Trusting A Sheikh (Playgrounds of Power 1) by Rosie Pike Page B

giggled. "Sometimes I forget that everyone's not just inside my head."
    "More's the pity…"
    Chloe blushed. "I was talking about the Royal Parks. They’re all over London, and it's so nice to see all that green space in the middle of the city. You can't see it now, because it's dark, but we're just above Green Park. It's the one that leads straight up to Buckingham Palace, you know."
    "I do," Tariq agreed.
    "You do?" Chloe replied, her turn to be confused.
    "I know it's the park that goes right up to the palace gates. I've been inside them."
    "You have ?" Chloe gasped with excitement. "Inside Buckingham Palace? How did you manage that?"
    "One of the many advantages of being a minor royalty," Tariq said with a grin. "The embassy usually gets a standing invitation to some of the Queen's garden parties every summer."
    "Get out of town," Chloe said, for the first time impressed by something about the Prince other than his good looks. "What's it like?"
    "Lovely. I wouldn't want to live there though…"
    "Why the hell not? It's a palace!" Chloe exclaimed in surprise.
    "It is," Tariq allowed. "But my father lives in a palace, and his is much nicer. Well, that's not entirely true – Buckingham Palace has beautiful architecture, and having those guards with a big bear skin on their heads is kind of cool, but it's a bit, well , antiquated inside."
    Chloe laughed. "You're all the same, you lot. If a place doesn't have air conditioning, then it's no good…"
    "Hey!" Tariq joked back with a contrived frown wrinkling his forehead. "You try living in the middle of the desert without AC!"
    "Oh my God!" Chloe half shouted.
    "What? Forgot to order the canapés?"
    "No." Chloe shot him a glare for that comment. "How did the meeting go earlier? Was I right?"
    Tariq immediately looked downwards, frowned and dragged his leather soled shoe along the luxuriously thick carpet. Chloe's stomach did a flip as she contemplated the consequences of her hasty decision to confide her observations about the way the CEO was behaving to Tariq. She should have kept her mouth shut.
    "I went back to the table," Tariq began slowly, "and did like you said – I just straight up asked him what the deal was with Charles." He paused.
    "And…" Chloe ventured, not really wanting to hear the answer.
    "And…" Tariq copied her, dragging out his answer. "And it turned out you were right!"
    It took Chloe a couple of seconds to process what Tariq had just said. She was right? Had he just said that?
    "What do you mean, I was right? What happened?" The questions tumbled out of Chloe in an unstoppable waterfall of relief, one that practically bowled over a smiling Tariq.
    He held up his hands to pause the flow of questions. "Whoa, hold up there," he said, grinning. "Give a man a chance to speak."
    "Sorry." Chloe glared, making it entirely clear that she wasn't sorry in the slightest. "But get on with it, would you?"
    "Feisty," Tariq commented, only to receive another harsh stare. "No, I'm kidding. You were completely right – it was all to do with Charles. Bodytech is running out of money, that's why Jack was so keen to get the business sold, so you were completely correct on that front."
    Chloe breathed a sigh of relief, believing finally that she'd made the right decision in telling Tariq what she'd thought. "Thank God."
    "Forget about him. Thank you!"
    "Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah – Bodytech is more or less out of cash, so they needed to sell. They spent way too much developing the technology, and even though it works, that's not enough – they need to get some money into the business or they won't be able to pay their staff next month."
    "So, why were they so reticent earlier on? You said I was right about Charles, but not how," Chloe asked, absorbed in the story.
    "Charles was worried that we were going to buy the business and shut it down."
    "What?" Chloe asked, befuddled. "Why would you do that?"
    "It makes sense from his point of view. Either way, he's going to