The Prince’s Forbidden Lover(3)

She couldn’t lose this friendship! Jo and Keith were both too important in her life! Well, and her business, but these two were special. They both made her feel…normal. She loved feeling normal. Not to mention, without Jo and Keith, she never would have had the courage to…

“Are they really that unreliable?” Rais commented as he breezed past her patrol area on his way to Ramzi’s office. He stopped and looked down into her worried, brown eyes, trying to understand why she was so nervous. He wasn’t the type of man who ever cared about another person’s opinion. He simply bulldozed over anyone that didn’t like him. He just didn’t care. He was too involved in the next business transaction, or the next acquisition that would add to the already impossibly huge portfolio of companies that he owned and directed. Where other men might think of themselves as lions in the business world, Rais was the dragon that breathed fire and gobbled up anything in his path.

“Go away!” Shantra tried to wave him on, not wanting him to be around when her friends arrived. It was bad enough that they had to enter through this area which was intimidating. Unfortunately, Turk had required it for security reasons. This area was the best equipped to speed her friends through the security checks. Shantra scoffed at Turk’s worry that her friends could be a threat. As if Jo and Keith would ever harm her or anyone she cared for! How preposterous was that?!

She tried to push Rais further down the hallway in her efforts to get him away from the entrance. “Go away!” she repeated, this time with more urgency. “It took me years to get my friends to visit me here at the palace. I don’t want you to be the first person they meet.”

Rais had been intent on his mission but, with her words, he stopped and turned to face his sister. “Oh really? Why is that? Am I so unworthy?” He stuffed the documents under his arm and crossed them over his chest. “And why is it that they haven’t visited before?”

Shantra shook her head, frustrated that he wouldn’t just go away. Unfortunately, she knew that she’d done this to herself. If she’d just kept her mouth shut, Rais would already have disappeared. He wasn’t one to linger unless he wanted to annoy her. Like now. “They’ve just been extremely busy. They get to work, hold down jobs,” she told him resentfully, her soft, brown eyes looking up to his as if challenging him. Unfortunately, she couldn’t maintain the look, afraid he might see into her soul and discover all of her secrets, which were too many to name, and she definitely didn’t want Rais to know what was going on in her private apartment. He absolutely wouldn’t approve!

A part of her worried about her brothers’ reactions to her business enterprise while another part of her didn’t care. This was her baby, she thought with pride as she glared up at her annoying older brother. This was her private enterprise, her secret joy. Yes, they had the power to stop her, but she had grown to enjoy the secret, the personal excitement of keeping something from them!

Just thinking about her secrets, a smile unknowingly formed on her lips and her shoulders swayed back and forth, almost as if she were daring her brother to discover what she did during her days.

Rais saw the smile and almost reached out to tweak her nose, just as he’d done when she was smaller. But he stopped himself, remembering that she wanted to impress her friends. Pulling back, he drew in an impatient breath. How many times were they going to have this argument? “You don’t need to work,” he told her firmly and with exasperation. “You have an allowance and, if you need more money, just ask me for it.”

Shantra had heard it all before. “How would you feel if you didn’t have the challenge of your work?”

Rais shrugged. “I don’t consider my job work. I enjoy my challenges.”

Shantra’s eyes widened and she lifted her hands, palms up as if to offer his explanation right back to him. “You work eighteen hours a day and I’ve read about how you crush any sort of business competition. How can you tell me that it isn’t work?”

He shook his head. “I enjoy business. It stimulates my mind.”

She looked up at him, wishing he could understand. “And you think I wouldn’t enjoy the same kind of mental stimulation?”

Rais looked down at his pretty sister. She wore a different outfit every day of her life and he rarely saw her without a sketch pad in her hands, drawing away at whatever it was she drew. “I think it’s time that Ramzi found you a husband,” he commented a moment before he walked away.

Shantra wanted to scream at him but restrained herself, not wanting to give in to the temper that was always just underneath the surface whenever she dealt with her brothers. “Chauvinistic pig,” she grumbled after him.