Desert Hearts: Sheikh Without a Heart / Heart of the Desert / The Sheikh's Destiny

Desert Hearts: Sheikh Without a Heart / Heart of the Desert / The Sheikh's Destiny
CAROL MARINELLI

Sandra Marton

Melissa James

Sheikh Without a HeartSheikh Karim is horrified that gorgeous Rachel Donnelly is the mother of his newly discovered nephew and he is determined that the heir to the throne will be raised in Alcantar!Heart of the DesertSheikh Prince Ibrahim has locked away his emotions and shuns his royal responsibility… But the desert calls him. Trapped in the swirling sands with the brooding rebel prince, one searing kiss is all it takes for Georgie to know Ibrahim is trouble…The Sheikh’s DestinySheikh Alim El-Kanar has left his war-torn home but without a kingdom to rule and a public to serve he has no pupose. When nurse Hana saves his life, she gives him hope. Finding each other has unleashed powerful forces.

Desert Hearts

Desert Hearts

Sheikh Without a Heart

Sandra Marton

Heart of the Desert

Carol Marinelli

The Sheikh’s Destiny

Melissa James

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

Sheikh Without a Heart

SANDRA MARTON wrote her first novel while she was still in infant school. Her doting parents told her she’d be a writer someday and Sandra believed them. In senior school and college, she wrote dark poetry nobody but her boyfriend understood, though looking back she suspects he was just being kind. As a wife and mother, she wrote murky short stories in what little spare time she could manage, but not even her boyfriend-turned-husband could pretend to understand those. Sandra tried her hand at other things, among them teaching and serving on the board of education in her home town, but the dream of becoming a writer was always in her heart.

At last Sandra realised she wanted to write books about what all women hope to find: love with that one special man, love that’s rich with fire and passion, love that lasts forever. She wrote a novel, her very first, and sold it to Mills & Boon. Since then, she’s written more than seventy books, all of them featuring sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life heroes. A four-time RITA

Award finalist, she has also received an RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award for Series Romance. Sandra lives with her very own sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life hero in a sun-filled house on a quiet country lane in the north-eastern United States.

Sandra loves to hear from her readers. You can contact her through her website www.sandramarton.com (http://www.sandramarton.com) or at PO Box 295, Storrs, CT 06268, USA.

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS the kind of night that made a man long to ride his favorite stallion across a sea of desert sand.

Black silk sky. Stars as brilliant as bonfires. An ivory moon that cast a milky glow over the endless sea of sand.

But there was no horse beneath Sheikh Karim al Safir. Not on this night. His Royal Highness the Prince of Alcantar, heir to its Ancient and Honorable throne, was twenty-five thousand feet above the desert, soaring through the darkness in the cabin of his private jet. A rapidly-cooling cup of coffee stood on a small glass-topped table beside him; his leather attaché case lay open on the next seat.

Minutes ago he’d started to go through its contents until he’d suddenly thought, what the hell was the point?

He knew what was in the case.

He’d gone through the contents endlessly during the last two weeks and then again tonight, flying from the British West Indies toward his final destination, as if doing so would somehow make more sense of things when he knew damned well that was not going to happen.

Karim reached for the cup of coffee and brought it to his lips. The black liquid had gone from cool to chilly.

He drank it anyway.

He needed it. The bitterness, the punch of caffeine. He needed something, God knew, to keep him going. He was exhausted. In body. In mind.

In spirit.

If only he could walk to the cockpit, tell his pilot to put the plane down. Here. Right now. On the desert below.

Crazy, of course.

It was just that he ached for the few moments of tranquility he might find if he could take only one long, deep breath of desert air.

Karim snorted. His head was full of crazy thoughts tonight.

For all he knew, there would never be a sense of peace to be drawn from this land.

This was not the desert of his childhood. Alcantar was thousands of miles away and its endless miles of gently undulating sand ended at the turquoise waters of the Persian Sea.

The desert over which his plane was flying ended at the eye-popping neon lights of Las Vegas.

Karim drank more cold coffee.

Las Vegas.

He had been there once. An acquaintance had tried to convince him to invest in a hotel being built there. He’d flown to McCarran field early in the morning—

And flown back to New York that same night.

He had not put his money into the hotel—or, rather, his fund’s money. And he’d never returned to Vegas.

He’d found the city tawdry. Seedy. Even its much-hyped glamour had struck him as false, like a whore trying to pass herself off as a courtesan by applying garish layers of make-up.

So, no. Las Vegas was not a city for him—but it had been one for his brother.

Rami had spent almost three months there, longer than he’d spent anywhere else the past few years. He’d have been drawn to it like a moth to flame.

Karim sat back in his leather seat.

Knowing all he now knew about his brother, that came as no surprise.

He’d finally had to face the truth about him. Tying up the loose ends of his dead brother’s life had torn away the final illusions.

Tying up loose ends, Karim thought.

His mouth twisted.

That was his father’s phrase. What he was really doing was cleaning up the messes Rami had left behind, but then, his father didn’t know about those. The King believed his younger son had simply been unable or unwilling to settle down, that he’d traveled from place to place in an endless search to find himself.