Penny Jordan Tribute Collection. PENNY JORDAN
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now and she had expected to be there at one. A film of sand dust had turned the sky a brassy red-gold colour, and as she crested a huge sand dune and looked down into the emptiness on the other side of it Mariella began to panic slightly. Surely she should be able to at least see the tourist base oasis from here?
Ruefully she reached for the vehicle’s mobile, realising that it might be sensible to ask for help, but to her dismay when she tried to make a call to the number programmed into the phone the only response was a fierce crackling sound. Stopping the vehicle she reached for her own mobile, but it was equally ineffective.
The sky was even more obscured by sand now, the wind hitting the vehicle with such force that it was physically rocking it. As though sensing her disquiet Fleur began to cry. She was hungry and needed changing, Mariella recognised, automatically attending to the baby’s needs whilst she tried to decide what she should do.
It was impossible that she could be lost, of course. The vehicle was fitted with a compass and she had been given very detailed and careful instructions, which she had followed to the letter.
So why hadn’t she reached the tourist oasis?
Fleur ate her own meal eagerly, but Mariella discovered that she herself had lost her appetite!
And then just as she was beginning to feel truly afraid she saw it! A line of camels swaying out of the dust towards her led by a robed camel driver.
Relieved, Mariella drove towards the camel train. Its leader was gravely polite. She had missed the turning to the oasis, he explained, something that was easily done with such a wind blowing sand across the track. To her alarm he further explained that, because of the sudden deterioration in the weather, all tourists had been urged to return to the city instead of remaining in the desert, but since Mariella had come so far her best course of action now was to press on to her ultimate destination, which he carefully showed her how to do using the vehicle’s compass.
Thanking him, she did as he had instructed her, grimly checking and re-checking the compass as she drove up and down what felt like an interminable series of the sand dunes until eventually, in the distance through the sand blowing against her windscreen, she could just about see the looming mass of the mountain range.
It was already four o’clock and the light seemed to be fading, a fact that panicked Mariella into driving a little faster. She had never dreamed that her journey would prove so hazardous and she was very much regretting having set out on it, but now at last its end was in sight.
It took her almost another hour of zigzagging across the sand dunes to reach the rocky thrust of the beginnings of the mountain range. The oasis was situated in a deep ravine, its escarpment so high that Mariella shuddered a little as she drove into its shadows. This was the last kind of place she had expected to appeal to the man who had been her sister’s faithless lover.
Would his villa here be as palatial as his home in Zuran? Mariella frowned and checked as the ravine opened out and she saw the oasis ahead of her. Remote and beautiful in its own way, it was very obviously a place of deep solitude, the oasis itself enclosed with a fringing of palms illuminated by the eerie glow of the final rays of the setting sun. Shielding her eyes, Mariella stopped the vehicle to look around. Where was the villa? All she could see was one solitary pavilion tent! A good-sized pavilion, to be sure, but most definitely not a villa! Had she somehow got lost—again?
Fleur had started to cry, a cross, tired, hungry noise that alerted Mariella to the fact that for Fleur’s sake if nothing else she needed to stop.
Carefully she drove the vehicle forward over the treacherously boulder-rutted track, which seemed more like a dry river bed than a roadway! Sand blowing in from the desert was covering the boulders and the thin sparse grass of the oasis.
There was a vehicle parked several yards from the pavilion and Mariella stopped next to it.
A man was emerging from the pavilion, alerted to her arrival by the sound of her vehicle.
As he strode towards her, his robe caught by the strong wind and flattened against his body revealing a torso muscle structure that caused her to suck in her own stomach in sharply dangerous womanly response to its maleness.
And then he turned his head and looked at her, and the earth halted on its axis before swinging perilously in a sickening movement as Mariella recognised him.
It was the man from the airport. The man from her dream!
CHAPTER TWO
HIS hand was on the door handle of the four-wheel drive. Wrenching it open, he demanded angrily, ‘Who the devil are you?’
He was looking at her eyes again, with that same look of biting contempt glittering in his own as he raked her with a gritty gaze.
‘I’m looking for Sheikh Xavier Al Agir,’ Mariella responded, returning his look with one of her own—plus interest!
‘What? What do you want with him?’
He was curt to the point of rudeness, but then, given what she had already seen—and dreamed—of him, she wouldn’t have expected anything else.
‘What I want with him is no business of yours!’ she told him angrily.
In her seat Fleur’s cries grew louder.
Peering into the vehicle, he demanded in disbelief, ‘You’ve brought a baby out in this?’
The disgust and anger in his voice made her face sting even more than the pieces of sand blown against it by the wind.
‘What the hell possessed you? Didn’t you hear the weather warning earlier? This area was reported as being strictly out of bounds to tourists because of the threat of sandstorms.’
Hot-faced, Mariella remembered how she had switched off the radio to play Fleur’s tapes.
‘I’m sorry if I’ve arrived at an inconvenient time,’ she responded sarcastically to cover her own discomfort, ‘but if you could just give me directions for the Oasis Istafan, then—’
‘This is the Oasis Istafan,’ came back the immediate and cold response.
It was? Then?
‘I want to see Sheikh Xavier Al Agir,’ Mariella told him again, gathering her composure together. ‘I presume he is here?’
‘What do you want to see him for?’
Mariella had had enough. ‘That is no business of yours,’ she said angrily. Inwardly she was worrying how on earth she was going to get back to the city and the comfort of her Beach Club bungalow and what on earth a man as wealthy as the sheikh was reputed to be was doing out here with this… this… this arrogant predator of a man!
‘Oh, I think you’ll find that anything concerning Xavier is very much my business,’ came the gritted reply.
Something—Mariella wasn’t sure what—must have alerted her to the truth. But she was too shocked by it to voice it, looking from his eyes to his mouth and then back again as she swallowed—hard—against the tight ball of shock tightening like ice around her heart. ‘You… you… can’t be the sheikh,’ she told him defiantly, but her voice was trembling lightly, betraying her lack of confidence in her own denial.
Was this man her sister’s lover… and Fleur’s father? What was that sharp, bitter, dangerous feeling settling over her like a black cloud?
‘You are the sheikh, aren’t you?’ she acknowledged bleakly.
A brief, sardonic inclination of his head was his only response but it was enough.
Turning away from him, she reached into the baby carrier and tenderly removed Fleur. Her whole face softened and illuminated with love as she hugged her and then kissed her before looking him straight in the eyes and saying fiercely to him, ‘This is Fleur, the baby you have refused to both acknowledge and support.’
She had shocked him, Mariella realised, even though he