The Sheikh's Convenient Princess

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‘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...