out of Aarifa city to their desert location in, but the stylist had pushed past her, bagging a seat next to the photographer’s assistant the girl had a crush on.
So, thanks to young love, Abby was now stranded in the middle of who knew where, trying without success to tune out the raised, angry voices outside. So far she had resisted the urge to add her own voice to the melee, but her clenched teeth were beginning to ache with the effort.
Leave well alone remained the best strategy, though, so along with Rob, who had reacted to being stranded in a desert by promptly taking the opportunity to grab a nap and falling asleep, she’d waited inside the broken-down vehicle.
It was a decision she was starting to rethink as the temperature inside the dark car rose and Rob, the person who had made her climb that damned sand dune ten times before he was satisfied he’d got the shot, began to snore.
Loudly!
Rolling her eyes, she pulled a bottle of water from the capacious tote bag she always carried with her. Despite the frequent-traveller miles she had clocked up since she’d embarked on her modelling career, Abby had never mastered the art of travelling light.
She had half-unscrewed the top before caution kicked in and she realised she may need to ration herself. Before he’d fallen asleep Rob had confidently claimed they would be rescued in a matter of minutes, but what if the photographer was being overly optimistic?
What if they were stuck here longer?
The internal debate didn’t last long. Her grandparents had raised her to always be cautious—pity they hadn’t displayed the same quality when it came to financial advice, considering they’d been swindled out of their life savings by a crooked financial advisor. But caution won out.
Gregory’s good-looking face, complete with that boyishly sincere smile, materialised in her head as she tightened the lid with a vicious turn and put the bottle back into her bag. Her jaw clenched, she fought her way through the familiar toxic mixture of guilt and self-contempt she experienced whenever she considered her own part in her grandparents’ situation. They put a brave face on it but she knew how unhappy they were.
It didn’t matter which way you looked at it, it was her fault Nana and Pops had lost their financial security.
If she hadn’t been fool enough to fall for Gregory’s sincere smile and the blue eyes that went with it, and if she hadn’t imagined herself in love and taken the sweet man of her dreams home to meet her grandparents, then they would still have the comfortable retirement they had worked so hard for to look forward to.
Instead they had nothing.
Her throat thickened with emotion, which she dismissed with a tiny impatient shake of her head. Tears, she reminded herself, weren’t going to fix anything; what she needed was a plan.
And she had one. At last.
A militant gleam lit her green eyes as her rounded chin lifted to a determined angle. By her calculations, if she took every single piece of work that came her way—barring those that wanted her to pose minus clothes, and there were quite a few—in another eighteen months she’d be able to buy back the retirement bungalow her grandparents had lost because of her conman boyfriend. She’d brought him into their lives, he’d got them all to trust him and then he had vanished with her grandparents’ life savings. In a vicious parting shot he’d emailed her a photo of him with another man, the pose they were in making the salt-in-the-wound footnote ‘You’re not really my type’ slightly redundant.
Gregory’s patience with her inexperience and his reassurance that he was prepared to wait because he respected her now made perfect sense.
Shutting out the humiliating memories before they took hold, Abby peeled off a wet wipe from a packet in the inner pocket of her bag. Eyes closed, she wiped her face and neck, removing the last of her make-up along with some of the dust and grime.
She was repeating the action while thinking longingly of a cool shower and a cold beer when one of the two men outside put his head into the cab. He fiddled with something beside the steering wheel before turning reproachfully to Abby.
‘You might have said something, Abby—we’ve been trying to open the damned engine for hours.’ He gave the lever he’d located a sharp tug and yelled to the man outside. ‘Got it, Jez!’
By her count it had actually only been ten minutes. ‘It felt more like days,’ she retorted, more bothered by the swelling bite on her arm than defending herself from this unfair criticism. Teeth gritted, she rolled up the sleeve of her blouse to take the pressure off the area, not that the shirt was actually hers—she was still wearing the outfit selected for today’s shoot, the shorts and shirt apparently meant to convince viewers that if a girl chose the new shampoo the company was unveiling with this campaign, they too could go from a casino table to trekking up sand dunes in the desert all while maintaining perfect, glowing hair. They might, but they’d also have blisters if they wore these wretched heels.
The developments through the fly-speckled window didn’t look good. The men had both stepped back hastily from the scalding steam that billowed out from the engine.
And then they both started shouting again.
She nudged Rob’s foot with her own—luckily for him she had swapped the spiky heels for canvas pumps.
‘We should go out and see if we can help.’
Or at least stop them killing one another, she thought as she grabbed a scarf from her bag and pulled the strands of sweat-damp hair back from her face, securing the flaming waves at her nape in a ponytail that was neither smooth nor elegant.
As she got to her feet, head down to avoid banging it on the door frame, Rob opened one eye, nodded, then closed it again and began to quietly snore.
Cool was the wrong word, but at least the temperature outside was marginally less oppressive than that inside the car.
‘So, what’s the verdict, guys?’ she asked, adopting a cheerful tone.
Her attitude did not rub off on the two men.
On the occasions she had worked with the lighting technician previously, Jez had always had a joke up his sleeve to lighten tense situations, but his sense of humour had clearly deserted him today. Frowning heavily, he stepped away from the inner workings of the steaming engine, his face glistening with sweat as he dropped the bonnet back into place.
‘It won’t go and, before anyone asks, I haven’t got a clue what’s wrong or how to fix it. If anyone else feels the urge...be my guest.’ The thickset technician tossed a challenging look in the direction of the younger man but the intern’s aggression had drained away and he was standing biting his nails, suddenly looking very young and very scared.
‘No need to worry, Jez. I’m sure once they realise they’ve left us behind they’ll come back to look for us,’ Abby said, determined to look on the bright side, despite the fact that the sun was quickly setting and darkness was starting to steal across the desert around them.
‘We shouldn’t have stopped,’ the younger man muttered under his breath as he kicked a tyre.
The older man nodded his agreement. ‘What’s he doing?’ He nodded towards the vehicle where the self-acknowledged photographic genius lay sleeping, exhausted, presumably by the effort of taking several dozen shots of an unusually shaped rock with a lizard sitting on it. By the time he had been satisfied with the result, the two lead vehicles in their small convoy had vanished back towards the city they’d come from earlier in the day.
‘He’s asleep.’
Abby’s announcement was greeted with astonished looks and a cry in unison. ‘Un-bloody-believable!’
The two men looked at one another and laughed, their mutual disgust for Rob draining some of the hostility out of the situation. The smiles didn’t last long though.
‘Anyone got a phone signal?’