want her softening. He didn’t want bright innocence to start peeking out from behind the façade. He wanted the self-assured, cranky client to stay. Because she was easier to dislike.
And dislike was easier to manage.
‘Ready for your room?’
She glanced longingly at the juice still half-full in her hand then back at him.
He caught the smile before it infected the rest of his neutral expression. ‘Those are as common as sand out here.’
She took one final long, hard suck on her straw, then placed the glass down on the carved coaster that had been discreetly laid out for her.
‘Let’s go.’
* * *
Al Saqr must look a bit like a scorpion from the air, Sera thought. Long stretches of treed pathway extended out from the resort’s main building like articulated legs, going in different directions along the bank of the massive dune the resort was built on. Dotted along them at private yet accessible distances were the individual suites.
Not rooms exactly, she saw as they passed two that weren’t theirs, more like quasi-tents with the same plastered white walls and dark timber windows as the resort, but with canopied canvas roofs sitting like a broad sun hat over each hexagonal suite. With timber deck everywhere its shadows reached.
She sighed as her eyes fell on every new and alien thing. Nothing here would remind her of the media and their scrabbling. Or of home. Or the season.
‘Here we are,’ Aqil advised, pulling the courtesy buggy into the shade of a suite about halfway along the front leg of the scorpion, facing all that empty desert.
The way the suites were staggered, it was easy to feel that it was just she and the desert. No other human being or work as far as the eye could see. She took her time getting off the buggy, knowing that Brad would get there before her and indeed he did, sweeping inside as soon as the door opened and clearing the room before she was allowed into it. She smiled awkwardly at Aqil, who just shrugged and waited in patient, dimpled silence with her.
Stepping inside was totally worth the wait. Cool and dim and fragrant. Just like the resort reception. But that was where the similarity ended. This was a suite that managed to be simple yet more luxurious than anything she’d ever stayed in before. The six-sided shape of the room was countered by custom furniture in traditional style so that everything fitted without making it feel cluttered. Long sofas, luxury coffee station, writing desk and an opulent, high, king-sized bed centred against it all. Three of the six edges of the suite were glass doors with thick light-controlling drapes of the same kind of silken weave she’d gone crazy patting earlier.
Until Aqil flung one set open.
Beyond the glass doors, the Arabian desert flowed golden and dramatic, its dunes laid out in all their glory all the way to the horizon where the shadows of mountains loomed. And immediately in front, between all that sand and her air-conditioned life-support system, a gorgeous, deep, blue plunge pool, half in desert sun, half in shade.
Sera pressed her hands to the glass doors and leaned into the heat soaking in through them. Hot desert. Cold pool. Espresso station. Massive Princess and the Pea bed...
Some of the tension she’d been carrying around for the past year shifted and broke away, turning to dust on the warm desert breeze.
‘Your home for the next month,’ Aqil murmured. ‘Let me show you everything...’
It only took a few minutes, yet there was nothing she could need that Al Saqr hadn’t thought of. Lazy luxury from top to bottom.
‘Mr Kruger is in the suite immediately to your right,’ Aqil said when the tour was done, handing Brad an old-fashioned, hand-wrought key that matched hers. ‘His bag has been placed there already.’
On cue, hers was whisked in. Even with only one bag, she’d over-packed. Right now she would be entirely happy to spend the whole month in her swimsuit, though probably she’d need to throw on a dress to go for food now and then. She glanced at the table set up by the pool.
Unless she had dinner come to her...
Another knot in her shoulder unravelled.
‘Aqil, thank you. This is...exactly what I needed.’
Silence. Beauty. Nature. Far enough from civilisation that even she couldn’t cause a stir out here. The perfect place to lie low for a bit.
And not a hint of Christmas festivity.
‘We pride ourselves on being what our guests need, Miss Blaise,’ Aqil murmured. Then he excused himself, told her how she could contact him if she needed him and departed. She leaned back on the warm glass doors, closed her eyes and let even more of the tension soak away into that heat.
When they reopened, Brad was still there. Waiting quietly for instructions.
Kruger. Brad Kruger. A strong name for a strong man.
‘I’m going to dig out my camera,’ she said, pushing the thought away as firmly as she pushed herself away from the glass. ‘And I’m going to take a swim. And lie on this day lounge. Possibly not in that order. Why don’t you get settled in next door and come back when you’re done? We can talk about how this is all going to work.’
He nodded—the only discernible part of his inscrutable expression—and departed, leaving just her, her heavy heart and the non-judgemental desert.
* * *
Brad tore himself away from the familiar view and got up off the sofa. Getting ‘settled’ had only taken him a few minutes—how long could it take to unpack one small bag and lay out basic toiletries in the obscenely large bathroom?
If Sera’s UK security were paying for anything other than close contact then he would be back in his own apartment in the city, driving out to the resort every morning to supervise his client. But close contact meant close and so he’d be enjoying the resort’s six-star facilities gratis for the next month. His eyes strayed back out to the soft, rich light falling onto the desert sands.
There were definitely worse ways to spend your Christmas.
He’d heard the distant splash of Sera lowering herself into her pool a while earlier, so he trusted that she was too busy enjoying the view to be getting up to any early mischief. But he’d figured she could probably use a little mental space after her dramatic arrival in the country, so he’d cooled his heels for the twenty minutes after unpacking, then done a token perimeter assessment of both their suites to stretch it out a little more.
In his experience, protectees never adjusted quite as well to the idea of close contact as the protectors, even the ones whose lives depended on high-level guard. It was a skill, hitting that fine balance between too much and too little supervision. Relaxed enough to keep your client sane and compliant, but not so relaxed that it opened a window for the kind of risk that he was hired to protect them against. And not so much that the client became overly reliant on you and stopped listening to their own instincts. Overly reliant or overly fond—the small twist in his gut reminded him. That was just as dangerous. As he’d discovered the hard way.
The best balance was...indifferent acquiescence.
