The Playboy Sheikh

She had laughed impatiently. “No, no, don’t you see what I’m trying to tell you? He was such a lover, your father, he just—girls, he just kissed me till…” She sighed. “Always before we’d used protection. That night he had none. But he was so passionate. I forgot everything, I wanted him and I didn’t care. A few weeks later I cared, right enough. When I told him I was pregnant I saw that he’d meant to do it.”

She had given up her dreams, married her lover, settled down to the grind of life as a miner’s wife and produced a string of children.

And never ceased to regret the life she might have had.

Lisbet had listened closely to the terrible warnings. She didn’t want a life like her mother’s. Always regretting what she hadn’t done. If it hadn’t been for you lot, that would be me up there, she would say when they sat around the television watching the latest costume drama.

Still, life had been more or less happy before the closure of the mines. Until then her father had come home at night exhausted and black with coal dust, maybe, but he was a man who held up his head. A man who made his wife smile with secret anticipation over the dinner table when he gave her burning looks out of those dark Celtic eyes.

Lisbet was just approaching her teens when the great miners’ strike was called, the prime minister infamously sent in the mounted strikebreakers, and an era came to an end. When the dust and blood cleared, the coal mines were finished, and so was Lisbet’s father.

More than his mine was gone, more than his job. His faith in British justice and fair play, and much else besides, was destroyed. His vision of himself had been shattered.

He had never worked again, except for casual labour here and there. It was his wife who went to work now, an even deeper shame for a man like him. Gillian worked in the little fish and chip shop, practically the only enterprise that survived the economic disaster that had engulfed the village, and came home smelling of cigarette smoke and half-rancid cooking fat, her hair lank and her once-beautiful face shiny with grease.

Her husband had hated the fact that his wife now had to work, without having the will to get up and change his life. He was a failure in the first source of pride he had, and it unmanned him completely. He began to drink.

The only bright side had been that there were no mines now for Lisbet’s brothers to go down. Their choice was different—join the ranks of the unemployed, or leave their village.

The MacArthurs were all bright. They had all gone on to higher education, in those days when, thank God, students from poor backgrounds were still being given full study grants. They had all worked hard, done well, gone on to good jobs.

Lisbet was always the special one. Lisbet, inheriting her mother’s beauty as well as her taste for theatre, had gone to a prestigious London drama college, with the weight of both their dreams on her shoulders. There she had left behind her musical regional accent and her father’s name. She chose her mother’s maiden name as a stage name, and Elizabeth Raine MacArthur became Lisbet Raine.

At graduation, she had won the most coveted prize, the Olivier Medal. Since then, she had worked steadily, mostly in television, getting bigger and better parts as time went by.

Lisbet knew at first hand that real security lay only in oneself. Not in marriage or a man. Not in letting someone else run your life according to their own tastes. The only real security was to become someone on your own merits. Only achievement lasted. Her mother was living proof that in the end you could count on no one but yourself.

For a woman, love was full of pitfalls. So, very soon after her affair with Jaf began, Lisbet was thinking of her independence. She didn’t want any misunderstandings about her expectations—or Jaf’s.

He bought her jewellery for her birthday, a beautiful gold bangle studded with rubies and diamonds. She was thrilled, but said with a smile, “It’ll come in handy to pawn next time I’m between jobs.” And she laughed when he furiously said that of course she would apply to him if she were ever broke, all the rest of her life.

“Oh, sure. And how will I get to you through your staff and what will I say when your secretary says you don’t know the name and can I tell him what it’s about?”

“I will forget nothing about you,” Jaf said, kissing her with ruthless passion. “From the first moment I saw you, there is not a moment I will forget.”

She thought he was the most wonderful, thoughtful lover a woman could have. But that only increased her risk. “Your lies are liquid honey,” she told him softly. “So sweet, so delicious.”

“You don’t believe it because you don’t want to believe it,” he had railed at her. “You avoid commitment by pretending to think that I am not serious, Lisbet. You tell yourself it is impossible for a rich and influential man to love you and you ignore the fact that your friend and my brother have married!”

On one level, it was true. When Anna and Gazi married, it shook her badly. Marriage was not for her, and she had been deeply dismayed by the yearnings that had surfaced as she stood beside her friend during the sweetly moving wedding service.

Maybe that was the first moment she understood that her affair with Jaf was a very dangerous liaison, and would have to end.

When Lisbet opened the door of her trailer, the first thing she saw, a few yards away down one of the metal roads that were temporarily crisscrossing the desert sand, was a Rolls. The chauffeur, in polo shirt and trousers, was wiping down the immaculate paint-work while chewing industriously on a toothpick. The limousine was a spotless, creamy white. The bumpers and handles—all the trim that should be chrome—were gold.

So it was true. She hadn’t believed it, reading about the car in the papers. It was a long way from the Jaf she had known.

But maybe he’d just known that a thing like the gold-plated Rolls wouldn’t go over very well in laid-back Britain.

A large number of the crew seemed to be lounging in doorways and under awnings, with no apparent purpose. Lisbet frowned and shook her head in disbelief as she realized that they were actually hanging around to watch the meeting between her and Jaf.

This afternoon’s little drama had ignited people’s imaginations.

The director, Masoud, was standing by his office trailer, talking to someone. The other man stood with his back to her in a black kaftan and keffiyah. It was the kind of dress worn, at times, by every male from waiter to prince in the Barakat Emirates.

Lisbet paused for a moment in the doorway, gazing at him. She had never seen Jafar al Hamzeh in Eastern clothing before, unless you counted this afternoon’s Lawrence of Arabia getup, but she knew it was him.

He seemed to have sensors on his back, too, because he instantly straightened and turned around and stared along the tiny “street” to the door of her trailer.

Jaf stood motionless, just looking, as she stepped out of her trailer and moved towards him. Her hair was drawn back to reveal the soft curves of her cheek and throat, the delicate sculpting of her ears, where beaten gold glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight. Flowing silk just darker than her hair brushed her body with every movement, simultaneously revealing and cloaking the curve of arm, thigh, breast. Blood rushed to his hands, burning him with the sensual memory of those curves.

Lisbet, under the intensity of his gaze, half stumbled, her fingers automatically spreading to steady herself. Jaf came to meet her, while the chauffeur stowed his polishing cloth and opened the door of the sumptuously appointed, gold-plated limousine. He was still resolutely chewing the toothpick.

The elegant Rolls-Royce emblem had been removed from the nose of the car, and Lisbet’s eyes were irresistibly drawn to the grotesque gold statuette that took its place—a full-breasted, naked woman in a kind of swan dive, her back arched and her hair streaming out behind her.

Well, she had seen a picture of it, but she hadn’t believed it.

“And some people say Arabs have no taste!” she marvelled.

“Out here this counts as the stripped-down model,” Jaf assured her.

“So I see.” She bent forward to peer inside the car. It was a vision of luscious white leather, burnished wood, Persian carpets, and more gold trim.

“What a lot of buttons!” she exclaimed in mock wonder, catching sight of a large panel of gold-plated switches on the armrest. “What do they all do?”

“I can only say it would be inadvisable to push any without prior notice.”

She couldn’t help laughing at that, but Jaf’s mouth suddenly lost its smile. He gazed at her with an unreadable expression that held no humour.

“Get in,” he said.

Sudden, superstitious fear pulsed in her. She’d never seen this side of him. She’d never seen him dressed like this. Here in his own country—on his own property—he was a stranger to her. A man who owned a gold-plated car.

She didn’t have a clue what he wanted from her tonight. But he looked as if he meant to get it.

She stood helplessly at the car door, battling with herself. She half felt she should refuse to go with this stranger, but her heart was beating with excitement and anticipation as well as nervous fear. His presence still affected her physically. Probably it always would.

He didn’t repeat his command, giving her nothing to kick against. The chauffeur was standing there expectantly, and everyone was more or less discreetly watching. Mostly less. After a moment Lisbet obediently bent and got in.

For all the ostentation, the leather seat was silky smooth, divinely comfortable. She slipped over to the right side as Jaf followed her inside and the door closed after him.

Masoud, the director, lifted his hand in farewell, and members of the crew stared unabashedly now as the car backed and turned, and carefully started along the metal slats of the temporary road.

They had scarcely moved beyond the immediate area of the movie camp, where desert stretched all around them, when Jaf reached out to grasp her wrist. Lisbet’s breath hissed with surprise.

“What is this?” he asked softly, lifting her hand. Left hand. His voice was deep, and running with dangerous undercurrents. Like the sea.

“You can see for yourself, a pearl solitaire with diamond chips.”