The Playboy Sheikh

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.”

He gave one slow blink, silently watching her. It was totally unnerving.

The sun was setting over the water. It had taken on a rich glow, painting the sea with thick gold. On the other side of the sky, behind the mountains, darkness approached. A portent, maybe.

Jaf remained silent, his eyes burning into hers. In spite of herself she was compelled to speak.

“An engagement ring, Jaf,” she said, a little more loudly than necessary.

He didn’t move, but now she was nervous of him. His eyes darkened all at once, in a way she knew.

He touched a switch, and the window beside him rolled smoothly down. The fine sand dust caused by their passing swirled gently into the car.

Lisbet gazed at him in puzzlement, blinking as his grip tightened on her wrist. Then he lifted her hand, dragged the ring down the length of her finger, and flung it out the window.

He didn’t speak a word. His hand dropped to the panel and the window glided silently up again.

Lisbet’s heart seemed to stop. Whorls of furious excitement exploded into a dance over her skin. “How dare you?” she choked.

He gave a contemptuous flick of his chin in the direction of the vanished ring. “It wasn’t even genuine. Is the man a fool? Are you?”

Lisbet bit her lip. She had borrowed it from the costume mistress’s collection only an hour ago. She’d thought it looked pretty good, but she ought to have known that Jaf would know the difference at a glance.

“I know it’s not real!” she improvised wildly. “We’re both stretched financially at the moment, but he said he wasn’t having me coming out here to sheikh country without some badge of possession on my finger.”

Jaf stared at her, so bemused she almost laughed. She was doing her best on the spur of the moment, but she had to agree, it was a pretty feeble story.

“And who is this fool who expects a cheap souk ring to be enough to hold his claim to a woman like you?”

“His name is Roger,” Lisbet said furiously.

“Roger what?”

She gave him a look, her lips firmly closed. He released her hand at last, and she pulled it back to her lap. It was pins and needles up to her elbow, as though his touch had cut off the blood supply, which was ridiculous.

“Six months ago you were not the marrying kind,” he reminded her harshly.

“People change.”

He was stretched against the upholstery, one arm along the back of the seat, the other elbow propped against the armrest, but she didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was relaxed. His tension shimmered in the air.

“And how have you changed, Lisbet?”

The ring had been the impulse of the moment, like putting on a magic talisman to avert the evil eye. She should have known he wouldn’t let it pass without question.

But she wasn’t exactly rehearsed in the role of adoring fiancée.

“Could we change the subject, please?”

“You don’t like to talk about him?”

“Not to you.”

“Does Roger understand that he is marrying a woman with no heart?” His anger was being ruthlessly kept in check. “Does he give up the desire for children for the sake of possessing you?”

The Rolls was still creeping along the steel road. There was no other way to travel along such a surface, but Lisbet’s claustrophobia was intensified by the dead slow pace. Long purple-grey shadows stretched out from the dunes over the rippling surface of the sand.

“Roger and I are perfectly agreed on what we want from the future, thank you!”

He smiled, but it was the smile of a tiger. “Poor Lisbet.”

“What does that mean?”

“You will never be happy with a yes-man.”

“Roger is not a yes-man!”

“Then he is a fool. A man who does not want children is a fool, or a liar.”

She thought of her father, and her heart hardened. “All men aren’t as primitive as you, Jaf.”

His eyes flashed dangerously. “Be careful. You might make me imagine that you are speaking from your desires rather than your observations.”

“Is that a threat?” she demanded shrilly.

His hand moved and his fingers caught the errant little curl of hair at her temple that could never be tamed. He stroked it around his forefinger while little jolts of electricity rushed down her temple and jaw and shot into her body.

“I only say what you should already know.”

Lisbet gritted her teeth. What a fool she had been to come out with him thinking to find protection in a cheap ring! She slapped his hand away.

“I think you’re confusing me with someone else.”

“I could prove to you that I am not.”

“No, you could not!” Lisbet said quickly.

“Too loyal to Roger to fan an old flame?”

“Of course!”

“Did you tell him about me?”

“Briefly, along with several others.”

One eyebrow flickered.

“Does he know you’re seeing me tonight?”

Lisbet hesitated for a fatal moment. “Yes,” she said. She knew it sounded like a lie.

He nodded, as if to himself. “Did you plan it, then, Lisbet? You are engaged to another man, and yet you risked coming here, living at my brother’s house. What did you tell yourself? That I could be put off by a ring from the bazaar and a distant fiancé?

“But no, you knew better than that!” he answered himself. “What was in your mind? Another quick, meaningless affair? Is that what you planned for when you came? A little reprise of passion with a barbarian before going back to marry a safe man, a man from your own culture? Did you hope I would be too hungry for your body to turn away from the crumbs you offer? Did you cast me in the part of the beggar at the gates, Lisbet? You mistook me.”

His lips smiled. But as his black eyes met hers a shiver of danger traced her skin. As if she were looking into a cave where a wolf lurked in the darkness.

“Do you tell yourself that I still want you, Lisbet? Do you imagine that it is impossible to kill a love such as mine?” His voice grated over her soul, rough and sharp together. “Or did you hope to find that I had now developed a taste for heartless passion like yours?”

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