ROMANCE: THE SHEIKH'S GAMES: A Sheikh Romance (117 page)

It was lunchtime, now: the halls suddenly flooded with staffers, all of them, it seemed yapping on their phones, or texting furiously. Most of them, she divined, were placing lunch orders for the their offices: meatball sandwiches, diet cokes, that sort of thing.

She eschewed the crowded elevator and took the stairs. She wasn’t the only one—the stairwell was full of the echoes of tapping shoes and clicking heels, and when she reached the ground floor she glanced behind her to check how far the person behind her was—

And walked right into Malcolm Raines—who’d been carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees—and they were both summarily covered with coffee. He wore his hair longer than it had been in the press release pictures that she’d seen, but she’d know those soulful brown eyes and patrician nose anywhere.

She blanched, as Bill’s statistics about Malcolm Raines rushed back to her: he’d made his first billion in tech before he was eighteen, his next billion coding and designing AI systems for Amazon. As far as oil billionaires went, he was far from the worst—his companies did go through extra measures to minimize their impact, but there was no getting around the fact that deep-core drilling was incredibly destructive and the machinery needed had to be moved through once-pristine wilderness. And, like all oil billionaires, he had Congress eating out of his hand. The suit he was wearing was probably worth more than her life. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him—sure, he gave away a lot of his fortune to good causes, but he still made money by the bucketful doing serious damage to the environment.

“Well, my dry cleaner will earn every cent of her thirty dollars this time,” he said mildly, pulling her over to the side so that they wouldn’t get run over by the masses that were milling around them. Nobody was even looking at them—coffee must be spilled all the time in these halls. He dabbed at the spots with a napkin, but then he shrugged out of the jacket

“I’m so sorry,” she finally managed.

“No, it’s my fault. I’d probably have spilled it on myself anyway, taking the stairs. I’m such a klutz.”

“You?” She couldn’t help cracking a smile. “I don’t believe it. What are you doing, anyway, getting the coffee? Aren’t you a billionaire or something?”

“Believe it or not I don’t have much staff, and I only travel with my personal assistant,” he said, “though I might change that in the future if I’m planning on making any more coffee runs.”

“Let me get it,” she said. She could afford an extra dry-cleaning bill, and it was at least as much her fault as it was his.

“I couldn’t,” he said, brushing aside her offer. “It’s just a suit, and it’s just coffee. It’s not the end of the world, and odds are I’d have spilled it on myself anyway. So, you know me?”

“I’ve heard a lot about the companies you control, Mr. Raines,” she said modestly. “I wouldn’t say that I know you. I don’t think anybody can.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

Yes, you idiot, what was that supposed to mean?
She did the only thing that made sense: she shrugged and said, “Just that someone with your means must find it very hard to meet someone who’s really into you and not your money.”

“Are you offering?” he asked, smiling playfully.

Oh shit, he thinks I’m flirting!

Well, you kind of were
.

“Mr. Raines, I’m here as a lobbyist on behalf of the groups trying to shut you down.”

“All the more reason to ask you to dinner, then,” he said.

“I’m not for sale,” she said, “unlike the Congressmen you’re probably bribing.”

“Oh, I’m not here to bribe them,” he said. “I’m helping them to refine their solar policy.”

She stopped, taken aback by this glib admission of his. “You’re—you’re here to help sustainability?”

He sighed and smiled, as if he’d given this lecture a thousand times before. “I’m not an idiot,” he said. “It takes hundreds of millions years to make one barrel of oil that we burn just to get from here to there. Eventually we’re going to run out, or else it’ll cost too much to tap. Solar is getting cheaper, better—it’s just a question of math.”

She frowned, puzzled. “So you don’t really care if the world burns and goes to hell?”

“The world doesn’t care if I burn,” he said. “Why should I care if the world does?”

“Because—because it’s the right thing to do!” she sputtered.

They’d been heading up the stairs, to his meeting, and now she opened the door for him. One accident a day was enough for her.

“That’s the problem with you tree-hugger types,” he said. “Yeah, doing the right thing may be the right thing, but if you want people to do them nothing beats self-interest. Watch and learn.”

He walked into a Senator’s office. “Hello, Senator Cardine, sorry for the delay. I uh, ran into one of my assistants—literally it turns out, as you can see.” Senator Joseph Cardine let out a snort of laughter. He was a round, jolly-looking man, a sort of beardless Santa Claus figure, except that he wore a suit and was one of the most reactionary figures in Congress. Jane felt her stomach curdle—Cardine wasn’t one of the senators on her list of might-be-persuadeds. If anything he was one of the ones that Bill had written off as a waste of time. “Some people believe in God more than reality,” was how Bill had put it. But here, in his office, he seemed almost friendly.

“Anyway, did you have a chance to look over the plans that I’m running through Nebraska?” Malcolm continued.

“They were impressive,” the senator said. “But I’m not sure what they have to do with security.”

Malcolm stepped around behind the senator and flashed Jane a quick wink. “Here, let me show you,” he said, taking a roll out of his briefcase. “This is the power grid for the United States.”

“If this is going to be a lecture about infrastructure—”

“It’s not about infrastructure, sir, it’s about bypassing the need for infrastructure. Imagine: solar panels on every house, every shed, every roof, feeding a distributed network of batteries. Each house would be its own node—and each node could bleed a few kilowatts into a nationwide network.”

“You’re talking about production on the scale of millions,” said the Senator. “That would be—”

“It is a lot work, to say nothing of maintenance and battery facilities—oh, I didn’t mention that? Well, let me be frank, sir—the main problem with solar is that it generates most of its energy during the day, but people need energy most at night—that’s when they clean, that’s when most of them cook, that’s when they’re out buying groceries—imagine a method of storing that solar energy so that people can use it whenever and wherever they need it.”

The Senator frowned. Jane could see him mulling over the proposal, probably debating whether it was worth pissing off the coalition from the people building the Matrix.

Malcolm continued, “The point is, Senator, no matter how you hang onto it, oil is dying. Any idiot who can do the math can figure that out. The only question is, do you want to be caught short when it does?”

Jane could hear Malcolm’s tone shift. Suddenly it was no longer wheedling—now it had become an overt threat. “Solar is coming, Senator, whether you want it or not. The only thing that matters in the end, of course, is who profits from it—the US, or China?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Solar panels are the hottest industry in China at the moment,” said Malcolm. “The government there is offering massive tax breaks for manufacturing, and R&D—but I’m a patriot, or too lazy to learn Chinese, which amounts to the same thing. I need your backing to make it worthwhile to stay in the US.”

“What sort of backing are you talking about?” asked the Senator, his voice gruff, but Jane could tell who’d lost the conversation.

“I thought you’d never ask.”

***

It had been a dazzling two hours, but Malcolm was an expert at seeing the objections that Senator Cardine would raise, seemingly ten questions before he opened his mouth to ask them. He played the senator like a fiddle, knowing when to cajole, when to present facts, when to make threats, and when to let him have his say. It’d been a thing of beauty, watching the senator who’d started the meeting adamantly opposed to anything to do with solar ending with a promise to make their case before the vote that week. Jane had sat through various meetings in her time at Rigel, but she’d never seen such virtuosity at converting someone who was so thoroughly opposed to solar into such a powerful ally.

She was telling him so as they were leaving the Capital building when he turned to her and said, “Do me a favor?”

He’s going to ask me for a date
.

“Anything,” she said, swallowing her breathlessness awkwardly.
Come on, get it together, Jane—not every guy wants to be your boyfriend.

“Don’t tell anybody about this meeting.”

“What? But you’ve just converted our biggest opponent to our cause! Why should I keep it a secret?”

He looked around. Suddenly his demeanor changed, going from friendly adversary to downright hostile in a flash. “Come with me,” he hissed. “They’re watching me. Say something to me. Something mean.”

Who’s watching?
But she spat out, “People like you are the reason that nobody thinks ahead! They think you’ll always be there and that you’re working for their interests but you can’t fool me—”

And then he was all smiles again. “Okay,” she said. “What the hell was that?”

He shook his head. “Come with me dinner and I’ll explain everything,” he said.

“That’s a rather involved way to ask a woman out to dinner,” she said.

“That’s the only way to be involved with me,” he said, hailing a cab. “Come with me—I have standing reservations at this marvelous little place in Alexandria.”

Thirty minutes later she was stepping out of a cab and into a little restaurant called “Alexandria”. It was a rather unpretentious, almost working-class place, and when he saw her looking at him he laughed and said, “Don’t be fooled by the outside, the food is great.”

The maitre’d knew Malcolm on sight, for he made a little bow to Malcolm and said, “Mr. Raines, so nice to have you back with us.”

“Roger, this is Jane,” said Malcolm. “She’ll be joining me, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“It’s never too much trouble, sir,” he said. “Right this way, sir.”

She followed the maitre’d. The restaurant seemed bigger on the inside than it’d looked on the outside, and while the tables were made up simply and the decor was plain, when she sat down she realized that the glassware was cut crystal and the tableware was, if not actual silver, a cut above her stainless-steel set from Ikea. The napkins were linen, the tablecloths the same—and apparently hand-embroidered with the restaurant’s logo.

Malcolm was watching her as she took everything in, and his smile widened when he saw that she realized what fine quality everything was. “I knew you’d be able to appreciate this,” he said, as he opened the wine list.

“This is really too much,” she said, smiling nervously. “I’m not even—”

“Jacques,” he called, beckoning over the waiter.

“How are you today, sir?” asked Jacques.

“Is Brandon doing a tasting menu today?”

“He is,” answered the waiter. “Do you—”

“We’ll do the tasting menu. Tell Norman to come and pour when he’s ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

She stared at him throughout the entire exchange. For any other man, it would have been a turn-off, but Malcolm seemed to walk the edge between rude and respectful that left her feeling confused—and, she had to admit to herself, a little turned on. “You know the staff really well,” she remarked.

He shrugged. “I’ve been coming here for ages. I didn’t want them to bother us while we’re eating.I did promise you a story of some kind, didn’t I?”

“Well,” she said. “It’s not every man that asks me to yell mean things at him after he’s helped our group’s cause.”

The sommelier came out, bearing a bottle cradled in a white towel. Malcolm nodded through the formalities involved in opening the bottle, smelling the cork, and tasting the wine, before agreeing to have the bottle served. “I have no idea what we’re ordering,” he said to Norman.

“Well, then, I hope you’ll agree with me that the wine pairs well with the food,” Norman said, as he poured out a glass for her. He left the bottle at the table, saying, “Do tell me, madame, if he is being a terrible boor. I cannot do anything about the food, but the company can be changed.”

She nodded, a
what the hell was that about
smile plastered on her face. She was sure he was joking, but she had no idea how seriously to take it. She hadn’t even known that places like this were capable of making those kinds of jokes.

“Norman is actually an old college buddy,” said Malcolm, reading her confusion. “I gave him a loan to start this place with his friend, and, well, he’s right—I can be a boor.”

“I’m sure he exaggerates,” she said.

“You’re very sweet to think so,” he replied. “But the world of business and power is a lot more cutthroat and cloak-and-dagger than you might realize.”

“I work in finance,” she said. “I know all about cutthroat.”

He seemed taken aback by that. “Well, well—someone in finance who cares about the environment—that’s something new.”

“It’s not as novel as you think,” she said. “If you knew the profiles of the other clients at Rigel—”

“You work at—wait, I knew you looked familiar—you’re Reid’s girlfriend, aren’t you?”

“Ex,” she corrected.

“Ex,” he said, intrigued. “Now I have to confess—this does pique my curiosity. Let me guess, you broke up with him and now you’re hoping that I’ll ditch Reid as my finance advisor—”

“Tell me what’s going on,” she said, before he could get any closer to the truth of the matter. What that truth was, exactly, she wasn’t quite sure of, now that Malcolm had shown that he was an ally, of sorts. He looked somewhat disappointed that she was changing the subject. She still hadn’t sorted out her feelings about Reid or any of that, and now, sitting across from Malcolm, his dark eyes piercing into her soul, reading her like an open book, she began to realize that maybe she should have resolved this issues before coming to Washington. Then again, there’d been no reason to think that she’d ever run into Malcolm Raines, much less be seated across from him in a swanky restaurant. She did the only thing she could at that point: rally and banter, “Or else I’ll take Norman up on his offer for better company.”