ROMANCE: THE SHEIKH'S GAMES: A Sheikh Romance (99 page)

Josh rolled his eyes. “Live acts are dead, Mr. Farzik. Just look at how empty this place is.”

Rahm snorted, savoring his priceless brandy before putting the snifter down. “It’s empty because I rented it out for our meeting, Josh. Typically this place has a six-month waiting list, namely for the trio you feel is so ‘outdated’. But why should people wait to hear such beautiful music when SoundCloud can broadcast it, live, in any number of restaurants?”

Josh sat back, nodding appreciatively. “With the band getting a cut, of course,” he suggested.

“Of course,” Rahm said. “This way, smaller restaurants get to have live, beautiful music regardless of their budget, and smaller acts get wider recognition than the dining room they’re currently playing in.”

Josh nodded, fingering the check more seriously now. “Funny,” he said, letting it fall back to the table as he admired the magnificent sunset outside their floor to ceiling window. “And I thought you brought me here for the view.”

“Well,” Rahm said, trying to keep the boredom out of his voice. “That too.”

“Are you a music fan?” Josh asked, turning back to him.

“Not really,” Rahm confessed with an absent shrug. “But I’m a fan of opportunity, and the more I read up on your company, the more opportunity I saw for you, for myself, and acts like this one…” They both admired the trio, three older gentleman in tuxedos.

Josh chuckled. “We typically deal in younger, more mainstream acts,” he confessed.

“Then you’re denying yourself opportunity, Mr. Seigel,” Rahm said, eyes narrowing across the candlelit table. “The world is as old as it is young, and to limit your older audience is to cut profits in half.”

Josh sat back, nodding as if impressed. For once, Rahm couldn’t blame him. In the 48-hours since Carly had seduced him – he could think of no better word for what had happened that savory, sultry night – Rahm had spent the time alternately waiting for her to call and assuring himself he’d been had.

As the minutes ticked into hours and the hours to mornings, afternoons and evenings – two full cycles of them – his curiosity turned to impatience, his impatience to frustration and his frustration into determination.

Revisiting the SoundCloud account, the one Carly had clearly made her next acquisition, Rahm grew more and more determined to get back at her by stealing it from her. For two straight days he poured over every bit of intel he could get his hands on, from internet searches to technology magazines, to stock market analysis to profiles of the company’s founder and CEO, young Josh Siegel. For once, he had done his homework. For once, he had found a reason for his own company, Platinum Dunes, to scoop it off the market. And, for once, he could have cared less.

All he wanted was for Carly to walk through that door, green eyes fiery with determination, red hair flowing, high heels clattering on the marble floors, eager to “negotiate” one more time. Instead Josh merely picked up the check with one hand, winked and offered the other hand in agreement.

“Sounds like the company will be in good hands, Mr. Farzik.”

“Please,” said Rahm, voice smooth as his silken shirt as he reached for Josh’s grip with one hand and waved the photographer he’d hired over with the other. “Call me Rahm.”

“That son of a bitch!”

Carly glared at the computer monitor where a beaming Rahm sat, shoulder to shoulder, with Josh Siegel.
Her
Josh Siegel, the one she’d been courting for at least two straight weeks. She stood in her office, pacing between leaning down at her desk to peer at the front page of TechnoTimes.com, where she’d just read the news that Rahm had bought SoundCloud for a staggering $27 million.

Her valuation of the company was far less, of course, as was her offer of $4.3 million. The one Josh said he was “seriously considering”. The one they’d been scheduled to talk about at their meeting in less than an hour. She stood in her lucky suit – black pinstripe slacks, high at the waist to match her silken white blouse and pencil thin grey jacket – and peered out the floor to ceiling windows at the ocean two blocks away.

“Son of a
bitch
!”

Clenching and unclenching her fists, Carly approached her desk once more. Pressing the speaker button on her phone, she pounded out Josh Siegel’s private line and was surprised when he actually picked up. “Carly,” he said, voice cocky and full of $27 million worth of bravado. “How nice to hear from you.”

She counted to ten before replying, deciding that rather than ranting and raving, playing it dumb was to her strategic advantage. “Yes, well, I’m looking forward to our lunch date at Cicero’s within the hour. Are we still on?”

There was a slight pause before Josh replied, voice tinged with disbelief. “Are… are you serious?”

“Absolutely!” Carly cried, enjoying the game as she peered out at the crystal blue Atlantic Ocean just down the street. “I hear the antipasto is to die for!”

Her declaration was followed by a long pause. “Haven’t… haven’t you read the trades this morning?”

“Why no,” she lied, laying it on thicker than ever. “I got to the office late this morning and just walked in. Is there… something I should know?”

There was a smattering of paper and the clicking of a pen, as if she’d caught Josh in the middle of something. “Well, actually,” he hemmed, as if deciding how best to break the news. “I got a better offer from Platinum Dunes.”

Despite already knowing all of the above, hearing the words hit Carly like a sucker punch. She sank into her leather chair, turning toward her desk and clicking the monitor off to avoid seeing Rahm’s beaming smile. “Is that so?”

“Carly, I know we’d been in discussions all week, but… their offer was incredible. Like, too good to pass up.”

“What about his plans for the company, Josh?” Carly huffed before thinking clearly. “What could Rahm offer you that I couldn’t.”

“Rahm?” Josh chuckled. “You… know Mr. Farzik?”

Intimately, Carly wanted to blurt, but kept her cool. “Who in South Beach doesn’t?” she said instead, recovering slightly from her earlier outburst. “I thought we were discussing logistics that would appeal to your Millennial demographic?”

“We were,” Josh confessed, his impatience growing. “But Rahm brought an even older, even larger audience to the table that you simply didn’t seem to understand.”

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…

“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.

“Well,” Rahm said, smirking as he sent his father a link through the video conferencing software they used, fresh from a company they owned. “I’d like you to take a look at this new company, TrackSmart. It keeps track of your map requests in order to personalize opt-in advertising specifically to your—”

Impatient, his father waved a hand, royal robes rustling slightly half a world away. Rahm hid a satisfied smile, knowing his father zoned out – and logged off – at the slightest mention of tech talk. “Fine, fine,” he huffed. “So where to next?”

“They’re out of Vegas,” Rahm said, suddenly listless about his plans to uproot from balmy, breezy South Beach for another sandy stretch of desert, no matter how glittery it might look at night. “So I’ll be closing up shop here within the week.”