ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Playboy Sheikh

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.

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.”