“Damn!” he growled. “Enough! This is going to end!”
He walked out of his office, determined to speak with his baby sister and find out why Joline was running away from him again. She had to know that they were perfect for each other.
Several hours later and a long flight home, he found both of his sisters walking down the hallway, their heads close together and whispering about something.
“Shantra, where is Joline?” he demanded.
Both sisters’ heads snapped up and Shantra glared at him. He recognized the outfit she was wearing and thought she looked very pretty. Joline had been wearing it one day as well. It made sense that his sister would support her best friend’s business and he highly approved. The designs really were ingenious, using the woman’s figure more as an art board. The designs were more flattering than anything he’d ever seen, even in Paris.
Both of his sisters crossed their arms and he gritted his teeth in frustration.
Shantra wasn’t going to be intimidated. “What did you say to Joline? Why is she hiding from you?”
Ciala covered her mouth, trying to hide her amusement. “He probably ignored her when she was talking.” Ciala looked up at her brother. “Did you ignore her?”
Rais gritted his teeth. “I didn’t ignore her.”
Shantra shook her head. “He ignored her.”
He glared down at his tiny, normally exuberant sister who looked abnormally calm at the moment. And abnormally stubborn. Since when had Shantra become stubborn?
“I didn’t ignore her!” he snapped at both of them. Unfortunately, they didn’t believe him.
Shantra stepped closer, poking him in the chest. “What did she say right before she stepped into the taxi?” she asked.
His eyes narrowed. “You’ve spoken to her,” he commented, zeroing in on her knowledge that Shantra knew that Joline had walked out on him in London by taking a taxi. “What did she tell you?”
Shantra wasn’t intimidated. Maybe when she was younger, she might have cowered when he looked like this, but not anymore. “I’ll tell you some of what she told me if you remember anything that she’d said to you in London. Or on the plane. Or before you left New York.”
Rais was getting angrier with each challenge. “Did Joline tell you what happened before we left New York?”
Shantra’s eyes widened but both women only shook their heads, laughing. “No, Joline didn’t say WHAT you were doing in New York. She only told me what you’d said and asked me how to handle you.”
“What did you tell her? And, just for the record, no one ‘handles me’, least of all my wife.”
Mia walked up at that moment with Raven right behind her, both women shaking their heads. “Oh, you are going to be handled,” Raven said as she and Mia stood shoulder to shoulder with Ciala and Shantra.
“There’s no other way to live with arrogant, know it all men,” Ciala explained. And then his mild-mannered, lovely sister grinned cheekily up at him.
Rais looked at his sister, stunned that she would say something like that. She was… “Why is your hand bandaged?” he demanded.
The smug expression on his sister’s face immediately disappeared and she hid her bandaged hand behind her back. “I just scraped myself in the stables yesterday,” she stammered out. “It’s nothing.” She glanced at Raven, smiling weakly. “The scrapes weren’t even bad enough to ask you for help.”
Ignoring Ciala for the moment, he turned to Mia and Raven. “Are you telling me that you both ‘handle’ my brothers? And be careful how you answer that, ladies. I interpret ‘handling’ to mean manipulating.”
Raven and Mia both laughed. “Of course we manipulate our husbands!” they explained. “How else are we supposed to survive without being smothered by men with personalities like Turk and Ramzi?” Mia explained.
Ciala was trying very hard not to laugh. “And I’m taking notes every time it happens. For the future, you know. I’m pretty sure that…”
“This is ridiculous!” Rais snapped.
Shantra linked her arm through his while Mia took his other arm. They started walking down the hallway towards the dining room with Ciala and Raven on either side. “Okay, deal still stands,” his baby sister said. “If you can tell me what she said, why she’s hiding from you, then I will tell you what you need to know.”
Rais felt cornered. And surrounded! He thought back to that morning several days ago, trying to remember. “She said something about not having her purse.”
“And?” Ciala prompted.