In the early days of the polo club, he had received practical advice from the dashing ex-player Alejandro Sabato, who had assured Jasmine that Zuhal had played no part in the photograph which had been plastered all over the press, of the two men emerging from a restaurant with several blonde women in pursuit that night in Paris.
‘He was unusually quiet that night,’ Alej had mused. ‘And several times he mentioned your name. I knew then that he was in love with you.’
Jasmine smiled, as Zuhal walked over to her and began to massage her shoulders. In love. Yes. Her previously closed-up lover had become the most demonstrative and affectionate of men.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Zuhal murmured, as he bent to kiss her neck. ‘About what you’d like to do tonight?’ loulou
She turned her head a little, so that she could catch the ebony gleam of his dark eyes. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘Plenty,’ he murmured. ‘But you are a remarkably difficult woman to please. I try to shower you with jewels, but you aren’t interested.’
She held up her left hand as she surveyed the rare blue stone which had been purloined from the palace vaults in Razrastan. ‘That’s because one diamond is enough.’
‘And I offer to fly you to Paris for the weekend, but you refuse.’
‘That’s because there’s no place like home.’
He smiled. ‘You didn’t even want to go out for dinner tonight, despite the fact that the chef of the restaurant I was planning to take you to has just won his third Michelin star. Which makes me wonder what exactly you would like to do tonight, my beautiful Sheikha Al Haidar?’
With a soft laugh Jasmine rose to her feet, wiggling her now bare toes against the cool tiles as she looped her arms around her husband’s neck and planted her lips just a few centimetres away from his. ‘I think I’d like to take you to bed,’ she murmured. ‘To show you and tell you just how much I love you, and how much I value having you in my life.’
Zuhal nodded, his throat suddenly constricting. ‘And I shall tell you yet again that I became the luckiest man in the world all those days ago, when I walked into a hotel boutique and saw you standing there, blushing and not quite meeting my eyes.’
Her beautiful face was so close to his. And, as he always did in times of great emotion—which he no longer attempted to bury or deny—Zuhal used the poetic words of his native tongue, a language which Jazz was gradually coming to understand.
‘If I stood you next to all the planets which glow in the mighty desert sky,’ he said huskily, ‘then you would be the very brightest, my darling Jazz.’
He lowered his head to hers and began to kiss her—tenderly at first, but with a fast-growing passion which soon had her moaning with pleasure. And the stars were shimmering like diamond dust in the darkening sky by the time Zuhal lifted his wife into his arms and carried her into the bedroom.
* * * * *