When he made his complaint.
She wasn’t even going to last out the day. Sadie would kill her. Sadie had every right…
‘Your office might,’ he said, ‘but I don’t.’
Busted. This was a man who left nothing to chance.
‘Metcalfe, sir.’
‘Metcalfe.’ He looked as if he might have something to say about that, but must have thought better of it because he let it go. ‘Well, Metcalfe, shall we make a move? Time is short and now we’re going to have to make a detour unless the birthday girl is to be disappointed.’
‘Birthday girl?’
Didn’t he know that it was seriously unPC to refer to a woman as a ‘girl’ these days?
‘Princess Ameerah, my cousin’s daughter, is ten years old today. Her heart’s desire, apparently, is for a glass snow globe. I promised her she would have one.’
‘Oh.’ A little girl…Then, forgetting that she was supposed to only speak when she was spoken to, ‘They are lovely. I’ve still got one that I was given when I was…’
She stopped. Why on earth would he care?
‘When you were?’
‘Um, six.’
‘I see.’ He looked at her as if trying to imagine her as a child. Apparently failing, he said, ‘This one was old too. An antique, in fact. Venetian glass.’
‘For a ten-year-old?’ The words were out before she could stop them. On the point of stepping into the car, he paused and frowned. ‘I mean, glass. Was that wise?’ She had the feeling that no one had ever questioned his judgement before and, trying to salvage something, she said, ‘Mine is made from some sort of polymer resin.’ It had come from a stall at the local market. ‘Not precious…’ except to her ‘…but it would have, um, bounced.’
Shut up now!
Her shoulders lifted in the smallest of shrugs, disassociating the rest of her from her mouth.
‘Since it’s for a child, maybe something less, um, fragile might be more sensible. Glass is a bit, well…’
Her mouth finally got the message and stopped moving.
‘Fragile?’ Sheikh Zahir, still not smiling, finished the sentence for her.
‘I’m sure the one you bought was very beautiful,’ she said quickly, not wanting him to think she was criticising. She was in enough trouble already. ‘But I’m guessing you don’t have children of your own.’
‘Or I’d know better?’
‘Mmm,’ she said through closed lips. ‘I mean, it would have to be kept out of reach, wouldn’t it?’ She attempted a smile to soften the message. ‘It is…was…a treasure, rather than a toy.’
‘I see.’
He might be dressed in the most casual clothes, but there was nothing casual about his expression. He was still frowning, although not in a bad way, more as if he was catching up with reality.
Face aching with the effort of maintaining the smile, Diana ploughed desperately on. ‘No doubt princesses are less clumsy than ordinary little girls.’
‘Not,’ he said, taking her breath away for the second time as he finally responded to her smile with a wry contraction of the lines fanning out from his charcoal eyes, ‘in my experience.’ Nowhere near a slay-’em-in-the-aisles smile, but a heart-stopper none-the-less. At least if her heart was anything to go by. ‘You’re not just a pretty face, are you, Metcalfe?’
‘Um…’
‘So, how much would it take to part you from this hardwearing toy?’
She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have it now.’
His brows rose slightly.
‘It didn’t break,’ she assured him. ‘I gave it to…’
Tell him.
Tell him you gave it to your five-year-old son.
It was what people did-talk incessantly about their kids. Their cute ways. The clever things they did.
Everyone except Miss Motormouth herself; how ironic was that?
She’d talk about anything except Freddy. Because when she talked about her little boy she knew, just knew, that all the listener really wanted to know was the one thing she’d never told a living soul.
Sheikh Zahir was waiting. ‘I gave it to a little boy who fell in love with it.’
‘Don’t look so tragic, Metcalfe, I wasn’t serious,’ he said, his smile deepening as he mistook her reluctance to speak for an apology. ‘Let’s go shopping.’
‘Y-yes, sir.’ Then, with a glance towards the terminal building, ‘Don’t you want to wait for your luggage?’
She’d assumed that some minion, left to unload it, would appear at any moment with a laden trolley but, without looking back as he finally stepped into the car, Sheikh Zahir said, ‘It will be dealt with.’
Sadie was right, she thought. This was another world. She closed the door, stowed the remains of the precious glass object out of harm’s way and took a deep breath before she slid behind the wheel and started the engine.
Shopping. With a sheikh.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
All James’s careful planning-every second accounted for-brought to naught in an instant of distraction.
But what a distraction…
Zahir had walked through the arrivals hall expecting the efficient and monosyllabic Jack Lumley to be waiting for him. Instead he’d got ‘Metcalfe’. A woman whose curves were only emphasized by the severe cut of her jacket. A woman with a long slender neck, against which soft tendrils of chestnut hair were, even now, gradually unfurling.
And a mouth made for trouble.
The kind of distraction he didn’t have time for on this trip.
No complaints. He loved the excitement, the buzz of making things happen, didn’t begrudge a single one of the long hours it had taken to turn a small, going-nowhere company running tours into the desert into a billion dollar business.
He’d single-handedly taken tourism in Ramal Hamrah out of the stopover business-little more than a place for long-haul passengers to break their journey to shop for gold in the souk, take a sand dune safari-into a real industry. His country was now regularly featured in travel magazines, weekend newspaper supplements-a destination in its own right. Not just for the desert, but the mountains, the history.
He’d created a luxurious tented resort in the desert. The marina complex was nearing completion. And now he was on the point of launching an airline that would bear his country’s name.
He’d had to work hard to make that happen.
Until he’d got a grip on it, tourism had been considered little more than a sideshow alongside the oil industry. Only a few people had had the vision to see what it could become, which meant that neighbouring countries were already light years ahead of them.
Perhaps it was as well; unable to challenge the dominance of states quicker off the starting blocks, he’d been forced to think laterally, take a different path. Instead of high-rise apartments and hotels, he’d gone for low impact development using local materials and the traditional styles of building to create an air of luxury-something entirely different to tempt the jaded traveller.
Using the desert as an environmental spectacle, travelling on horseback and camel train, rather than as a rip-’em-up playground for sand-surfers and dune-racers. Re-opening long-ignored archaeological sites to attract a different kind of visitor fascinated by the rich history of the area.
And a change of attitude to international tourism in the last year or so had given him an edge in the market; suddenly he was the visionary, out in front.
Out in front and on his own.
‘…you don’t have children of your own…’
Well, when you were building an empire, something had to give. A situation that his mother was doing her best to change. Even as he sat in the back of this limousine, watching Metcalfe’s glossy chestnut hair unravel, she was sifting through the likely applicants for the vacant post of Mother-Of-His-Sons, eager to negotiate a marriage settlement with the lucky girl’s family.