Anne Herries - The Sheikh

“I do so want to know you better.”

“Do you, Chloe?” His dark eyes were intent, his mouth somehow softer than usual. His voice was making her feel odd. “That is good, for it is what I want also.”

Pasha gave her a hungry look that made her tremble. She remembered the magic of that dance on board ship, and for the first time began to understand what she had discovered in his arms. This was the passion she had seen portrayed on the movie screen—but for real! A feeling of intense excitement mixed with a hint of danger ran through her. This was real! She was beneath desert stars with her own sheikh and he was about to kiss her….

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lives in Cambridge, but spends part of the winter in Spain, where she and her husband stay in a pretty resort nestled amid the hills that run from Malaga to Gibraltar. Gazing over a sparkling blue ocean, watching the sunbeams dance like silver confetti on the restless waves, Anne loves to dream up her stories of laughter, tears and romantic lovers. She is the author of over thirty published novels.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Afterword

‘S o that’s my news,’ Chloe said, trying hard not to show her excitement too much. ‘I’m off to Morocco next week, and I don’t know when I shall be back…’

‘You are so lucky!’ Justine cried as she stared enviously at her cousin. ‘All I’ve managed to find is a job at the local library—and that’s after years at college.’ She pouted her rouged mouth at Chloe and adopted what she fondly thought of as an artistic pose.

Chloe Randall tried to look suitably sympathetic as Justine bemoaned her lack of success in finding a really exciting job, but her mouth wouldn’t stop smiling.

She had a soft, pretty mouth, which was free of the lip rouge her cousin liked to wear, and her straight, fair, collar-length hair was worn brushed back from her face and held in place by a scarf. Justine’s hair had been cut recently into a style favoured by some of the stars of the silent screen, and was short at the back with longer sides. She was also very daringly wearing red lipstick!

They both looked what they were, young girls of good family emerging from the restrictions of their education and beginning to flex their wings in the sun of freedom like little butterflies. It was 1925, the terrible war that had blighted the lives of the generation before them seemed almost a distant memory, and life appeared made for having fun and enjoying oneself.

‘It was sheer luck,’ Chloe said for perhaps the tenth time that evening, and got up to wind the gramophone once more and play her favourite recording of Paul Robeson one last time. ‘I do love this. It was wonderful actually seeing him on stage when Daddy took me.’

‘Oh, don’t play it again yet,’ Justine begged. ‘I’ve got a new jazz record I want to put on in a minute. Sit down and talk to me. Tell me about what happened—how you came to meet this professor…’

‘As I was saying, it was luck.’ Chloe left the gramophone and sat cross-legged on the floor on a pile of ‘harem cushions’, which were another one of Justine’s fads and popular just at the moment with all the Bright Young Things. ‘I happened to be in the research department of the museum when he came in. He was carrying an umbrella, several parcels and a bag of oranges. The paper was wet because it had been raining hard, and his oranges went all over the floor.’

Justine giggled as she pictured the scene. Although she tried very hard to be sophisticated, she was still an innocent at heart, a little starstruck, which came of going to the cinema as much as she possibly could, and being thoroughly spoiled by her indulgent and wealthy parents.

In that she was luckier than Chloe, who had lost her mother to a painful illness while she was away at school, and whose father always seemed rather a cold man to Justine, though she would never have voiced her thoughts aloud out of loyalty to her cousin.

‘What did you say his name was—the professor?’

‘Hicks—Charles Hicks,’ Chloe said and flicked a stray wisp of hair from her eyes. ‘The thing is, I helped pick up his oranges and naturally we got talking—and it appears that he knew my father from way back. Apparently, he was at my christening but lost touch with Daddy when he went out to Egypt soon after that. Naturally, I invited him to dinner…’

‘And that’s when he asked you if you would like to accompany him on a trip to Morocco.’ Justine stared at her with a mixture of envy and disbelief.

‘To help with some research,’ Chloe agreed, her mouth refusing to stay in a straight line. ‘Just now, he’s working on a book about various nomadic tribes—particularly the Bedouin and Berber peoples. He has already done most of his research on the Bedouins, who inhabit much of northern Africa, and now he wants to do a study of the Berbers—so that he can compare them, apparently. He’s also interested in the religious customs and intends to visit a lot of places considered holy—if he can get permission, that is. It’s all very clever and beyond me, but interesting, don’t you think?’

She laughed as she saw Justine’s blank look. Obviously her cousin didn’t agree, but then Justine’s interests were mostly clothes, dancing, and going to the cinema, as were most young women’s these days.

‘When Daddy told him that I was interested in Arabic literature, he thought I would be the ideal person to help—especially as I took shorthand as one of my skills.’

‘You jumped at the chance, of course.’ Justine sighed. ‘I wish I could find someone to give me a free holiday abroad.’

‘I wish you could come with us,’ Chloe said regretfully. ‘But Professor Hicks is paying all my expenses so I can’t very well ask if my cousin can come too. I doubt if he really needs help with his research at all, but Daddy told him I’d just finished college and was looking for work while I did my own research. He was quite impressed with my ambition—that’s how he put it. Something about admiring a girl who wasn’t prepared to settle for marriage straight away.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s what most of us do—get married and have babies,’ Justine said with some regret. ‘You’re the exception, Chloe. I went to college because my father wanted me to, and you were already there so it was fun. But Mummy expects me to do the season, and I expect I’ll get engaged—if I can find someone who looks like him…’

Justine reached for a copy of the magazine she had discovered at the library that morning. It had a full-page picture of the actor Rudolph Valentino inside and was advertising his latest film.

‘We must see this before you go away,’ Justine said and sighed over the picture of the screen idol. ‘I’ve seen all his films over and over again, but I love The Sheikh the most. They say he’s planning to make a sequel to it soon.’