Total pages in book: 230
Estimated words: 217798 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1089(@200wpm)___ 871(@250wpm)___ 726(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 217798 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1089(@200wpm)___ 871(@250wpm)___ 726(@300wpm)
It was silly, but she suspected the queen mother was going all out with this wedding. “I suspect the practice was created by fish merchants. One of our main industries is fishing, but we have a problem with bycatch. These are the unwanted fish that are caught by our commercial fishermen. Several of our local fish are quite horrible to eat, but legend has it those fish are imbued with the potency of our ancient sea god, so they’re prized for wedding and fertility rituals. Not only will Kashmir have his friends beat him with the fish, he’ll have to eat a good portion of one raw in order to ensure our wedding night is productive. And since we haven’t yet agreed to have relations on our wedding night, I fear it will be for nothing.”
“You’re not sleeping with Kash?” Chelsea Weston sat on the bench to Day’s left. “I would love to have seen the look on his face when you told him. That man thinks he’s God’s gift to women. Not that I don’t like Kash. He’s fun to be around, but he does think a whole lot of that face of his.”
Did he? Day wondered about that. “I think a lot of it is armor. I knew Kash before he became the king. In some ways he did everything he did to differentiate himself from his older brother. He became the playboy because Shray was so serious. But you have to understand that playboy prince was studying theoretical physics at Oxford when I met him, and he didn’t get in because of his name. Kash is incredibly smart.”
“Oh, I know that,” Phoebe replied. “When Jesse first met him, he was close to a working prototype of a car that ran on water.”
Day had been grateful for the company when she’d been told Chelsea and Phoebe would accompany her. Normally this day would be spent with Day’s sisters and her female in-laws-to-be. She had some cousins, but they had mostly moved to Europe or the States. She’d been unable to see herself spending this time with the little mice who worked with her at the department. They were sweet women, but her two assistants were mostly biding their time until they could find husbands. She liked these two women. They were smart and strong of opinion.
It was interesting that she also thought they would be quite submissive when it came to sex. But then she had started to wonder the same thing about Kashmir.
“I’d heard a rumor that the explosion in the Arabian Sea wasn’t an accident.” She hadn’t talked to him about it the night before. They’d sat together and drank and talked about their old friends. She hadn’t wanted to bring up anything that might make him sad or angry. He’d been in a good place, and she’d been the one to take him there. She wasn’t one to undo her own work.
How would he feel if he knew she was looking at him as if he was a potential sub to top?
Chelsea shook her head. “Not an accident at all. It was all the work of a group of major douchebags known as The Collective.”
Phoebe stared at her friend. “You are the worst CIA employee in the world. You know that’s probably classified.”
Chelsea shrugged. “It’s also good gossip, and I don’t work for them anymore. Right now, I’m a happy housewife. Well, a housewife who works ten hours a day writing code for the new business. And let me tell you, dealing with Adam is not a picnic. He thinks he’s way smarter than he is. Satan’s right about him.”
Chelsea talked a lot about Satan. Day was fairly certain it was an oddly affectionate nickname for someone, and not that Chelsea had a weird religious bent. Still, she wanted to shift the flow of conversation back to the important stuff. “Why would this Collective come after Kashmir?”
Phoebe and Chelsea seemed to have an entire conversation through frowns and the narrowing of eyes.
Finally, Phoebe gave in. “Fine. It is good gossip and I don’t work for the Agency anymore either. Also, you’re about to become like the head of the country and stuff, so I think you could probably find this out on your own. The Collective was a group of the world’s biggest companies and they basically Star Chambered the rest of the world. They helped each other out, you know. Some business needed to sell their firearms, so The Collective helped out by starting a civil war somewhere. They manipulated stock prices, practiced all the worst things humanity can do. Kash’s experiments would have cost the oil industry everything, so they sent an agent to blow the lab up.”
“They were also supposed to kill Kash,” Chelsea explained. “But my Simon jumped off a cliff and saved him.”