The Desert Virgin
Sandra Marton
All about the author…
Sandra Marton
SANDRA MARTON wrote her first novel while she was still in elementary school. Her doting parents told her she’d be a writer someday and Sandra believed them. In high school and college, she wrote dark poetry nobody but her boyfriend understood, though looking back, she suspects he was just being kind. As a wife and mother, she wrote murky short stories in what little spare time she could manage, but not even her boyfriend-turned-husband could pretend to understand those. Sandra tried her hand at other things, among them teaching and serving on the board of education in her hometown, but the dream of becoming a writer was always in her heart.
At last Sandra realized she wanted to write books about what all women hope to find: love with that one special man; love that’s rich with fire and passion; love that lasts forever. She wrote a novel, her very first, and sold it to the Harlequin Presents line. Since then, she’s written more than sixty books, all of them featuring sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life heroes. She’s a four-time RITA® award finalist. From Romantic Times BOOKclub she’s received five awards for Best Harlequin Presents of the Year and a Career Achievement Award for Series Romance.
Sandra lives with her very own sexy, gorgeous, larger-than-life hero in a sun-filled house on a quiet country lane in the northeastern United States.
“Sandra Marton introduces sexy, action-adventures to Presents with The Desert Virgin. This story is one nonstop exhilarating ride as an irresistible alpha hero rescues the woman, who will become his true love, and saves them both as they traverse a desert nation to gain their freedom…. Sandra Marton has once again outdone herself and has raised the bar of excellence in romance.”
—Shannon Short, Romantic Times BOOKclub
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
AT THIRTY-TWO, Cameron Knight stood six foot four inches tall. He had green eyes and a leanly muscled body, courtesy of his Anglo father; jet-black hair and knife-sharp cheekbones, thanks to his half-Comanche mother. He loved beautiful women, fast cars and danger.
In all the ways that mattered, he was still the dangerously handsome bad-boy half the girls in Dallas, Texas, had lusted after when he was seventeen.
The only thing that had changed was that Cam had turned his passion for danger into a career, first in Special Forces, then in the Agency, and now in the firm he’d started with his brothers.
Knight, Knight and Knight had made him rich as hell. Men on three continents asked for his help when things got out of hand.
Now, to Cam’s surprise, so had his father.
Even more surprising, Cam had agreed to give it.
That was why he was flying high over the Atlantic in a small private jet, heading for a dot on the map called Baslaam.
Cam checked his watch. Half an hour to touchdown. Good. Things had happened so fast that he’d had to spend most of the flight reading his father’s files on Baslaam. Now, he had time to try to relax.
A man about to drop into an unknown situation needed to be ready for anything. Deep breathing exercises, what one of his instructors at the Agency had always referred to as tai chi of the mind, did the job.
Cam put back his leather seat, closed his eyes and let his mind drift. Maybe because he was on a mission for his father, he thought about his life. What he’d made of it. What he hadn’t.
How close he’d come to meeting his father’s bitter predictions.
“You’re worthless,” Avery used to tell him when he was a kid. “You’ll never amount to anything.”
Cam had to admit he’d seemed determined to prove his father right.
He’d cut school. Gotten drunk. Smoked dope, though not for long. He didn’t like the loss of self-control that came with the short-lived high.
By seventeen, he was a kid heading for trouble.
Angry at his mother for dying, at his old man for caring more for money than for his wife or sons, he’d been a time bomb ready to go off.
Late one night, driving a winding back road, watching the speedometer needle of his souped-up truck climb over one hundred, he’d realized he was going past the dark house of a cop who’d roughed him up a year back. It hadn’t been much, just a little hard handling.
What mattered was that the cop had done it as a courtesy to Cam’s father.
“His old man wanted me to give the kid somethin’ to think about,” Cam had heard the cop tell his partner.
With those words echoing in his head, Cam had pulled his truck to the side of the road. Climbed a tree, jimmied open a window, stood over the sleeping cop while the bastard snored, then went out the same way he’d gone in.
It was an exhilarating experience. So exhilarating that he did it again and again, breaking into the homes of men who danced to his old man’s tune, taking nothing from the break-ins but the satisfaction of success.
One night, it all came apart. He was in college by then, home for a long weekend…and he’d come within a whisper of getting caught.
Playing dangerous games was one thing; being stupid was another. Cam quit school, joined the Army, got recruited into Special Forces. When the Agency expressed interest, he said yes. Risk was what you ate and breathed in covert operations.
He thought he’d found a home.
Not true. It turned out the Agency sometimes asked things of you that made you a stranger, even to yourself.
His brothers had taken similar routes. Fast cars, beautiful women, playing Russian roulette with trouble, seemed the path a Knight took to manhood.
A year apart in age, they attended the same college on football scholarships. They’d even all scored touch-downs in the same game, one memorable championship season.
They’d all quit school after a couple of years, joined the Army, then Special Forces and, finally, maybe inevitably, the clandestine labyrinth of the Agency.
Just as inevitably, they’d grown disillusioned with what they found there.
The brothers returned to Dallas and went into business together. Knight, Knight and Knight: Risk Management Specialists. Cam had come up with the name after hours of solemn planning and not-so-solemn drinking.
“But what in hell does it mean?” Matt had asked.
“It means we’re gonna make ourselves a fortune,” Alex had said, grinning.
And they did. Powerful clients paid them exorbitant amounts of money to do things that would have made most men’s bellies knot with fear.
Things