Chosen As The Sheikh's Wife. Liz Fielding

getting dressed until she’d had coffee.

      The local newspaper was lying on the mat. Her gran had liked her to read the local news to her…

      She bent to pick it up, groaning as the headache she thought she’d defeated slid forward and collided with the back of her aching eyes.

      Then she groaned again as she saw the front page. It must be a slow news day, because she seemed to fill the front page, staring like a rabbit caught in the media head lights, with the Trash or Treasure expert beside her displaying the khanjar. In full colour.

      The headline read: ARABIAN ‘PRINCESS’ AT ROADSHOW.

      What?

      The doorbell rang and without thinking she wrenched the door open, certain that it would be Sarah. She’d taken to dropping in every morning over the last few weeks, to see if she needed anything. She usually came round the back, letting herself in with her “good neighbour” key, as she had yesterday when she’d heard her cry for help when the floor had given way.

      Clearly the fact that the phone had gone unanswered was causing her concern, but since she’d bolted the back door last night the key would be useless.

      But it wasn’t Sarah, who was tiny—apart from around the middle, where she was spreading spectacularly—and fair; the figure that filled the tiny porch was her opposite in every conceivable way.

      Tall, spare, broad-shouldered, male, there was nothing soft about him. His features were austere, chiselled to the bone, and his olive-toned skin was positively Mediterranean against a snowy band-collared shirt, fastened to the neck. His hair was thick and crisply cut. But it was his eyes that held her.

      Dark as midnight and just as dangerous.

      He looked very…foreign.

      He was also stunningly, knee-wobblingly handsome.

      Violet was suitably stunned. And her knees dutifully wobbled.

      Just her luck that she’d emerged from the shower pink of face, with her hair in its usual wet tangle, and with nothing between her and decency but a film of moisturiser and a faded pink bathrobe that could only be described as…functional. ‘Miss Hamilton?’

      Oh, and guess what…? He had a voice like melted chocolate, delicately flavoured with an exotic, barely there accent.

      Whatever he was selling, she was buying it by the crate…

      Except, of course, that he was far too expensively dressed to be a door-to-door salesman. She knew clothes. And what he was wearing did not come off a peg in the high street.

      Oh, well. She was expecting a visit from a representative of the finance company to call any day, with the release papers for her to sign so that they could sell the house, recover their money.

      This had to be him.

      ‘Miss Violet Hamilton?’ he repeated, when she didn’t answer.

      ‘Who?’ she asked, just to hear him say Violet again. Long and slow.

      Vi-o-let.

      Pronouncing every syllable, turning a name she loathed only slightly less than the hideously shortened “Vi” into the most desirable name in the entire world.

      ‘I’m looking for Miss Violet Hamilton.’ And, taking the newspaper from her hand, he held the front page up for her to see. ‘I believe I’ve found her.’

      No point pretending to be the lodger, then. Asking him to come back when she’d gussied herself up, straightened her hair, applied some make-up, was decked out in one of her more creative outfits. Oh, well…

      ‘And here I was kidding myself that the photograph is so awful that you couldn’t possibly tell,’ she said. ‘Clearly I was fooling myself.’

      He looked at the photograph and then at her, for rather longer than seemed necessary just to confirm the likeness. Then, clearly thinking better of commenting one way or the other, he returned the paper and said, ‘I am Fayad al Kuwani, Miss Hamilton.’ And he held out a visiting card—as if they couldn’t be printed off by the dozen in any name you cared to dream up by anyone with a computer.

      Except that this wasn’t a do-it-yourself job, but embossed on heavy ivory-coloured card.

      If he was from the finance company, he certainly wasn’t one of the foot-soldiers.

      The front of the card gave no hint, but contained only his name: Fayad al Kuwani. Unusual enough. She turned it over. The back was blank. No address, no phone number.

      Obviously this was a man whose name was enough for those with the wit to recognise it. Which did not include her.

      ‘Nice card,’ she said. ‘But a trifle shy of information.’

      ‘The Ras al Kawi Embassy will vouch for me.’

      ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then,’ she said. Her friends would have recognised sarcasm. He apparently did not, but merely nodded. Good grief, he was serious…

      Ras al Kawi? Where was that?

      ‘I need to talk to you about a khanjar that I believe is in your possession,’ he said. ‘It is possible that it once belonged to my family.’

      ‘Oh?’ Then, realising that he’d come to demand it back, ‘It’s amazing how fast good news spreads.’

      ‘You have no idea. Perhaps I should wait in my car while you…?’

      He made the vaguest of gestures, resolutely looking at her face, avoiding her bare legs, the shabby bathrobe that had a tendency to gape at the neck. It made no difference. Every inch of her skin tingled.

      ‘Dress?’ she offered, lippy to the last. Except that the word didn’t come out quite as she’d intended, but thick and throaty. More to avoid those eyes than because she was interested in his choice of trans port, Violet looked past him.

      A black Rolls-Royce was parked at the kerb. The little green and gold flag on the bonnet stirred in the breeze.

      She barely stopped herself from letting slip an expression that would have brought her a rebuke from her grandma.

      Her breathless, ‘Who are you?’ wasn’t a whole heap better.

      ‘If your story is true, Miss Hamilton, then your great-great-grand mother, Princess Fatima al Sayyid, was once married to my great-great-grandfather.’

      At which point she did let slip a word that she used only under the most extreme pressure.

      She would have been embarrassed about that, but a scream from rear of the house—Sarah’s scream—obliterated the sound.

CHAPTER THREE