Page 190 of Modern Romance March 2025 (5-8)

He took a breath, turned around and blanched. With her slim gold-plated mobile, Hind was zooming in on one of the many model airplane interiors he had displayed on the boardroom table, thinking that something visual might be of interest to the teenager. She was mouthing the lyrics to a song he vaguely recognized and flashing the peace sign at her imaginary audience.

Was she streaminglive?

“Hind!” he snapped.

She peered up at him through several layers of mascara, lips tilted in a glossy pout.

“Those areconfidential.” Even he could hear how stuffy he sounded. He hadn’t shown her any of the really confidential work of his firm—he wasn’t a fool—but he didn’t want any unfinished work leaked on the internet, no matter how good it was. “As I mentioned earlier, it’s work for a client who wouldn’t appreciate it being leaked to the competition before launch day.”

Hind blinked, bringing to mind a confused puppy, albeit a very expensively dressed one. She pushed a lock of glossy dark hair behind one ear, Cartier dangling from both her earlobes and her wrist. “But you said,yanni, they were toys?”

“Models, Hind.” A vein was beginning to throb at his temple, and he glanced discreetly down at his watch. Four forty-five. “Anyway, kindly delete that footage and let’s take a walk down to advertising, where you’ll see some of the specifics of our latest campaign, and then,finally, we can head out for an early dinner…”

Hind sighed loudly.

“You’ll feel better once you get some food into you,” Desmond said dryly. “Come on, Sheikha.” He waited for Hind to gather herself together with much dramatic effect, restraining the impulse to roll his eyes until her back was to him. He pressed the button for the automatic doors, and followed her out.

It must be nice, he thought, to have a life so uncomplicated that one could afford to squander opportunities.

* * *

Val Montgomery had been forgotten. Again. On her birthday, no less.

A bare two days after Valentine’s Day, which she’d also spent alone.

Another person might have decided to wallow in self-pity. Val shrugged it off in the darkened conference room and stood, slipping her feet into the sensible pumps she’d been wearing since morning.

She was used to being invisible, and she was used to being alone. It didn’t bother her; on the contrary, she supposed it meant she was doing her job well. Being a personal assistant to one of the wealthiest heiresses in the Gulf did require a certain degree of discretion, and the most successful domestic servants knew how to be both invisible and indispensable at the same time. As to the birthday bit, well… She hadn’t celebrated one since that disastrous milestone nearly ten years ago when her husband had shown her his true colors.

She’d beenhappyto be alone since then, and reminded herself of that at every opportunity. There was no solitude that was worse than being mistreated.

Val scooped up Hind’s custom lipstick-red couture handbag, hoisting her own high-street leather satchel onto her shoulder, and hurried for the door.

Just ahead of her, Hind and Desmond’s voices were bouncing off the walls of the corridor. This part of the office was designed to look like a high-tech but extremely luxurious hangar bay, with vivid lighting, sleek furniture in icy chrome that looked uncomfortable but somehow hugged the body in the most ergonomic way, and mock-ups of aircraft that hung from high ceilings on thin chains.

Tesfay International had clearly been designed to impress everyone who stepped foot inside, and although Val had spent nearly a decade in some of the finest architectural structures the Gulf had to offer, she still found herself gawking at the interior.

She’d barely managed, thank goodness, to keep from gawking at the sight of its owner. Not that it would have mattered, she thought with an internal sigh, quickening her pace. For all the notice Desmond Tesfay took of her that morning she might as well have been one of the leather chairs that circled the marble-topped boardroom table.

Val had seen him before, of course. He’d been courting Sheikh Rashid for months, and no one who saw the Englishman could forget him. He’d left his stamp all over Europe, transforming budget airlines into everyday luxuries, and now he was expanding into the Middle East.

It was a wise decision. The oil-rich oasis of the Gulf had been Val’s home for more than a decade and the wealth she saw on a daily basis still amazed her, even now. Bahr Al-Dahab, while the smallest country by far out of the many that clustered round the balmy turquoise-blue waters of the Gulf, was the richest. It had been a small cluster of Bedouin settlements a couple of generations ago, and then oil had been discovered in the region. Now it surpassed its bigger cousins in riches, and investors were pouring into the region, making men like Hind’s father into billionaires practically overnight.

“But I’ll need mybagfor that,” Val heard Hind whine, and she snapped back to attention, hurrying forward to hand over the handbag.

“Thank you so much, Val,” the girl said sweetly, although she didn’t look up because she was scrolling through her mobile. “We’re to go to dinner with Desmond this evening, he tells me, and I’ll need to change.”

Val looked up from placing the bag on Hind’s arm and then arranging her sleeve to meet Desmond’s eyes, and her skin heated.

She thought she’d been dead to the effects of men for years, and for very good reason. But Desmond had been having this effect on her all day, much to her confusion. It was because he was basically a celebrity, she told herself. A celebrity with warm bronzed skin, brandy-dark eyes framed by heavy lashes, and his mouth—

What waswrongwith her? She closed her eyes briefly, willing the apparition to disappear. Unfortunately, doing so merely heightened her other senses, and she was overwhelmed by the clean, crisp scent of him. Something woodsy, spicy and soft all at once…

When she opened her eyes he was peering down at her curiously, and she took a step back, casting her eyes down to the floor. She was thirty-nine, she reminded herself sternly. One year left until forty. Much too old to be fluttering roundanyman in this manner. He’d just taken her by surprise, was all…

“Will you be joining us?” he asked.

Hind answered for her, huffing through her nose. “She has to,” she groused. “Daddy won’t let me go anywhere in London without a companion. Like it’s 1890 or something…”

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