The Sheikh's Unsuitable Bride »

Reading is, and always has been, the first love of Liz Fielding's life. Except writing.

Success came early; Liz was twelve when she won an Easter egg in a hymn writing competition at school. But life intervened with her plans to become a hotshot author—she got a day job. Not that this was dull. Liz travelled to Zambia at the age of twenty where she worked as a secretary, before following her personal hero to the Middle East, Kenya and Botswana, and ambition became buried in the joyful business of raising a family.

However Liz never forgot that she was a writer. She wrote magazine articles, ghost stories and children's stories for BBC Radio. She was at a point where she wanted to move onto something bigger when she read a magazine piece about Charlotte Lamb and Anne Hampson and discovered, rather late in life, romantic fiction. She then read everything she could lay her hands on, and feeling certain she had a grasp of the genre, began writing. Liz had three rejections—she still has those letters!—but her fourth submission became An Image of You and was published in 1992.

Liz has now written forty-five Harlequin Romance books. Seven of them have been nominated for RWA's RITA award; The Best Man & The Bridesmaid took the prize in 2001. A Family of His Own won the RNA's Romance Prize, and was also named Reviewers' Choice Best Harlequin Romance by Romantic Times BOOKreviews in 2005. A Marriage Miracle took the Short Contemporary RITA in 2006.

These days, Liz, an empty-nester, lives in a small village in Wales where excitement means a visit from the mobile shop, the travelling library or the fish man. But she'sa writer, soshe invents her own worlds. Once the door to her cabin in the woods is closed, Liz can be anywhere her imagination takes her: the desert kingdom of Ramal Hamrah, the villages of Upper Haughton, Little Hinton and Longbourne (where romance is always just around the corner) or New York, the Mediterranean and even the Himalayas. "Pick up a book and come with me...

Zahir was surprised to find he had a beautiful new driver. This chauffeur did not blend into the background. Oh, no. Diana Metcalfe talked. She laughed. She took him on unplanned detours. And he had more fun than he'd had in years.

But back in his desert kingdom, a dynastic marriage was being brokered for Zahir. Crazy though it seemed, he wished that this wonderful, vivacious, thoroughly unsuitable woman could be his bride instead....