Secrets of the Oasis

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.

That first weekend Salman had taken her back to his apartment and made love to her for the first time…and even now a deep flowing heat invaded her lower body, making her blush as X-rated images flooded her mind.

She shook her head to dispel the images, kept walking. She was on her way to his apartment now, to cook him dinner. Her conscience struck again. Salman hadn’t actually invited her over this evening—in fact he’d been unusually quiet that morning. But Jamilah was confident that when he saw her, saw the delicious supplies she’d bought, he’d smile that sexy, crooked smile and open his door wide.

As she waited to cross the busy road across from his imposing eighteenth-century apartment building she thought of the instances when she’d seen an intense darkness pervade Salman—whenever she mentioned Merkazad, where they were both from, or his older brother Sheikh Nadim, ruler of Merkazad.

Salman had always had an innate darkness, but it had never intimidated Jamilah. From as far back as she could remember she’d felt an affinity with him, and had never questioned the fact that he was a loner and didn’t seem to share the social ease of his older brother. But in the past few weeks Jamilah had quickly learnt to avoid talking of Nadim or Merkazad.

She was due to return to Merkazad in a week’s time, but she was going to tell Salman tonight that if he wanted her to stay in Paris she would. It wasn’t what she’d planned at all, but the anatomy of her world had changed utterly since she’d met him again.

She arrived at the ornate door of Salman’s building, where he lived on the top floor in a stunning open-plan apartment. The concierge started to greet her warmly when she came in, but then a look flashed over his face and he said, ‘Excusez-moi, mademoiselle, but is the Sheikh expecting you this evening?’

Hearing Salman being described as ‘the Sheikh’ gave Jamilah a little jolt; she’d almost forgotten about his status as next in line to be ruler of Merkazad after Nadim. Merkazad was a small independent sheikhdom within the bigger country of Al-Omar on the Arabian peninsula. It had been her mother’s home and birthplace, where Jamilah had been brought up after her birth in Paris. Her French father had worked for Salman’s father as an advisor.

Jamilah smiled widely and held up the bulging bags of shopping. ‘I’m cooking dinner.’

The concierge smiled back, but he looked a little uncomfortable, and a shiver of unease went down Jamilah’s spine for no good reason as the lift ascended. When it came to a smooth halt and the doors opened the trickle of unease got stronger. Salman’s door was partially open, and she heard a deep-throated, very feminine chuckle just as she pushed it open fully.

It took a few seconds for the scene in front of her to register. Salman was standing with his head bent, about to kiss a very beautiful red-haired woman who was twined around him like a climbing vine. Jamilah suddenly felt stupidly self-conscious in her student uniform of jeans and T-shirt.

Their mouths met, and Salman’s hands were on the woman’s slender waist as he hauled her closer. Exactly the way he had done with Jamilah. She must have made a sound or something—it was only afterwards that she’d realised that was the moment she’d dropped the shopping.

Salman broke off the kiss and looked round. But, Jamilah noted, he didn’t take his hands off the woman, who was now looking at her, too, her beautiful green eyes flashing at the interruption.

Jamilah barely registered Salman’s thick dark unruly hair, which had always curled a touch too near his collar, or his intensely dark flashing eyes, which she’d always thought held a universe of shadows and secrets. The hard line of his jaw, and his exquisitely sculpted cheekbones which somehow didn’t diminish the harsh masculinity of his face, were all peripheral to her shock.

Numb with that shock, and a million and one other things all at once, Jamilah just stood stupidly and watched Salman say something low and succinct to the woman, who gave a little moue of displeasure before she stepped back and picked up her bag and coat.

She brushed past Jamilah on her way out, trailing a noxious cloud of perfume behind her, and said huskily, ‘Je te voir plus tard, cheri.’

See you later, darling.