The Playboy Sheikh

He shrugged disparagingly. “Par for the course in these parts.”

“Nice for some. But I have a job to do.”

Her hands on the reins, she guided the horse into a 180-degree turn. Jaf allowed it, but when she tried to spur the horse to move, it froze into immobility.

She was startled to see how far they had come. She had expected to see, in the distance, the cluster of trailers, equipment, umbrellas and people that marked the filming location, but the sand was empty. They were alone. A thrill of fear shivered through her. In this barren landscape and merciless, unforgiving climate, she was at his mercy.

Just what she had always feared.

“Damn it!” Lisbet exclaimed, urging the reins, and nudging the horse’s foreleg with her bare heels. The horse might as well have been carved of wood. “Move damn it!” she cried. And then, “What have you done to this horse?”

He laughed, showing white teeth. His eyes sparkled in a way she remembered they had even in London’s damp. Here in the harsh sunshine the look dazzled her.

“Firouz and I have been together for six years,” he said. “If you understood me as well as he does…”

Lisbet gritted her teeth. “It would be better if you understood me!” she snapped. “Now, are you going to get this horse to move and take me back to the set, or am I going to get down and walk?”

It was a long way in such heat, and if she did not get lost, she would get sunburn, if not actual sunstroke. She could feel the prickle of drying salt on her skin and knew that the sea had washed off some, if not all, of her protection.

“You can’t walk in the sun,” he told her, looking down at her bare legs, the rise of her breasts in the revealing neckline of the costume. It was a look she remembered all too well. Her skin tingled under the drying salt. “You are nearly naked. My house is cool inside. It is among trees, a date plantation.”

“Take me back,” she said stonily, kicking futilely at the immovable horse. Her eyes scoured the horizon for some sign that someone was coming to her rescue. “They must have called the police by now. They must think you’re a kidnapper.”

“But that is what I am,” Jaf pointed out.

“What have you done to Adnan?” she almost shrieked.

“Your imagination is very vivid, but perhaps that is a professional necessity for an actress,” he said. Lisbet ground her teeth. She had never had an easy time controlling her temper around him. “I have done nothing to Adnan Amani except ease his financial worries for the immediate future.”

“You bribed him to let you take his place?” she cried, outraged.

“Would you prefer that I had knocked him on the head and tied him up? Violence should always be a last resort,” he chided.

“Of course I wouldn’t prefer—” Lisbet began heatedly, then realized that he was succeeding in putting her in the wrong. She heaved a breath.

“Take me back to the set.”

“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.

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?”

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.