Her Desert Prince

Her Desert Prince
Rebecca Winters

Dare to dream… these sparkling romances will make you laugh, cry and fall in love – again and again!The magic of the desert…Visiting the beautiful Nafud desert is a chance for Lauren Viret to lay her grandmother’s spirit and secrets to rest. But, caught up in a sandstorm, Lauren is rescued by a handsome stranger… Prince Rashad believes the stunning American he’s saved is hiding something – he must keep her close! What he doesn’t expect is to fall under Lauren’s captivating spell…Yet as enchanting nights in Arabia reveal the truth, can a future for Lauren and her prince ever be more than just a mirage

Rashad stood up. “Let’s dance.”

In a euphoric daze, Lauren moved into his strong arms. She’d been in them before, but this time it was different. He held her so close she could feel his hard-muscled body down to their feet. There was no place to put her arms but around his neck. As she did so, she felt his hands rove over her back and pull her up tight against him.

“Have I frightened you?” he whispered against her lips.

“No.” Her voice throbbed. She needed him like she needed air to breathe.

“That’s good, because I’m going to kiss you. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since the moment you woke up after the sandstorm.”

About the Author

REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include three beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high Alpine meadows full of wild flowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favourite vacation spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church.

HER DESERT PRINCE

BY REBECCA WINTERS

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE

Montreux, Switzerland—The third of June

“I CAN’T MARRY YOU, Paul. Though I think you’re a wonderful man, I’m not in love with you.”

“Since your grandmother died, you’re too sad to know your own feelings right now.”

“But I do know them. A marriage between us wouldn’t work.”

“So you’re really going on that trip?”

“Yes. I want to walk in her footsteps for a time. It’s my tribute to her.”

“You shouldn’t go there alone, Lauren. At least let me come with you to protect you.”

“Protect me? From what? No, Paul.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. This has to be good-bye.”

The Nafud Desert—The fifth of June

THEY WANDERED IN THE DESERT in a solitary way. Thirsty, their souls fainted in them.

The line from Psalms didn’t leave Lauren Viret’s mind as she drank from her water bag, surveying the indescribable vastness and loneliness of the northern Arabian desert.

Since they had left the major city of El-Joktor, bone-scorching heat had born down on their little group of twenty penetrating deeper into the desert’s heart. Forty actually if you counted the camels. In a movie, the audience would consider them secondary characters. But out here where there were no movie cameras rolling, the humped female dromedary played the star role.

Lauren was less than a granule on this endless burning waste of sand where one could be swallowed alive in an instant. Before she’d set out this morning on her forty-mile journey, her guide, Mustafa, had lectured her that her camel was more valuable than any human.

She’d read enough firsthand accounts of desert survival to believe it. Besides transportation the camels provided shelter, protection, even water and food in dire circumstances.

While she was deep in thought, Mustafa urged his beast forward to ride alongside her. He talked with excitement as he pointed out the huge, awe-inspiring crescent-shaped dunes in this area of the Nafud Desert. It was true she’d never seen anything like them. No wonder her grandmother had never stopped talking about this place.

But Mustafa had no idea it was something flesh and blood, someone more awesome than these dunes that had captivated Lauren’s American grandmother many years ago.

“Malik was bigger than life, Lauren,” her grandmother had once told her, “the sheikh over all his people. His word was law. He was as beautiful as a god. I couldn’t help myself loving him any more than I could stop breathing.”

Lauren couldn’t imagine a love like that.

She turned her head to glance at the camel drivers in their head scarves and cloaks, true men of the desert no doubt wondering what had possessed her to come out here alone. Lauren knew she looked out of place, a blonde American woman wearing the Arab male guthra and lightweight kandura herself, just the way her grandmother Celia Melrose Bancroft had once done.

Everyone at home had marveled over Lauren’s resemblance to her grandmother. Odd how certain genetic traits skipped a generation. Lauren’s mother had been a stunning brunette, as dark as Lauren was fair. Celia had given her daughter an Arabic name, Lana, meaning tender, which had added to the mystique of Lauren’s beautiful mother. Both her mother and father had tragically died in a cable-car accident while skiing six months after Lauren was born, but thankfully Celia had hundreds of photographs which Lauren pored over to keep her father and mother alive in her heart.

“Jolie-laide,” Paul had once murmured when he’d first seen a close up of Lana, but Lauren had heard him. In French that meant striking, in an interesting way without being beautiful. When she’d asked Paul what he’d meant by it he’d said, “I’m afraid you inherited all the ravissante genes, petite. No offense to your lovely mother.”

Lauren had known that Paul had been flirting with her at the time. Of course, he didn’t realize that Lauren’s part-American, part-Arabic mother had the look of her father, the great Sheikh Malik Ghazi Shafeeq. Lauren had seen a copy of a picture of her grandfather from an old Arab newspaper her grandmother had once shown her. It was still with Celia’s treasures.

The sheikh had been dressed in robes and head scarf, making it impossible to see much, except that he had a proud nose and wide mouth, which he’d bequeathed to his daughter. Lauren wondered if her grandfather might still be alive today? Probably not.

Now that Celia had passed away, no one else on earth knew of Lauren’s relationship to her Arabic grandfather and they never would. But her curiosity where he was concerned had been one of the main reasons driving her to make this journey into the desert.

Tonight she’d camp out under the stars. Tomorrow the caravan would continue on to the Oasis Al-Shafeeq where she’d spend several weeks and hoped to find out more about the man himself.

On occasion Celia would say, “The one thing I see that reveals the Arab blood in you is your fierce passion for life. Only in that regard have I glimpsed signs of Malik. Mark my words … with the right man, that passion will be unleashed.”

Paul, a newspaper journalist from Paris, could never have been that man. Lauren liked Paul, but in her heart she was waiting for the day she experienced the grande passion her grandmother had often talked about.

Though Lauren had turned down Paul’s marriage proposal, she feared that he hadn’t given up hope of marrying her and would be waiting for her upon her return. It was this unflagging trait to his personality that had won him an interview with Celia in the first place.

For several years Paul had been wanting to do a series for his paper on the life of Richard Bancroft, Celia’s deceased husband. Though Celia had been a young unwed mother at the time, Richard had married her and become a father figure to a young Lana. He had later become a favorite of Lauren’s too, especially after her parents had been killed. Apparently it had never bothered Richard that Celia did not tell him the name of her lover, and Lana’s father. It was simply enough that she’d loved Richard.

Richard had been a celebrated adventurer and anthropologist and had led fourteen different expeditions into some of the most inhospitable places on earth. Lauren and her grandmother had often gone along on some of his expeditions, amazed at the new sights they saw on their travels. But for some reason Richard had never traveled to the Arabian desert, and so neither Lauren nor her grandmother had ever ventured there either. Whether it was because her grandmother considered it too sacred a place to revisit with another man, or whether Richard’s interests took him elsewhere, Lauren would never know.

With persistence, Paul had finally won the opportunity to interview Celia about her life with Richard and their many travels. From the beginning he’d made it his business to get to know Lauren, too, who had still lived with her grandmother in Montreux and was helping to compile Richard’s many notes and diaries into a book for publication.

Celia had found Paul charming. Lauren had, too, but for her their relationship had been strictly platonic; her heart wasn’t involved. Her grandmother had known that, but one day had confessed to Lauren that her greatest fear was to leave her beloved granddaughter alone without a companion to share her life.

“I won’t always be alone,” she had assured Celia. “Like you, I plan to travel and do something worthwhile with my life. In time someone will come along.” Lauren hadn’t wanted to cause her dying grandmother any unnecessary anxiety, but there’d always been honesty between them.

Once Celia was buried, Lauren had made preparations for this trip to the Oasis Al-Shafeeq. She had needed to see the place where her grandmother—romantic to the depths of her being—had experienced a soul-captivating love encountered beneath a full desert moon.

Lauren’s hand instinctively went to her throat to touch the small hammered-gold medallion with its inscribed half moon on a gold chain hidden beneath her clothes. It had been her grandmother’s greatest treasure, given to her by her lover during a romantic visit to the Garden of the Moon.