Karim shook his head. What was he thinking? Kim was Amare’s tutor. Furthermore, she was a western woman. He started wondering why he was even allowing her to help him. He was fully capable of sorting everything out by himself.
“Actually, I can take it from here,” he blurted out as she looked up at him in surprise. Her lips were slightly parted and her eyes were shining brightly. He knew that he was curt but he was not bothered.
“It’s okay, I do not mind helping,” she said.
Why was she always wanting to help him? Karim asked himself. She strolled into his office in her nightclothes the night before and offered her help. He couldn’t figure out why she had offered. It was not as if he did not have things under control. He was perfectly fine doing things himself, his way, as he had always done.
“It is fine. You may leave,” he dismissed her as she looked at him with her jaw hung open.
“You just asked me for help and now you are dismissing me?” She put the pen down and shook her head. “Unbelievable.”
Standing up, Kim walked around his desk and stalked toward the door. Karim could not understand what was so unbelievable about that.
Just as Kim was walking out the door, she tripped on her own foot. She stumbled forward slightly but quickly righted herself and kept walking. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. That was not the first time he had seen her tripping over her own feet and he found that it amused him.
Karim chastised himself for looking at her so lustfully. She was not his type. And while it was clear that she wanted him, he didn’t want anything to do with her. He could remember her watching him while he was working out and felt his body grow warm at her interest. Shaking himself, even if she wanted him to, he was not going to take her. Because of her, Amare was doing better than he ever had before. She was needed as his brother’s tutor. Complications from an amorous female that he paid too much attention to, he did not need.
Women always seemed to have more feelings for him than he did for them and the word love would often come up, which had Karim ending the relationship often before it started. He could never understand what it was with women and love. This “love” did not exist. It was nothing more than an infatuation. Women always confused hormones with emotions, he thought.
No doubt, Kim was one of these people. Western women were the worst when it came to this “love” thing. They were always looking for their so-called Prince Charming and he had no interest in being that man.
Karim sighed and returned to his work. It was not going to do itself. He wanted to make a good impression on their shareholders and in order to do so; he needed to understand his father’s ledger. Something he could do without Kim’s help. He just had to convert the documents over to modern spreadsheets.
Brought up by a father who ruled with an iron fist, Karim was taught that the only way to get things done was to do it yourself and to depend on a woman for assistance was tantamount to disaster. Their mother had died when Amare was only a few months old and the brothers were raised by a man who blamed their mother for dying and leaving them.
Unable to accept the loss of his wife to cancer, Saeed Sharqi raised his sons not to depend on women because they would only leave you in the end. Love, like all other emotions, was for those who didn’t have businesses to run and money to make.
At twenty-five, Karim had embraced many of his father’s traditional ways, but as he stared at his archaic accounting sheets, not for the first time did he question some of his father’s beliefs.
Looking at the notes Kim had made, he knew that it would go much faster with her help, but he was certain that if he asked for it now, she would make him beg out of some sort of need for self-satisfaction. While he still didn’t understand her motives, he knew that they couldn’t be altruistic.
Chapter Eight
It was late afternoon and Kim and Amare had finished early for the day. He had been worried about his English exam and since he did so well, Kim decided to give him the rest of the day off and he had left to hang out with his friends.
After watching Zara pointedly ignore her, she decided that she wanted to get out of the house. Slipping into a sundress and her flats, she grabbed her hat and her books and went downstairs to find the driver to take her over to the orphanage. Unfortunately, he had decided to remain near Amare and would not be back for several hours. Sighing, Kim contemplated walking, but determined that it was much too hot to attempt that distance in this weather.
Hearing an engine, she looked up to see Karim driving around the corner toward the driveway. Waving to him, she realized that he was intentionally ignoring her, so she stepped in front of his car, forcing him to stop. Pasting a smile on her face, she ran around to the passenger side of his roadster, opened the door and jumped in.