Alexandra Sellers - The Fierce and Tender Sheikh

She put her hand in his but as he drew her closer, she protested nervously, “I’ve never danced with a man before. I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s like walking. Shift your weight back and forth between your feet, and let me give you your direction.”

Shakira felt enclosed and safe. The music seemed to flow through them, wrap around them, binding them together, so that after a time it seemed as though something else created the dance, using their bodies.

A singing heat tingled on her skin when he touched her. His hand moved against her bare back, and she felt a shivering response down her spine. He bent his head to murmur something, and even his breath against her neck caused a delicious melting.

Then he dropped his hands and she knew she had been wrong about the bonds that linked them. They were not the product of the music, but something else. Because they were still there, binding her to him, when the music stopped. And she regretted that this moment ever had to end.

Dear Reader,

Silhouette Desire is starting the New Year off with a bang as we introduce our brand-new family-centric continuity, DYNASTIES: THE ASHTONS. Set in the lush wine-making country of Napa Valley, California, the Ashtons are a family divided by a less-than-fatherly patriarch. We think you’ll be thoroughly entranced by all the drama and romance when the wonderful Eileen Wilks starts things off with Entangled. Look for a new book in the series each month…all year long.

The New Year also brings new things from the fabulous Dixie Browning as she launches DIVAS WHO DISH. You’ll love her sassy heroine in Her Passionate Plan B. SONS OF THE DESERT, Alexandra Sellers’s memorable series, is back this month with the dramatic conclusion, The Fierce and Tender Sheikh. RITA ®Award-winning author Cindy Gerard will thrill you with the heart-stopping hero in Between Midnight and Morning. (My favorite time of the night. What about you?)

Rounding out the month are two clever stories about shocking romances: Shawna Delacorte’s tale of a sexy hero who falls for his best friend’s sister, In Forbidden Territory, and Shirley Rogers’s story of a secretary who ends up winning her boss in a bachelor auction, Business Affairs.

Here’s to a New Year’s resolution we should all keep: indulging in more desire!

Happy reading,

Melissa Jeglinski

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

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is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.

Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.

What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.

Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, UK, England.

1 Hani

Hani’s Dream

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

2 Shakira

Shakira’s Dream

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

3 Princess

The Princess’s Dream

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

4 The Beloved

The Dream of the Beloved

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

In the dream she had a name. Her own true name. In the dream she knew who she was.

She wasn’t alone, in the dream. She had a home and a family, her own true family. The beloved faces she had lost so long ago were restored to her, in other faces that somehow belonged to her.

She wasn’t hungry, in the dream, and they told her that she would never go hungry again. And there was water there, clean water, to wash in as well as to drink. Nor did she sleep in mud under a filthy tent, nor in a tiny, stifling room with bars on the windows. No, she had a bed so large and comfortable and clean she could not sleep for the freshness and wonder of it, and a room so airy and beautiful that in the dream she wept to see it.

In the dream they said—her family—that it belonged to her by right and that she would never again be lost to them. People called her Princess in the dream, as if she were someone to cherish. Someone important, someone worth loving.

In the dream, she was a woman.

The desert lay smoking under the burning sun, rugged and inhospitable all the way to the distant mountains. Cutting across it, the highway made no compromise with the terrain, a grey, featureless ribbon streaking over gully and flat with ruthless self-importance: the hostile conspiring with the inflexible to produce a faceless indifference to human need.

A large flatbed truck, its load covered with a bright blue plastic tarpaulin and fixed with ropes, was roaring over the lonely stretch of highway, smoky dust rising from its passing, as if the flat tarmac were setting fire to its wheels and it had to keep moving or be consumed.

Far behind, on the otherwise empty road, in a glinting silver car that was quickly gaining on the truck, Sheikh Sharif Azad al Dauleh flicked his eyes from the map flattened against the steering wheel to the view out the window. No sign of his destination yet. All that met his gaze was the barren landscape, sere and rust-coloured, scratched with gullies as if by a giant claw, dotted with parched scrub. As barren as any Bagestani desert, and yet unmistakably alien. He could not feel at home here.

It was a printed map, on which the site he was searching the desert for was marked only in pen. Burry Hill Detention Centre had been scratched above a rough X near the line that was the road, some miles from the nearest town. His eyes flicked over the landscape, looking for evidence of a side road. According to his information, it would not be sign-posted. The general public was not encouraged to drop in at refugee camps.

He tossed the map down and sighed. A difficult mission, the Sultan had said. But neither Ashraf nor he himself had had any idea of the nature of the difficulties that would confront him. The assignment to find a lost member of the royal family, somewhere in the world’s refugee camps, was not merely a logistical nightmare; it was an emotional black hole. The scale of suffering he had seen was something no one could be prepared for.

The truck was belching a noxious, thick grey smoke. The sheikh put his foot down harder and pulled into the passing lane.