Книга - The Playboy Sheikh

The Playboy Sheikh
ALEXANDRA SELLERS


You're mine and no other man's.- Jafar al Hamzeh, Royal Advisor Extraordinaire Savoring the look on his ex-lover's face, he swept her astride his regal steed, then raced toward his desert domain. Once, he'd envisaged Lisbet Raine as mother to his babies. That was before she'd inexplicably walked away. Before duty demanded he metamorphose from warrior to wastrel in order to flush out a traitor.In revenge he offered only heartless passion to the sweet betrayer returned to his bed. But when the enemy targeted Lisbet, Jaf wondered if he'd been wrong to believe love like theirs could die. For he'd risk everything to ensure she didn't….






“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










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?”

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.

“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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