Desert Sheikhs: Monarch of the Sands / To Tame a Sheikh / Sheikh Protector

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

AGAINST her pale skin, the diamond flashed like a shooting star and Frankie gazed at it in wonder. Who would ever have thought it? Geeky, freaky Frankie O’Hara engaged to be married—and sporting a solitaire the size of a blueberry.

Spreading out her fingers, she watched as the precious stone caught the pale November light and glittered it back at her. Her father would have smiled and said that a diamond was nothing but a hard and highly refractive form of carbon—but to Frankie it was so much more than that. It was a symbol. It signified that a man loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.A handsome, successful man, too. Not the kind of man she’d ever have thought would be attracted to someone like her—not in the million or so years it took to make a diamond.

The low roar of a car disturbed her dreamy thoughts and Frankie blinked with surprise and a slight feeling of panic. Surely Simon wasn’t here already? Why, she hadn’t peeled a single potato for the celebration meal she’d been planning—and surely the chicken breasts hadn’t been marinating for nearly long enough?

She peered out of the window and the breath caught sharply in her throat as she saw the expensive and gleaming vehicle which was making its way up the drive, spraying little shoals of gravel in its wake.

That certainly wasn’t Simon—who drove a comfortable saloon indistinguishable from the many others which dominated the roads of this affluent area of suburban England. The car which was now pulling to a halt in front of the house was sporty, black and powerful and looked as if it would be more at home on an international racing circuit than in this quiet corner of the world. And she didn’t have to look at the driver’s hard profile to know exactly who was driving it.

Zahid!

Her heart began to pound and Frankie’s mouth became parchment-dry. After all, the man in question was pretty close to every woman’s fantasy man and he was sitting right outside her house. Zahid Al Hakam—royal Sheikh and King. The man with the hard, hawklike features and the dark, enigmatic eyes.

It was highly unusual for someone as ordinary as Frankie to be friends with an exotic and powerful sheikh, but life often had funny twists and turns along the way. The sheikh’s father had been a long-time friend of her father’s, so she’d known the Prince of Khayarzah ever since she’d been a little girl—though his visits had tapered away since he had unexpectedly become King. The sudden death of his uncle and his cousin had left Zahid as the heir apparent—with no time in his busy diary to visit old friends in small English towns.

At first, she’d missed his visits dreadfully, before deciding that his absence was probably all for the best—because hadn’t she wasted too many hours fantasising about a man who was way out of her league?

She glanced out of the window again. So why had he just turned up out of the blue? And why today, of all days?

She saw him get out of the car—unfolding his long-legged frame with the lithe elegance which always made her think of a jungle cat. He slammed the car door but didn’t bother locking it—though, come to think of it, he’d probably stationed his security people at the end of the drive. And besides, who would dare try and steal his car?

The pealing of the doorbell galvanised her into life—and as she rushed to answer it she thought that wasn’t the only thing which was peeling. The walls badly needed painting. The big house was inevitably showing signs of wear and tear—despite her best efforts to try to maintain the place. And didn’t that only reinforce Simon’s increasingly urgent suggestion that she sell the family home and the valuable land on which it stood?

Heart still pounding, she pulled open the door and psyched herself up to greet him, praying that she might have grown up and moved on enough not to be affected by him. Five long years had passed since she’d last seen him—surely enough time to give her some kind of immunity against him.

Vain hope. She swallowed, trying to quell the rush of guilty longing which made her heart begin to race as she stared into his stern face. Because was there a woman on earth who could have been unmoved by his presence—even if they had just agreed to marry someone else?

He wasn’t how most people expected a sheikh to look—with not a flowing robe in sight—but that was deliberate. Years ago, he had told her that he liked to blend in—like the chameleon who adapted its appearance to its habitat in order to survive. That was the reason why he was fluent in several languages and spoke them like a native. Except that someone as rugged and as powerful as Zahid could never really blend in. No matter what he said or wore, he drew the eye and caught people’s attention, just as a beautiful bloom tossed on a dusty roadside might have done.

Clad in a beautifully cut grey suit, which showcased the musculature of his magnificent body, he completely dominated the doorway of her house. Eyes like chips of black stone surveyed her from a hawk-featured face, his skin a shade lighter than burnished copper. With that raven-dark hair, he looked like some brooding movie-star of yesteryear, she thought, with a sudden and unwanted ache. He was all stillness and silence—while managing to exude a raw and undeniable animal magnetism.

For some inexplicable reason, Frankie plunged her left hand deep into the pocket of her jeans and a wave of guilt shivered through her. Was she trying to hide her brand-new engagement ring? And why on earth was she doing that?

‘Hello, Zahid,’ she said.

Few people—and especially commoners—were permitted to use his first name, but Zahid wasn’t thinking about protocol at that moment. For a moment there was complete silence as his gaze raked over her in astonishment. Surely there must be some kind of mistake?

‘Francesca?’ His eyes narrowed—as if he’d been confronted by a mirage in the middle of the desert. ‘Is that really you?’

Frankie tried not to react. Nobody called her Francesca. Nobody except him. She heard the familiar way he curled the syllables around his tongue and a stupid little shiver whispered over her skin. It was a name given to her by her glamorous mother who had been hoping for a mini-me and been bitterly disappointed. When the duckling child had stubbornly refused to become a swan, the exotic tag had disappeared and been replaced by the much more workaday ‘Frankie’ and that was what she’d been ever since. But not to Zahid.

‘Of course it’s me!’ she said, but she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t felt a sudden rush of pleasure at that flash of very grown-up appreciation in his eyes. He’d never looked at her in any way other than the way he might have regarded a faithful retainer. A loyal servant, say—or a pet dog who came running over with its tail wagging eagerly. She knew that her question was an unnecessary one but she wanted to hear how Zahid would answer it. ‘Why, do I look different?’

He felt a flicker of something unexpected. Damned right she did. Different didn’t even come close to it. Last time he’d seen her, she’d been a tomboyish nineteen-year-old, so nondescript and shapeless that you’d never have noticed her in a crowd. So what the hell had happened in the intervening years?

He studied her closely. The short hair, which used to stick out at odd angles, had been allowed to grow so that now it fell in dark, silken waves down her back. The thick, geeky glasses had disappeared and instead he could see a pair of eyes which were a deep shade of startling blue. And the shapeless clothes she used to wear had been replaced by a pair of snug jeans and a soft oatmeal sweater, which hinted at a body he would never have imagined Francesca possessing.

‘What the hell happened to your glasses?’ he demanded unevenly.

‘Oh, I wear contacts now.’ She shrugged. ‘Everybody does.’

He wanted to ask when had she developed such an amazing pair of breasts and a bottom which was curvier than a scimitar? He wanted to know when the dramatic transformation from girl to woman had taken place—but he stopped himself by biting back the faintly erotic questions. Because this was Francesca he was talking to—sweet, innocent little Francesca—not some potential lover he’d just met at a cocktail party.

Instead, he fixed her with a cool look, which was intended to remind her that although he was a family friend of long-standing he still expected a degree of formality and protocol.

Frankie saw the faint furrow which had appeared on his brow and correctly interpreted it. ‘Oh, forgive me! Would you …?’ She opened the door a little wider, unable to decide whether she wanted him to go or to stay. Because if he stayed—wouldn’t it unsettle her? Wouldn’t it risk starting those stupid fantasies again—the ones she used to get whenever he strode into the house? The ones which had always ended with Zahid scooping her up in his arms and starting to kiss her before telling her that he couldn’t live without her. ‘Would you like to come in?’ she finished weakly.

No, he’d driven down from London to stand on her doorstep like a salesman! ‘Thanks,’ he said drily, and walked into the hallway—a place which was at once both alien and familiar to him. A large and faintly shabby English home with a big, green garden. Yet hadn’t this been the one place outside his homeland where he had always been able to kick back and relax? A place where nobody watched him or where there were no indiscreet gossips or the threat of someone talking to the press. Because being the sheikh’s nephew meant that you were always watched; always listened to.

Over the years, his father used to bring him here—to talk to the man who had changed the course of his country’s history. Francesca’s brilliant and eccentric geologist father. It had been his unexpected discovery of oil which had lifted Khayarzah out of the crippling debts caused by decades of warfare—and changed its whole future.

As Francesca shut the door behind him Zahid found his gaze lingering for longer than usual on her unexpectedly blue eyes, remembering seeing her soon after she’d been born. What a mewling little creature she’d been—with her bright red face screaming out from amid a swathe of white blankets. He’d have been, what—thirteen at the time?

He remembered the way she used to waddle up to him as a chubby-faced toddler—unbelievably cute—and the way she’d demand to be carried by him just before she first started school. And hadn’t he done as she’d asked? Allowed her to twist him round her little finger in a way which no woman had ever done before, nor since.

He remembered, too, the cold air of neglect and despair which settled on the house when her mother left, pronouncing herself bored with her older, scientist husband. She’d run off with someone richer. Someone who had shown her the finer things in life. The first of the many wealthy lovers who would ultimately dump her before she died in a car crash, a tragedy sullied by the shame of knowing that the car was being driven by a prominent and very married politician.

But Francesca and her father had rallied. They’d formed a tight little unit. The little girl had grown up surrounded by scientists and left largely to her own devices. Consequently, she hadn’t gone through the coy teenage years—or the stage of showing off her body with minuscule clothes. In fact, up until this precise moment you would barely have noticed she was a woman at all.

He remembered teaching her how to play cards when she’d been unhappy at school. And actually letting her beat him! He was deeply and instinctively competitive, and it was the only time in his life that he hadn’t insisted on winning. It had been worth it just to see the little smile which had briefly illuminated her troubled features.

A voice broke into his thoughts and he realised she was speaking to him. ‘Did you say something?’ he questioned, shaking his head a little because it was unlike him to be sentimental.

‘I was asking what had brought you here, to Surrey.’ She tipped her head to one side. ‘Or were you just passing?’

For a moment he didn’t answer. What had brought him here today? The realisation that he hadn’t seen her in nearly five years and the faint guilt which had accompanied that thought? He knew that she was alone in the world now—and though he’d always intended to keep an eye on her, life just somehow kept getting in the way. And ever since the unexpected crown had been placed on his head just eighteen months ago the restrictions imposed by his new role had piled down thick and fast.

‘I have business in London, so I thought I’d do a detour,’ he said. ‘To see how you are. Realising that it is quite some time since I last saw you—and that I really ought to do something about it.’

He was looking at her in such an odd and piercing way that Frankie could feel colour stealing into her cheeks.

‘Would you … would you like a drink?’ she asked, knowing that he rarely accepted any kind of sustenance. She used to wonder if it was because he always had to be careful about someone trying to poison him until her father explained that royals always liked to keep a certain amount of distance about them, no matter where they were.

‘Yes, I would.’

‘You would?’

He knitted his eyebrows together. ‘Didn’t you just offer me a drink—or have I started hearing things? And if you offer something, then it’s usually expected you’ll provide it. Tea, please. Mint—if you have it.’

Nervously, she nodded, wishing that he’d disappear for a moment, leaving her to compose herself. So she could slip her engagement ring off until after he’d gone—thus postponing the inevitable questions she had no desire to answer even though she wasn’t quite sure why that was. ‘Would you … would you like to wait in the sitting room?’

Zahid frowned. What the hell was the matter with her today? He began to wonder if her dramatic physical transformation was responsible for her odd and rather secretive attitude? ‘No. I’ll come into the kitchen and talk to you while you’re making it—that’s what I usually do.’

‘Yes.’ But usually she didn’t feel this odd and prickling kind of awareness fizzing in the air around them. As if something had changed between them and nobody had bothered to warn her about it. ‘Come with me,’ she said.

Zahid followed her along the chilly corridor, carefully trying to avert his eyes from the rhythmic sway of her bottom and wondering why she was being so edgy. And why she was walking in a way which seemed …

They’d reached the kitchen when he worked out just what the anomaly was and he frowned. ‘Is there something the matter with your hand, Francesca?’

She turned round, her heart thudding guiltily against her breast. ‘My hand?’

‘The one which seems to be glued to your left thigh.’

Was it rude to stand in front of a sheikh with your hand rammed deeply into your pocket? She supposed that it was. And she couldn’t exactly potter one-handedly around this vast kitchen making tea, with his clever black eyes watching her, could she? Reluctantly, she withdrew her fingers, aware of the scratch of the stone against the denim and the dazzle of the gem as it emerged into the light.

The feeling of wonderment she’d been experiencing just minutes before his arrival now evaporated into one of acute embarrassment. Stupidly, she found her cheeks colouring as she lifted her eyes to meet his—but finding nothing other than cold curiosity in his gaze.

‘Why, Francesca,’ he said, with a note in his voice she’d never heard before. ‘I don’t believe it. You’re engaged to be married.’

CHAPTER TWO

BLACK eyes burned into her with a question blazing at their depths and for a moment Frankie felt oddly weak beneath their fierce scrutiny.

‘You’re getting married?’ Zahid queried silkily.

Frankie nodded, her throat parchment-dry, wondering why she was feeling so damned nervous when she should have been feeling proud. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Just—yesterday.’

‘Let me see. Oh, please don’t be coy about it.’ His black eyes gleamed with some dark emotion she didn’t recognise. ‘Come on, Francesca—I thought that all women loved showing off their engagement rings?’

Reluctantly, Frankie extended her hand and as he took it in his she felt the prickle of awareness as the sheikh’s warm flesh touched hers. Hadn’t there been years and years when she’d dreamt of Zahid holding her hand like this? And yet the exquisite irony was that at last it was happening and it meant precisely nothing. All he was doing was holding her hand so that he could examine an engagement ring bought for her by another man!

Zahid frowned as he studied the gem closely, feeling her unmistakable shiver as she pulled her fingers away. And hadn’t he felt the faintest whisper of something himself? Something which, if he didn’t know better, might almost have been the first potent shimmering of desire. Lifting his head, he met her eyes, raising his brows in mocking query. ‘But surely this should be a cause for celebration, rather than secrecy?’

The colour in her cheeks intensified. ‘Oh, but it is.’ So why had she been hiding the ring from him? The unspoken question hovered on the air, but even if he’d asked her Frankie doubted whether she would have been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. Not to him—not even to herself. And as it happened, he didn’t ask her.

‘So who’s the lucky man?’

‘His name’s Simon Forrester.’

‘Simon Forrester.’ Zahid pulled out a chair from beneath the large, scrubbed oak table and sat down, spreading his legs out in front of him. Idly, he noticed the unusual and fancy display of hothouse roses which were sitting there replacing the hand-picked sprigs from the garden which she normally favoured. Had ‘Simon’ bought her those? Was he the reason for the long hair and the junking of her glasses? The incentive to start wearing sexy jeans and a clinging sweater? Had Simon woken her up to all kinds of new experiences, as well as a new way of dressing?

Inexplicably, he felt the souring flavour of distaste in his mouth. ‘And what does he do, this Simon Forrester?’

Frankie’s smile became fixed. Wasn’t this what she had instinctively been fearing—having to give a detailed account? She felt like telling him that it wasn’t his place to just breeze in after however long it had been and start interrogating her. But she knew that there was no point. Zahid was used to getting exactly what he wanted—and why on earth wouldn’t she tell him?

‘He owns the estate agency I work in. Remember I mentioned I’d started there, in one of my Christmas cards?’

Had she? Zahid frowned. He was certain she knew that Christmas wasn’t celebrated in Khayarzah, but she still insisted on sending him a card every year. And for some reason, he insisted on opening them himself—instead of letting one of his aides deal with it. They were always variations on a theme: images of robins and berry-laden sprigs of holly. Or carol singers singing in snowy villages. And even though he didn’t celebrate Christmas, he did find those cards made him nostalgic for the years he spent in England while he was at boarding school.

‘Maybe you did mention it,’ he said slowly. But it was a surprise. Hadn’t he thought she might follow a scientific route, like her father? ‘Tell me more.’

Frankie bit her lip. He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about! Obviously, he never even bothered to read the chatty accompanying letter she always took the time to tuck inside the annual card. ‘Well, Simon runs a very successful company—’

‘Not about the company, Francesca—about him,’ he butted in. ‘This man you are proposing to marry. This Simon Forrester.’

It wasn’t easy when she felt as if he were spearing her with hostile black light from his eyes and spitting out Simon’s name as if it were some particularly nasty kind of medicine, but Frankie tried to remember all the things she liked best about her fiancé. Those blue eyes and the way he’d dazzled her with his attention. The roses which he’d had sent to her house, week after week—she, who had never received a bunch of flowers in her life!

She licked her lips. ‘He’s not the kind of man I would have normally expected to go out with—’

‘Really? You go out with many men, do you?’ he fired back. ‘And then compare them?’

‘N-no.’ Why on earth was he looking at her so darkly? ‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘So what do you mean?’

Frankie swallowed as she filled the kettle from the big, old-fashioned sink and put it on to boil. Why was he tying her up in knots with his clever line in questioning and, furthermore, why was he being so … aggressive? As if he had some sort of right to question her. Resisting the impulse to tell him it was none of his business, she forced her mind back to Simon and an image of his face popped into her mind. She thought of the thick lock of hair which flopped onto his forehead unless he brushed it back, which he did—rather a lot, as it happened. ‘Well, he’s blond and very good-looking.’

Zahid scowled. ‘I’m disappointed in you, Francesca,’ he said. ‘Are you really so superficial that physical attributes matter most?’

‘That’s rich, coming from you!’ said Frankie quietly, before she could stop herself.

There was a short and disbelieving silence. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, but it does.’ His voice dipped to a tone of menacing silk. ‘Tell me.’

Frankie met the flash of annoyance which sparked from his eyes. Why shouldn’t she tell him? He didn’t think twice about foisting his opinion on her. ‘You’re not such an angel yourself, are you, Zahid? Don’t you use your so-called “business” trips to Europe and the United States as a cover-up for your affairs with women?’

It would have been laughable if it were not so insulting and Zahid felt a mounting fury that Francesca—whom he had known all her life—could think so poorly of him. As if he were nothing more than some brainless stud. ‘And just where did you acquire this fascinating piece of information?’

‘The gossip columns are always full of your exploits—though I notice that they’ve tailed off since you became King. But prior to that, you were always being seen with some woman or other!’

‘How very naïve you are, Francesca.’ With a faint sigh of impatience, he shook his dark head and subjected her to a look of chilly censure. ‘Do you really believe everything you read in the papers?’

‘I believe the evidence of my own eyes! I’ve seen enough photos of you wit … with …’ To her fury and consternation, Frankie found that her breath was catching in her throat and that her mind was now being plagued with images far more vivid than that of Simon’s face.

Zahid with a Hollywood hottie gazing up at him, with naked adoration on her face. Zahid being papped with a sexy international lawyer who had been representing one of his rivals in some complicated court case. Except that she was pretty sure it wasn’t written into a legal code of conduct that a legal representative should look at her own client’s adversary as if she’d like to eat him up for breakfast. ‘With all kinds of women!’ she finished hotly. ‘Making you look like some sort of international playboy!’