Читать книгу The Playboy Sheikh - ALEXANDRA SELLERS - Страница 7

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.