The Sheikh's Beloved (Books 1 and 2 of The Sheikh's Beloved series)

THE SHEIKH’S BELOVED

Books 1 and 2 of The Sheikh’s Beloved romance series

by

Katheryn Lane

Smashwords Edition

Published by:

Katheryn Lane on Smashwords

The Sheikh’s Beloved

Copyright © 2013 by Katheryn Lane

All rights reserved

Cover art by JD Smith Design at www.jdsmith-design.co.uk

Thank you to The Atwater Group for copyediting this book.

www.TheAtwaterGroup.com

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places, and events depicted herein are either a product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. However, I would like to thank Tassie Jan Van Engen and Mandy Hessong for letting me name the heroine and the heroine’s mother after them. Thank you!

* * * * *

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

* * * * *

Also by Katheryn Lane

Contents

Book 1

Adored By The Sheikh

Book 2

Treasured By The Sheikh

BOOK 1

ADORED BY THE SHEIKH

Two people.

Two cultures.

Two completely different sets of expectations.

On a flight home from Australia, a volcanic ash storm forces Tassie Fielding to prolong a scheduled stopover in the Middle East and it’s not long before she’s being offered some local hospitality by a fabulously rich, handsome sheikh. However, what will Sheikh Najid expect from her in return for his lavish generosity?

Chapter 1

I’m sorry, but all flights out of Kalil have been cancelled.

There must be at least one plane going somewhere, sometime!

I’m afraid that the current weather conditions mean all air traffic has been suspended with immediate effect.

But I have to get back home, Tassie said.

I’m sorry, the airline agent replied and she placed Tassie’s travel documents back on the airport transfer counter.

But what am I supposed to do now? Where am I supposed to go?

You will need to wait until the weather conditions improve. Next, please, the woman called out to the long queue of passengers who were waiting behind the thick yellow line painted across the white concourse floor.

Tassie picked up her passport along with the paper showing her flight details and shoved them into her worn leather handbag. Maybe the customer service staff would be of more assistance. She marched across the departure lounge and found an extremely crowded help desk. After queuing for the better part of two hours and narrowly avoiding a fight with a middle-aged man in a pink Hawaiian shirt when he tried to barge in front of her, she finally came face to face with a customer service representative. He was a young Arab man with a pale downy beard.

How can I help you? he asked. He looked very tired. The dark circles under his eyes were almost as bad as Tassie’s.

I flew in earlier today from Australia. I was supposed to be on a connecting flight to London six hours ago, but the woman at the Kalil Airways desk says that there aren’t any flights. They’ve all been cancelled.

They have, the man agreed, glancing up at a departures screen. Every single flight out of Kalil airport had the word Cancelled next to it in unmistakable red letters.

It’s the volcanic ash, he continued. We can’t risk having planes flying in these conditions.

Through the huge glass wall behind him, Tassie could see a perfectly clear day with the hot white sun blazing over dozens of static planes. I’ve seen the news on the TV screens you have here in the airport and I don’t understand how a volcano erupting in Iceland can stop planes flying out of the Middle East.

Wind. It blows the ash into the plane’s engines.

Tassie thought the whole thing sounded like a load of wind. When will it go away? When can I fly home?

Impossible to say. Two, maybe three days?

Two or three days! Tassie had been thinking of two or three more hours, not days! A murmur went through the crowd that was standing behind her. I was only meant to be here for a two-hour stopover. Where am I supposed to go and what about my luggage?

All the passengers’ luggage has been taken off the planes. You can collect your suitcases from Arrivals. There are some hotel reservation counters there. I suggest you book a hotel in the city.

But who’s going to pay for it? Tassie asked.

I’m afraid the airline doesn’t cover this type of thing, as technically it’s not the airline’s fault.

It’s not mine either.

The young man rubbed his soft little beard and then motioned to the next customer to come forward, signalling that he had nothing more to say to Tassie.

Tassie went off in search of the Arrivals terminal and her luggage, wondering whether her travel insurance would cover the cost of a decent hotel and if her boss would understand if she wasn’t back at her desk first thing Monday morning.

Once she got to Arrivals, she found her suitcase without any problems. In a pile under a sign with her flight number on it, her case was easy to recognise as it was bright purple. Given the choice, she wouldn’t have bought such a vibrant colour, especially as it clashed with her strawberry-blonde hair (some people called it orange, but Tassie always preferred term strawberry-blonde). However, the case was a good brand and the purple one had been on sale at less than half price. The cost of her return flight ticket to Australia didn’t leave a lot of money left for things such as suitcases. Nor did it leave her much spare cash for unexpected stays in foreign countries.

She dug around in her handbag and found her travel insurance documents. She needed to see whether they would cover her hotel costs. The insurance details ran to several pages, but she found the section that said they would cover the costs of flight delays if they were more than five hours. Considering she had already been delayed for more than six and the total delay was going to run to several days, it was clear that the insurance would cover her stay in Kalil. She looked at the maximum amount of coverage they would pay out and felt a small surge of relief. The amount stated would certainly pay for the cost of a very good hotel and possibly a few spa treatments as well. Staying in Kalil was certainly not part of her original holiday plans, but after the stress of visiting her mum in Australia for two weeks, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing, after all, that a volcano had erupted. Even if she was late getting back to work, her boss could hardly blame her, could he? After all, what else could she do? Walk back to England? Take a boat?

Tassie looked over at the reservation counters for the five-star luxury hotels. She wondered which she should pick from the choices of more than ten leading chains. In the end, she decided to go to the counter with the shortest queue; she had done enough queuing for one day. However, when it was her turn to speak to the man at the desk, he informed her that the hotel was fully booked. The person at the counter next to him said the same, as did the next and the next. The travel chaos meant that Tassie wasn’t the only one looking for a room for a few nights and obviously many of the other passengers had beaten her to it. However, she finally got lucky at the counter of a hotel whose name she didn’t recognise. They said they had a few vacancies, but the only rooms they had left were suites and they weren’t cheap. Tassie checked her insurance policy again and worked out that if she didn’t order too much off room service and skipped having spa treatments, the insurance would just about cover it. She booked herself in and allowed a smartly dressed porter to take her purple case and lead her outside to catch one of the hotel’s limousines into the city.

As soon as she stepped through the automatic doors of Arrivals, she was hit by the intense heat. Even though it was now late afternoon, it was like walking straight into a furnace. The sheltered air-conditioned environment of airport completely disguised just how extreme the heat outdoors was. Tassie had never felt anything like it before in her life. Australia had been hot, certainly much hotter than England ever was, even when the UK was having a so-called heat wave, but this was insane. How could anyone live in this? She stood on the curb for less than a minute when she began to feel small beads of sweat trickling down her back. As soon as she got to the hotel, she would unpack a couple of things and have a long, refreshing shower.

One minute, madam, the porter said. I’ll just call for one of the hotel cars to come. He dialled his phone and started saying something incoherent into it. He seemed to be Asian, possibly Indian, one of dozens of Asian porters, guards, drivers and cleaners who were coming and going around the airport. Being helped by them were a miscellaneous number of Western travellers, predominantly business people, looking hot in suit jackets, and travellers, such as herself, looking tired and slightly lost. In the minority, and looking by far the most comfortable and relaxed, were Arab men dressed in immaculate long white robes and Arab women covered up from head to toe in black silk.

Tassie wished the hotel car would hurry up. Not only was the heat making her hot, but she was also incredibly thirsty. She wished she had a bottle of water with her. Finally, after a very long ten minutes, a shiny black limousine pulled up in front of her with the name of the hotel written across the side. The porter opened the passenger door for her. She was just about to step in, when a tall Arab man with broad shoulders walked in front of her and got into the car.

Excuse me! This is my car, Tassie yelled.

I need to get to the hotel, he replied, smiling at her as if his answer explained everything.

Madam, I will call you another car, the porter said.

You don’t need to call me another car. This is my car. This is the one you called for me, not him, she said, pointing to the tall, dark man now sitting in the back seat, the seat where she