Читать книгу The Legacies of Powerful Men онлайн | страница 4

Zarif’s business manager, Yaman, awaited him in the room Zarif used as an office. ‘What brings you here?’ Zarif asked in surprise for the older man rarely made such visits.

Unlike his brothers, Nik and Cristo, who had both made names in the financial world, Zarif had little interest in his business affairs. Vashir had become oil-rich long before he was born and he had grown up wrapped in the golden cocoon of his family’s fabulous wealth. Yaman and his highly professional team presided over that fortune and conserved it.

‘There is a matter which I felt I should bring to your personal attention,’ Yaman informed him gravely.

‘Of course. What is this matter?’ Zarif asked, resting back against the edge of his desk, his dark eyes enquiring in his lean bronzed features.

The middle-aged accountant’s air of discomfiture increased. ‘It relates to a personal loan you made to a friend three years ago...Jason Gilchrist.’

Disconcerted by the mention of that name, Zarif stiffened. Yet it was not his one-time friend’s face that he pictured, it was that of Jason’s sister, Eleonora. An image of a young woman with a honey-blonde fall of silky curls, gentian-blue eyes and the legs of a gazelle flashed in his mind’s eye. Zarif froze into angry defensiveness at the speed of his own unwelcome response and the unwelcome remembrance of the staccato delivery of insults he had never forgotten:

We’re both far too young to get married.

I’m British. I couldn’t live in a culture where women are second-class citizens.

I’m not cut out to be a queen.

‘What has happened?’ he asked Yaman with his customary quietness, only the charge of sudden flaring energy lighting his dark gaze to amber belying his outer façade of cool.

* * *

Ella walked into the silent house. She was so tired that only will power was keeping her upright.

A light was burning below the living-room door: Jason was still up. She walked past quietly, unable to face another clash with her hot-tempered brother, and went into the kitchen. The room was a disaster area with abandoned plates of food still resting on the table. The chairs were still pushed back from the day before, when they had each leapt out of their seats as Jason broke his devastating news of their financial ruin during a family meal. Straightening her shoulders and reluctant to recall that dreadful lunch, Ella began to clear up, knowing that she would only feel worse if she had to face the mess in the morning.