Page 1 of Bred By the Sheikh

Chapter 1

Dubai was so bright it looked Photoshopped.

Through the towering glass wall of the Al-Hadid Grand lobby, the sky stretched an impossible blue above the city, sharp and cloudless in the late-July sun. The light bounced off pale stone and glass outside hard enough to make me squint.

Then the doors whispered shut behind me, and the hotel swallowed me in cool, blessed air-conditioning.

I nearly moaned.

That probably wasn’t the first impression StayWell Hotels wanted its emergency representative making at the flagship property of one of the largest luxury hospitality companies in the world.

I adjusted the strap of my laptop bag instead.

My pale aqua dress had survived fourteen hours of travel better than I had, mostly. The lightweight skirt still floated around my knees when I walked, but there was a crease near one hip from the plane, and my strawberry-blonde hair had abandoned its loose waves somewhere over the Atlantic. Humidity had found every shorter piece around my face and encouraged it toward rebellion.

At least my sensible nude flats weren’t trying to kill me.

I took the small victory.

I checked the time on my phone, then the six-day itinerary Amanda had sent me before I left Omaha.

My first rebrand meeting started in twenty-three minutes.

My boss had been supposed to be here.

Amanda Emerson knew this account. Amanda had seniority. Amanda owned suits that never wrinkled and could probably cross three time zones without developing a cowlick.

I had forty-eight hours of warning, one hastily packed suitcase, and a bachelor’s degree that suddenly felt much less impressive beneath a ceiling high enough to have weather.

But I knew guest experience.

Amanda had sent me for exactly that.

So I pulled my shoulders back, followed the discreet sign toward the executive meeting rooms, and concentrated on the part I could control.

I just had to do the work.

For six days, that was all I had to do.

The executive meeting room was larger than the conference room at StayWell’s Omaha headquarters and considerably better at pretending it wasn’t a conference room.

There were no tangled charging cords, no whiteboard with someone’s half-erased notes from Tuesday, and no bowl of mints slowly turning into fossils.

A long pale table faced a wall-sized screen displaying the Al-Hadid Grand Dubai relaunch deck. Beyond another stretch of glass, the city rose into the white-blue afternoon.

I took a seat near the end of the table, opened Amanda’s brief, and reminded myself exactly what StayWell had sent me here to do.

I was here to provide the North American guest perspective, not run the relaunch, tell one of the world’s most powerful hotel companies how to operate, or develop a sudden case of executive confidence and start redesigning Dubai before lunch.

StayWell’s partnership gave us a narrow lane. Al-Hadid Hospitality wanted a stronger North American audience for its flagship brand, and our team was supposed to help identify where the current campaign connected with U.S. luxury travelers and where it didn’t.

That I could do.

I’d spent the last two years reading guest surveys, digging through loyalty data, sitting in focus groups, and listening to people explain that they’d happily pay too much for a hotel room as long as paying too much made their trip easier.

Travelers were surprisingly reasonable that way.

“Ms. Campbell?”