The Sheikh's Baby Omnibus Read Online Free

re-checking the compass as she drove up and down what felt like an interminable series of the sand dunes until eventually, in the distance through the sand blowing against her windscreen, she could just about see the looming mass of the mountain range.
    It was already four o’clock and the light seemed to be fading, a fact that panicked Mariella into driving a little faster. She had never dreamed that her journey would prove so hazardous and she was very much regretting having set out on it, but now at last its end was in sight.
    It took her almost another hour of zigzagging across the sand dunes to reach the rocky thrust of the beginnings of the mountain range. The oasis was situated in a deep ravine, its escarpment so high that Mariella shuddered a little as she drove into its shadows. This was the last kind of place she had expected to appeal to the man who had been her sister’s faithless lover.
    Would his villa here be as palatial as his home in Zuran? Mariella frowned and checked as the ravine opened out and she saw the oasis ahead of her. Remote and beautiful in its own way, it was very obviously a place of deep solitude, the oasis itself enclosed with a fringing of palms illuminated by the eerie glow of the final rays of the setting sun. Shielding her eyes, Mariella stopped the vehicle to look around. Where was the villa? All she could see was one solitary pavilion tent! A good-sized pavilion, to be sure, but most definitely not a villa! Had she somehow got lost—again?
    Fleur had started to cry, a cross, tired, hungry noise that alerted Mariella to the fact that for Fleur’s sake if nothing else she needed to stop.
    Carefully she drove the vehicle forward over the treacherously boulder-rutted track, which seemed more like a dry river bed than a roadway! Sand blowing in from the desert was covering the boulders and the thin sparse grass of the oasis.
    There was a vehicle parked several yards from the pavilion and Mariella stopped next to it.
    A man was emerging from the pavilion, alerted to her arrival by the sound of her vehicle.
    As he strode towards her, his robe caught by the strong wind and flattened against his body revealing a torso muscle structure that caused her to suck in her own stomach in a sharply dangerous womanly response to its maleness.
    And then he turned his head and looked at her, and the earth halted on its axis before swinging perilously in a sickening movement as Mariella recognised him.
    It was the man from the airport. The man from her dream!

CHAPTER TWO
    H IS hand was on the door handle of the four-wheel drive. Wrenching it open, he demanded angrily, ‘Who the devil are you?’
    He was looking at her eyes again, with that same look of biting contempt glittering in his own as he raked her with a gritty gaze.
    ‘I’m looking for Sheikh Xavier Al Agir,’ Mariella responded, returning his look with one of her own—plus interest!
    ‘What? What do you want with him?’
    He was curt to the point of rudeness, but then, given what she had already seen—and dreamed—of him, she wouldn’t have expected anything else.
    ‘What I want with him is no business of yours!’ she told him angrily.
    In her seat Fleur’s cries grew louder.
    Peering into the vehicle, he demanded in disbelief, ‘You’ve brought a baby out in this?’
    The disgust and anger in his voice made her face sting even more than the pieces of sand blown against it by the wind.
    ‘What the hell possessed you? Didn’t you hear the weather warning earlier? This area was reported as being strictly out of bounds to tourists because of the threat of sandstorms.’
    Hot-faced, Mariella remembered how she had switched off the radio to play Fleur’s tapes.
    ‘I’m sorry if I’ve arrived at an inconvenient time,’ she responded sarcastically to cover her own discomfort, ‘but if you could just give me directions for the Oasis Istafan, then—’
    ‘This is the Oasis Istafan,’ came back the immediate and cold response.
    It