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When she collapsed into her own bed shortly afterwards, she could still feel him on her skin. She could smell him. She could sense him.
She groaned and turned into her pillow.
Her phone began to ring, but for the first time since coming to work for Sheikh Zamir Fayez, she ignored it.
She wished she could ignore him so easily.
The following morning, having barely slept, Olivia was at a crossroads. She could quit. Not the agency, but at least this job. Johnny wouldn’t like it, but he valued her too much to fire her. It would be a mark against her, but not the end. Yes, she could quit. She could walk away from Zamir, and pretend none of this ever happened.
Or, she could stick it out.
She could carry on with her duties, and show him that she was stronger than he’d ever imagined.
Olivia barely needed to give it a moment’s thought.
Quitting had never been her style.
She dressed with care. It was imperative that she look as she always did, but Olivia hated to think that Zamir might assume she had wasted time trying to look attractive for him.
In the end, she settled on a pair of dark pants, and a top that had swirls of grey and black through the fabric. She pulled a black vest over the top. Her hair she assembled into her go-to style, then added only enough makeup to remove the vestiges of a sleepless night from her face.
She looked, Olivia decided, completely normal.
When Marook came to collect her, as he had every day since she began working for the Sheikh, she had almost convinced herself that she felt normal, too.
She rode down the elevator, steeling herself for her first sighting of Zamir.
But no amount of preparation could have been sufficient.
He didn’t look the same.
He looked better.
He was wearing a pair of jeans, low slung and faded, and a white button down shirt that drew attention to his flawless tan. A tan she now knew to be all over his body. His hair had just been washed, and it was still damp and c
urled around his nape. Despite the subterranean garage environment, she slipped her glasses on and averted her gaze.
Her heart, the heart she had lectured sternly to be strong and unaffected, began to rabbit disobediently in her chest.
“Are you ready, Miss Henderson?” He was addressing her with cool civility and it chilled the blood in her veins.
“Yes, sir,” she responded in kind, forcing her legs to carry her towards the car. He didn’t sit in the front passenger seat as he always had. Instead, he waited for her beside the car.
When she was close enough, he opened the door for her.
She didn’t meet his eyes, nor did she acknowledge the gesture. She settled herself in the seat and busied herself with buckling the seatbelt. She did anything she could to avoid having to interact with him.
On the drive to the clinic, she pulled her phone from her bag and emailed her sisters. She was prevented from relaying any of the important changes that were happening in her life, but she emailed them with snippets of what was happening in Vegas, and she read their replies with a sweet sense of normality. They were out there, and they loved her. Just the way she was.
Her head was bent, and she was oblivious to the way Zamir stared at her in his mirror. She didn’t realise that he barely took his eyes from her face, the entire time they drove. How he wished she would take her sunglasses off so that he could see her properly.
When they pulled up outside the clinic, he knew he could wait no longer. He stepped out of the car and moved to her door. Olivia had just undone her seatbelt and she startled to look up and see him waiting.
“We must speak.”
She pressed her lips together. Though Marook and the driver were out of the car, and probably couldn’t hear them, she still felt embarrassment tingle through her.
“I don’t want to talk,” she said stubbornly, waiting for him to move so that she could step out of the car.
