Mills and Boon are putting out a dozen or so of my backlist books between now and January 1st and I'm having a lovely time watching Amazon to see the fabulous new covers as they're added to the listing.
The latest is for
Chosen As the Sheikh's Wife, a novella that was written for the Mills and Boon centenary celebrations and originally published in the 100 Arabian Nights anthology.
I absolutely love writing sheikh books and the dh and I (we spent a lot of time working in the Middle East when we were young) had a ball brainstorming ideas.
Here's a little taster -
It was the phone that woke
her. Dragging her from somewhere so deep
that she was certain that it must have been ringing for some time.
She ignored
it and finally it stopped, allowing her to concentrate on her headache, and the
fact that her eyes felt as if someone had been shovelling grit in them all
night.
The bright
sunshine didn’t help.
With her hand
shading her eyes, she made it to the bathroom.
She was in the shower when the phone began to ring again. Sarah, she thought. It would be Sarah, worrying about her. She’d call her back…
She washed
her hair, brushed her teeth. Decided to
forget about getting dressed until she’d had coffee.
The local newspaper
was lying on the mat. Her gran had liked
her to read the local news to her…
She bent to
pick it up, groaning as the headache she thought she’d defeated slid forward
and collided with the back of her aching eyes.
Then she groaned
again as she saw the front page. It must
have been a slow news day because she seemed to fill the front page, staring like
a rabbit caught in the media headlights, with the Trash or Treasure expert beside
her displaying the khanjar. In full
colour.
The headline
read, ARABIAN “PRINCESS” AT ROADSHOW.
What?
The doorbell
rang and without thinking she wrenched it open, certain that it would
Sarah. She’d taken to dropping in every morning
in the last few weeks, to see if she needed anything. She usually came round the back, letting
herself in with her “good neighbour” key as she had yesterday when she’d heard
her cry for help when the floor had given way.
Clearly the
fact that the phone had gone unanswered was causing her concern, but since
she’d bolted the back door last night, the key would be useless.
But it wasn’t
Sarah, who was tiny – apart from around the middle where she was spreading
spectacularly – and fair; the figure that filled the tiny porch was her
opposite in every conceivable way.
Tall, spare,
broad-shouldered, male, there was nothing soft about him. His features were austere, chiselled to the
bone, his beard closely cut against olive-toned skin that was positively
Mediterranean against a snowy band-collared shirt, fastened to the neck. His hair was thick and crisply cut. But it was his eyes that held her.
Dark as
midnight and just as dangerous.
He looked
very … foreign.
He was also stunningly,
knee-wobblingly handsome.
Violet was
suitably stunned. And her knees
dutifully wobbled.
Just her luck
that she’d emerged from the shower pink of face, with her hair in it’s usual
wet tangle and nothing between her and decency but a film of moisturiser and a faded
pink bathrobe that could only be described as … functional.
‘Miss Hamilton?’
Oh, and guess
what… He had a voice like melted
chocolate, delicately flavoured with an exotic, barely-there accent.
Whatever he
was selling she was buying by the crate…
Except, of
course, that he was far too expensively dressed to be a door-to-door
salesman. She knew clothes. And what he was wearing did not come off a
peg in the High Street.
Oh,
well. She was expecting a visit from a
representative of the finance company to call any day with the release papers
for her to sign so that they could sell the house, recover their money.
This had to
be him.
‘Miss Violet Hamilton?’
he repeated, when she didn’t answer.
‘Who?’ she
asked, just to hear him say Violet again. Long and slow.
Vi-o-let.
Pronouncing
every syllable, turning a name she’d loathed only slightly less than the
hideously shortened “Vi” into the most desirable name in the entire world.
‘I’m looking
for Miss Violet Hamilton.’ And taking
the newspaper from her hand, he held the front page up for her to see. ‘I believe I’ve found her.’
No point
pretending to be the lodger, then.
Asking him to come back when she’d gussied herself up; straightened her hair, applied some make-up,
was decked out in one of her more creative outfits. Oh, well…
‘And here I was
kidding myself that the photograph is so awful that you couldn’t possibly
tell,’ she said. ‘Clearly I was fooling
myself.’
He looked at
the photograph and then at her for rather longer than seemed necessary just to confirm
the likeness. Then, clearly thinking better
of commenting one way or the other, he returned the paper and said, ‘I am Fayad
al Khalifa, Miss Hamilton.’ And he held
out a visiting card -- as if they couldn’t printed off by the dozen in any name
you cared to dream up by anyone with a computer.
Except that this
wasn’t a do-it-yourself job, but embossed on heavy ivory-coloured card.
If he was from the finance company, he certainly
wasn’t one of the foot-soldiers.
The front of
the card gave no hint, but contained only his name: Fayad al Khalifa. Unusual
enough. She turned it over. The back was blank. No address, no phone number.
Obviously
this was a man whose name was enough for those with the wit to recognise
it. Which did not include her.
‘Nice card,’
she said. ‘But a trifle shy of
information.’
‘The Ras al
Kawi embassy will vouch for me.’
‘Oh, well,
that’s all right then,’ she said. Her
friends would have recognised sarcasm.
He apparently did not, but merely nodded. Good grief, he was serious…
Ras al Kawi?
Where was that?
‘I need to
talk to you about a khanjar that I
believe is in your possession,’ he said.
‘It is possible that it once belonged to my family.’
‘Oh?’ Then, realising that he come to demand it
back, ‘It’s amazing how fast good news spreads.’
‘You have no
idea. Perhaps I should wait in my car
while you …’
He made the
vaguest of gestures, resolutely looking at her face, avoiding her bare legs,
the shabby bathrobe that had a tendency to gape at the neck. It made no difference, every inch of her skin
tingled.
‘Dress?’ she
offered, lippy to the last. Except that
the word didn’t come out quite as she’d intended, but thick and throaty and
more to avoid those eyes, than because she was interested in his choice in
transport, Violet looked past him.
A black Rolls
Royce was parked at the kerb. The little
green and gold flag on the bonnet stirred in the breeze.
She barely
stopped herself from letting slip an expression that would have brought her a
rebuke from her grandma.
Her breathless,
‘Who are you?’ wasn’t a whole heap
better.
‘If your
story is true, Miss Hamilton, then your great-great-grandmother, Princess
Fatima al-Sayyid, was once married to my great-great-grandfather.’
At which
point she did let slip a word that she used only under the most extreme
pressure.
She would
have been embarrassed about that, but a scream from rear of the house – Sarah’s
scream -- obliterated the sound.
Chosen As the Sheikh's Wife is available to pre-order at Amazon as an ebook for $1.89 in the US -
here's the link and for £1.19 in the UK
here
Nook UK and
Kobo also have it listed with the new cover - and I imagine
iBooks (where the book is available but showing the old cover), will catch up soon.
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