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Scandals Of The Crown: The Life She Left Behind / The Price of Royal Duty / The Sheikh's Heir
Аннотация к произведению Scandals Of The Crown: The Life She Left Behind / The Price of Royal Duty / The Sheikh's Heir - Пенни Джордан
Secrets of the Santina Royals!Heiress Angelina Carpenter chose freedom when she fled a marriage to Sheikh Taj Ahmad. Now working as a nanny, Angelina runs straight into him! And the ruthless sheikh has no intention of letting his runaway bride get away again…*Santina's rebellious princess Sophia was outraged at the announcement of an arranged marriage for her and boldly stowed away on the Maharaja of Naipur's private jet! But did the charismatic maharaja and Sophia spend a wild night together before their arrival in Mumbai?*Ella Jackson caused a stir at her sister's engagement party when she tossed a glass of vintage champagne over Sheikh Hassan Al Abbas. What happened later is unknown but Miss Jackson was seen leaving the Sheikh's opulent suite the morning after the party…and is now pregnant!
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Chapter One
MAISEY YATES knew she wanted to be a writer even before she knew what it was she wanted to write. It wasn’t until she was pregnant with her second child that she found her very first Mills & Boon book in a local thrift store – by the time she’d reached the happily ever after, she had fallen in love. Maisey lives with her supportive, handsome, wonderful, diaper-changing husband and three small children, across the street from her parents and the home she grew up in, in the wilds of southern Oregon.
PENNY JORDAN, one of Mills & Boon’s most popular authors, sadly passed away on December 31st, 2011. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over 100 million books around the world. Penny wrote a total of 187 novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour and Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the New York Times bestseller list. Loved for her distinctive voice, she was successful in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan, “Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan’s characters.” It is perhaps this gift for sympathetic characterization that helps to explain her enduring appeal.
SHARON KENDRICK started story-telling at the age of eleven and has never really stopped. She likes to write fast-paced, feel-good romances with heroes who are so sexy they’ll make your toes curl! Born in west London, she now lives in the beautiful city of Winchester – where she can see the cathedral from her window (but only if she stands on tip-toe). Visit Sharon at www.sharonkendrick.com.
Scandals of the Crown
The Life She Left Behind
Maisey Yates
The Price of Royal Duty
Penny Jordan
The Sheikh’s Heir
Sharon Kendrick
ISBN: 978-1-474-08335-5
SCANDALS OF THE CROWN
The Life She Left Behind © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A The Price of Royal Duty © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A The Sheikh’s Heir © 2012 Harlequin Books S.A
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
Table of Contents
Maisey Yates
Chapter One
It had finally happened. Sheikh Taj Ahmad, ruler of Rahat, had lost his mind completely. She was there, standing in the shadows on the otherwise vacant balcony that extended over the back portion of the ballroom. In an instant all the well-dressed, beautiful women that surrounded him faded away. He could see nothing but Angelina Carpenter.
So many times she had featured in his dreams, and yet, she had never quite looked like this. Hair pulled back into a ponytail, skinny jeans hugging her curves. This was a formal event, the engagement party for Prince Alessandro Santina. And famed oil heiress Angelina Carpenter was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
The entire party had possessed an air of the surreal from the moment it had started. The presence of the loud, tacky Jackson family, the prince’s future in-laws, with their penchant for drama had turned the royal setting on its head from the beginning.
The tension was only heightened by the attendance of Alessandro’s ex-fiancée, who looked beautiful and brittle, ready to crack at any moment.
But none of that mattered now. He couldn’t see it anymore. He could hardly remember the reason he’d come tonight. There was nothing but Angelina now.
She turned her head, her eyes clashing with his, in spite of the distance and every person between them. She froze, up in her hiding place there on the balcony, her beautiful lips parting.
He could see her intake of breath, see her hold it, and he held his in answer. Or possibly because breathing had simply become too difficult.
“Taj,” the woman to his right, the one who had been attempting to climb him all evening, purred his name, her fingers curving into his bicep, “would you go and fetch me a drink?”
He turned to look at her, breaking the spell Angelina had held him under. The room came back, conversation rising in volume. His unwanted companion’s red lips were pursed into a pout. His stomach clenched. With annoyance, not desire.
“I do not fetch,” he said, breaking out of the woman’s grasp, redirecting his attention to the balcony.
Angelina was gone.
Had she really been an illusion? A dream? A waking one this time, sent to tempt and torment him with the memory of what he could not have?
It wasn’t possible. Angelina, in his dreams, was always the polished heiress. Never undone, not even in his more erotic dreams, when he pictured holding her in his arms, their naked limbs entwined. Even then she was the soul of high-gloss perfection.
This woman, with her strawberry hair pulled back into something as juvenile and unsophisticated as a ponytail, was not the Angelina of his fantasies.
That could only mean she was real.
Cold pin pricks dotted over his back, a clammy sweat on his forehead, as he wove through the ballroom, headed to the back doors. Unless there were secret passageways in the Santina palace, and it was possible, she would have to pass by the ballroom when she went down the stairs.
He moved quickly through the crowd, paying no attention to the people who tried to greet him. He hardly heard them, hardly understood them. The low din of conversation and the strains of music simply faded.
He pushed the doors open and cursed when he saw the empty corridor. Perhaps it had been an illusion. Another round of torture at the hands of Angelina Carpenter. Three years since he’d seen her and still she tormented him.
He heard a sound to his left and he followed it, feeling a fool on an even more foolish errand. But he could not stop himself. Not now.
His heart thundered and he rounded the corner and into another stretch of hallway, just in time to see long strawberry hair disappearing around the next corner.
And he ran.
It couldn’t be him. No, it very well could be him, and that was the problem. The very scary, very bad, very heart pounding-hand-shaking problem.
Angelina leaned against the wall in the vacant corridor and closed her eyes, tried to catch her breath. Taj.
Flashes. Pictures. The happiest moments of her life flashed behind her eyes. Taj when she’d met him for the first time, his warm smile. His attempt at wearing a cowboy hat and adapting to the Western style of horseback riding. And the evening they’d spent in the main barn at her father’s ranch, the night she’d fallen in love with him.
She fought hard against the pain that was threatening to overwhelm her. So much of her life, of what had happened in the past three years, was tied to Taj. All of it, really. Because without Taj, without her father’s deception, she never would have run away from Texas. Never would have ended up in Italy, taking care of Princess Carlotta’s son, Luca.
Without Taj, she would never have known what it felt like to love someone, and find out how much it hurt when they didn’t love you back.
A muttered curse in Arabic brought her head up, and her gaze collided with Taj’s coal colored eyes. He looked the same. Dark and commanding. His black hair cropped short, no sign of the slight curl at his neck that she’d loved to twirl around her fingers.
It was the same Taj, yet different somehow. Leaner. Harder.
The impact he had on her hadn’t changed, either. Her heart was pounding, her body shaking, a surge of adrenaline making her blood run hotter, faster.
He was the man who haunted her dreams. The reason she woke up in a cold sweat, aching and unsatisfied. The reason no man had appealed to her in the least since she’d left home.
He exhaled a breath and for the first time since spotting him from the balcony, she drew breath in.
“It is you.” He sounded like a man addressing a ghost. He looked about like that, too.
She tried to smile. “And it’s you.”
“I was invited to help celebrate this occasion. What escapes me is why you’re here. No one has heard from you in three years.”
“How do you…how do you know that?”
“I keep in touch,” he said, his voice cold as stone and just as hard.
She bet he did. Her father had one of the things that Sheikh Taj prized above all else. Oil. Their money was slick with it, and they had been ready to make an alliance. She imagined they had made it, even without her as the glue to hold it together.
Without her as the sacrificial virgin.
“You and my father always did have a lot in common,” she said, her tone sharp and lofty. Rich, considering she was standing in front of him in jeans and a ratty ponytail while he was in a custom made suit.
“Not as much as you might think,” he said.
“I don’t have time to wonder what that means. I have to get back.”
“To?”
“Luca. He’s asleep he…”
“You have a lover with you?” he asked, his voice going cold.
She laughed in spite of the situation. “Luca is a child.”
He jerked back as though she’d hit him. “Your child?”
“Princess Carlotta’s child. I’m his nanny.”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. “You traded your life, your future, as my queen to be a nanny?”
“No. I traded being your queen for some self-respect.”
She turned and walked away from him, her entire body shaking, regret threatening to climb up from her chest and strangle her.
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