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How far would he go to keep a secret?
Off the cliffs of Brittany, danger awaits. To Bella DiCaprio, the windswept island offers hope. The story that cost her a prestigious reporting job has brought her here, where a mysterious recluse holds the key to a horrific bombing....
For Sheik Tariq Al Arif, the grief is still fresh. That tragedy took not only his career as a lifesaving surgeon but also his fiancée. Only here, walking the windswept cliffs by the haunted abbey, does he begin to feel alive again. And when the American beauty shows up on the storm-ravaged island off the coast of France, he knows their passion is dangerous.
To desire is to dare: can either take the risk to love again?
“How...how long have you been standing there?”
He came into the kitchen, a strange intensity on his face. Bella swallowed. The music segued to some slow, melancholic tune...will you still love me tomorrow....
“Long enough,” he said, his voice thick.
Her cheeks heated. She wanted to smile, say something casual, easy, but the look on his features stopped her.
“Long enough for what?” she whispered, thinking of his men in her room, going through her computer. The photo in her bag. Did he know? His gaze held hers. He came closer—very close. Bella reached behind her, bracing herself against the counter where she knew there was a knife. Even so, a dark carnal ribbon of desire unfurled inside her.
Dear Reader,
There’s a reason fairy tales have been retold, rewritten and loved throughout the centuries—it’s because they deal with basic ethical questions that affect all of us. And they do it by delightfully juxtaposing opposites like good versus evil, strange versus ordinary, appearance versus reality.
One of my favorite fairy tales as a child was Beauty and the Beast, the story of a handsome prince who is locked by a spell into the body of an ugly beast, and Beauty, who sees beneath the beast’s exterior and falls in love.
I wanted to play with this trope—this deception of appearances—in the third installment of my Sahara Kings series. In this story, Sheik Tariq Al Arif has been badly damaged both physically and emotionally by his family’s arch nemesis. He now hides in a dark, cold stone monastery on the cliffs of a remote windswept island. All the world believes he is dead. But not Bella DiCaprio. She believes there is more to the mysterious, scarred stranger who hides behind walls, and she’s intent on exposing him. But Bella plays a game of deception herself. Will the truth destroy the love that grows between them, or will it be deadly?
I hope you enjoy Bella and Tariq’s journey to their own happy ever after.
Loreth Anne White
Surgeon Sheikh’s Rescue
Loreth Anne White
LORETH ANNE WHITE
was born and raised in southern Africa, but now lives in Whistler, a ski resort in the moody British Columbia Coast Mountain range. It’s a place of vast wilderness, larger-than-life characters, epic adventure and romance—the perfect place to escape reality. It’s no wonder she was inspired to abandon a sixteen-year career as a journalist to escape into a world of romance fiction filled with dangerous men and adventurous women.
When she’s not writing you will find her long-distance running, biking or skiing on the trails and generally trying to avoid the bears—albeit not very successfully. She calls this work, because it’s when the best ideas come.
For a peek into her world visit her website, www.lorethannewhite.com. She’d love to hear from you.
For Patsy Adkins, and all readers like her—
you make it worthwhile. Thank you.
Contents
Chapter 1
The late February mist rolled in thick, tattered swaths off the Atlantic as Bella DiCaprio rode her bike along the exposed cliff tops of Ile-en-Mer, one of the tiny, storm-ravaged islands off the French coast of Brittany. Water poured from the brim of a red rain hat pulled low over her brow, snaking down the matching slicker Madame Dubois had loaned her for the duration of her employment as housekeeper. The old-fashioned bicycle was on loan, too, tires slipping in black mud as she negotiated a narrow trail through the heath.
Bella had been on the island two weeks now. She was using the name Amelie Chenard and she’d taken a job in the home of Estelle Dubois, a wealthy and eccentric widow who’d once worked in theater and been married to a Parisian banker.
The fact Bella was not in possession of a work visa did not faze the colorful Madame in the slightest—she was happy to pay in cash, under the table. More than a housekeeper, Estelle Dubois seemed to want someone to amuse her two pampered Papillons, particularly the youngest, a seven-month-old pup named Kiki. Part of Bella’s job was to walk Kiki once a day, and play with her. The male dog was old and arthritic and preferred to spend his days sleeping in his basket by the fire.
The arrangement suited her fine. Now that she’d settled into a routine, Bella had plenty of free time for her real mission—to investigate the mysterious stranger who lived in an imposing stone abbey that loomed over cliffs on the bleak windward side of the island, accepting the brunt of the Atlantic storms.
Island lore claimed the foreboding structure—built in the high medieval period and renovated over the centuries—was haunted by the ghost of an abbess who’d been killed during a Breton revolt in the twelfth century. The abbess’s headless body was said to have been walled behind rock in the dungeons, her head staked outside on the monastery gates as a warning to others who might shelter rebels.
Some said in a certain slant of moonlight the abbess’s ghost could be seen floating through the arches. Others claimed they heard her screams when winter storms blew and fog swirled thick over the surrounding heath.
Whatever anyone wanted to make of it, the legend gave Bella an excuse to poke around. And, if she was right about who was living in that monastery now, she’d nail a journalistic scoop that would salvage her career, rock U.S. politics and put her name squarely back on the political news map.
If the story didn’t kill her first.
Already, she’d been attacked by three men back home in Washington, D.C. If it hadn’t been for the intervention of