The Playboy Sheikh

His smile made her drunker than champagne. “What should I have warned you about?”

He put out a hand and drew her inside, and before she could begin to answer his mouth closed on hers, hungry and demanding.

Later, they lay lazily entwined in each other, while he stroked her back, her hip, her thigh. Above them, a huge skylight showed them the stars. His hold was light, and yet he seemed to protect and enclose her. She had never felt so safe.

They looked up at the stars, and he complained at how pale they were, compared to the sky in Barakat.

“Once, when I was very young,” Jaf murmured, “I was with my grandfather as he examined a collection of diamonds. I can still see those stones dropping onto the black velvet cushion my grandfather had set down. They sparkled with black fire. They dazzled my eyes.”

“Mmmm,” she said, as his hand painted little sparkles of electricity along her spine.

“My mother said afterwards, though I don’t remember that part of it, that I absolutely insisted on touching them. All I remember is that I was lifted up and put my hands out, and my grandfather dropped diamonds onto my palms. It was a moment that thrilled me beyond description.”

Lisbet smiled, picturing him as a little boy, trembling with delight. “I wonder why it had such impact.”

“Because I thought I was touching the stars, Lisbet,” he said softly. “That is what the stars are like in my country. They are diamonds. I really believed that my grandfather had brought down stars and a piece of sky. It was a moment of almost mystical ecstasy.”

Lisbet smiled, touched and charmed by the image. She turned her head and looked up at the night sky. “Yes, I see.”

Jaf’s arms tightened around her. He gazed down into her upturned face and saw starlight in her eyes. For a moment there was pure silence.

“I have never had such a feeling again until now,” he whispered, lifting one hand to her cheek. “Till now I never touched the stars again.”

Three

“He’s here,” Lisbet’s dresser said breathlessly, tapping and entering the trailer that was Lisbet’s living quarters for the duration of the location shoot. Tina was trying to disguise her excitement, but still her tone of voice irritated Lisbet.

“You sound like a pensioner meeting the Queen,” she muttered.

“Funny you should say that. When I was twelve I met Princess Diana. It was the most exciting moment of my life,” Tina said with a grin. “I’ve met plenty of celebrities since then, but in this business the glitter goes fast. Nothing’s ever had quite the impact. Until now.”

Lisbet knew she was joking, but couldn’t help responding in a repressive tone, “What’s so hot about Jafar al Hamzeh?”

“Hey, you’re the one who’s going to have dinner with him!”

Lisbet shrugged. No one here was aware that she had known Jaf before, and she had no intention of letting them know.

Tina gave her a look. “You do know he’s one of Prince Karim’s Cup Companions, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know.”

But Tina was in full swing. “So’s his brother Gazi. In these parts that’s sort of like being a rock star, except that they also have political clout. Rashid—one of the grips—told me that the tradition of the Cup Companions goes back a very long way, to pre-Islamic times, but in the old days they were just the guys the king relaxed with. They were deliberately excluded from the executive process. Nowadays, they form what amounts to the prince’s cabinet. Most of them have specific responsibilities, and they all have a lot of influence, right across the board. And they’re as loyal as it gets, to each other and the princes.”

Lisbet wanted to shout at her to shut up. But she concentrated on her lipstick and did not answer.

“He’s rich, too, Lisbet—stinking rich, since his father died, according to the scuttlebutt on the set—and, they say, very generous. Also spending mad. Those stories in the press aren’t all scandalmongering, apparently. He’s going through his inheritance like water over a falls. He dropped half a million barakatis in one sitting at the casino a couple of nights ago, and got up completely unfazed. If you play it right, you could dip your bucket into the flow and put something away for a comfortable old age.”

She paused, but Lisbet was still carefully outlining her lips in a pinky beige. Tina frowned. With that outfit, her lips should be wine-red.

“And incredibly sexy, on top of it. What about the way he galloped after you on the beach—woo! We were all practically fainting. And when he actually picked you up on the fly—I swear I got sensory burn from here. What did he say when he had you on the horse?”

“Nothing much.” Lisbet set down the lipstick brush and sat back to examine the result. “Certainly I don’t recall hearing any apology for risking my life in a circus stunt.”

Tina manifestly disbelieved her indifference. She waggled her eyebrows.

“Well, anytime he wants to perform a stunt with me, he’s welcome!” Tina said. “Did you know he was on the Barakat Emirates’ Olympic equestrian team in 1996, and they got a gold? And in his wild youth, when he was at university in the States, he spent his holidays in a circus or rodeo or something.”

Lisbet knew it all, but she wasn’t going to have everyone on the set raking over her ancient affair with Jaf if she could help it.

“A rodeo would be just the place for him. The wonder is why he ever left,” she said. She got to her feet and checked herself in the mirror. She was wearing a knee-length tunic top over pants, all in a soft knitted oatmeal silk, a few shades darker than her hair.

“You’ve got to be joking!” The dresser was unstoppable now. “The man oozes sensuality. He reminds me of those old French movie stars. Belmondo. Delon. Je t’aime, moi non plus. Ooooh.” Tina picked up the matching calf-length silk coat and held it as Lisbet slipped her arms into the sleeves. “I wish it were me he was after. Yum!”

“He is not after me!” Lisbet said irritably. She shrugged into the coat and reached for her evening bag. Tina’s litany was only making her more nervous. She wondered why she had capitulated to his ridiculous ultimatum. She should have realized he couldn’t make it stick.

Maybe she just couldn’t resist seeing him one more time.

“Silly me, I thought he was,” Tina corrected herself in a tone of extreme irony. “He was just warning you off his land, then, was he? Did you know he owns the whole stretch of beach along here?” she added in parentheses. “We’re on his land.”

Lisbet concentrated on her reflection. Her leather sandals and handbag matched the oatmeal silk, and her long hair was held back with a tiny braided ribbon of the same colour. She had chosen the outfit carefully, for its cool, undramatic elegance. It was the furthest thing from deliberately sexy, she told herself, that you could find.

Her earrings were thin squares of beaten gold. With them she wore a gold chain necklace…and on the third finger of her left hand, a large pearl ring.

“You look fabulous!” Tina said, hoping her tone disguised her faint disappointment. She began unnecessarily brushing Lisbet down, and tweaked a fold of her coat. She wished Lisbet had left her hair loose or worn a touch of colour. Anyone would think she was deliberately dressing her warm sexuality down, but Tina couldn’t believe anyone would act in such a stupid and self-defeating way.

It must be nerves. Because Lisbet, as her dresser had quickly learned, had a craftsman’s eye for what suited her. She could always add just that personal touch to a costume that made it her own, giving it a flair the camera loved. That was Tina’s yardstick for what made a star.

But as the actress moved to the door Tina blinked and took a second look. Maybe Lisbet knew what she was doing after all. She supposed Arabs were as susceptible to the Ice Maiden myth as other men, and the hinting motion of Lisbet’s body under that silk might just drive a guy wild.

At first she had given herself up to the passion that consumed them.

They had a devastating, emotionally tormenting, crazily passionate time together. Like nothing she had ever experienced. Sometimes she felt drunk, so drunk she was reeling. Sometimes she felt that Jaf had her heart in his hand. A word, a look, had a power over her that was completely outside her previous experience.

It frightened her. Not just his possessiveness, but her own response to it. And she had plenty of reason to fear having her life taken over.

It touched Lisbet on an old but ever tender wound.

It had been out of motives of love that her father had deliberately got her mother pregnant, in order to put an end to her promised stage career and keep her with him.

That had been a long time ago, when the morality of the swinging sixties hadn’t quite reached the small Welsh mining village where the young lovers lived. Gillian Raine had won a place at drama school and was waiting for the summer to end before leaving for London and another life. Her lover, Edward MacArthur, had already done what every man in the village did—he had started work down the coal mines.

The cautionary tale of her mother’s murdered dreams had been burned into Lisbet from a child. How he had pleaded with her to stay home and marry him. How she had had to give in when she learned she was pregnant… Never give up your dreams, girls, her mother had warned them.

As they grew into teenagers, the story became clearer. Then Gillian told her daughters how that life-changing pregnancy had occurred. Told them of the fateful night when Edward had asked her to turn her back on drama college, stay at home and marry him….

Gillian had resisted all Edward’s pleading and, when he knew he had lost the argument, he began to kiss her.

Her daughters, educated in the new model of the world, had asked breathlessly, “Did Dad date rape you, Mama?”