LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER ONE

       Montreux, Switzerland—The third of June

      “I CAN’T MARRY YOU, Paul. Though I think you’re a wonderful man, I’m not in love with you.”

      “Since your grandmother died, you’re too sad to know your own feelings right now.”

      “But I do know them. A marriage between us wouldn’t work.”

      “So you’re really going on that trip?”

      “Yes. I want to walk in her footsteps for a time. It’s my tribute to her.”

      “You shouldn’t go there alone, Lauren. At least let me come with you to protect you.”

      “Protect me? From what? No, Paul.”

      “How long will you be gone?”

      “I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. This has to be good-bye.”

       The Nafud Desert—The fifth of June

      THEY WANDERED IN THE DESERT in a solitary way. Thirsty, their souls fainted in them.

      The line from Psalms didn’t leave Lauren Viret’s mind as she drank from her water bag, surveying the indescribable vastness and loneliness of the northern Arabian desert.

      Since they had left the major city of El-Joktor, bone-scorching heat had born down on their little group of twenty penetrating deeper into the desert’s heart. Forty actually if you counted the camels. In a movie, the audience would consider them secondary characters. But out here where there were no movie cameras rolling, the humped female dromedary played the star role.

      Lauren was less than a granule on this endless burning waste of sand where one could be swallowed alive in an instant. Before she’d set out this morning on her forty-mile journey, her guide, Mustafa, had lectured her that her camel was more valuable than any human.

      She’d read enough firsthand accounts of desert survival to believe it. Besides transportation the camels provided shelter, protection, even water and food in dire circumstances.

      While she was deep in thought, Mustafa urged his beast forward to ride alongside her. He talked with excitement as he pointed out the huge, awe-inspiring crescent-shaped dunes in this area of the Nafud Desert. It was true she’d never seen anything like them. No wonder her grandmother had never stopped talking about this place.

      But Mustafa had no idea it was something flesh and blood, someone more awesome than these dunes that had captivated Lauren’s American grandmother many years ago.

      “Malik was bigger than life, Lauren,” her grandmother had once told her, “the sheikh over all his people. His word was law. He was as beautiful as a god. I couldn’t help myself loving him any more than I could stop breathing.”

      Lauren couldn’t imagine a love like that.

      She turned her head to glance at the camel drivers in their head scarves and cloaks, true men of the desert no doubt wondering what had possessed her to come out here alone. Lauren knew she looked out of place, a blonde American woman wearing the Arab male guthra and lightweight kandura herself, just the way her grandmother Celia Melrose Bancroft had once done.

      Everyone at home had marveled over Lauren’s resemblance to her grandmother. Odd how certain genetic traits skipped a generation. Lauren’s mother had been a stunning brunette, as dark as Lauren was fair. Celia had given her daughter an Arabic name, Lana, meaning tender, which had added to the mystique of Lauren’s beautiful mother. Both her mother and father had tragically died in a cable-car accident while skiing six months after Lauren was born, but thankfully Celia had hundreds of photographs which Lauren pored over to keep her father and mother alive in her heart.

      “Jolie-laide,” Paul had once murmured when he’d first seen a close up of Lana, but Lauren had heard him. In French that meant striking, in an interesting way without being beautiful. When she’d asked Paul what he’d meant by it he’d said, “I’m afraid you inherited all the ravissante genes, petite. No offense to your lovely mother.”

      Lauren had known that Paul had been flirting with her at the time. Of course, he didn’t realize that Lauren’s part-American, part-Arabic mother had the look of her father, the great Sheikh Malik Ghazi Shafeeq. Lauren had seen a copy of a picture of her grandfather from an old Arab newspaper her grandmother had once shown her. It was still with Celia’s treasures.

      The sheikh had been dressed in robes and head scarf, making it impossible to see much, except that he had a proud nose and wide mouth, which he’d bequeathed to his daughter. Lauren wondered if her grandfather might still be alive today? Probably not.

      Now that Celia had passed away, no one else on earth knew of Lauren’s relationship to her Arabic grandfather and they never would. But her curiosity where he was concerned had been one of the main reasons driving her to make this journey into the desert.

      Tonight she’d camp out under the stars. Tomorrow the caravan would continue on to the Oasis Al-Shafeeq where she’d spend several weeks and hoped to find out more about the man himself.

      On occasion Celia would say, “The one thing I see that reveals the Arab blood in you is your fierce passion for life. Only in that regard have I glimpsed signs of Malik. Mark my words … with the right man, that passion will be unleashed.”

      Paul, a newspaper journalist from Paris, could never have been that man. Lauren liked Paul, but in her heart she was waiting for the day she experienced the grande passion her grandmother had often talked about.

      Though Lauren had turned down Paul’s marriage proposal, she feared that he hadn’t given up hope of marrying her and would be waiting for her upon her return. It was this unflagging trait to his personality that had won him an interview with Celia in the first place.

      For several years Paul had been wanting to do a series for his paper on the life of Richard Bancroft, Celia’s deceased husband. Though Celia had been a young unwed mother at the time, Richard had married her and become a father figure to a young Lana. He had later become a favorite of Lauren’s too, especially after her parents had been killed. Apparently it had never bothered Richard that Celia did not tell him the name of her lover, and Lana’s

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