Читать книгу: «The Playboy Sheikh»
“I Did Not Say I Do Not Want You.
“That did not die with my love. I want to make love to you, Lisbet,” he said with rough urgency. “It is the kind of wanting you wanted me to feel…a wanting without heart. Isn’t it so?”
“Jaf,” she pleaded.
“Tell me it is all you want!” he commanded.
As if his anguished passion were a burning brand setting her alight, now, at last, Lisbet recognized the love she had hidden deep inside. Set free by the flames of the remorse and regret that swept her, as surely as if he had burnt down a prison that held her, love stood up without disguise for the first time.
She was breathless with the discovery, and with the anguish of knowing that it had come too late.
“Tell me!”
But what she wanted to tell him, he no longer wanted to hear.
Dear Reader,
Escape the winter doldrums by reading six new passionate, powerful and provocative romances from Silhouette Desire!
Start with our MAN OF THE MONTH, The Playboy Sheikh, the latest SONS OF THE DESERT love story by bestselling author Alexandra Sellers. Also thrilling is the second title in our yearlong continuity series DYNASTIES: THE CONNELLYS. In Maternally Yours by Kathie DeNosky, a pleasure-seeking tycoon falls for a soon-to-be mom.
All you readers who’ve requested more titles in Cait London’s beloved TALLCHIEFS miniseries will delight in her smoldering Tallchief: The Hunter. And more great news for our loyal Desire readers—a brand-new five-book series featuring THE TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB, subtitled THE LAST BACHELOR, launches this month. In The Millionaire’s Pregnant Bride by Dixie Browning, passion erupts between an oil executive and secretary who marry for the sake of her unborn child.
A single-dad surgeon meets his match in Dr. Desirable, the second book of Kristi Gold’s MARRYING AN M.D. miniseries. And Kate Little’s Tall, Dark & Cranky is an enchanting contemporary version of Beauty and the Beast.
Indulge yourself with all six of these exhilarating love stories from Silhouette Desire!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
The Playboy Sheikh
Alexandra Sellers
MILLS & BOON
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ALEXANDRA SELLERS
is the author of over twenty-five novels and a feline language text published in 1997 and still selling.
Born and raised in Canada, Alexandra first came to London, England, as a drama student. Now she lives near Hampstead Heath with her husband, Nick. They share housekeeping with Monsieur, who jumped through the window one day and announced, as cats do, that he was moving in.
What she would miss most on a desert island is shared laughter.
Readers can write to Alexandra at P.O. Box 9449, London NW3 2WH, UK, England.
for Nick
for love’s sake only
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Prologue
A pair of green eyes filled the screen and smiled a challenge into the room. His stomach tightened and he caught his breath.
“This is her now,” said a voice behind him.
“I know it is,” said Jafar al Hamzeh. His mouth was firm with conscious control as he gazed at her. The eyes looked straight at him, into his soul.
The irises were pale green, delicately traced with darker green and russet and then bordered by a smooth, fine circle of deep emerald. The whites were pure and clear, the eyes themselves wide and slanting slightly up at the corners under straight, fair eyebrows.
He had seen those eyes close like this, and they had filled his whole world. When she had lain above him, his arms around her, and he had been consumed with a pleasure-pain that he thought would annihilate him. Or the world. He hadn’t known which. Hadn’t cared.
Then her eyes had been as close as this. He was aware of a deep, primitive jealousy now that the others in the room were seeing her so intimately. If he had given way to it, he would have stood up and tossed them bodily out of the studio.
The camera drew back to reveal the wide, straight forehead, smooth cheeks, the straight, slightly flat nose. Then further, and her generous, half-truculent mouth trembled into a smile. Thick, pale blond hair in a wave above her eyes fell back from her forehead and down in a luxurious tumble over one shoulder and arm.
He had lain tangled in that hair, had stroked it and threaded his fingers into it. He could feel the memory of it now on his fingertips, a sensuous silk. Its perfume was suddenly thick in his nostrils. He closed his eyes as the familiar yearning swept him.
“Very unusual beauty.”
“Real individuality…”
Behind him the voices murmured, but he scarcely heard. Onscreen, she spoke briefly, turned and walked away from the camera. She was wearing a short, tight skirt that outlined her hips, showed the slender legs. Her voice was low and resonant, as always, and amused, as it had been when he last heard it. She spoke over her shoulder, a half smile toying at the corner of her mouth, then swung her head so that her hair slid from her shoulder and tumbled down her back.
He felt it like a touch. His skin burned.
The door opened and closed, and she was gone. Just the way she had walked out of his life. A smile, a shake of the head, and the sound of a closing door.
He ached now the way he had then, for the door to open again, for her to come back, to say she had changed her mind.
“Here’s another,” said a voice.
She was there again, this time in a bikini, on a beach. She was eating ice cream, totally absorbed in it, while all around her men ignored reality to watch her and dream. A man capsized a boat. His passengers waved and shouted from the water, and the lifeguard leapt to attention, but it was her that he had seen. A volleyball game collapsed in mayhem as she strolled in the sunshine, her hair blowing, her beautiful body warm with female curves. A hot dog vendor drove his cart off a pier.
She is mine, he told them all.
“Fabulous,” murmured a voice.
There were murmurs of agreement, but Jaf said nothing. He watched her lick the cone and mime a satisfaction that was almost sexual. He had seen that look on her face before, too, but she had not been miming then. He was sure of that.
The ice cream manufacturer’s logo flashed and froze onscreen above her upturned face. “Well, I don’t think we could find a better addition to the harem, could we?” a man said, as if he had a choice. As if it had not been a foregone conclusion from the beginning. “I think she’d be a gift to please any sultan. How about it, Jaf?”
He smiled and nodded. Going along with the pretence. “Fine by me,” he said. As if it hardly mattered to him. As if they didn’t know.
She had smiled at him before she went, half mocking, challenging him. Do your worst, she had said.
She would see what his worst was. A gift for the sultan first, but she would be his, all his, in the end.
One
She clung desperately to the slippery surface of the mahogany chest and rode the swell as a wave lifted her. Behind her the next wave broke with a tumbling hiss, and she gulped in air as it washed over her.
Ahead of her was the long white coastline. Beyond, miles of blinding green sea.
The sun was fierce. The salt stung her eyes. Her pale hair floated around her in the water and clung to her cheeks like rich seaweed. The long skirt of her dress, open down the front to free her legs, trailed behind her in the waves, green on green. Her legs kicked through the sparkling water, searching for a footing. As if the sea were a passionate, impatient lover, another wave rose over her and grasped her in its rough caress.
At a little distance, hidden from view behind a rocky outcrop, he sat astride a white horse, watching. Jealousy burned in him as if he saw another man make love to her.
Her kicking foot touched ground then, and she stood upright in waist-deep water and let the wooden chest go to be pummelled and tumbled up the white sand beach by the surf.
As she struggled through the breakers, they rushed and dragged, the sea trying to pull her back into its arms. She stumbled once, and staggered, almost losing the battle, but the sea missed its moment, and she righted herself.
Still he watched, motionless, as if waiting for a sign.
The sea’s froth bubbled around her as she moved, dragging her skirt back to reveal her legs and then rushing forward with it again, as if in sudden anxiety to preserve her modesty. As she came unsteadily out of the sea it danced and hissed around her slick, glowing thighs, then her knees, then her rippling calves, and finally her ankles, while her dress alternately hid and revealed her flesh.
It was an erotic and evocative striptease. His body tormented him as he imagined his hands, his mouth, his body stroking her as the waves did, reducing her to the panting exhaustion that made her breasts heave.
With a sensuous sweep, she lifted one arm to drag the long, water-soaked hair off her neck and shoulders and toss it to fall down her back. Her firm young breasts pressed against the low neckline of her dress as she moved, and her forearm showed soft and female under the green fabric.
His mount snorted and tossed its head, and he laid a hand on its neck. “Wait a little,” he murmured. The horse obediently stilled.
At a point barely beyond the water’s reach, in grateful, graceful exhaustion, her hands lifted high, her head fell back, and she opened her mouth with a cry of triumph and gratitude and dropped to her knees on the sand. Then she collapsed onto her back, her arms outstretched, to drink in sun and air and life.
A stronger wave rolled up the beach under her legs, lifting the skirt of her dress in a bubble and then dropping it to one side, revealing her legs again, one knee a little bent. His body hurt with the need to kiss her where the water kissed her.
The horse reacted instantly to the permission of his knees and leapt forward into a gallop. Sand flew up under its hooves. His keffiyeh and his white robe streamed out behind and his white-clad legs blended with the horse’s back as if they were one creature.
They pounded along the beach together, horse and man, spattering sparkling water that caught the bright sun so that they seemed to spread diamonds in their train.
She must have felt the thunder under her back but, as if too exhausted to react, still lay without moving. Then he was almost upon her. He pulled the horse to a standstill as she turned her head against the sand to look up.
Her eyes found his face. Her mouth fell open in complete shock. She leapt to a sitting position, all trace of exhaustion gone. Totally disoriented, she cried, “What are you doing here?”
He smiled grimly, one eyebrow raised. “This is my land,” he informed her.
“Your land?” she repeated in blank amazement.
“I told you you would come to me in the end,” he said.
“What the devil’s going on?” demanded Masoud al Badi, of no one in particular. “Where did that white horse come from? Where’s the black horse? What the hell is Adnan doing?”
The assistant looked up from the shooting script and shrugged expressively. “I went over the scene with him, and he was on the black horse then.”
The director turned his eyes back to the couple on the beach. “Isn’t that Adnan out there with her? Who the hell is it? Where’s Adnan?”
“I’m here,” said a sheepish voice as a man in the same white desert garb as the rider came out of a nearby trailer. “It’s Jafar al Hamzeh.” He shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, Mr. al Badi, he said—”
“Jaf?” exploded the director incredulously, whirling to stare again. “Is he crazy?”
As he watched, the distant female figure struggled to her feet and started running wildly along the beach. Her naked feet left small, perfect white imprints in the wet sand as she ran.
“Allah, he’s panicked her! She’ll break her ankle!” the director cried.
A buzz ran through the set at the sound of the name, and the crew was suddenly alert. Wardrobe people and makeup artists and gofers appeared at the doors of different trailers as if someone had waved a magic wand. Jafar al Hamzeh, Cup Companion to Prince Karim, was not only rich and as handsome as the devil, he was also, at the moment, the tabloids’ favourite playboy.
Things got interesting when Jafar al Hamzeh was around. If he had taken an interest in the film’s star…this could be quite an adventurous shoot.
Down on the beach, the rider remained still, seated negligently on the horse, one fist against his hip, the other casually gripping the reins, in a posture so purely, physically arrogant it was like watching a hawk or a big cat. Letting his prey run a little, his attitude said, for the sake of better sport.
The director stood as if tied, staring, while the tiny green-clad figure raced wildly down the beach. He lifted his bullhorn and shouted, but they were too far away. His voice would be feeble against the surf.
He turned and glanced around him for inspiration. Catching sight of the actor in the white desert robes, he gestured imperatively. “Adnan, get on your horse and—”
“Oh, my God!” someone gasped, and Masoud al Badi turned again.
The rider had spurred his horse to action at last. The white beast responded eagerly, leaping forward to the chase, and within moments was close behind the running woman. He did not slacken speed.
The director cursed helplessly into the bullhorn.
“Jaf! God damn it, Jaf!”
Those watching gave a collective gasp as, in the distance, the horseman now dropped the reins against the horse’s neck. Like a trick rider in the circus, he leaned sideways out of the saddle, clinging with his knees, while the horse, galloping perilously close to the fleeing woman, moved abreast of her.
“Is he trying to run her down?” Masoud demanded furiously.
She screamed something, turning to flail her arms at him, but to no avail. The horseman’s hands caught her firmly around her slim waist and he lifted her effortlessly as he straightened in the saddle. Suddenly she was sitting in front of him on the horse, being held tight in one ruthless arm. With the other he captured the reins again and urged the horse forward.
“Put me down!” Lisbet shouted wildly. “Are you trying to kill me? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“But you dared me, Lisbet,” he murmured, his face alight with a devilish smile. “When a woman dares a man of spirit it is because she wishes to provoke him to action. But she must beware. The action may not be exactly what she wished.”
Lisbet gasped in outrage. “Do you imagine I wanted you to—! How did you get here, anyway? How did you know where we were?”
He smiled down into her face, showing all his teeth.
“Do you take me for a weakling, who waits for circumstance to assist him? You are not so foolish!”
Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast. At this it kicked hard. “What do you mean?”
Jaf laughed and encouraged the horse, forcing her to cling to his chest for balance. The white horse galloped effortlessly along the perfect, smooth sand with his double load. Water diamonds splashed up around them and fell back into the glittering sea.
“What do you mean, you didn’t wait for circumstance?” she repeated, more loudly.
“You will learn what I mean,” he said.
Once they were lovers, but that was long ago. No, not in a previous life, though such is always possible. They had met almost a year ago, when her friend and his brother were struggling through suspicion and misunderstanding towards love.
There had been no suspicion or misunderstanding for Jaf and Lisbet. Not at the beginning. For them to look had been to love—or at least, to desire. And from desire there had been nothing to bar the rapid progress to completion.
Of a sort. But soon he came to feel that sexual completion was not all that he wanted. He had wanted, in the words of that still echoing song, to get inside her head.
She had not wanted him there. He would hold her head between his two powerful hands in the moment when passion was about to drag them away from shore and into those unfathomable depths—he would cup her head, as if it were one of the precious, paper-thin jade cups in his late father’s treasury of antique art, and gaze into her eyes, watching for a sign that what swept his heart also touched her. But she would only laugh and turn her head away or, if his hands were too insistent, close her eyes as the pleasure his body made for her coursed through her.
When he became demanding, she had warned him. “Don’t dream about me, Jaf. Don’t look at me and see the mother of your babies. That’s not who I am.”
It drove him wild. Of course when he looked at her he saw the mother of his sons and daughters. He saw the grandmother of his grandchildren.
“Come with me to Barakat when I go,” he pleaded, for soon he would have to return. “A visit. See whether you could live there. We would live there for part of the year only. It’s a beautiful country, Lisbet.”
She had smiled in that way that infuriated him—remote and untouchable. “I’m sure it is. Anna loves it there.” Anna was her friend, who had married his brother—once love had conquered, as it must. “Maybe I’d love the country, too. But that’s not the point, is it? It’s not about Barakat versus England. It’s about marriage versus freedom. And I did warn you, Jaf. Right at the start.”
“Freedom!” he had exclaimed impatiently. How could she be so blind? “What freedom? The freedom to grow old alone? To be without children to comfort you?”
A look he did not understand had crossed over her face then, and her eyes became shuttered. “Exactly,” she said cheerfully, her voice belying the expression on her face. “The freedom to grow old alone, without children to comfort me. We’re mismatched, Jaf. If you would just face that simple—”
His hand urgently clasped her neck to stop the words in her throat. “We are not mismatched,” he growled. “We are the perfect mating that others only dream of.”
She had the grace to blush. “I didn’t mean sex.”
He stared at her, shaking his head, until her gaze fell. Then he said gently, to the top of her bent head. “Sex is only one of the ways in which we are matched, Lisbet. Do you think I do not know how you struggle to hide from me? Do you understand that what I am saying means that such hiding is unnecessary?”
She had looked at him then, smiling defiantly. “You’re imagining things, Jaf.”
But he knew that he was not.
Two
Lisbet kicked her heels futilely at the horse’s powerful, rhythmically flexing shoulders. She was sitting side-saddle in front of Jaf, one hip tilted against the low pommel. In spite of his imprisoning arm, it felt precarious, and she was forced to cling to him for stability.
“Where do you think you’re taking me?” she cried.
“My home is a few miles away,” Jaf told her.
Lisbet gasped. “Your home! Are you crazy? Take me back to t—”
His dark eyes met hers with hard anger. “Do not speak to me in this tone, Lisbet.”
She quailed, then forced her courage up. “I’m in the middle of shooting a film, Jaf!” she cried. “You’ve already wrecked a scene we were hoping to get in the can in one take! Take me back to the set!”
“When I am through with you,” Jaf agreed, his voice grating against her already electrified nerve ends.
Her blood surged up under her skin at the pressure of his unforgiving hold against her waist. Her body told her it had been long, too long. But she wasn’t going to admit her weakness to him.
“When you’re—how dare you? What are you planning, Jaf? Rape? Let me go!”
He laughed. “Do you pretend that rape would be possible between us? How long has it been, Lisbet? Have you counted the days?”
“No, I have not!”
“The weeks?”
“Stop this horse!”
She reached for the reins, one hand still of necessity clinging to his chest, but he simply knocked her hand aside.
“The months?” he prodded. “I want to know, Lisbet.”
“It’s over six months!” she snapped. “And I was not coun—”
“How much over six months?” he demanded relentlessly.
“I have no idea!”
“How much?”
“It’s seven months and three weeks, damn you!”
“And how many days?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?”
“You know.”
“I do not know!”
“Then I will tell you. Four days. It is seven months, three weeks and four days since you told me to do my worst, Lisbet. Did no instinct warn you that it might be dangerous to come to my country so soon?”
“You call nearly eight months soon?” she gibed. “I thought you’d have forgotten my name by now.”
“You were disappointed that I did not come after you?” he inquired softly. “Ah, Lisbet, if I had known…”
She stiffened, feeling the silky edges of the trap he had laid for her.
“No, I was not! After all your ranting, I was relieved.”
“Liar!”
“Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice, Jaf!” she snapped furiously.
He laughed. “Ah, my fire spitter! I had almost forgotten the delights of tangling with you. But we will have the pleasure of learning them all again.”
“Spitfire,” she said coldly. “If you’re going to insult me, at least get your English right.”
“Spitfire?” he repeated. “Isn’t the Spitfire an aeroplane?”
“A fighter plane,” she told him sweetly. “And as for the delights of warfare with me, the little Spitfire defeated the Luftwaffe, so don’t get your hopes up.”
He raised surprised eyebrows. “You call this war?”
“What would you call it?”
He shook his head, and she felt the muscles of his arm bunch as he drew on the horse’s reins. The horse slowed.
Ahead of them a high ridge of rock erupting from the sand stretched into the sea, barring their path—one of the isolated fingers of the distant mountain range that brooded over the scene, as if, in this desperately hot, inhospitable climate, even the mountains yearned and reached for the sea.
He drew the horse to a walk, and they entered the shadow of the ridge with relief. Lisbet put both her hands above his on the reins and now he allowed her to pull the horse to a standstill.
“One way or another, I’m going back to the set,” she announced.
His jaw clenched with the possessive ferocity that had made her run the first time. “Not one hour to spare for your ex-lover?”
“While I’m working? I’m a professional, Jaf,” she said. “Don’t expect me to fall in with your amateur, playboy attitude to life.”
His eyes glinted with an indecipherable expression. “Ah,” he said. “So you didn’t forget me entirely.”
“It was a little difficult to forget you entirely!” she snapped. “You’re in the tabloids every week.”
“One of the benefits of fame I hadn’t foreseen,” he observed blandly.
Now he believed she had been following his career in the papers, she realized with irritation. It would have been better to pretend she knew nothing of his new status as the tabloids’ favourite bad boy.
But she couldn’t stop herself complaining, “That’s a heady lifestyle you’ve got yourself. I was particularly entranced by the gold-plated limousine.”
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?”
