KATE HEWITT discovered her first Mills & Boon romance novel on a trip to England when she was thirteen and she’s continued to read them ever since. She wrote her first story at the age of five, simply because her older brother had written one and she thought she could do it, too. That story was one sentence long. Fortunately, they’ve become a bit more detailed as she’s grown older. She has written plays, short stories and magazine serials for many years, but writing romance remains her first love. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, travelling and learning to knit. After marrying the man of her dreams—her older brother’s childhood friend—she lived in England for six years and now resides in Connecticut with her husband, her three young children and the possibility of one day getting a dog. Kate loves to hear from readers; you can contact her through her website, www.kate-hewitt.com.

       CHAPTER ONE

      THE dream came to him again. It was an assault of the senses and of memory, a tangle of images, grasping hands, the choking sea. Aarif Al’Farisi slept with his eyes clenched shut, his hands fisted on his bed sheets, a sheen of sweat glistening on his skin.

       ‘Help me…help me…Aarif!’

      The desperate cry of his name echoed endlessly, helplessly through the corridors of time and memory.

      Aarif woke suddenly; his eyes opened and adjusted to the darkness of his bedroom. A pale sliver of moon cast a jagged swathe of light on the floor. He took a deep, shuddering breath and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

      It took a moment to calm his racing heart. Each careful, measured breath steadied him and made the shadows retreat. For now. He ran a hand through his sleep-tousled hair, still damp with sweat, and rose from the bed.

      From the balcony of the Calistan royal palace he could see an endless stretch of moonlit sand, arid desert, all the way to the Kordela river with its diamonds, Calista’s lifeblood, mixed treacherously in its silt. He kept his gaze on the undulating waves of sand and the promise of the river with its guarded treasure, and let his breathing return to normal as a dry desert wind cooled the sweat on his skin.

      He hated his dreams. He hated that even now, twenty years later, they left him shaken, afraid, helpless. Weak. Instinctively Aarif shook his head, as if to deny the dream. The reality. For the truth, stark as it was, was that he’d failed his brother and his family all those years ago, and he was destined to relive those agonising moments in his mind whenever the dreams visited him.

      He hadn’t had a dream like this for months, and the respite had lulled him into a false sense of security. Safety. Yet he would never have either, he knew. How could you be safe from yourself, secure from the endless repercussions of your own failures?

      Letting out a sigh of frustrated exasperation, Aarif turned from the balcony and the inky night spangled with stars. He moved to the laptop he’d left on the desk by his bed, for he knew sleep was far off now. He would redeem the night through work.

      He opened the computer and the machine hummed to life as he pulled on a pair of loose-fitting cotton trousers, his chest and feet still bare. In the mirror above the bureau he caught a glimpse of his reflection, saw the remembered fear still etched in harsh lines on his face, flared in