Читать книгу: «The Playboy Sheikh», страница 2

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.

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.