MORE SHEIKHS, MORE SHEIKHS...

When I was in Matera a couple of years ago, doing a book signing in starlit square with my lovely Italian editor, Stephano, at my side, he kept whispering in my ear, "More sheikhs, Liz. More sheikhs."

Well HER DESERT DREAM is for you, Stephano!

Those of you who've read CHRISTMAS ANGEL FOR THE BILLIONAIRE will know that Lydia Young, who does "look alike" gigs as the "people's angel", has traded places with Lady Roseanne Napier to give her a break from the media.

The tricky part is getting past the press cordon at the entrance to the hotel where they do the swap, but after that it's going to easy. A week of luxury in the private Ramal Hamrah holiday villa of Princess Lucy al-Khatib (The Sheikh's Guarded Heart) where no one has ever met Lady Rose. All she has to do is take a daily walk along the beach to give the paps a target for their ever present cameras.

The best laid plans...

Princess Lucy has another friend who needs her help and she seizes the chance to infiltrate Kalil al Zaki into the royal household under the guise of a bodyguard for "Lady Rose".

From the first moment Lydia and Kal set eyes on one another the temperature rises but falling in love with a national treasure will do his cause no good. And Lydia knows that next week she'll be back on the supermarket checkout.

Here's the moment they meet: --

It was like some dream-come-true fairytale, Lydia thought. Check out girl to princess. Pure Cinderella.

All she needed was a pair of glass slippers and a fairy godmother to provide her with someone tall, dark and handsome to play Prince Charming.

She wouldn’t even have to flee when the clock struck twelve. She had a whole week before she turned back into Lydia Young, whose job as on the supermarket checkout was occasionally enlivened by a look-alike gig.

She automatically reached for the door to the VIP departure lounge, but it opened as she approached; a “Lady”, with a capital L, did not open doors for herself. She was so intent of covering her mistake by adjusting the veil on her hat that she missed the fact that her escort had stopped at the door.

‘Mr al-Zaki will take care of you from here, madam.’

Who?

She thought the word, but never voiced it.

All sound seemed to fade away as she looked up. She was tall, but the knee-meltingly gorgeous man waiting to “take care” of her was half a head taller and as his eyes, dark and intense, locked with hers, she felt the jolt of it to her knees. And yes, no doubt about it, her knees melted as he lowered his head briefly, said, ‘Kalil al-Zaki, Lady Rose,’ introducing himself with the utmost formality. ‘Princess Lucy has asked me to ensure that your holiday is all that you wish.’

Graceful, beautiful, contained power rippling beneath exquisite tailoring, he was, she thought, crazily, the embodiment of Bagheera, the bold, reckless panther from her childhood favourite Jungle Book. She’d made her father read over and over the description of his coat like watered silk, his voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree.

Her own, as she struggled for a suitable response, was non-existent.

Kalil al-Zaki might favour well-cut British tailoring over a fancy Ruritanian uniform but he was as close to her own Prince Charming fantasy as she was ever likely to come and she had to resist the temptation to look around for the old lady with wings and a wand who’d been listening in on her thoughts.

‘You’re coming with me to Bab el Sama?’ she managed, finally, knowing that she should be horrified by this turn of events. The frisson of excitement rippling through her suggested that she was anything but.

Here's what Romantic Times said:

"Complex characters with powerful chemistry, a compelling conflict and plenty of humour highlight this memorable story. A keeper." 4.5 stars.

To read the entire first chapter, click on the UK cover --

As you'll see from this, lucky UK readers will also get the fabulous Lucy Gordon's THE BRIDE WORE RED as part of the new 2-in-1 format. Lucy's book is part of the "Escape Around the World" series and is set in China. Lucy is a trooper. Nothing is too much for her fans and she went to China twice to research the book. :) She's captured the country so beautifully that you'll think you've been there yourself. The romance is great, too!

FOREIGN EDITIONS

It's always a thrill to get a foreign edition in the post, but I'm always especially thrilled to see a Dutch translation of my books.

Family ties take me to the Netherlands fairly regularly and I do feel a special affinity with the country, so it was a particular delight to spot this one on the Harlequin Netherlands website, a 3-in-1 containing reprints of The Bachelor's Bab, His Personal Agenda and The Bridesmaid's Rewards (the one with all the chocolate).



The French have been busy publishing "Liz Fielding" this summer, too. They've published 100 Arabian Nights (with Meredith Webber and Kim Lawrence), this gorgeous volume, containing The Ordinary Princess.

There are a couple of other stories available in France this month, including The Sheikh's Unsuitable Bride, in the Horizon series.







And in Italy they've just issued Secret Baby, Surprise Parents, and this lovely Christmas anthology is also available for the holidays.

Right now, I'm working hard on a book due this month, but I'll be back soon to introduce Annie and Lydia, the two heroines of my TRADING PLACES duet and -- obviously -- there'll be a competition, so watch out for that. :)

Inthe meantime, here's what Romantic Times has to say about Annie's book, available now online and retail next month, CHRISTMAS ANGEL FOR THE BILLIONAIRE:

A delicate blending of fantasy and reality, this story has everything, including a difficult but irresistible hero and a clever, gutsy heroine who's in every way his match. 4.5 stars

And today a reviewer at All About Romance said about my books --

There is a quality to her writing that pleases me – she lets dialogue stand for itself without cluttering it with speech tags and the sentences roll off each other in the best tradition of understated British prose; her stories are tasteful fairy tales with moderately stiff upper lips.

And of Christmas Angel --

A fairy tale with slick writing and gentle humour.

It’s October. The kids are back at school, the nights are drawing in and the local supermarket have shifted the cereals and filled the shelf with seasonal goodies. Try as we might to bury our head in the sand and ignore it, it’s nearly Christmas. And that means it’s time for Christmas titles from Harlequin and Mills & Boon.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a Christmas title on sale. I’ve only done two others – All She Wants for Christmas and A Surprise Christmas Proposal. Both of those were accidental Christmas books.

This year, I’m making up for ignoring the season and you’ll be getting two books from me. In the “Trading Places” duet -- Christmas Angel for the Billionaire (November) and Her Desert Dream (December) – Lady Roseanne Napier and Lydia Young swap places for a week just before the holidays.

Lady Roseanne, orphaned just before Christmas when she was six years old, has become the “people’s angel”. At sixteen she stepped into her parents’ shoes to become the face of the charity they founded. Ten years on, she’s a young woman cut off from real life, confined within the protective bubble of bodyguards and protocol.

Here she is –

Annie smothered a yawn. The room was hot, the lingering scent of food nauseating and all she wanted to do was lay her head on the table in front of her, close her eyes and switch off.

If only.

There was a visit to a hospital, then three hours of Wagner at a charity gala to endure before she could even think about sleep. And even then, no matter how tired she was, thinking about it was as close as she would get.

She’d tried it all. Soothing baths, a lavender pillow, every kind of relaxation technique without success. But calming her mind wasn’t the problem.

It wasn’t the fact that it was swirling with all the things she needed to remember that was keeping her awake. She had an efficient personal assistant to take care of every single detail of her life and ensure that she was in the right place, at the right time. A speech writer to put carefully chosen words into her mouth when she got there. A style consultant whose job it was to ensure that whenever she appeared in public she made the front page.

That was the problem.


There was absolutely nothing in her mind to swirl around. It was empty. Like her life.
In just under a minute she was going to have to stand up and talk to these amazing people who had put themselves on the line to alleviate suffering in the world.

They had come to see her, listen to her inspire them to even greater efforts. And her presence ensured that the press was here, too, which meant that the work they did would be noticed, reported.

Maybe.

Her hat, a rich green velvet and feather folly perched at a saucy angle over her right eye would probably garner more column inches than the charity she was here to support.
She was doing more for magazine and newspaper circulation than she was for the medical teams, the search units, pilots, drivers, communications people who dropped everything at a moment’s notice, risking their lives to help victims of war, famine, disaster, a point she’d made to her grandfather more than once.

A pragmatist, he had dismissed her concerns, reminding her that it was a symbiotic relationship and everyone would benefit from her appearance, including the British fashion industry.

It didn’t help that he was right.

She wanted to do more, be more than a cover girl, a fashion icon. Her parents had been out there, on the front line, picking up the pieces of ruined lives and she had planned to follow in their footsteps.

She stopped the thought. Publicity was the only gift she had and she had better do it right but as she took her place at the lectern and a wave of applause hit her, a long silent scream invaded the emptiness inside her head.

Noooooo…

A chance encounter with her “look-alike”, Lydia Young, gives her the opportunity to escape, to grab a week of freedom, be invisible. Be herself. It took planning, careful timing and a lot of nerve on Lydia’s part, but now she was off, free, the open road in front of her and no one but herself to please. But life isn’t ever that easy. All it takes to throw a spanner in the works is a missed turning, a car that isn’t quite what it seems and George Saxon.

Here’s George –


George Saxon, bare feet propped on the deck rail of his California beach house, laptop on his knees, gave up on the problem that had been eluding him for weeks and surfed idly through the headlines of the London newspapers.

His eyes were caught by the picture of a couple leaving some gala. She was one of those tall, patrician women, pale blonde hair swept up off her neck, her fabulously expensive gown cut low to reveal hollows in her shoulders even deeper than those in her cheeks.

But it wasn’t her dress or the fact that she’d so obviously starved herself to get into it that had caught and held his attention. It was her eyes.

Her mouth was smiling for the camera, but her eyes, large, blue seemed to be looking straight at him, sending him a silent appeal for help.
He clicked swiftly back to the program he’d been working on. Sometimes switching in and out of a problem cleared the blockage but this one was stubborn, which was why he’d left his Chicago office, his lakeside apartment. Escaping the frantic pre-Christmas party atmosphere for the peace of the beach.

Behind him, inside the house, the phone began to ring. It would be his accountant, or his lawyer, or his office but success had insulated him from the need to jump when the phone rang and he left it for the machine to pick up. There was nothing, no one --

‘George? It’s your dad…’

But then again there were exceptions to every rule.

And here’s what Romantic Times had to say –

CHRISTMAS ANGEL FOR THE BILLIONAIRE (4.5) A delicate blending of fantasy and reality, this story has everything, including a difficult but irresistible hero and a clever, gutsy heroine who's in every way his match.

Christmas Angel for the Billionaire is on sale as a 2-in-1 with Jessica Hart’s fabulous story, Under the Boss’s Mistletoe in the UK, or on it’s own from eHarlequin, in both paper and eBook formats.

There’s a chance to win signed copies of both “Trading Places” books on the Harlequin Romance Authors blog at eHarlequin from Friday this week – you just have to leave a comment to enter the draw.

There will also be an interview with me on Friday here so do drop by and say hello if you have a moment.

And you can let me know what you think of the book on Twitter, too.

You'll find more about the book on my website, or you can Browse the Book --