LSF Publications: spanking fiction ebooks

The desert was hot and relentless; there was nothing romantic about it in Megan's view. She eyed the man at the wheel beside her and made a pout with her lips. Some prince he was, she thought, the white T-shirt and Ray-Bans he wore made him look more like a Californian poser than anything. It just wasn't the story she was after. Oh he was handsome enough, but if it had been pretty boys she was wanting then she could have stayed in LA.

The Range Rover slid down the highway between hills of orange sand for mile after mile and so far she had seen nothing.

"Tell me Sir, what do you do? For a living I mean?" she asked him with a yawn.

At least the air conditioning worked and her short pixie hair cupped the top of her head much as it had back in the salon. But now she thought she needn't have cut it all to accommodate the heat.

"Hey, call me Ahmed," Sheikh Ahmed Aleem Al Elohahem said, pronouncing his name in its Anglicised form. "I am an engineer, but my uncle was concerned that..." He gave her an easy smile and shrugged. "He just wanted you to get what you needed. My cousin usually handles PR, but quite frankly, well... let's say it is not his forte." He smiled warmly. "You know... well, jobs can be hereditary. I am supposed to be a soldier, but I prefer building to destruction." He sighed. "But sometimes I still have to be a colonel."

His English was better than good; it sounded almost as if he were English, Megan thought. It even made her West Coast vowels sound coarse by comparison.

"So where were you educated?" Megan asked politely.

"Kings, Cambridge and London, Sandhurst, the LSE, Harvard, Brunel..." He reeled off his list as if it was of no particular concern.

"So you are the brains of the family and they have lumbered you with babysitting." She let her professional cynicism show.

"Hardly, but if you want technical details rather than overly bold hubris, then I will prove more useful," Ahmed said with a wink.

"So you're serious then, I mean about developing solar power?" Megan slipped the question in through a row of even white teeth better matched to a crocodile.

"The oil won't last forever." Ahmed shrugged.

Megan pushed her mouth back into a pout, a thinking pose for the 32-year-old journalist. Oh hell, a man of vision and modesty, he really did just want to talk about engineering, she thought; where is my damn story?

---oOo---
The solar array was impressive. Mile upon mile of silver grey glass all facing heaven. But even after she heard the numbers Megan had nothing that she couldn't have got on the website from LA.

"What about the desert? The real country, the real people out there?" she asked, narrowing her gaze as though it would suck a story from the man.