Lydia Young has landed her dream assignment! Used to stacking shelves, she's now jetting off to a desert kingdom for a holiday as a media darling's look-alike.
All Lydia has to do is enjoy a week of pampered bliss in a luxury oasis--and not blow her cover by falling for her host, dangerously out-of-her-league Sheikh Kalil al-Zaki.
Hmm, this might just be trickier than she first thought!
Reading is, and always has been, the first love of my life. Except writing.
Success came early -- I was twelve when I won an Easter egg in a hymn writing competition at school - but life intervened with my plans to become a hot shot author. The day job. Not that this was dull. I travelled to Zambia at the age of twenty where I worked as a secretary, before following my personal hero to the Middle East, Kenya, Botswana and ambition became buried in the joyful business of raising a family.
I never forgot that I was a "writer", however. I wrote children's stories for Listen With Mother. Magazines articles. Ghost stories. I was at a point where I wanted to move onto something bigger when I read a magazine piece about Charlotte Lamb and Anne Hampson and discovered, rather late in life, romantic fiction. I read everything I could lay my hands on, then, feeling certain I had a grasp of the genre, began writing. I had three rejections - I still have those letters! -- but my fourth submission became An Image of You and was published in 1992.
Since then seven of my books have been shortlisted for RWA's RITA award - two of them, THE BEST MAN & THE BRIDESMAID and THE MARRIAGE MIRACLE winning in 2001 and 2006, respectively. A FAMILY OF HIS OWN always won the RNA's Romance Prize in 2005.
My best-beloved and I are empty-nesters these days, living out in the country where excitement means a visit from the mobile shop, the travelling library, the fish man. But I'm a writer, I invent my own worlds. Once the door to the my cabin in the woods is closed I can be anywhere my imagination takes me; the desert kingdom of Ramal Hamrah, the villages of Upper Haughton, Little Hinton and Longbourne where romance is always just around the corner, or I can jet off to New York, the Mediterranean, even the Himalayas. Come and see where I'm headed next - http://www.lizfielding.com
