also sharp like her father’s.
She’s perfect. Just like her parents. And just the opposite of me and Albie.
I’ve become used to living in the background. I prefer it that way after what happened in Hawaii. But watching that beautiful family, taking a break from their perfect lives to pose in their perfect clothes for the frantically clicking cameras, I can’t help but wonder what that would be like. To actually belong at a wedding like this one. To live in the foreground of life as opposed to in the back where most people can’t see you. To be that beautiful and perfect.
“Mom, are we going back to the game room or what? I’m bored and you promised we’d only have to stay here for fifteen minutes after dropping Wes and Ender off!”
Albie’s voice pulls me out of my uncharacteristic moment of feeling sorry for myself.
He’s squirming in the suit I bought him from that same TJ Maxx and tugging on his tie. The very picture of discomfort.
I know exactly how he feels. Being here with all these beautiful people dressed to the nines, makes me feel itchy and squirmy too.
“You know what, you’re right. Let’s go,” I say to Albie, leading him toward the ballroom entrance. “Maybe I can teach you how to play pool like you’ve been asking.”
Albie cheers, smiling for the first time since Holt and Sylvie’s relatively boring wedding day began. His happy response makes my outlook ten times brighter.
Who cares if I feel a little lonely sometimes? I’ve got a great son and a great job far away from Hawaii. We’re safe and that’s all I really need.
Albie and our security are my food and water. The rest...romantic love...more children...all the stuff I sometimes find myself yearning for towards the end of long days or when I see preternaturally beautiful couples posing for the cameras? Well, that’s just dessert isn’t it? A cup of halo-halo. Something I want but know I can’t afford to eat.
Still, as I leave with Albie, I can’t help but look back at that beautiful, perfect family. The photographers have left and the girl is tugging on the father’s hand to get his attention. He bends down to her eye level to speak with her. I can’t hear what she’s saying. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t speak Arabic.
But whatever it is, he smiles and nods yes.
RASHID
My wife stops smiling as soon as the photographers disappear. And I know exactly why.
As the newly ascended King of
Jahwar, my cousin Zahir, always has two guards posted both inside and outside the doors of whatever room he’s in during public events. However, there is only one guard standing outside the ballroom and two inside the party, scanning for any possible threats.
Mahirah looks at the ballroom entrance with its conspicuously missing guard, then back at me, a storm in her eyes.
And even though it took me several extra minutes to dress for the wedding, due to having to wash that guard’s blood off my hands and from underneath my fingernails, I keep my face neutral as I stare back at my wife. My beautiful, angry, and duplicitous wife.
In the end, Mahirah breaks off our stare down, by turning on our daughter. “You have crumbs on your sari. Filthy child! I knew we should not have allowed you to attend this wedding with us!”
Aisha’s face falls. Children are usually not permitted to attend weddings in the UAK, so she was thrilled when Zahir invited her to this one. She’d been talking about getting to attend a Western-style wedding all week and had preened in the mirror for nearly an hour, at the sight of herself dressed in a sari, just like her beautiful mother.
But now… “I’m sorry,” she says, shrinking under her mother’s criticism.
“You should be—"
”Come, let’s find our places to sit,” I interrupt before Mahirah can go on another tangent about ungrateful children and why they shouldn’t be invited to weddings—even Western ones. It’s not Aisha’s fault that her mother is frustrated and thinks it’s okay to take it out on a defenseless child. “Look, there’s Grandfather. I’m sure he’ll be excited to see you.”
“Grandfather!“ Aisha runs to my grandfather, her great grandfather, with her arms wide open.
“Aisha, habibti, no running!” Mahirah gently chides after her, keeping her voice lovely for the other partygoers.
But as soon as our daughter is out of earshot, she drops the fussy mother act and turns back to me. “What did you do?” she hisses.
“Let’s not cause a scene,” I answer.
I take her by the elbow and lead her to the round table where Aisha is already happily chatting with Grandfather.
I’m sure Mahirah will find a way to confront me about what I did later. But I’m betting she’s too much of a suck-up to ever let on to the billionaire who handpicked her to be my wife that we aren’t the perfect match he’d commanded us to be.
My wager pays off. With one last stormy look at me, Mahirah plasters on a charming smile for my grandfather. “Sham Bakhair, Dada ji!” she greets him in his native Urdu. “Aisha was just saying that you were the one she was most excited about seeing at this wedding!”
That is not true at all. Aisha has been talking non-stop about meeting and dancing with Princess Jones, the former star of the now-canceled hip-hop reality show, His Majesty, ever since the Jahwari papers announced she would be standing up for the bride at her wedding.
“I will never forgive that terrible nanny for letting you watch that wretched program,” Mahirah had groused when Aisha announced her mission to dance with Princess Jones at the Western wedding. “I don’t know why you’re so obsessed with her anyway. Your mother is a real princess, not that horribly-named reality starlet.”
“She’s so pretty! And she talks like Clawdeen from Monster’s High!” Aisha answered as if the trashy reality star’s superiority to her mother was obvious. “And you never want to dance with me.”
If not for what I’d been forced to do earlier that morning, I might have attempted to defend Mahirah against my daughter’s harsh comparison. As it was, all I could manage on my wife’s behalf was suppressing my own laughter while Mahirah fumed, looking every bit the child as her daughter.
But now in front of grandfather, who is grooming me to take over his multinational corporation, Mahirah laughs and touches my arm as if she couldn’t possibly adore me more.
A lie. That’s all we are. A complete lie covered up in luxury, business, and family expectations.
Still, I nod along and take a seat next to my wife. Pretending we’re the happy couple everyone assumes us to be.
2
MIKA
I blink, thinking it’s an illusion when the beautiful mother in the sari and hijab from earlier suddenly appears in the game room where Albie and I have been playing pool for over an hour.
When the doors first opened, I’d assumed it would be Ender and Wes.
I’m sure that the Calson boys were just as bored as Albie at the reception. After all, their attendance hadn’t exactly been voluntary. The boys debated fiercely with their parents last night about how long they would have to stay at “that boring after party” before they were allowed to return to the game room. And I’d had no doubt that the Calson boys would be back at six on the D.O.T. if not earlier.
They’d been obsessed with this particular room of the palace ever since we’d arrived in the United Arabian Kingdoms emirate of Jahwar a few days ago. Real talk, I kinda can’t blame them. The warehouse-sized room was a delight for kids of any age. It hosted stand-up and sit down video games, VR skydiving, golf, roller coaster, and flight simulators, along with analog classics like a half basketball court and air hockey, ping pong, foosball, and pool tables.
Sure, the wedding of the Calson boy’s parents was long delayed and a once-in-a-lifetime event. But so was this Vegas level arcade that one of the king’s servants had so humbly called a game room.
Which was why I had been so surprised when instead of Wes and Ender, the sheikha entered, dragging her cute little girl behind her.
At first, I thought maybe she was lost or looking for a bathroom, but then she made a beeline towards me and my pool cue.
“You’re the Calsons’ nanny?” she asks, eyeing me up and down.
She sounds surprised, and I guess I don’t blame her. This isn’t the first up and down look my simple blue jersey long-sleeved maxi dress had gotten tonight.
“Yes, I’m the Calsons’ nanny,” I answer, nonetheless, trying not to stare. The Arabian princess is even more gorgeous up close, a stunning combination of good genes and perfect make-up. She appears to be in her late twenties like me, maybe even younger. But she has the snooty air of a dowager from a British drama about her.
She gives me another up and down look. “Well, I suppose you will have to do.” She pushes the little girl toward me. “Take her and bring her back to me when the reception is done,” she commands.
“But--”
She storms off before I can ask for the little girl’s name, or point out that I’m the Calsons’ nanny, not hers. And she slams the game room’s door behind her.
RASHID
“You son of a bitch! You killed him! I know you did!”
I’d come to Zahir’s private study for what the American engineers I used to oversee at my startup called “alone time.” Also, I knew this was where he kept the technically banned in the UAK alcohol for his meetings with Westerners.
Yet, after only a few sips of brandy, my buzz was instantly killed by the sound of my wife’s voice, accusing and brittle.
Composing my face into a cold and polite mask, I turn to face her.
Mahirah stands before me radiating both exquisite beauty and anger underneath her hajib and the sari she’s been wearing to all formal occasions ever since we moved back to Jahwar. It’s her way of sucking up to my grandfather, who according to her, “saved her life “when he commanded I abandon my exoskeleton tech company in America and return to Jahwar.
She took a steady breath, clearly trying to regain her composure. “Ben wasn’t at his usual post tonight. What did you do to him?”
I stare down at her, weighing my options. The cruelest thing to do would be to refuse to answer. Let her stew, imagining the horrific fate of her lover. It’s no less than she deserved for her actions.
But, I have no desire for future iterations of this conversation, so I answer, “If you are referring to Zahir’s British guard, he has chosen to return to his home country to recover from his injur
ies.”
“Injuries,” she repeats, her eyes widening with horror. “Did you hurt him? Tell me you didn’t hurt him!”
I let a long beat of silence go by before saying, “Actually Zahir was annoyed with me for merely beating him within an inch of his life. He said I should have done much worse and even offered to hand him over to the palace guard for execution. He was that appalled that a member of his personal guard would be so stupid as to be seen coming out of a married Ardu Alzuhuwr princess’s rooms.”
She pales but lifts her chin defiantly. “Who told you that?” Mahirah demands. “If it was a servant, you should know they are lying. They are so jealous of me, it is sometimes hard to trust the food they set down in front of me. Why just yesterday--”
Disgust that she would still lie after trampling all over our vows burns through me. I know ours has never been a relationship based on love, and it is a well-known secret that many UAK royals take lovers after agreeing to arranged marriages. But she owes me more respect than this.
“Aisha was the one who told me she saw him coming out of your rooms while I was out of town,” I answer, my tone scathing. “Late at night, after she had a nightmare. She asked me if he was now guarding both you and Zahir too.”
Ask anyone in Jahwar, and they will tell you my grandfather couldn’t have found a better match for me. Her Highness, Sheikha Mahirah hailed from the same royal Ardu Alzuhuwr family as the recently deceased king’s second wife, and she was even more stunning than her older sister.
RASHID: HER RUTHLESS BOSS: 50 Loving States, Hawaii Page 1