Possessed by the Sheikh. PENNY JORDAN

A discarded lute-like instrument lay on the floor to one side of the divan, and behind them she could see a pile of leather-bound books.

      Automatically she went over to them and picked one of them up. Its title was picked out in gold leaf, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam…A book of poetry. It seemed out of character somehow. She put the book back and sat down on one of the cushions. Her head was still aching and she felt both physically and emotionally exhausted. Tiredly she closed her eyes.

      Pensively Xander picked his way through the tents towards his own, pausing to check on the mare he had been riding earlier. When she saw him she tossed her head and pushed her nose into his arm, begging for the tidbit he always gave her. The boy whom he paid to keep an eye on her sprang up from where he had been lying several feet away from her and then settled down again as he recognised him.

      Katrina’s challenge to him about his European inheritance had rubbed against a raw place in his emotional make-up. His mother had been loved and respected by all of his Zurani family, with the exception of Nazir and Nazir’s late father. And, according to his half-brother, his mother had happily embraced the way of life of her husband. She had loved the desert and its people, as he did himself, but she had not been totally and completely desert blood, bone and sinew, just as he wasn’t himself. His father had chosen to have him educated in Europe, wanting him to experience his European cultural inheritance, and to keep the promise he had made to his dying wife, but Xander had never forgotten overhearing a conversation between his father and the British government official who had undertaken to escort him to his new school in England.