Sheikh's Ex-Girlfriend (Khayyam Sheikh Series #1) Read Online Free PDF

friend.”
    The teasing words made Nasim scowl, straightening the papers in front of him and glare at Marid.
    Arana and Khayyam were partners in most things, and their interests in the east had run aground at precisely the same spot. Now they were meeting to figure out how best to deal with those problems, but if Nasim was being perfectly honest, his mind was not on Asia at all.
    Instead, it and his heart were persisting in winding their way down to the Old Quarter, where he knew a slender blonde girl with hair like a bright dandelion was working on her manuscripts. He had spent innumerable afternoons with her when they were together in New York watching her edit. He had seen the way she concentrated, the way she focused her whole being on the stories in front of her. There was something so compelling about the way that she could lose herself in those stories. It was as if she went wandering in different worlds, only to come back to his side when he touched her hand or kissed her neck.
    “I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about,” he growled.
    Still, instead of going back to his work, he got up to stalk over to the large window. When they worked, they often ended up in his building downtown, where he could look down on the rest of the city. Dalal was home to hundreds of thousands of people, but in all of that mass of humanity, there was only one person who could occupy his thoughts.
    Marid laughed quietly. In the glass, he could see the reflection of his friend's mirth. Still, there was a note of care when Marid spoke next.
    “You are fooling yourself, my friend, if you think that you are not thinking of her. Lie to me if you wish, but lying to yourself is only going to exhaust you and make you angry.”
    Nasim opened his mouth to protest, but then it felt as if all of the air had been drained out of him.
    “I don't know what to do,” he said finally. “She seems to think we are friends.”
    “Are you?” asked Marid shrewdly.
    Nasim shot him a dark look. “I'm friends with you. I'm friends with the man who sells good doner kebabs on the corner. I do not think about doing the things that I want to do with Ella with the two of you.”
    “That is certainly fair. Well, now, love-lorn friend of mine, what exactly are you going to do?”
    Nasim could have have snarled at Marid. “What do you think I can do?” he demanded. “She has made her position perfectly clear, and even if she had not … five years ago, I failed her. Do you even understand what that is like? She needed me to be a better man than I am, and I failed. How can she look at me and see anything else?”
    “Was,” Marid said succinctly.
    “What?”
    “You needed to be a better man than you were five years ago. Now, I have to say that you are the better man that you needed to be back then. People change, my friend. If she will forgive you, if you can meet on new ground, perhaps there is more hope than you thought there was.”
    Nasim told himself that he shouldn't respond to the stirring of hope in his chest. He told himself that there was no way that Ella would forgive the things that had happened between them. However, in light of what Marid was saying, and from the way that she had kissed him last night, his doubts were shrinking, shriveling in the heat of possibilities.
    “I'm right,” Marid continued. “Don't be the man you were five years ago. You are someone else now. Be the man that you must be, and let her be who she is.”
    Nasim didn't respond, and Marid let the subject go. However, even as they went back to the trade agreements, Nasim could feel something inside him shift and change. He wasn't the man he had been five years ago. He had wanted her fiercely, but now his need for her was like a flame.
    Now that he had spent time with her, all he could think about was who she was, how she deserved to be protected.
    That day, he made a decision, and so he began to plan.
    ***
     “A masked party?”
    Ella blinked, and her assistant