Caine Garnette is a Strategic Service officer accepting of his own fate. Jaded by his past, he embarks on a quest to save a small child from destruction, only to find his own salvation deep in the sandy heart of Arabia.
He also finds an Englishwoman stolen from the streets of Jerusalem.
Although she has lost her spectacles on the slave market, Virgilia Wessex soon discovers that the man of her dreams is right before her eyes. But the disguised American known as Caine Ali Hakira is anything but the charming prince she had been expecting. Secretive, unfriendly and haunted by an irreconcilable tragedy, Caine further acquaints her with the reality of the world in which she has been thrown. In turn, she introduces him to the possibilities of wishes made on stars... and to the same God he’d abandoned as a boy.
Spanning post-World War One England, America, and Africa, they encounter sandstorms, dangerous revolutionaries, and charming locals. Imprisonment, risk and friendship. Aching loss and glorious redemption. The course of this man and this woman will ultimately merge into the same: a life of forgiveness, of love… and of realized dreams.

April 20, 1922

The hooves of the horse and camel clomped through the golden sand, puffing up tiny clouds that resembled a jeweler’s topaz dust in the swirling brightness of midmorning. The sun glared white-hot and relentless, undaunted by mist or cloud, terrible in its intensity. And delighting in it, much like a prankish child playing with a magnifying lens over a naïve anthill. Lordly and uncontested in its domain, it sapped even the blue of the sky with crystalline heat and scoffed at the nonexistent shade of the occasional olive tree.

The two men rode southward through that oven, shielded as much as possible from the interminable scorch by kuffiyahs and silks and heavy hemp. On the left, a great, lumbering camel, laden with provisions. With each giant step in the glittering sand, the richly dyed tassels swayed from the saddle like a hypnotist’s pendulum… puff… puff…

On the east, a massive Arabian stallion, his thunderous muscles gliding beneath his glossy coat, salted with the same sweat that ran in rivulets down his master’s face. He moved with satin dynamism, governed might, and age-old elegance. Puff-puff… puff…

There were no birds in this region. No flowers to contribute their beauty or scent. No bashful waterway or bubbling oasis for two long nights. No sound at all, but the sand-rinsed gale and the slosh of the canteen and the golden gust of the hooves and the pants exhaled from the beasts…

Puff… puff…

Puff…

Caine peered through the perspiration in his eyes at the horizon. Beside him, astride the camel relevantly named Spit, Kas seemed to be puffing quite a bit, himself.

“God protect us. Friend or foe?” the Israelite questioned, taking his companion’s cue to rein in his mount.

Caine shook his head slightly, longing for a trough to dunk his head. “Looks like Bedouin.” He tapped his heels to reanimate his labored steed and urged the magnificent animal forward. “Merchants, maybe.”

Kas sighed, the intonation muffled by his headscarf, and Spit fell into step beside the horse once again. “Friend,” he decided, despite his dislike of the Bedouin religion. He proved it so with, “I would salaam a cobra, if he could promise me a bath!”

“Right about now, the snow’s just melted in Washington.”

“You are unkind to flaunt it, sahibi.”

The breeze ruffled the series of tents in uneven measure. At a furrow in the sand, beneath a makeshift canopy of canvas, six camels of varied worth lay at ease. A shorthair dog lay across the hump of the first, and his tongue lay beside him, pulsing with each heat-ravished breath. The dog did not bark, either too warm or too unbiased to give the new arrivals more than a soulful, canine stare as they entered the site. Other than that, there was no one.

Kas dismounted and called out an unthreatening greeting, once, then twice in the direction of the hills beyond the camp. The stallion heard the answer first, aiming his ears toward the largest of the closed tents. Alerted, Caine gave the long gray mane an absent caress of thanks and slid from the saddle, feeling through his robes for the assurance of his sidearm. Kas looked at him and the agent nodded beyond his shoulder just as the tent flaps flew wide.

Spit bawled in alarm and shifted aside as a short, thickly garbed gentleman hobbled quickly toward them with outstretched hands. His name was Mustafa—which came as no surprise, as most of the vagabonds Caine had ever encountered had that in common, and Mustafa was to the natives much the same as John Doe was to the Americans. Caine, however, figured he had no grounds to be critical, as Kas introduced his “master”, Caine Ali Hakira.
The tiny Bedouin claimed to hail from the Al-Howaitat Tribe of Southern Jordan and a long line of prestigious tradesmen. Recognizing the value of Caine’s attire as well as the beasts he’d brought with him, he straightway launched into a trade spiel that made his prospective customer’s ears ring.
Caine shot Kas a quicksilver glance and his friend interrupted the twaddle of words, asking for refreshment. Mustafa bobbed and bestowed upon them all the blessings of Allah—some of them quite lengthy—before turning to bark at the waggling tent flaps. A small child rushed from the dwelling to fetch water for the animals. At the merchant’s bidding, Caine and Kas were ushered into the tent and seated upon sweat-stained cushions of both Bagdad silk and ragtag Egyptian brocade. They were lovely, yes? Perhaps the master would wish to purchase one or more, after his leisure was served.

The child served them juice, fruit and goat cheese, while Mustafa’s eagerness to make a few shekels assaulted their ears. His voice was as high-pitched as a woman's and as scratchy as a drunkard's, which combined only to create a positively annoying cadence. Caine wondered if Kas would salaam that cobra now. He did not look, but he was almost sure his friend was trying not to laugh aloud. Once or twice, he felt the shoulder next to him tremble with mirth, followed by an attack of coughing which would silence the Bedouin’s advertisement only long enough to offer more juice.

“The boy,” Caine said abruptly in Arabic, speaking for the first time and nodding to the child that waited in a docile huddle near the tent opening. “Do you have more?”

Mustafa squinted sun-lined eyes at him. Caine had once seen an adding machine in a general store make the same exact jolt that went off inside the merchant’s rapacious gaze. “Allah save you and turn your beard to gold. A keen eye, has my lord. He is a bargain, that one: industrious and strong. Do not let his size deceive you. He cares for all of the animals and me…”

“You have not heard me.” Caine set his cup of lukewarm juice aside and leaned forward with his palms on his knees. “Do you have more?”

“He is the only child servant, O Master. But, perhaps, you would be better pleased with a woman?”

Caine felt his lip curl. “Perhaps, not,” he said and made to rise.

Mustafa’s panic was strong enough to choke a pig. “Or two?” He stretched forth an appealing hand, chubby and callused, overdone in jewels. “Two women and the boy, by God’s word, and I will give you a fair price.”

“My master has spoken,” Kas interjected with solemn dignity. He really played the part of the snob well; Caine had always told him so. He tossed a shekel on his cushion as he rose after Caine. “The Lord smile on you. We will be gone.”

“Min fadlak!” Mustafa dogged their heels all the way to their mounts. Caine was seriously considering giving him a hundred pieces of silver just to get him to shut his mouth, when the merchant proposed, “A rarity is what a man such as you would wish, yes?”

No. A child. An English child with his father’s smile.

“My lord would require no less, I am certain.”

Caine stopped just short of snorting. If he had a nickel for every rarity promised by a trader, he wouldn’t have had to use the horded savings of a government agent’s salary to fund this expedition. He’d be richer than Solomon, and would afford to hire a team of detectives while he sat back and drank real coffee in his glamorous apartment on Fifth Avenue. He took his horse’s bridle and silently led him from the trough.

“You must see to believe! Allah has kissed her head with sunlight, this one. Master would indeed be envied such a treasure.”

Arrested by that single description, Caine turned to look at him through the sand in the wind. Mustafa’s greedy eyes pleaded with him. Against his better judgment, despite the red flags waving before his eyes and the pressure of finding Frank’s son as soon as possible, he said, “I am listening.”

The other man, spotting his chance, enthused with poetic gestures. “Sunlight, as the breaking of the dawn, O Master. Eyes of blue gold. Skin like goat’s milk. So lovely a creature never graced the desert, as this golden flower…”

Caine’s eyes sharpened. How on earth had this funny little man—who had probably never sojourned past the Red Sea shoreline—come to possess a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes? He handed Kas the reins and grudged, “I will see this rarity for myself.”

He was led to the smaller of the tents, where the height of the nearby dunes blocked most of the blast of wind. “I would wife her myself, but she would serve me better for the price she could bring in Cairo. There is a market for such novelties among the foreigners.”

Mustafa bowed several times, much like a floating cork, and dramatically swept the flap aside. His hand habitually on his pistol in the event this was an elaborate ruse to rob him, Caine stepped in, allowing his vision to adjust to the dim interior. He saw nothing at first, but swirling spots that refused to die from his eyelids… and then… there, a bundle of fabric shifted in the far corner and his hand slipped numbly from his sidearm. The woman was asleep, wrapped up like a golden butterfly in the cocoon of blankets, a bare toe sticking out of one end, a spill of light, unruly hair out of the other. In repose, her face was like that of a porcelain doll, but Caine knew the animation that would flow over it. He knew those eyes, even though heavy lashes shielded them. Her spectacles were nowhere to be seen, but he’d not remembered her for her spectacles. He’d seen her in his mind and in his dreams since he’d kissed her in Jordan nine months ago.

“My God.” He spoke quietly, to keep from waking her. He almost forgot himself and spoke in English. Almost. “Where did you find her?”

Mustafa mistook the hush in his voice for admiration, and gushed with revived zeal, “I came upon her just yesterday morning, master. She was lying in this very spot—just here! Exhausted and hungry. I planned to leave at dawn for the sea. For her sake alone, did I tarry. Yet, if you are interested, I will leave immediately, God be praised, and tender her to your attention.”

English, he recalled. What was she doing this far from where he’d left her? “Ay billah. It is difficult to believe… no one was with her?”

“None, O Wise One,” he assured him quickly, misunderstanding the motive behind the query. “Do not fear. To be certain, her former master will not be looking for her.”

Caine was afraid to believe that to be true.

Alone. He stepped closer a single pace and narrowed his eyes. Skin like goat’s milk, sure, but for the spray of sunburn across her nose. She’d said she had an escort upon the insistence of the British Embassy… Frank.

And Frank was dead.

“You recognize a find when you see it,” Mustafa’s chafing voice whispered at his elbow. “You understand, a jewel such as this, I could part with only for a small fortune.”

Caine gritted his teeth and looked down into the miserly face of the Bedouin, then at the tiny, defenseless creature across the tent. What was she doing here? “How small?”