ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Playboy Sheikh

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.”

“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.