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‘Good decision. What’s the prognosis?’
‘Boredom, physio, boredom, physio. Repeat until done... What’s the Garland Girl like?’
‘Garland Girl?’
‘That’s what they were called before it became politically incorrect to call anyone over the age of ten a girl. She did turn up, didn’t she? I told Amanda that it was urgent. Tried to tell you but your phone was busy and then...’ He hesitated, clearly trying to remember what had happened next.
‘Don’t worry about it. She’s here and right now staring at your laptop wondering where you hid your password. I was on my way to rescue her when you rang.’
‘She won’t need you to rescue her,’ he said. ‘Garland temps are the keyboard queens, the crème de la crème of the business world. Her job is to rescue you. Ask m’father,’ he said. ‘M’mother was one...’ He coughed, swore again. ‘She sends her love, by the way.’
‘Please give her my best wishes. Is your father there?’ he asked.
‘He’s at the UN until next week. Why?’ he said, suddenly sharper. ‘Is there a problem?’ When he was too slow to deny it Peter said, ‘What’s happened?’
‘Well, the good news is that I have received an invitation to my father’s birthday majlis.’
‘And the bad news is that Ahmed Khadri will gut you the moment he sets eyes on you.’
‘Apparently not. Hamad phoned to warn me that my father has done a secret deal with Khadri. Safia hasn’t given my brother a son and they’re impatient for an heir with Khadri blood. The price of my return is marriage to Bibi Khadri, Safia’s youngest sister.’
Peter’s soft expletive said it all. ‘There’s more than one way to gut a man...’
‘He wins, whichever way I jump. If I go, he has more influence in court as well as the eye-watering dowry he will demand from me. If I stay away, my father will take it as a personal insult and any chance of a reconciliation will be lost. I doubt Khadri can make up his mind which outcome would please him most.’
‘Who knows about this?’
‘No one. Hamad only found out because Bibi managed to smuggle a note to her sister.’
He was not the only one to be horrified by such a match.
‘Okay... So if you turned up with a wife in tow—’
‘You’re rambling, Peter. Go to sleep.’
‘Not a real wife. A temp,’ he said. ‘And, by happy coincidence, you happen to have one handy... Ask the Garland Girl.’
* * *
Ruby put the phone down, turned to the laptop and began to go through Peter’s diary, printing off each entry for the following week. She had collected the sheets from the printer, sorted them and clipped them into a folder when a shadow across the door warned her that she was no longer alone.
‘I realised that you didn’t have the password to Peter’s laptop but I see that you’ve found it. Did he have it written down somewhere obvious?’ he asked.
She counted to three before she looked up. Bram Ansari was leaning against the doorjamb, arms folded, but there was an intense watchfulness in his eyes that belied the casual stance.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No, not obvious?’
‘No, he didn’t have it written down.’
‘And yet you are in. Should I be worried?’
Ruby was seriously tempted to leave it at that and let him wonder how she’d done it. She resisted. He’d taken his time about it but he had eventually turned up and playing mind games was not the way to build a working relationship. She took pride in the fact that when she had worked for someone she always got a call back.
‘I’m good, Bram, but I’m not that good. Peter asked his mother to text it to me.’
‘I was just talking to him. He didn’t mention it.’
‘Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he wanted to make me look amazingly efficient. How is he?’
‘High on the lingering remains of anaesthetic. Talking too much when he should be resting.’
‘Did you rest?’ she asked. ‘When you broke your ankle?’
His shoulders moved in the merest suggestion of a shrug. ‘Boredom is the mother of invention.’
His smile was little more than a tug on the corner of his mouth, deepening the droop, but it felt as if he had included her in a private joke and her own lips responded all by themselves. And not just her lips. Little pings of recognition lit up in parts of her body that had lain dormant, unused, not wanted in this life. Definitely not wanted here.
‘He rang to make sure that you’d arrived safely and to tell me how lucky I am to have you.’
‘What a nice man,’ she said. ‘I’ll send him a box of liquorice allsorts.’
‘It didn’t take you long to discover his weakness.’
‘One I confess that I share.’ He didn’t respond and, feeling rather foolish, she said, ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Hammond and passed on all the information she needed.’ He nodded. ‘It’s going to be weeks before Peter will be able to manage all these steps.’
‘He won’t be coming back.’ She frowned. ‘His father was Ambassador to Umm al Basr when Peter was a boy. He loves the desert and when he dropped out of university, didn’t know what to do with himself, I asked him if he wanted to come here and give me a hand. I’d given financial backing to a friend who wanted to go into commercial production with winter sports equipment—’
‘Maxim de Groote.’
‘Is that in your file too?’ he asked.
‘It’s all over the Internet.’
‘I don’t use social media.’ He shook his head, as if the interest of other people in his life bewildered him.
She wasn’t convinced. This was a man whose naked romp in a fountain, caught on someone’s phone, had gone viral on social media networks before the police arrived to arrest him.
‘When he publicly floated his company Maxim told a journalist that he owed everything to you,’ she said. ‘Did he?’
‘No, he owed it to his own vision and hard work.’
‘And the fact that you had the faith to invest in him.’
‘I knew him,’ he said, ‘but I was immediately inundated with would-be entrepreneurs looking for capital. Peter was going to stay for a few weeks and do the thanks-but-no-thanks replies while he thought about his future.’
‘But that didn’t happen.’
‘He would insist on reading the crazier ideas out loud and one of them caught my interest. The rest, as they say, is history.’ He shrugged as if his ability to pick winners was nothing. ‘Peter stayed because it suited him at the time.’ He gestured towards the photographs. ‘These days he spends more time out in the desert with his camera than at his desk.’
‘Peter is the photographer? He’s very talented.’
‘And it’s time he got serious about it. If I hadn’t been so busy I would have kicked him out a year ago. The fact that he had Amanda Garland’s number to hand suggests that he’d been working on an exit strategy of his own.’ He nodded at the folder she was holding. ‘What have you got there?’
She glanced at it. ‘It’s your detailed diary for tomorrow and a summary for the week. I wasn’t sure how Peter handled it. I usually print out a list.’
‘Run me through it,’ he said, finally leaving the doorway and crossing to her desk.
‘You have a conference call booked with Roger Pei in Hong Kong tomorrow morning and there’s a reminder that you should call Susan Graham in New York before Wall Street opens.’ She went through a list of other calls he was both expecting and planned to make. ‘The times and numbers are all there.’
‘And the rest of the week?’
‘You have video conferences booked every day this week, you’re flying to Dubai on Wednesday and there’s a charity dinner here in Ras al Kawi hosted by His Highness Sheikh Fayad and Princess Violet tomorrow evening.’
‘I can’t miss that,’ he said, taking the folder from her and checking the entry. ‘Have you got anything to wear?’
‘Wear?’
‘Something suitable for a formal dinner.’
She felt her carefully controlled air of calm—which hadn’t buckled under the suggestion that she might have to slaughter a goat—slip a notch. But then she hadn’t taken that threat seriously.
‘You want me to go with you?’ Meetings, conferences, receptions were all grist to her mill, but she’d never been asked to accompany any of the men she’d worked for to a black tie dinner. They had partners for that. Partners with designer wardrobes, accessories costing four figures, jewellery...
Perhaps sensing her reluctance, he looked up from the diary page. ‘It comes under the “whatever is necessary” brief. You were serious about that, Ruby?’ he asked, regarding her with a quiet intensity that sent a ripple of apprehension coursing through her veins.
‘Whatever is necessary within the parameters of legal, honest and decent,’ she said, hoping that the smile made it through to her face.
He handed back the diary. ‘Call Princess Violet’s office and ask her assistant to send you some dresses from her latest collection.’
‘I have a dress,’ she said quickly. Even the simplest of Princess Violet al Kuwani’s designer gowns would cost more than she earned in a month.
‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘It’s black.’
Black was practical and her capsule wardrobe had been created to cover all eventualities, although she hadn’t anticipated wearing anything so formal on this assignment.
‘A simple black dress will take you anywhere,’ she told him. ‘It’s the female equivalent of a dinner jacket.’
‘So it’s a boring black dress.’
‘I’ll be working, not flirting.’
‘I’m glad you understand that.’ He held her gaze for a moment then said, ‘There has been a development that will involve rescheduling some of those appointments, but first we will eat.’
No, no, no...
No socialising in the workplace. No getting into situations where people would ask where she came from, about her family, all the conversational gambits used to probe who you were and where you would fit into the social layers of their lives.
She didn’t do ‘social’.
‘Come,’ he said, extending a hand towards her, and for the first time since she’d arrived she saw not the A-list pin-up, the sportsman, the venture capitalist, but a man born to command, a prince. ‘Bring the diary with you.’
The diary. Right. It was a working dinner. Of course it was. He only wanted her with him to keep track of who he spoke to, the appointments he made. That she could handle and, fortifying herself with a steadying breath, she gathered her things and headed for the door and that outstretched hand.
She was sure he was going to place it at her back, maybe take her arm as they descended the worn, uneven steps. He waited until she passed him, closed the door behind them and, having held herself rigid, knowing that no matter how much she tried to relax she would still jump at his touch, she felt a weird jolt of disappointment when he simply paused beside her.
Disappointment was bad.
She looked up, anywhere but at him.
During the short time she had been working, every trace of light had left the sky. Above them stars were glittering diamond-bright in a clear black sky, but she was too strung up to look for the constellations; all her senses were focused on the man beside her. The warmth of his body so close to hers. The scent of the sea air clinging to his skin overlaid with the tiny flowers that had fallen on his shoulders as he brushed past a jasmine vine.
No...
The word clanged in her brain so loudly that when Bram glanced at her she thought he must have heard.
It wasn’t as if she even liked the man but it was pointless to pretend that she was immune to the magnetic quality that had once made him a Celebrity cover favourite.
Work, she reminded herself. She was here to work.
Concentrate on the job.
‘What’s your routine?’ she asked in her briskly efficient PA voice as he led the way down to a lower level, determined to blot out emergency signals from synapses that hadn’t been this excited in years.
‘Routine?’ He frowned, as if it was a word alien to his vocabulary.
‘What time are you normally at your desk? I imagine it’s earlier than London.’
‘Peter usually goes for a run or swim at first light, has breakfast and if he’s not chasing the light with his camera he deals with overnight emails.’ He glanced down at her. ‘Do you run, Ruby?’
‘Only for a bus.’ She’d hoped to raise a smile, lessen the tension, but there was no noticeable reaction.
‘Swim?’
She glanced across the tumble of walls, courtyards, to the dark water sucking at the foot of the fort. ‘Not in the sea.’
‘There is a pool.’ If he’d noticed her involuntary shiver, he made no comment. ‘There’s also a fully equipped gym if you prefer.’
‘No, thanks.’ She’d already seen him wet from the sea and she wasn’t about to risk walking in on him slicked with sweat. ‘I keep in shape by walking to work when I can, using the stairs instead of the lift and taking a weekly tap dancing class.’ He gave her another of those looks. Assessing, unnerving... ‘It’s cheaper than a gym membership and the shoes are prettier,’ she said quickly.
‘There’s no shortage of steps here.’ His smile, unexpected as the sun on a winter morning—he knew how to smile?—took her by surprise. For a moment her foot hung in mid-air and then, as she missed the step, she flung out her hands, grabbing for something—anything—to hang onto and found herself face first in Bram Ansari’s washed soft T-shirt, nestled against the hard-muscled shoulder it concealed. Drowning in the scent of sun-dried laundry and warm skin as he caught her, held her.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled in a rush of embarrassed heat, jerking back from the intimacy of the contact. ‘Apparently I can’t walk and talk at the same time.’
‘The steps are old, uneven.’ Her head might have made a bid to escape the mortifying closeness but the rest of her was pressed against hard thighs, a washboard-flat stomach, her breasts pinioned against the broad chest that she was picturing all too vividly. ‘Maybe you should stick to swimming while you’re here,’ he said, moving his hands to her shoulders and, still holding her steady, taking a step back. ‘If you didn’t bring a costume then send for one. You’ll be glad of it when the weather heats up.’
Forget the weather. Bram Ansari was creating all the heat she could handle.
‘It seems hardly worth it for a week.’
They had reached a point where the steps narrowed and he’d taken the lead so that when he stopped, turned, he was looking directly into her eyes.
‘And if I need more than a week?’
Ruby had been a temp for a long time and she knew that there were people you had to flatter, those you had to mother and those rare and wonderful individuals who just got on with it and required nothing from you except your ability to keep things running smoothly in a crisis. Then there were the ones you had face down, never showing the slightest hint of weakness, never showing by as much as the flicker of an eyelash what you were feeling.
It had been clear from the moment that she’d set eyes on him that Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ansari fitted the latter description. Ignoring the battalion of butterflies battering against her breastbone, she looked right back at him and said, ‘At this rate I’ll be surprised if I’m here for more than twenty-four hours.’
They continued to stare at one another for the longest ten seconds in her life and then he said, ‘Is that it or have you run out of smart answers?’
‘I wouldn’t count on it.’
This time his smile was no more than a tiny contraction of the lines fanning out from eyes that said nothing but it softened his face and had much the same effect on her knees.
‘No...’ For a moment he seemed lost for words. ‘Shall we eat?’
‘Good idea. With my mouth full I’ll be less likely to put my foot in it.’
His smile deepened and it was probably a good thing that he placed his hand beneath her elbow, keeping her safe as they continued down the steps. Probably. She wouldn’t fall, but her skin shimmered with the intimacy of his touch and she didn’t let out her breath until they stepped down onto a terrace from which wide steps led down to the beach and he finally let go.
A table had been laid with a white cloth, flowers, candles sheltered within glass globes, sleek modern silver cutlery. The only sound was the lulling ripple of the sea, the shushing of the sand moving as the tide began to recede.
The scene was seductively exotic, a long way from the usual end to her working day. Khal gave her a wide smile as he held out a chair for her then, when she was settled, he turned to Bram and asked him a question.
For a moment the conversation went back and forth until finally Bram said, ‘Antares.’
‘Ruby?’ Khal asked, turning to her and evidently expecting her to understand what he’d said.
‘Khal is asking if you wish to ride in the morning.’
‘Ride?’
The soft, fizzing intimacy of the moment shattered and in an instant she was in the past, hugging the fat little Shetland pony that had arrived on her fourth birthday, the feel of his thick, shaggy mane beneath her fingers, the smell of new leather.
‘Do you ride?’ Bram prompted when she took too long to answer.
Ruby forced a smile. ‘Not for years and, in view of what happened to Peter, I promised Amanda that I wouldn’t take part in any dangerous sports while I was here.’
‘Life is a dangerous sport, Ruby.’ He held her gaze for a moment, a questioning kink to his brow, but when she said nothing he turned back to Khal, said a few words in Arabic.
The man bowed, wished them both goodnight and left them to their supper.
‘Antares?’ she asked as she picked up her napkin and laid it on her lap, determined to keep the conversation impersonal. ‘You name your horses after the stars?’
‘Only the brightest ones. Antares, Rigel, Vega, Hadar, Altair, Adhara. They were my polo string.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have sold them when I left England. They’re getting fat and lazy.’
‘It’s hard. They become an extension of you,’ she said. ‘Part of the family.’ Her mother had wanted to sell her ponies as she grew out of them but she’d pleaded with her father and they had all stayed, eating their heads off and costing a fortune in vet’s bills.
His look was thoughtful—so much for keeping it impersonal—but a woman appeared with a tray and he said, ‘Ruby, this is Mina. She is an extraordinary cook but she only has a few words of English. Her husband, son and daughter-in-law take care of the fort for me.’
‘As-salaam alaykum, Mina.’
Mina responded with a rush of Arabic and a broad smile. ‘She’s very happy to meet you,’ Bram said, filling their glasses from a jug of juice. ‘You have some Arabic?’
‘I’ve worked in Bahrain and Dubai so I picked up a few words. Amanda assured me that you worked in English but I assumed all the staff would be Arabic speaking so I downloaded a basic course to my tablet. It was a long flight.’
‘The legend is true then.’
‘Legend?’
‘Peter suggested that to have a Garland Girl as a personal assistant or nanny is considered something of a status symbol.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘A newspaper did a profile on Amanda’s agency years ago and came up with that ghastly name. They made us sound like the office equivalent of the Playboy Bunny.’
His jaw tightened as he fought a grin.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘you can laugh. I’m twenty-seven. No one’s idea of a girl,’ she said. ‘Or a bunny.’
‘There is no right answer to that,’ he said, offering her a plate. ‘Have one of these.’
She took one of the hot, crispy little pastries without comment. It was filled with goat’s cheese and as she bit into it Ruby almost groaned with pleasure. They had to be about a million calories each, but she told herself that she’d work them off walking up and down all those steps.
‘You approve?’
‘They are scrumptious.’
‘That’s a word I haven’t heard in a while. If I had to make a guess, I’d say you went to one of those exclusive boarding schools where the British upper classes park their children.’
The kind of women whose social calendar would include afternoons at Smith’s Lawn watching as princes whacked a ball with a polo stick, and après-ski parties in Gstaad...
‘What is this? Tit for tat?’ she asked, with a smile to disguise the fact that she’d changed the subject. ‘I know how you like your coffee so you checked me out online?’
‘And if I had, Ruby Dance,’ he replied, his voice softer than a Dartmoor mist and twice as dangerous, that almost-smile a trap for the unwary, ‘what would I have found?’
Her skin prickled, her mouth dried.
He had...
Despite Jude’s reference, despite the fact that Peter Hammond was Amanda’s godson, he’d put her name into a search engine and knew exactly what he would find.
‘Not very much,’ she admitted.
‘Not very much suggests that there would be something,’ he pointed out, ‘but there was no social media, no credit history and no Ruby Dance who was born twenty-seven years ago.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘I could dig deeper and unearth your secrets, but why don’t you save me the bother and tell me who you really are?’
Protected by the reputation of the Garland Agency, her anonymity as a temp, this was the first time anyone had ever bothered to question Ruby’s bona fides and the air rang with the silence as she tried to marshal her thoughts.
She wasn’t fooled by the casual way he’d asked the question.
She’d been joking when she’d suggested that she’d last no more than twenty-four hours. Apparently the joke was on her because she wasn’t going to be able to brush this aside, laugh it off as an aversion to the rush to tell everyone what she had for breakfast, of sharing pictures of cute kittens, as an excuse for her low profile.
He’d already gone far deeper than social media, was certain that she had not been born Ruby Dance, and the less he found the more suspicious he would become.
She unstuck her tongue from the roof of her mouth and said, ‘I changed my name for family reasons.’
‘A clause in a will? Your mother remarried?’ he suggested.
She shook her head. He was dangling easy answers before her. Testing her. ‘There was a scandal involving my father. Newspaper headlines. Reporters digging around in dustbins and paying the neighbours for gossip.’
He raised an eyebrow, inviting her to continue.
‘Amanda Garland knows my history,’ she said, ‘and her reputation stands on trust.’
‘Trust her, trust you—is that the deal?’
Her throat was dry and the juice gleamed enticingly but she resisted the urge to grab for it, swallow a mouthful. ‘That’s the deal.’
‘And that’s why you continue to temp rather than accept a permanent job? For the anonymity?’
‘Yes...’ The word stuck like a lump of wood in her throat.
‘Where is your father now, Ruby?’
‘He’s dead. He and my mother died when I was seventeen.’
‘Do you have any other family?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I was the only child of only children.’ At least as far as she knew. Her father might have had a dozen children...
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