Friend or Foe (1989)

Jenny Arden's Harlequin Presents novel brings Kira Newall home to London from six months in Provence with her ten-year-old stepdaughter Heather, a year after the death of her husband Stuart in a car crash that left Kira herself weeks in hospital. Waiting at Heathrow is Glenn Mason, whom Heather calls Uncle Glenn and whose guardianship of the girl Kira resents; she has always considered him her enemy. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): On the evening he has danced with her, the lights in Kira's house fail and Glenn crouches under the stairboards in the cupboard by torchlight, finds fuse-wire and mends the old unlabelled fuse-box while she holds the torch, warning her that bare wires touching somewhere are a fire risk. Too big and too close in the confined space, he works in his pristine white shirt with the gold Omega on his swarthy wrist, and she is not sure whether it is the cupboard or a flush of awareness that makes her hot. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: She noted the play of his pristine white shirt across his back as he worked, the gold Omega watch on his swarthy wrist. (Jenny Arden, Friend or Foe, scan cataloged as Harlequin Books, 1989, p. 55, with a stray OCR hyphen before "swarthy" dropped; the fuse-box repair begins on p. 54 and his full name is on p. 7; Internet Archive scan OCR)