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* * *
Bram watched from beneath hooded lids as Ruby Dance picked up her glass and disappeared into Peter’s office.
Something about her bothered him and it wasn’t just that first shocking moment when he’d thought she was Safia. It was nothing that he could put his finger on. She was clearly good at her job if a little waspish. No doubt she was simply responding to his own mood; Jude Radcliffe, not a man to bestow praise lightly, had said that he was very lucky that she’d been free. Apparently she had a memory like an elephant, was cool-headed in a crisis and was as tight-lipped as a clam. She certainly hadn’t been fazed by his clumsy attempt to unsettle her, to get a feeling for the woman hiding behind that cool mask.
On the contrary, he felt as if he’d been in a fencing match and was lucky to have got away with a draw.
Only once he’d caught a momentary flash of irritation in those cool grey eyes. Such control was rare, a learned skill. That she’d taken the trouble to master it suggested that she had something to hide.
He thumbed her name into a search engine but all he came up with was a dance studio. That, too, was unusual. His curiosity aroused, he called up the security program he used when he ran an initial check on someone who was looking for financial backing. Again nothing.
No social media presence, no borrowing, not even a credit rating, which implied that she didn’t have a credit card. Or maybe not one in that name. It was definitely time to go and check what she was up to in Peter’s office.
He’d just swung his feet to the floor when his phone rang.
‘Bram?’
The voice was sleepy, a bit slurred, but unmistakable.
‘Peter...’ No point in asking how he was; he would be floating on the residue of anaesthesia. ‘I suppose you were trying to impress some leggy chalet maid?’
‘You’ve got me,’ he said, a soft chuckle abruptly shortened into an expletive as his ribs gave him a sharp reminder that it was no laughing matter. ‘Next time I’ll stay in bed and let her impress me.’
‘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.
