Carver's Bride (1982)

Nicola West's romance, first published by Mills & Boon in 1982, follows Linzi Berwick, a model back from New York and engaged to the banker Richard Fabian, who accepts one last sitting for an artist who will not give his name. The sculptor turns out to be Jason Carver, who promised her dying father he would look after her, whom she ran away from to London, and who now works in a house in Wales inherited from his great-uncle. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines watch: On the terrace at Bron Melyn, Jason tells Linzi he has known where she was every day since she ran from him, in London, Paris, Rome and New York. Unsettled, she takes in the signs of his success as a sculptor: suede slacks, a dove grey silk shirt, a thin gold chain at his chest and the answering dull gleam of his Longines wristwatch. Catching his sardonic glance, she looks away to a slab of Italian marble. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: She glanced at him from under her lashes, taking in the signs of success — the suede slacks, the silk shirt in matching dove grey, the thin gold chain that glinted among the hairs of his chest, and the answering dull gleam from his Longines wristwatch. (Nicola West, Carver's Bride, scan cataloged as Harlequin Romance, 1984, pp. 35 to 36, where the sentence runs across the page break; his full name is given on p. 16; Internet Archive scan OCR)