Secrets of the Oasis
Shocking secrets of the sands!When she gave herself to Sheikh Salman in Paris five years ago, Jamilah Moreau fantasised about wedding dresses and happy endings. But Salman was driven by desire, not diamond solitaires… Now, Sheikh of a desert kingdom, Salman can have anything he wants – and, as Jamilah discovers when he spirits her off to a desert oasis, it’s still her!However, time has wrought changes, and their lovemaking is no longer enough… Something happened back in Paris that had everlasting consequences for both of them…
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‘Are you sure you really want to know, Jamilah?’
She faced him and could see the intense glitter of his eyes, the way a muscle pulsed in his jaw. Slowly, as if she might scare him off, she nodded her head. ‘Yes, I want to know, Salman.’
Salman looked into Jamilah’s eyes. He had a bizarre sensation of drowning, while at the same time clinging onto a life raft. Did he really think that he was about to divulge to her what no one else knew? His deepest darkest shame? Yet in that instant he knew an overwhelming need to unburden himself to her. It could never be with anyone else. He saw that now, as clear as day.
About the Author
ABBY GREEN got hooked on Mills & Boon® Romances while still in her teens, when she stumbled across one belonging to her grandmother, in the west of Ireland. After many years of reading them voraciously, she sat down one day and gave it a go herself. Happily, after a few failed attempts, Mills & Boon bought her first manuscript.
Abby works freelance in the film and TV industry, but thankfully the four a.m. starts and the stresses of dealing with recalcitrant actors are becoming more and more infrequent, leaving her more time to write!
She loves to hear from readers, and you can contact her through her website at www.abby-green.com She lives and works in Dublin.
PROLOGUE
A SIX-YEAR-OLD girl stands at a graveside, on her own. Her face is deathly pale, her blue eyes huge and shimmering with unshed tears, her hair a sleek waterfall of black down to her waist. A dark, handsome boy, Salman, detaches himself from the larger group and comes over to take her hand.
He looks at her solemnly, too solemn for his twelve years. ‘Don’t cry, Jamilah, you have to be strong now.’
She just looks at him. His parents died in the same plane crash as hers. If he can be strong, so can she. She blinks back the tears and nods briefly, once, and doesn’t take her eyes off him even when he looks away to where his own parents have just been buried. Their hands stay tightly clasped together.
CHAPTER ONE
Six years ago, Paris.
JAMILAH MOREAU had to restrain herself from turning her walk into a light-hearted skip as she walked up the French boulevard with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. She grimaced at herself. It was such a cliché but it was Paris, it was springtime, and she was in love. She wanted to throw her bags of shopping in the air and laugh out loud, and turn her face up to the blossoms floating lazily to the ground from the trees.
She wanted to hug everyone. She forced back an irrepressible grin. She’d always thought people over-exaggerated Paris’s romantic allure, but now she knew why. You had to be in love to get it. No wonder her French father and Merkazadi mother had fallen in love here—how could they not have?
She was unaware of the admiring looks her jet-black hair, exotic olive-skinned colouring and startlingly blue eyes drew from people passing by—both men and women. Her heart was beating so fast with excitement that she knew she had to calm herself. But all she felt like doing was shouting out to the world with arms wide: I’m in love with Salman al Saqr and he loves me, too!
At that thought, though, her step faltered slightly and her conscience pricked. He hadn’t actually said he loved her. Not even when she’d told him she loved him that morning, as they’d lain in bed, when Jamilah had felt as if she’d expire with happiness and sensual satedness. She couldn’t have held it back any longer. The words had been trembling on her lips for days.
Three weeks. That was all it had been since she’d literally bumped into Salman in the street, when she’d emerged from the university where she’d just finished her final exams. She’d practically grown up with him, but hadn’t seen him in a few years, and a seismic reaction had washed through her at seeing the object of her lifelong crush. As darkly handsome as he’d ever been, and even more so. Because now he was a man. Tall, broad, and powerful.
His hands had wrapped around her arms to steady her, and he’d been about to let her go, with a thrillingly appreciative gleam in his dark gaze, when suddenly those black brows had drawn together, his eyes had narrowed and he’d snapped out disbelievingly, ‘Jamilah?’ She’d nodded, her heart thumping and a hot blush rising up through her body. She’d fantasised about him looking at her like that for so long…
They’d gone for a coffee. When they’d stood in the street afterwards she’d been about to walk away, feeling as though her heart was being torn from her chest, when Salman had stopped her and said quickly, ‘Wait…have dinner with me tonight?’
And that had been the start of the most magical three weeks of her life. She’d said yes quickly. Too quickly. Jamilah grimaced again as a dose of reality hit. She should have been more cool, more sophisticated…but it would have been impossible after years of idolising him from afar—a childhood crush which had developed into teenage obsession and now adult longing.
