The Sheikh's Baby: One Night With The Sheikh / The Sheikh's Blackmailed Mistress

The lives of two sheikhs are changed forever…when they each meet the woman of their dreams ONE NIGHT WITH THE SHEIKH The searing attraction between Sheikh Xavier Al Agir and Mariella Sutton is instant and all consuming. When a storm leaves Mariella stranded at Xavier's desert home, desire soon takes over, leading to a night neither will soon forget–for more reasons than they can imagine!THE SHEIKH'S BLACKMAILED MISTRESS Life has taught Prince Vereham al a'Karim bin Hakar to control his emotions. But an unexpected encounter with the enchanting Samantha McLellan shakes Vere's steely reserve. Though love is not an option for the sheikh, he knows that somehow he must have Sam.

One Night with the Sheikh

From The Penny Jordan Collection, the lives of two sheikhs are changed forever…when they each meet the woman of their dreams

The searing attraction between Sheikh Xavier Al Agir and Mariella Sutton is instant and all consuming. When a storm leaves Mariella stranded at Xavier’s desert home, desire soon takes over, leading to a night neither will soon forget–for more reasons than they can imagine!

Life has taught Prince Vereham al a’Karim bin Hakar to control his emotions. But an unexpected encounter with the enchanting Samantha McLellan shakes Vere's steely reserve. Though love is not an option for the sheikh, he knows that somehow he must have Sam.

“One Night with the Sheikh is a deliciously wonderful tale with blazing sexual chemistry, a warm and engaging romance and two larger-than-life characters.”

“The Christmas Bride by Penny Jordan is a well-told love story…The beautiful settings and sensual love scenes add charm and zest to this holiday romance.”

One Night with the Sheikh

PROLOGUE

‘YOU WON’T FORGET your mummy whilst I’m away working, will you, my precious baby girl?’

Mariella watched sympathetically as her younger half-sister Tanya’s eyes filled with tears as she handed her precious four-month-old daughter over to her.

‘I know that Fleur couldn’t have anyone better to look after her than you, Ella,’ Tanya acknowledged emotionally. ‘After all, you became my mother as well as my sister when Mum and Dad died. I just wish I could have got a job that didn’t mean I have to be away, but this six-week contract on this cruise liner pays so well that I just can’t afford to give it up! Yes, I know you would support us both,’ she continued before Mariella could say anything, ‘but that isn’t what I want. I want to be as independent as I can be. Anyway,’ she told Mariella bitterly, ‘supporting Fleur financially should be her father’s job and not yours! What I ever saw in that weak, lying rat of a man, I’ll never know! My wonderful sexy dream fantasy of a sheikh! Some dream he turned out to be—more of a nightmare.’

Mariella let her vent her feelings, without comment, knowing just how devastated and hurt her half-sister had been when her lover had abandoned her.

‘You don’t have to do this, Tanya,’ she told her gently now. ‘I’m earning enough to support us all, and this house is big enough for the three of us.’

‘Oh, Mariella, I know that. I know you’d starve yourself to give to me and Fleur, but that isn’t what I want. You’ve done so much for me since Mum and Dad died. You were only eighteen, after all, three years younger than I am now, when we found out that there wasn’t going to be any money! I suppose Dad wanted to give us all so much that he simply didn’t think about what would happen if anything happened to him, and with him remortgaging the house because of the stock market crisis.’

Both of them had inherited their mother’s delicate bone structure and heart-shaped face, along with her strawberry-blonde hair and peach perfect complexion, but where Tanya had inherited her father’s height and hazel eyes, Mariella had inherited intensely turquoise eyes from her father, the man who had decided less than a year after her birth that the responsibilities of fatherhood and marriage simply weren’t for him and walked out on his wife and baby daughter.

‘It’s not fair,’ Tanya had mock complained to her when she had announced that she was not going to go to university as Mariella had hoped she would, but wanted to pursue a career singing and dancing. ‘If I had your eyes, I’d have a ready-made advantage over everyone else whenever I went for a part.’

Although she knew how headstrong and impulsive her half-sister could be, Mariella admired her for what she was doing, even whilst she worried about how she was going to cope with being away from her daughter for six long weeks.

Whatever small differences there might ever have been between them, in their passionate and protective love for baby Fleur they were totally united.

‘And I want to know everything she does, Ella…Every tiny little thing. Oh, Ella…I feel so guilty about all of this…I know how you suffered as a little girl because your father wasn’t there; because he’d abandoned you and Mum…and I know too how lucky I was to have both Mum and Dad and you there for me, and yet here is my poor little Fleur…’

‘The taxi’s here,’ she warned, before releasing Tanya and tenderly brushing the tears off her face.

Recognising the voice of her agent, Mariella shifted Fleur’s warm weight from one arm to the other, smiling lovingly at her as the baby guzzled happily on her bottle. ‘It’s racehorses, dozens of them. The client owns his own racing yard out in Zuran. He’s a member of the Zuran royal family, and apparently he heard about you via that chap in Kentucky, whose Kentucky Derby winner you painted the other year. Anyway—he wants to fly you out there, all expenses paid, so that you can discuss the project with him, see the beasts in situ so to speak!’

Mariella laughed. Kate, with her immaculate designer clothes and equally immaculate all-white apartment, was not an animal lover. ‘Ella, what is that noise?’ she demanded plaintively.

Mariella laughed. ‘It’s Fleur. I’m just giving her her bottle. It does sound promising, but right now I’m pretty booked with commissions, and, to be honest, I don’t really think that going to Zuran is on. For a start, I’m looking after Fleur for the next six weeks, and—’

‘That’s no problem—I am sure Prince Sayid wouldn’t mind you taking her with you and February is the perfect time of year to go there; the weather will be wonderful—warm and mild. Ella, you can’t turn this one down. Just what I’d earn in commission is making my mouth water,’ she admitted frankly.

She had begun painting animal ‘portraits’ almost by accident. Her painting had been merely a small hobby and her ‘pet portraits’ done for friends, but her reputation had spread by word of mouth, and eventually she had decided to make it her full-time career.

Now she earned what to her was a very comfortable living from her work, and she knew she would normally have leapt at the chance she was being offered.

‘I’d love to go, Kate,’ she replied. ‘But Fleur is my priority right now…’

‘Well, don’t turn it down out of hand,’ Kate warned her. ‘Like I said, there’s no reason why Fleur shouldn’t go with you. You won’t be working on this trip, it’s only a mutual look-see. You’d be gone just over a week, and forget any idiotic ideas you might have about potential health hazards to any young baby out there—Zuran is second to none when it comes to being a world-class cosmopolitan city!’

One of the reasons Mariella had originally bought her small three-storey house had been because of the excellent north-facing window on the top floor, which she had turned into her studio. With Fleur contently fed she looked out at the grey early February day. The rain that had been sheeting down all week had turned to a mere drizzle. A walk in the park and some fresh air would do them both good, Mariella decided, putting Fleur down whilst she went to prepare her pram.

It had been her decision to buy the baby a huge old-fashioned ‘nanny’ style pram.

‘You can use the running stroller if you want,’ she had informed Tanya firmly. ‘But when I walk her it will be in a traditional vehicle and at a traditional pace!’

‘Ella, you talk as though you were sixty-eight, not twenty-eight,’ Tanya had protested. Perhaps she was a little bit old-fashioned, Mariella conceded as she started to remove the blankets from the running stroller to put in the pram. Her father’s desertion and her mother’s consequent vulnerability and helplessness had left her with a very strong determination to stand on her own two feet, and an extremely strong disinclination to allow herself to be emotionally vulnerable through loving a man too much as her mother had done.

She frowned as her fingers brushed against a balled-up piece of paper as she removed the bedding. It could easily have scratched Fleur’s delicate skin. She was on the point of throwing it away, when a line of her sister’s handwriting suddenly caught her eye.

The piece of paper was a letter, Mariella recognised, and she could see the name and address on it quite plainly.

Her heart thudded guiltily as she smoothed out the note and read the first line.

‘You have destroyed my life and Fleur’s and I shall hate you for ever for that,’ she read.

The letter was obviously one Tanya had written but not sent to Fleur’s father.

Tanya had always refused to discuss her relationship with him other than to say that he was a very wealthy Middle Eastern man whom she had met whilst working in a nightclub as a singer and dancer.

Privately Mariella had always thought that he had escaped far too lightly from his responsibility to her sister and to his baby…

And now she had discovered he lived in Zuran! Frowning slightly, she carefully folded the note. She had no right to interfere, she knew that, but…Would she be interfering or merely acknowledging the validity of fate? How many, many times over the years had she longed for the opportunity to confront her own father and tell him just what she thought of him, how he had broken her mother’s heart and almost destroyed her life?

Her father, like her mother, was now dead, and could never make reparation for what he had done; but Tanya’s lover was very much alive, and it would give her a great deal of satisfaction to tell him just what she thought of him!

Blowing Fleur a kiss, she hurried over to the telephone and quickly dialled her agent’s number.

‘You’ve changed your mind! Wonderful…You won’t regret it, Ella, I promise you. I mean, this guy is mega, mega rich, and what he’s prepared to pay to have his four-legged friends immortalised in oils…’

Listening to her, Mariella reflected ruefully that on occasion Kate could show a depressing tendency to favour the material over the emotional, but she was an excellent agent!

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One Night with the Sheikh

One Night with the Sheikh

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE