The Sheikh's Scheming Sweetheart Read online

  Table of 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 Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  The Sheikh’s Scheming Sweetheart

  Holly Rayner

  Contents

  The Sheikh’s Scheming Sweetheart

  Subscribe

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Epilogue

  Holly Rayner

  The Tycoon’s Temporary Twins

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Subscribe

  Holly Rayner and Alexa Ross

  Secret Triplets

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Holly Rayner and Lara Hunter

  The Sheikh’s ASAP Baby

  Introduction

  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

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Also by Holly Rayner

  The Sheikh’s Scheming Sweetheart

  Copyright 2017 by Holly Rayner

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.

  All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

  Chapter One

  The wind screamed over the dunes of the Nubian Desert, whipping stinging sand into the eyes of the expedition party. Men struggled with panicking horses and recalcitrant camels as they rushed to pack up.

  A single woman stood apart, standing at the top of the dune, her auburn hair catching the last of the sunlight as it was choked out by the encroaching sandstorm. Petite and academic, she stood with her back to the others, ignoring the rush of people preparing to leave. She scanned the orange sky with tireless, green-blue eyes, even as the wind caught the white linen of her skirt and tried to carry her off.

  An older man, round and heavily mustached, struggled up the sand to her side.

  “Vanessa, we have to go!”

  The man had to shout to be heard over the wind, one hand holding his hat to his head, the other reaching for his companion.

  “The porters are ready to leave without us!”

  “Just a few minutes longer!” Vanessa begged, scanning the horizon with desperation. “The wind may reveal something!”

  “If there was anything to be revealed, we would have seen it already!” the older man shouted back, taking her arm. “It’s time to face the facts, girl. There is nothing here!”

  “The tomb has to be here somewhere!” Vanessa said, taking a map from her bag to squint at it through the obscuring sand, searching frantically for some last-minute revelation. “I’ve spent years on this, Abraham! I know it’s here!”

  A sudden gust of wind snatched the map out of her hand and whipped it away across the sand. Vanessa shouted in surprise and stumbled after it, but it had vanished into the storm within a blink. Abraham caught her and pulled her back towards the horses.

  “I’m sorry, Vanessa,” he said with genuine sympathy. “The tomb of Amanirenas is out there somewhere, but it’s not here. It’s time to go home, girl.”

  Vanessa hung on to him as they made their way towards the horses, crushed.

  “This was supposed to be it, Abraham,” she said. “All that work! This was meant to be my moment.”

  “Hold it together, girl,” Abraham said with a sigh, patting her shoulder. “You’re young yet, and the search for Amanirenas has caused greater disappointments than this. Once you’re my age, such failures will hardly even faze you. You’ll go out expecting them, and so you’ll never be disappointed when all there is to find is dust and sand…”

  Three years later, Vanessa sat on the edge of the fountain in the center of the Low Plaza at Columbia University, listening to a young man pontificate at length on the relative virtues of the different actors who had played his favorite character in movies. She was twenty-seven and working towards her doctorate in Middle Eastern Archeology, and she still couldn’t understand how people had conversations like this.

  Sh
e stared up at the rounded bronze centerpiece of the fountain, surrounded by a prismatic halo as the late spring sunlight shimmered on the water which sprayed directly from its tip.

  She supposed this was what she got for dating a film studies major. She just wasn’t that interested in movies. It was a basic incompatibility that she really should have considered before agreeing to go to dinner with him. She sighed and glanced at her watch, wondering if she could end this early and return to the library.

  “You aren’t listening.”

  Vanessa looked up as Sean’s tone changed abruptly. He was frowning at her, clearly hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at once, knowing it was pointless to pretend she’d been paying attention. “As soon as you start talking about actors, I just tune out.”

  “You know, popular movies are generally a pretty safe topic to talk about with anyone,” he said with a frustrated sigh. “Except you. If there isn’t a million-year-old pyramid involved, you’re just not interested.”

  “You’re not much better,” Vanessa said with a frown. “I can’t mention anything about my work without you launching into a sermon about some action movie that botches the history it attempts to include.”

  “Only because if I didn’t, you’d spend the next two hours describing the royal family of Sheba all the way back to the flood,” Sean pointed out. “At least I’m capable of talking about something besides movies. I haven’t had a single conversation with you that wasn’t about your work.”

  “It’s important to me,” Vanessa said defensively.

  “It’s all that’s important to you,” he replied, exasperated. “I’m sorry, Vanessa. I just don’t think this is going to work out.”

  Sean stood up and Vanessa felt a sudden rush of regret.

  “Wait,” she said. “I can—we can—”

  “Listen,” Sean said. “You’re a great person. You’re gorgeous and I don’t need to tell you that you’re brilliant. But I don’t think you’re ever going to love anyone more than your work. And I really don’t feel like competing with a bunch of thousand-year-old mummies. Goodbye, Vanessa.”

  He turned and left, and Vanessa dropped back down onto the rim of the fountain, feeling her spirits sink down into her shoes. It was hardly the first time a relationship had ended this way.

  After a long moment, she stood up, shaking off the clinging mantle of moroseness. Who cared if she wasn’t dating anyone? Her work was what really mattered. She’d happily die alone if it meant the realization of her dream of being a successful and renowned archeologist. She tried to tell herself that she believed this as she gathered her things and marched, chin high, back towards the library.

  She hadn’t been exactly excited for this date anyway, to be perfectly honest. She was caught up in her work and taking her thoughts off of it for even a moment was a struggle. Her thesis had been consuming all of her time and energy lately.

  It was on the same topic as all of her independent research. Kandake Amanirenas had fascinated her since she’d first started looking for her specialty. She had been planning to enter Egyptology when she’d glanced over Near Eastern Anthropology and discovered Amanirenas. Warrior queen of the Kushite, she’d stopped the Roman advance into Africa cold, and brokered a peace that had lasted hundreds of years.

  The image of this woman, one-eyed and ferocious, gold gleaming on her dark skin, leading her armies into what must have seemed an impossible battle, only to snatch victory against all odds, had captured Vanessa’s imagination entirely. And when she’d learned that the system of hieroglyphs used during Amanirenas’s reign had never been translated and thus the tomb of Amanirenas herself never located, she’d been seized with the desire to do this magnificent empress justice.

  She was known only through Greek and Roman writings about their encounters with the Kushite. Vanessa wanted to see Amanirenas described in her own words, in her own tongue. Her life, unaltered by frequently less-than glowing Roman opinions. Vanessa wanted to know her without others’ biases.

  But, at the moment, she had a more mundane task to perform. She’d commandeered two tables in a quiet back corner of the university library conveniently close to the Egyptology section but out of the way enough that her books wouldn’t be re-shelved nor her papers moved. Amidst the towers of reference materials and notes, she settled down, back to the letter she’d been writing before she stepped away for the disappointing date.

  Dear Professor Van Rees,

  I feel I must remind you of the incredible difficulty your sabbatical presents to your being my doctoral mentor. Not only can I not simply walk to your office when I have questions, I can’t even email you due to your decision to vacation in the most remote of locations possible. Which, I’m sure had something to do with how you knew the board would react when they learned you’d left all your teaching responsibilities to your TA. Which is me. Which has also not been beneficial to my studies.

  I remind you of all of this so that you understand the magnitude of my feelings when I say thank you, from the very deepest depths of my soul, for deciding to go to Ksatta-Galan instead of Tahiti or the Bahamas or whatever other tropical paradise I’m sure was calling your name. The map you sent arrived safely this morning, and I almost immediately destroyed it by crying on it like a child.

  She glanced at the map which sat on the table near her, sealed in glass like a microscope slide to protect the outrageously delicate fibers of the ancient papyrus beneath. She sighed like an infatuated lover just thinking about it. Beneath the glass an intricate map of ancient Meroitic Nubia was painstakingly painted in Kushite script, and titled in Greek.

  It’s beautiful, Abraham, Vanessa wrote. I can’t begin to know how you managed to get your hands on an original copy, much less imagine how you shipped it here! This is going to change the course of my research entirely. You know how close I’m getting to a real translation of the Meroitic language. This map may finally make that a reality.

  I owe you the biggest, fanciest bottle of scotch when you return, and if I can really decipher this language and get the recognition I rightly should for such an achievement, I may be able to afford it!

  She wrote a little longer, catching him up on his classes and various campus gossip before signing off.

  Money really is the issue, though, she thought as she reviewed the letter.

  Translating Meroitic script might get her a grant to continue her research, but it wouldn’t keep her apartment paid for, or even make a dent in her substantial student loans. She’d kept them deferred so far as she pursued her doctorate, but the finish line was coming up fast, at which point that debt was going to hit her like a freight train.

  Vanessa had no real plan for how to deal with her debt and the thought worried her deeply. She’d started looking to line up professorships, there at Columbia or abroad, but there were distressingly few openings. Her specialty wasn’t exactly in demand.

  Sighing, she pushed the letter away and pulled the map closer, deciding to put off thinking about it for a while longer. She’d rather focus on her work.

  Vanessa had been working on a translation of Meroitic for most of her academic career. That was nearly eight years of effort. Five years of that effort had led her to that miserable spot in the desert. She’d been so certain that the tomb had been right there. But her translation had been wrong. She’d gone back to the drawing board, and here she was now.

  The map gave her the best chance she’d had in a while. It was newly discovered, of Greek origin. Until now, she’d been working with copies made decades and sometimes centuries later, much degraded and changed as the area was redrawn over and over. And those later copies had often cut out the Meroitic titles in favor of the Greek. The original had both, which gave her a direct comparison between the two languages. Bending her head to her work, she shut out the world around her, pen scratching on the paper beside her.

  Hours passed, daylight fading into evening as she worked mechanically, deconstructing the place names th
e map described one letter at a time. She could almost feel the key turning in the lock of her mind, the secrets of the Meroitic language about to be released.

  Then, her eye fell on a site marked in the upper right corner of the map, in a remote part of the Sahara. It was marked with a symbol she’d come to recognize as signifying a burial site. She frowned as she realized this; she’d spent enough time with the other copies of this map to know there was no such site marked on them. And she’d certainly spent enough time looking into Kushite burial sites to know there’d never been any graves discovered in that area.

  Her confusion rapidly turned to intrigue as she began translating its title. The Greek was not very descriptive, reporting something like ‘twin tomb’ or ‘double tomb’ which didn’t make a lot of sense nor convey much useful information about who was buried there. But the symbols in the Meroitic version of the name set her heart racing. She knew those symbols. There was royalty buried here. And maybe not just any royalty.

  Comparing the words to those she’d translated from the Greek elsewhere on the page, Vanessa felt her breath catch, beginning to feel lightheaded.

  ‘One-Eyed Candace’ it read. ‘Kandake and Qore.’

  One-Eyed Candace was what the Romans had called Amanirenas during their conflict. Kandake and Qore were her titles—Queen mother and ruling King. She had found it, nearly by accident. She had found the tomb of Amanirenas.

  She stood up so quickly she fell over, then scrambled back to her feet. She shoved one arm into her coat, then grabbed a pen without putting her coat the rest of the way on in order to scrawl on the bottom of her letter to the professor.

  FOUND CANDACE, she wrote. MAY ARRIVE BEFORE LETTER DOES. GETTING ON A PLANE TONIGHT.

  Chapter Two

  Vanessa crammed her letter into an envelope and took off, racing across campus to the mailboxes in Lerner Hall, her jacket still only halfway on and her expression wild. She still couldn’t quite believe it was real, but god damn if she wasn’t going to question it until she’d seen the place with her own eyes. And Abraham would want to see the map. She’d need to go back and get that.