DEAR READER LETTER
By Sharon Kendrick
Dear Reader,
One hundred. Doesn’t matter how many times I say it, I still can’t believe that’s how many books I’ve written. It’s a fabulous feeling but more fabulous still is the news that Mills & Boon are issuing every single one of my backlist as digital titles. Wow. I can’t wait to share all my stories with you - which are as vivid to me now as when I wrote them.
There’s BOUGHT FOR HER HUSBAND, with its outrageously macho Greek hero and A SCANDAL, A SECRET AND A BABY featuring a very sexy Tuscan. THE SHEIKH’S HEIR proved so popular with readers that it spent two weeks on the USA Today charts and…well, I could go on, but I’ll leave you to discover them for yourselves.
I remember the first line of my very first book: “So you’ve come to Australia looking for a husband?” Actually, the heroine had gone to Australia escape men, but guess what? She found a husband all the same! The man who inspired that book rang me up recently and when I told him I was beginning my 100th story and couldn’t decide what to write, he said, “Why don’t you go back to where it all started?”
So I did. And that’s how A ROYAL VOW OF CONVENIENCE was born. It opens in beautiful Queensland and moves to England and New York. It’s about a runaway princess and the enigmatic billionaire who is infuriated by her, yet who winds up rescuing her. But then, she goes and rescues him… Wouldn’t you know it?
I’ll end by saying how very grateful I am to have a career I love, and to thank each and every one of you who has supported me along the way. You really are very dear readers.
Love,
Sharon xxx
He flung his shirt onto the desert scrub
“Now name your next command.”
“Take it off,” she instructed, enjoying the heady sensation of having such power over this man. This man.
“What?”
“Everything.”
He made his undressing as slow and as deliberate as he could, and Rose was shocked, startled and unbearably aroused. He read the expression in her eyes as the jodhpurs joined the shirt. “You worry that I am too much of a man for you?”
She laughed in soft delight at the arrogant boast. Maybe you worry that I am too much of a woman for you!”
He took one breathless look at her, before coming to lie on top of her.
Rose’s head fell back. “Oh! Khalim!”
“You want me to stop?” he suggested teasingly.
Mills & Boon are proud to present a thrilling digital collection of all Sharon Kendrick’s novels and novellas for us to celebrate the publication of her amazing and awesome 100th book! Sharon is known worldwide for her likeable, spirited heroines and her gorgeous, utterly masculine heroes.
SHARON KENDRICK once won a national writing competition, describing her ideal date: being flown to an exotic island by a gorgeous and powerful man. Little did she realise that she’d just wandered into her dream job! Today she writes for Mills & Boon, featuring her often stubborn but always to-die-for heroes and the women who bring them to their knees. She believes that the best books are those you never want to end. Just like life…
Surrender to the Sheikh
Sharon Kendrick
www.millsandboon.co.uk
For the debonair Tom Roberts,
the world’s leading authority on Maraban,
and without whom this book would never have been written!
CONTENTS
Cover
Dear Reader
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
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 FOURTEEN
EPILOGUE
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
THERE was something about a wedding. Something magical which made everyday cynicism evaporate into thin air. Rose twisted the stem of her champagne glass thoughtfully as they waited for the best man to begin speaking.
She’d noticed it in the church, where even the most hardened pessimists in the congregation had been busy dabbing away at the corners of their eyes—well, the women, certainly. Women who would normally congregate in wine bars, denouncing the entire male sex as unthinking and uncaring, had been sitting through the entire service with wistful smiles softening their faces beneath the wide-brimmed hats.
Why Rose had even shed a tear herself, and she was not a woman given to a public display of emotion!
‘In my country,’ announced the best man, and his jet-black eyes glittered like ebony as they fixed themselves on the bride and groom, ‘we always begin the wedding feast with a toast. That their mutual joy shall never be diminished. And so I ask you to raise your glasses and drink to Sabrina and Guy.’
‘Sabrina and Guy,’ echoed the glittering crowd, and obediently raised their glasses.
Not for the first time, Rose found herself surveying the best man over the top of her glass, along with just about every other female in the room, but then it was hard not to.
He was certainly spectacular—and spectacular in the true sense of the word. But, there again, not many men were fortunate enough to have a real live prince acting as their steward!
His name was Prince Khalim, as Sabrina had informed her excitedly when she’d begun to plan the wedding. A real-life prince with a real-life country of his own—the beautiful Maraban—over which he would one day rule, as his forebears had ruled for centuries. He was an old schoolfriend of Guy’s, Sabrina had shyly confided to Rose—the two men being as close as two men who’d known each other since childhood could be.
Rose had been expecting the prince to be short and squat and rather ugly—but, for once, her expectations had been way off mark. Because Prince Khalim was quite the most perfect man she had ever set eyes on.
He was tall—though perhaps not quite as tall as the groom—and he wore the most amazing clothes that Rose had ever seen. Exotic clothes in sensual fabrics. An exquisite silken tunic coloured in a soft and creamy gold, with loose trousers worn beneath.
Such an outfit could, Rose reasoned, have made some men look as though they were on their way to a fancy-dress party—maybe even a little bit feminine. But the silk whispered tantalisingly against his flesh, and there was no disguising the lean, hard contours of the body which lay beneath. A body which seemed to exude a raw and vibrant masculinity from every pore.
Rose swallowed, the champagne tasting suddenly bitter in her throat. And then swallowed again as those onyx eyes were levelled in her direction and then narrowed, so that only a night-dark gleam could be seen through the thick, black lashes.
