The Playboy Sheikh

“On one condition.”

“To hell with your condition!”

“You must have dinner with me this evening.”

“Dinner! If that was all you wanted, why didn’t you come to Gazi and Anna’s? You must know I’ve been staying there!”

Coming to the Barakat Emirates to shoot the movie a week ago, she had naturally stayed with Anna and Gazi. It would have been natural for Jaf to visit them, but he made no move to try and see her. “We usually see him once or twice a week,” Anna had said apologetically. “He must be very busy.”

Lisbet had been half relieved, half anxious. If there was going to be a meeting, she wanted to get it over with. If not, she’d have liked to be certain of that.

He laughed. “Did you miss me?”

“I never expected you to come. Why would you want to see me? Why do you now?”

“What I have to say to you is not for public consumption,” he said.

Her heart pounded. She was afraid of him in this steely mood. She remembered how hard it had been to shut him out of her life. It had taken all her determination. “I’m not interested,” she said stonily.

“You do not agree to come?”

“We finished months ago, Jaf. It’s over and it’s going to stay that way.”

He seemed to make no move, and yet the horse lifted a delicate foreleg and stepped around in place, till it was facing the rocky ridge and the sea again.

“My house is beyond this point,” he said. The horse moved into the sea. “It is well protected. Once we are there, no one will reach you except with my permission.”

“Let me down!” she cried.

She struggled, but he held her tight, and the horse moved faster. She could not risk jumping, especially when she couldn’t be sure of the surface under the water. If her foot landed on a rock, if she fell or the horse kicked her…

“Now, or tonight, Lisbet? One way or another, you will see me.” The horse was moving into deeper water, on a heading around the thrusting finger of rock.

She could feel determination in him. Her feet were now brushing the surface of the water. Her body skittered with nervous anticipation.

After the months of silence, she had begun to believe that he had forgotten her, forgotten all his protestations of love. During the past week of waiting every night on tenterhooks for him to turn up at dinner, she had been convinced. And now, suddenly, here he was, angry, unforgiving, punitive.

She felt disoriented. She suddenly felt she didn’t know him. He was in his own country, on his own territory, taking her she knew not where. She was a foreigner, and he was influential here.

“All right!” she exploded, furious at her own capitulation.

The horse stopped instantly. Jaf frowned into her eyes. “You will have dinner with me tonight?”

“Yes, I’ll have dinner with you, damn you! But not at your house. I’ll go with you to a restaurant, and that’s final. So if you were expecting more than dinner, forget it! A face over a meal is all you’ll get.”

His head inclined with regal acceptance, making her feel like a rude peasant in the presence of the lord of the manor. “But of course,” Jaf said, as if she had made an indelicate remark. “What else?”

Firouz turned in place and began to pace back out of the water, as precise as a circus horse.

“Just as long as you realize there’ll be no sex for dessert,” Lisbet said defiantly.

“Do you realize it?” Jaf said.

They met two dune buggies halfway. Jaf laughed and reined in. “Your rescuers are only a little late,” he said.

“Lisbet, are you all right?” the director demanded, piling out of one of the vehicles in half-crazed concern. “Is everything okay?”

They had galloped in silence, Jaf’s chest against her back, the horse moving powerfully under her thighs, in a twin reminder of masculine might. Lisbet was filled with such a churning of conflicting and varied emotions she couldn’t find words.

One of the grips was there to help her down, but the dark, stocky director pushed him aside and solicitously reached up for her himself. She slipped out of Jaf’s strong hold and down onto the sand, and only when his protection was gone felt the loss.

Jaf’s face was stone as he watched the movement drag the dress of her skirt up around her hips, revealing the full length of her legs and the lacy underwear.

Masoud, glancing up at Jaf, let her go a moment too quickly. Lisbet staggered a little and then straightened.

“No, everything is not all right,” she informed the director in quiet fury. “Do you know this man? I won’t work while he’s on the set,” she said, storming off towards the dune buggy.

She was hoping for an argument, because Jaf was certain to lose. But she might have known better. She had taken no more than two steps when there came the sound of hooves. Involuntarily, Lisbet turned. Jafar al Hamzeh, his robes flying, magnificent on the white horse, was riding back the way they had come.

Minutes later, Lisbet slammed into the welcome if erratic air conditioning of her trailer. Tina, her dresser, wide-eyed with unspoken curiosity, fluttered in anxious concern while she struggled with the buttons on her costume.

“You’ve been in the sun too long! Is your nose burned? I told Masoud, less than half an hour and then we need to reapply the sun block!”

Lisbet was suddenly exhausted. Her meeting with Jaf seemed to have drained her of energy. “Save it, Tina. I want a shower,” she said, stripping off the torn costume.

Then she was under the cooling spray. Cast and crew had all been asked to use the fresh water sparingly, since it had to be trucked onto the site, but Lisbet forgot that as she held her face to the cool stream.

If only other things could be so easily forgotten.

She had met Jafar al Hamzeh when he came to ask for her help. Her best friend, Anna Lamb, was in trouble and needed her. Naturally, she had agreed to go with him.

There was an immediate spark between them. He made no secret of his attraction to her. That evening, having given Anna the help she needed, Lisbet had had to leave for work—shooting an exterior scene for an episode of a television series, on Hampstead Heath. Jaf had driven her to the location and then stayed to keep her company—all night.

She would never forget the electricity of that night. Sitting in the deeper dark behind the floodlights, bundled up against the chill, she and Jaf gazed into each other’s eyes, talking about nothing and everything, while she waited to be called. Each time she went on set to do a take, she feared he would have gone when she got back, but he was always there, waiting.

There was a connection between them like a taut, singing wire, and over the course of that long night, the electric charge got stronger and stronger till Jaf was more blinding than the floodlights.

He had taken her home in the limousine, and she had invited him in for coffee. As they entered the darkened apartment he kissed her, suddenly, hungrily, as if he had let go a self-restraint of banded steel. It was their first kiss, and it exploded on their lips with fiery sweetness. The thought of it, even now, could make chills run over her skin.

She would never forget that first time, making love with Jaf as the sun came up over the damp roofs of London. Not if she lived to be a hundred.

Afterwards, she had worried that, coming from so different a culture, he would think her cheap, despise her for such ease of conquest. He left her with a passionate kiss in the morning, saying he would call her soon, and her fear whispered that for him it had been no more than a one-night stand.

The limousine was waiting for her at the curb when she left the television studio that evening. Her heart leapt so hard she staggered. It took her—or perhaps, she had told herself, giggling, in the lush, leather-lined splendour of the Rolls, swept was the more appropriate word—to the Dorchester Hotel.

No one at the Dorchester even raised an eyebrow at her grubby sweatpants, the frayed sweater, the ragged bomber jacket, her shiny, just-scrubbed face, the hair caught up with a couple of jumbo clips, the extra-long scarf taking three turns around her neck.

“You might have given a girl some warning!” she protested, when Jaf opened the door on the penthouse suite. He was standing in an entrance hall bigger than her whole flat.