“You Should Fear Me.”

Her heart quivered to a standstill.

This was the moment she’d waited and worked for since she’d laid eyes on him. The full disclosure. The final negotiation before he surrendered. Before he let her give him herself, let her have him.

She rose to her knees, shaking. “I would fear anything and anyone but you.”

“How did you come by this certainty?”

His bass rasp shivered down each quailing nerve. She had to be very, very careful. The wild, wounded tiger was giving her one chance to reach out and pet him. If she got it right, he’d be hers for life, she knew it.

But if she didn’t get it right…

“Do you have a few years? I’ll tell you, show you.”

“What if I told you I don’t deserve your trust?”

Her lips trembled on a smile at the ferocity of his final struggle. “Don’t bother. You have it. So if you think you don’t deserve it, how about doing all you can from now on so that you do?”

Dear Reader,

As soon as Amjad Aal Shalaan made an appearance in the first book of the Pride of Zohayd trilogy, I knew. He would be my favorite of all my heroes so far. For not only is Amjad a man who has barely survived treachery and sworn to never think the best of anyone ever again, he’s a man who’s hidden for so long behind an impenetrable barrier of cynicism, he now believes he’s indifferent as well as invulnerable.

So it was easily the most fun I’ve ever had writing, penning his every wickedly irreverent word and thought. The fun escalated when I gave him the only heroine who could…undo him, in every way, and I sat back and watched them spar and parry and fall irrevocably, absolutely in love.

With this book, the Pride of Zohayd trilogy comes to an end. For me, it has been an exhilarating journey that concluded on a high note. I hope you enjoy this book, and the other two in the trilogy, as much as I delighted in writing them.

I love to hear from readers, so please contact me at oliviagates@gmail.com. Also please visit my website www.oliviagates.com for my latest news and contests. I would also love it if you “Like” me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading!

Olivia

OLIVIA GATES

TO TOUCH A SHEIKH

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OLIVIA GATES

has always pursued creative passions like singing and handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career—writing.

She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.

When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding Angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.

To Marialina Tota, the first one who loved Amjad. For all your support.
Wish I could have “dedicated” him to you for real!;-)

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

Epilogue

Prologue

“Will you forgive, Amjad?”

Amjad Aal Shalaan could barely raise his gaze to the man whose voice boomed out the question.

His father and king loomed over him in full regalia, his responsibility-carved face frozen in a mask of control. His eyes blazed with an amalgam of regret and wrath, agony and outrage.

Amjad’s unfocused gaze panned to his brothers, who flanked his father, then to the sea of tribal representatives who crowded the expansive glory of Dar Al Adl—Zohayd’s Hall of Justice. Their faces blurred into a homogenous mass of anticipation as his father’s question reverberated off the arches and domes of the venerable place in a taunting echo.

Will you forgive?

But he’d already forgiven what no other man would have.

He’d forgiven his bride for not coming to their marriage bed a virgin. He’d soothed her fear, assured her he wouldn’t hold against her what he couldn’t provide himself. What mattered were her life choices after she became his wife.

Then he’d forgiven her when he’d discovered that she carried a baby. From her previous lover.

People made mistakes. No sense in destroying a life, or even a relationship, over one.

He couldn’t feel betrayed. She’d been a stranger he’d picked—or rather had had pointed out to him with a…strong recommendation—from a list of convenient brides a week before the wedding. As crown prince of a kingdom ruled by tribal pacts, his own considerations hadn’t come into play.

But she’d become his wife, was going to be his one woman. And because he couldn’t live the rest of his life for the cold convenience of everyone else, he’d determined to see only the best in her, to give her the best of himself. He’d focused on what he appreciated in her, dismissed what he didn’t.

And she’d repaid his clemency and compassion with deceit and destruction.

“Amjad?” His father’s gruff whisper prodded him to answer.

He’d had many answers. To his worries when loss of appetite had been followed by pins and needles in his palms and cramps in his calves. Overwork, stress, exhaustion.

When the burning in his gut, the gnawing in his throat and that terrible taste in his mouth joined in, he’d suspected another cause. Soul sickness.

His mind might have accepted his situation, but his spirit was seared that they were starting the marriage with a lie to protect his wife’s and her family’s honor, to maintain the peace their marriage had sealed. That he might not love her baby as every innocent child deserved to be loved.

It was only when the real sickness began, purging every bite of food and drop of water from his body, when restlessness started dismantling his psyche and crippling headaches his sanity, that he’d sought out the royal physicians in secret.

They’d been baffled. His symptoms defied their tests, their prescriptions did nothing to mitigate them. He’d felt relieved when apathy descended on him, sparing him the constant torment.

But when delirium followed dizziness and drowsiness, doubts became certainty.

Something malignant was eating through his body. Because tests could find nothing within, it had to be something from without.

He’d doubted everything, and almost everyone. But not her.

How could he doubt the wife who showered him with tokens of her gratitude and blossoming love?

His focus wavered on the hands lying limply on his knees. They bore the marks of her treachery. White crescent markings on the fingernails, dark mottling of the skin.

He shuddered with the blow of recollection. When realization had crushed him. Of how he’d been poisoned.

The poison had been slipped into the most solicitous of gestures and sweetest of gifts. Clothes, towels, delicacies, bath salts, scented oils and far more. All emerald green, the color she’d said she adored for being that of his eyes.

All laced with arsenic.

His wife had been killing him. Slowly. Almost untraceably.

She almost had. He’d barely gasped his conviction to his brothers before he’d descended into a coma. Finally knowing what to treat him for, the doctors had been able to drag him out of it. Their treatments had made him wish they hadn’t.

Now there stood his father, asking for what his attempted murderess’s family couldn’t ask themselves. His forgiveness.

His gaze blurred back to the crowd.

To one side, segregated, supplicant, stood Salmah. Beside her was her lover. Her accomplice.

Their eyes, beneath the dread and shame, were eloquent. With hope. No. More. With certainty. That he’d forgive. As he’d forgiven so many unforgivable things before.

If he forgave, rescinded his right to mete out punishment, the law would decide it, mitigating it. Enforcing his right meant he could demand satisfaction in any way he deemed sufficient, from not only those who’d perpetrated the crime, but also anyone who had the misfortune to be of their blood.

His gaze steadied on Salmah. Now that he wasn’t blinding himself to what disturbed him, her act of trembling repentance was as superficial as that of her budding love had been. She considered him a weak fool to be manipulated, then dispatched. She was sorry only that she hadn’t succeeded.

A shard of clarity traversed his being. She had.

He was dead, inside.

He closed his eyes, accepting the feeling, welcoming it.

“Amjad?”

The anxiety in his father’s voice made him open them.

Amjad imagined what raged inside his father at the sight of him. His brothers had had to help him into his clothes, had wheeled him in here. He’d seen the horror of his condition twisting every face in his path. The emaciated remains of the man he’d been before six months of accumulated poison had ravaged him in flesh and spirit.

But his father had to advocate peace even when he writhed for vengeance for his firstborn. His brothers seethed to avenge him, too, but had to abide by his verdict.

He pushed the deadweight of his body up on shaking arms, fought the weakness pulling at him, demanding his defeat. He gestured feebly, aborting his family’s dash to help him. They stood back, his father looking as if he’d already lost a son; Harres, Shaheen, Haidar and Jalal, a brother.

They still might.

But if he survived, he’d never again give compassion dominion over his decisions, never blind himself to disturbing truths.

He’d never think the best again.

He dredged reserves of power into his poisoned nerves, straightened on wasting legs, faced the crowd.

“I will not forgive.”

His gravelly whisper was met with stunned silence.

Everyone had expected him to play the chivalrous prince who’d waive his rights for everyone’s benefit.

Salmah burst into tears. Her mother swooned. Her father begged his mercy in his righteousness.

Irony trembled on Amjad’s lips as he ignored their theatrics, turned his gaze to those whose power plays he’d almost died for. They weren’t here to show him support and regret, but to make sure their interests would be served, their convenience undisturbed.

He swept his hand in a wide arc, his forefinger pointing at all of them. “I will never forgive any of you. I will never forget. What you all did, what you all are. You’d better pray I don’t survive this. If I do, I’ll live to make you pay. And don’t bother trying to get rid of me. You had your chance and you blew it. No one’s ever getting another one.”

One

Eight years later

Maram Aal Waaked was finally getting her chance at the Mad Prince.

At least, Amjad Aal Shalaan was known that way to the world.

To her, he was the best thing since chocolate fudge.

He’d been tantalizing her with his dark, rich lusciousness for four years now and leaving her starving for more. But this time she had him cornered.

Yeah, right. Cornered among dozens of nosy male royals in the open desert. The man who was so slippery, he could pull a Houdini in a heavily guarded one-exit room.

He had once, during closed negotiations she’d attended representing her emirate. When others had begun to rant, he’d given that worthy-of-sonnets smirk of his, said, “Bored now.” Then he’d disappeared. Poof.

Her friends called her crazy for even thinking about him.

Sure, they said, he was a phenomenal male who made women within a one-mile radius swoon. But he also made them cringe, because he was a madman who would pulverize any woman in his power.

She said if he were, he would have collected women to abuse. Not letting anyone get close to him proved that he was actually merciful and sane.

They dismissed the reasons for his paranoia, said he should have gotten over his past already. She thought that no one could come back from something so terrible except through something equally wonderful. Or at least through someone who appreciated his ruthlessness, cared nothing for his wealth and power and saw the wounded soul, the noble, heroic man underneath.

She lived for the chance to prove she was that someone.

But before she could achieve such ambitious aspirations, she had to make him stay put long enough to have a real conversation.

Apart from one epic incident, he’d spared her nothing but a few acerbic-wit-filled moments before leaving her to deliver her volleys to his departing back.

But she was going to soothe that magnificent beast if it was the last thing she did. All the pleasures she’d experience when she could finally…pet him were worth any battle scars.

The first skirmish was about to begin.

Her GPS said she was minutes from the battleground, a five-mile solid-earth flat track among the dunes. Amjad’s location of choice for the region’s royal horse race. Zohayd hosted the race annually on the last day of fall. This year, due to unchangeable commitments, Amjad had brought the date forward.

Everyone had been horrified at his proposal to hold the race midsummer. In response, Amjad had sent taunting letters, something only he could get away with, considering the recipients were hard-hitting royals with egos to complement their lofty status.

She’d seen his letter to her father, could hear his lazy, lethal voice in her head as she’d read his elegant, forceful handwriting.

Was her father afraid of roughing it in the sun, outside his rarefied cocoon of luxury? Was the big, tough man afraid of some sweat, when he wasn’t even racing?

He must have tailored his missives to each recipient’s idiosyncrasies. Her father was too wary physically, too fastidious about his neatness. Not that anyone knew this. Her father recognized these characteristics as a potential source of ridicule, projected the opposite. But Amjad Aal Shalaan was infallible in deciphering people. That was just one among the endless weapons that made him unstoppable in the worlds of highest-level finance and politics.

Needless to say, everyone had succumbed to his wishes. He’d specified three o’clock for arrival.

It was noon. She’d just called her father to tell him she’d arrived. He’d exclaimed his anxiety that she’d gone alone, had left behind the entourage he’d tried to saddle her with. She’d told him they could catch up, that she had no problem going back with them. But she was getting some one-on-one time with Amjad first, before the desert became a forest of people for him to fade among.

She eased her foot off the accelerator to savor the last moments of approach. The sight warranted the most leisurely of zooms, to savor its every smidge of magnificence.

And no, she didn’t mean the majestic desert with its undulating dunes surrounding the naturally flat land. That and the canopy of bleached-blue sky, painted in wisps of incandescent white, were indeed glorious. But it was the sight of him that spread firecrackers of pleasure through her system, had flutters of anticipation accumulating in her rib cage.

He stood in front of one of the huge tents. Dozens of his men flitted around him. She saw only him. Standing half a foot taller than anyone else, broad, lean and loaded with inborn grace and inimitable power, uncaring of the mercilessness of the sun beating down on his raven head, indifferent to existence in its whole.

The man was so aptly named “most glorious.”

And that was before you took into account the difference in him today. She’d only ever seen him in hand-sculpted suits that looked to be made of living silk, designed and delighted to worship his body. She’d thought that nothing could look better than that.

He did now. All in white, his billowy shirt tucked into skin-tight pants and those into tan boots, he was…description-defying.

She parked beside the other cars, grabbed her bag and hat and hopped down from the steel behemoth her father had bequeathed her for the trip. She slung her bag across her torso and hid from the sun’s pummeling rays beneath the hat, willing the necessities to cool down her urge to run to him.

Not that Amjad was in any rush to acknowledge her. It was only when she slammed the door that he glanced sideways at her in that maddeningly delicious, delightfully nonchalant way of his.

From beneath the arch of world-famous eyebrows, legendary emerald eyes documented her approach with ponderous detachment. She felt them drilling into her recesses, taking her apart one cell at a time. His ruthlessly sensuous mouth was set, every hollow and slash of his masterpiece bone structure showcased by the almost-perpendicular sunrays. While the harsh shadows they cast turned others into grotesque caricatures of themselves, they made him into the god of vengeance that he was. The ultimate yum that he was.

As she closed the last feet between them, he sort of faced her, looked at her in his patented insignificance-inducing way.

Undeterred as usual, she waved a salute to all present, then focused on him, gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m here!”

She is here.

The words reverberated inside Amjad’s mind.

B’haggej’ jaheem! What, in hell’s name, was Princess Aal Waaked doing here? He’d invited Prince Aal Waaked.

Yet Maram Aal Waaked was here. As she’d so triumphantly announced after walking up to him with all the mesmerizing intent of a stalking, starving tigress.

Amjad forced every muscle in his body into neutral as Maram’s every detail surged through his awareness.

Lushness encased in a loose beige pantsuit that still did nothing to obscure each long limb and ripe curve, each undulation of feminine assurance and fluid grace. A ponytail that would cascade into a waterfall of gold-shot butterscotch when released. Eyes as hot as the sun, as fathomless as the desert, deep-set in mystery and self-possession. Features sculpted from cream flawlessness by a higher god of beauty. A bearing of one who knew her worth, wielded it like a weapon, cast it like a spell.

His lungs burned.

It was seconds before he realized why and breathed again.

Seemed being male was incurable. Problem was, his maleness only manifested around this manifestation of brazen womanliness.

There was no mistaking it. Maram Aal Waaked was a hazard wherever creatures of the XY persuasion trod.

And that wasn’t his “paranoia” talking.

At thirty, Maram had already gone through two men. Officially. A prince and a business-empire heir. One older than her father, the other young enough to be her kid brother. Off the record, dozens were no doubt scattered on either side of the swath she’d cut through the male population.

She now had her eye on him. Both of her dipped-in-molten-gold-and-captured-sunshine eyes.

Before that implied he was anything special, he had to amend the statement. She had her eye on him and his brother.

Whichever fell into her honey trap would do. She probably wouldn’t mind and could handle it just fine if they both did.

She’d sooner entrap the devil than him. But his half brother, Haidar, while a wily, temperamental fiend in his own right, wasn’t as impervious. He’d shared some syrupy friendship with her since they’d been young, and she might penetrate his defenses through nostalgia. Not that he could see any man other than himself even considering resisting her if she made her desire evident.

She was her name, after all. The aspired to. The coveted.

But never by him. And she was now more off-limits than ever before.

If he’d once put her on his most-abhorred list due to her own actions, he now put her on the list of his most-bitter enemies due to her father.

Yusuf Aal Waaked, ruling prince of the neighboring emirate of Ossaylan, was behind the theft of the Pride of Zohayd jewels, the master conspirator behind the plot to dethrone the Aal Shalaans.

Now, the serpent’s daughter—a boa constrictor herself who’d squeezed the reason and life out of many a man—was looking up at him with that excitement that always threatened to devour him.

He inclined his head at her, injected his voice with its maximum level of scorn. “Princess Haram.”

Maram blinked. Had he just called her Haram?

The glint in those unique eyes said he had!

Sinful. Wicked. Evil. Taboo.

The word encompassed all that. And more.

And he’d made sure everyone had heard it.

So. How did he expect her to react? Get flustered? Defensive? Outraged?

No. The Amjad she knew would expect her to engage him. And boy, would she.

She gave him a curtsy, fluttered her lashes. “Prince Abghad!”

Amjad’s eyes snapped a fraction wider before danger slithered across his heart-stoppingly gorgeous face, his hand flattening over his heart in mock hurt. “And here I thought you…liked me.”

“I far more than…like you. And you know it.” She grinned up at him. “But a Haram deserves at least an Abghad.”

“Princess Sinful and Prince Hateful,” Amjad said slowly, as if tasting the slurs, his darkest-chocolate voice making them as delicious as the sweetest compliments. “Those do have a far better ring to them than the trite names our pompous parents saddled us with.”

She nodded, enjoyment rising. “They’d sure make for better protagonists in a fantasy novel or D&D video game.”

“They’d also spawn far better descriptions than the ones we’ve earned so far. Instead of the Half-Blood Princess you’d be the Blonde Taboo and instead of the Mad Prince I’d be Bad, Mad and Loathsome. We’d sell millions.”

She grabbed her ponytail, wagged it at him. “I’m not blonde, Your Horrid Highness.”

“Technicalities, Your Venerable Vileness.”

Her grin widened as she noticed that everyone had left their prince to his sparring match.

“Where’s Prince Ass-ef?” he said offhandedly. “Couldn’t wake up early after a nightlong taxing game of solitaire?”

A chuckle burst out of her at his double pun. In Arabic Prince Ass-ef meant the Sorry Prince. In English…

She giggled again. “He is Ass-ef, that he can’t come.”

Everything about him seemed to hit pause. She felt as if the whole desert froze, bating its breath for his reaction.

When it came, it sent a frisson sliding through her spine. His narrowed eyes became laserlike slits. “He isn’t coming at all?”

Weird. That his annoyance would be so great that it would show.

“He recently had pneumonia and his doctors feared a relapse with exposure to unfavorable weather conditions.” She smiled coaxingly. “But isn’t it your lucky day he sent me in his place?”

His spectacularly sculpted lips twisted with disdain. “It feels like every unwanted present I’ve been cursed to receive has burst open in my face at once.”

Relieved that he’d gotten back to searing sarcasm, she chuckled. “Oh, I love it when you try to be mean.”

“I assure you, when I do try, you won’t love it that much.”

“Take your best shot, Prince Abrad.”

At her taunt, another pun meaning meanest or coldest, those obsidian pupils that seemed to respond to his whims overpowered the sun’s constriction, almost obliterating his irises. “You wouldn’t survive it…Princess Kalam.”

She hooted. “I’d thrive on it. Go ahead, see if I’m ‘All Talk.’”

“Where’s the fun if you’re impervious, Princess Rokham?”

She struggled with the urge to reach up to grab his raven mane, drag his witty venom-dripping lips down to hers.

She sighed her frustration. “It won’t be because I’m made of marble that your barbs won’t penetrate me.”

At her last two words, his pupils almost vanished, leaving his eyes blazing emerald.

She hadn’t meant it that way! But she wasn’t babbling a qualification.

“And the pathetic thing is, your tactics work spectacularly with men.” He shook his head. “I’m deeply ashamed of my gender.”

“Don’t be a boor, Amjad,” she chided, fighting another urge to pinch his chiseled cheeks.

“But Mo-om! I am a boor.” His whiney-boy impersonation tickled her. “But chin up, no one has died of my boor-dom. Yet.”

She couldn’t help it. She stuck her tongue out at him.

That stopped him in his tracks.

She pressed her advantage. “You’re delightful when you’re boor-ing, but I’m not as genetically equipped as you are to handle the desert.”

He jerked one formidable shoulder. “You’re standing four paces away from a climate-controlled cocoon. Put one foot in front of the other and take your genetically deficient self into its protection.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Okay, let’s try this again. Do pretend host-dom this time.”

He tsked. “What? You expect me to carry you across the threshold?”

“I drove two hundred miles to come here, after an hour’s flight. It would be the least you could do.”

“First, I’m not this little do’s host, I’m its warden. Second, I don’t lug gate-crashers around.”

“God forbid your reputation be tarnished by an act of chivalry, eh?”

“You got it.”

She grinned. “Oh, well, I guess I can take four more steps under my own power.”

With that she brushed past him, opened the tent’s door and stepped into a shock of blessed dimness and fragrant coolness.

She took in the twenty-foot-high interior with its sumptuous, bedouin-inspired decor and furnishings, heard the almost-inaudible burr of the AC and electricity generators. She swung around, afraid Amjad had let her enter alone. She breathed in relief to find him standing at the tent’s now-closed entrance, thumbs hooked at his waistband, eyes crackling a more intense emerald in the dimness.

Her shiver had nothing to do with the drop in temperature.

She couldn’t fight the urge to counter one of his previous statements/accusations. “By the way, I don’t have tactics.”

His gaze didn’t waver on a change of expression. “You do. They are unique to you, making them even more dangerous—and devious.”

“I’m the farthest thing from either,” she said patiently. “And what would I need tactics for? They don’t work on the only one of your ‘gender’ I’m interested in. You.”

Her straightforwardness gained her a grimace. “And the only one of your gender I’m interested in is—wait! I’m not interested in any of you.”

She nodded vigorously. “With good reason.”

One eyebrow rose in mockery. “Ah, so kind of you to sanction it. It is the best, isn’t it?”

“Ingeniously evil, yes.”

“Indeed. But you don’t think I’m so pathetic that I’d hang on to my ‘complex’ for this long, hold one woman’s crimes against the whole sex, do you?”

She advanced on him, secure that he wouldn’t step back to keep his distance. “No. You’re too penetr…uh…discerning, too cerebral to turn your deservedly atrocious opinion of one into a generalization you know is bound to be faulty.”

He didn’t need to back off. The look in his eyes was enough to keep her paces away. “Problem is, I only stumble across women who reinforce my ‘deservedly atrocious opinion.’ Not that they’re cold-blooded criminals. Seems I’m not about to get that lucky twice in one nearly aborted lifetime. But I draw only those with a toxic level of self-serving cunning and hunger for power. So my generalization has yet to be proven faulty.”

“You mean women—other than me—were brave enough to come near you?”

“Some, under the compulsion of my status and holdings, were as foolhardy. Very briefly, though. Their survival instinct kicked in, overwhelming even their avarice.”

“Doesn’t one exception prove the generalization wrong?”

He barked a denigrating laugh. “You being said exception?”

She smiled into his eyes, unfazed by the expected ridicule. “I certainly don’t have a toxic level of anything, and I have levels in the negative when it comes to avarice and power hunger.”

“Says the woman who married a ruling prince and then an heir to a shipping empire. Killed one off and divorced the other after getting him disinherited.”

That made her smile falter. “Uh…we’re still in the zone of obnoxious one-upmanship, right?”

“We’re in the zone of stating facts.”

She raised both eyebrows in answering challenge. “My killing off Uncle Ziad and getting Brad disinherited are ‘facts’? On the M-class Planet Paranoia, where you make up a population of one?”

He put a hand to his left shoulder, gave a bow of mock contrition. “My apologies. You had nothing to do with either’s literal or financial demise. Both were stupid enough to marry you and cause their own destruction. An ill man older than your father, trying to keep up with a sexual ego-crushing bride, and a barely out-of-diapers babe who destroyed his future to impress a seductress a hundred years his senior in maturity.”

Her mouth dropped open. She closed it. It dropped open again.

Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, boy, you’re good. Do you even think of the things that stampede out of your lips, or do you just open your mouth and they lash out into existence?”

He inclined his head. “Thanks for sparing me the hackneyed act of indignation and sanctioning the truth.”

“You’re so far from the truth you could be in another nebula. But you’re still so good, you’d be a global success in scripting satires, too. You entertain me to no end even while you try to insult me.”

“Meaning I’m failing to? I must be losing my powers. Do you have arsenic on you?”

Another chuckle burst out of her, even as the reminder of his ordeal sent empathy shearing through her. “Your kryptonite, eh? Nah. I’m as nontoxic as it gets. But insults are insulting only when they contain painful truth. Yours don’t have even a trace of it, are so far-fetched, they’re purely hilarious.”

He suddenly took a step forward. She almost fell flat on her back in surprise.

“You know what’s hilarious?” His drawl was laced with danger. “Your calling your deceased husband ‘uncle.’ Was that his fetish?”

She waited, not breathing, to see if he’d close the remaining gap between them. He didn’t.

She let out a shaky exhalation. “He was my uncle, although not by blood, as you know. You of all people should know that political marriages are not what they seem.”

The cruelty and calculation in his eyes spiked, and with them her temperature. “I wasn’t my political wife’s uncle, so I wouldn’t know. But then it seems you succeeded where she failed. You offed your hapless spouse without a hitch.”

She pulled herself up to her full five-foot-eight height. “If you call him dying six years after the wedding ‘without a hitch,’ I’d like to look through that warped lens you hold up to the world.”

He shrugged. “Aih, that wasn’t an efficient rate. I started my marriage as healthy as an ox and was almost dead in six months. But in your defense, you started yours too young, were still learning the ropes of femme fatalism. But you’ve made up for lost time and then some.”

The man was unmovable. Or so he thought. She had two full days to launch on her campaign of getting him to budge.

The intention spread across her lips. “And you might have started your marriage a trusting pushover, but you’ve mastered the tropes of male chauvinism since. But don’t despair. Your condition, according to the best of authorities, isn’t incurable.”

He answered her smile with one that could eat through metal. “Aih, so I’ve heard. All a man needs to revert to being a gullible mark is a woman who’ll imprison him in her loving servitude for life.”

She guffawed. “You’re just too delicious. So delicious you make me hungry.” She waited until a scowl started to dawn across his face, chalked a point up for herself and swung around. “You have anything to eat around here?”

Amjad stared after the chuckling Maram, trying to figure out what had just happened here.

She’d had the last, and totally unexpected, word?

Worse, she’d dragged him through this compulsive confrontation, volleyed his salvos—which seemed only to whet her…appetite for him even more—with a huge grin…

What was he thinking?

None of that mattered. Only one thing did. That she was here in her father’s stead. That messed up all his plans.

No. This was his only opportunity to see them through.

But his plans had hinged on her father’s presence.

He had to improvise.

His gut tightened. He never took a step without calculating the minutest consequence. The only time he had, it had almost cost him his life. Now the fate of Zohayd itself hung in the balance.

But he had no choice.

If he couldn’t have her father, he’d kidnap Maram instead.

Two

How do you kidnap the willing?

The answer: Easily.

Or that should be the answer.

It remained to be seen how this kidnapping would turn out.

Amjad brooded after Maram’s lithe figure, his mind racing to adjust his original plan.

Her father had said he’d come early, after Amjad had hinted he was willing to negotiate the terms for the dealership he’d been coveting. That Yusuf had agreed to come at all had made Amjad certain he had no idea the Aal Shalaan brothers had discovered his leading role in stealing and counterfeiting the Pride of Zohayd jewels.

Due to an inane tribal law, the jewels were necessary for the Aal Shalaans to remain rulers of Zohayd. The law sprouted from equally lame legends that said that King Ezzat—Amjad’s ancestor and supposed doppelganger, or as the harebrained public liked to tell it, Amjad was Ezzat reincarnated—had united the tribes under his rule and founded Zohayd through their power.

The dimwitted story became more established the more the world around them advanced. It didn’t matter to Zohaydans that the Aal Shalaans had made their country one of the most prosperous nations in the world. All they cared about was that the royal family make good treasure keepers. The kingdom’s most important event was Exhibition Day, when imbecile representatives of the moronic public came to ascertain the jewels’ safety. The legends claimed the demon-spawn jewelry wouldn’t remain in the hands of anyone who no longer deserved the throne.

Yusuf Aal Waaked and his cohorts were using that entrenched superstition, biding their time until Exhibition Day to expose the jewels currently in the Aal Shalaans’ possession as fakes. When Yusuf produced the real ones, no one in the brainless herd would accuse him of theft but would hail him as the new ruler the jewels had “chosen.”

Idiots. All of them. Including his own family.

He was tempted to leave the whole region to muck around in its Dark Ages rot. His father could be better off retiring, and he would prefer to never again have to endure being around some of the world’s sleaziest creatures—without ripping them apart—to serve trivial things like world peace.

He’d always found this royalty gig a pain anyway. Sure, he did his job because he did nothing if not to the best of his abilities, and his father needed him more since his heart attack. But being first in line to the throne was synonymous with being the same in front of a stampeding herd or a firing squad. He’d gotten nothing for it but slaughter attempts in the boardroom and murder schemes in the bedroom, interspersed with persistent conspiracies to trap, bankrupt or implicate him in crimes he’d never be stupid enough to contemplate. Not to mention the infringing fascination of the public.

But he and his brothers had made their fortunes unaided by their status. None of them would lose anything but boatloads of burdens if they woke up tomorrow a royal family no more. And it would serve the ingrate nation right if, after all the royal family had done for the kingdom, they chose criminals over the Aal Shalaans because of some trinkets.

But—and it was a gigantic but—it wasn’t as simple as that.

Even if the people were stupid enough to bow to the rule of legend, they wouldn’t find an outside force easy to accept. Yusuf, a man who ruled only a tiny emirate, couldn’t hope to control a kingdom of Zohayd’s size and complexity. He’d be overthrown, and the true catastrophe would begin.

None of the tribes had enough clout to claim the throne alone. They could all get a piece of the action only through a democracy. He needed no foresight to know how that would turn out. A look at the so-called democracies in the region said it all.

So, like it or not, the Pride of Zohayd jewels were vital, making his mission unavoidable. He had to get them back.

He’d intended to make Yusuf ransom himself with them.

But the weasel had sent his daughter in his stead.

Yusuf didn’t suspect exposure, or he wouldn’t have sent his only offspring, the daughter he called “the heart outside my body.” But Amjad knew why he had.

Yusuf knew Amjad opposed a union between Maram and Haidar. Yusuf must think Maram could sway Amjad if she got him alone, facilitating her acquisition of Haidar while having him eating out of her hand, too, hitting two princes with one seduction spell.

She was no innocent. Even had she been, children often paid for their parents’ sins. It was her father who’d conspired against his family, then dared to stay home sick.

Yusuf had better not surprise him again. He wouldn’t appreciate finding out that Yusuf didn’t value his daughter enough to ransom her with the jewels that could secure him a throne ten times the size of his current one.

“So where are you keeping the food?”

Maram swirled back to him, her ponytail swishing like that of a spirited mare.

Amjad gritted his teeth at the jolt of hated response that lashed through him, spread his lips in a smile he knew mirrored his vicious thoughts. “Something finally defeated Your Nosiness?”

Her smile was one of elation. She was invulnerable to his put-downs, wasn’t she? She truly did thrive on them. If he wanted to thwart her, he should deprive her of them.

“Since you must be keeping it in airtight containers, I doubt a hound dog could smell it out.” She stopped before him again, deluging his lungs with the uniqueness of her scent, a distillation of desire and delicacy, of freshness, femininity and fragrant flesh. Her. Her eyes gleamed up at him. “I’ll settle for coffee. Just set me on the trail and I’ll fix myself a cup. I’ll fix you one, too, if you’re…not too nasty.”

It was no use. He was incapable of thwarting her. “Guess you’ll never fix me one, then.”

She let out one of those laughs that tinkled through his nerves with harmonies of sensation and vitality. He had to exert extra effort not to groan, not to crowd her and hiss for her to stop trying to ensnare him.

“Nah, I’ll fix you one. Bad boys are just misunderstood and shouldn’t be left out.”

Merriment radiated from her, tugged on his own humor.

This Maram was dangerous in ways no one had ever been.

She evidently thought his considering look meant that he was trying to make up his mind whether to let her drag him through the camaraderie of coffee making. He was actually thinking he should get her something to eat and drink. Before the ordeal.

He took out his phone, called Ameen, murmured for him to bring in refreshments.

He paused mid-order, looked at Maram. “Which side of your heritage do you drink? Arabian or American?”

She twinkled up at him. “Both, of course.”

Aih. That was her M.O.

“Why choose when you can have it all, eh?” He completed his instructions, almost drove his finger through the screen turning off the phone.

In minutes, his men had spread a table with cheeses, breads, chilled fruits and cold and hot drinks. He’d planned for this gathering to look on the up and up so that Yusuf and his men would relax, giving Amjad a chance to kidnap him without any trouble for either side.

Maram rushed to the table and turned to him, pointing to the coffeemaker and then the carafe filled with Arabian cardamom coffee. He flicked a finger at the first.

She busied herself brewing. In minutes, she brought back a mug. She licked her lips as she handed it to him, the look in her eyes saying it was his own lips she was imagining under her glistening tongue. He congratulated himself on his choice of pants today. No space in them to betray any hormone-driven stupidity.

“Black and bitter.” Her voice was velvet fire along each nerve she managed to expose just standing near. “Just like you…like it.”

“You remembered.” He gave her a mock touched look, even as he wondered how she knew. He never accepted food or drink anywhere where his trusted people weren’t in charge. Aih, he was paranoid that way. He had eaten in her presence, but she couldn’t have observed this particular preference.

She answered his unspoken curiosity. “I asked Aliyah. In fact, I gave her an extensive questionnaire about you.”

“And she filled it in.” He shook his head. “I always said having a family is like living your life surrounded by a bunch of busybodies and blabbermouths. I wouldn’t be surprised if she and Laylah are tweeting and updating their Facebook statuses with anecdotes about my paranoid preferences.”

Her eyes told him his every word tickled her that mouth-watering peach color. “I assure you, they aren’t spreading your specs to the world. Aliyah was just delighted with my interest because she despaired of any female being ‘foolhardy’ enough to even admit being curious about you. She also thought if her Kamal could be approached, then approaching you—whom she admits are an even more…advanced case—might not be in the realm of the impossible.”

“Kamal hasn’t been ‘approached,’ he’s been breached, poor sap. I almost feel sorry for him. But he certainly deserves what he got—Aliyah, my questionnaire-completing half sister. But how fanciful of you both to lump me in the same species as him. Even if you placed me far higher on its evolutionary scale.”

She made a cartoonish expression of soothing seriousness. “Don’t worry. To me, you’re a species of one.”

The contrast between her overpowering beauty and that ridiculous look was so funny that he almost laughed.

He pressed down hard on the urge, smirked. “How reassuring. Here’s hoping Aliyah isn’t dispensing more completed forms to ‘interested’ females. I already had one use knowledge of my specs to systematically eliminate me.”

“Yeah, Aliyah told me you came to hate the color green after…after…”

He huffed his disbelief that she seemed so moved, recalling what had been done to him. “After it became associated with arsenic and an excruciating near-death in my mind? Nah, I always did. My mother dressed me in nothing but green till I was six, to go with my damn eyes. The moment she died I swore to never let that hue near me again. Then my loving ex-wannabe murderess started showering me with items in shades of it, looking as if she’d die if I didn’t accept them. Little knowing that my life was the one in danger, I swallowed my aversion, along with the poison.”

Seemingly over her poignancy, she was back in teasing mode. “Great to know aversion is no longer a thing you swallow.”

He gave her a scathing look, what she’d seen freezing heads of state. “Aih, I prefer to swallow my opposition and chew out anyone foolhardy enough to approach me.”

“Oh, chew away.” She sighed as if he’d whispered some over-the-top endearment. “And speaking of chewing…” She twirled around, filled herself a plate of sliced fruits. “In case you’re wondering how I got Aliyah to disclose your classified info, we go way back, from the time when we both lived in the States. It was inevitable that we became best buddies, with both of us being half-Arabian, half-American and belonging to royal families in neighboring kingdoms.”

“Your country isn’t a kingdom. It’s a speck of an emirate with delusions of grandeur.”

She hooted. “My father would have a fit if he heard his beloved Ossaylan described like that. But compared to the kingdoms surrounding it, that is what it is.” She bit into a plum slice, transmitting the mental image into his brain. Of her biting into his lips. Of his teeth sinking into her ripe ones. “I love how you smack out painful truths. So refreshing after the stifling decorum and protocol I have to bate my breath through.”

“So glad I’m acting as your social inhaler and royal oxygen mask.” He was rewarded—or rather, from the twisting ache in his gut, punished—by that melodic laugh of hers. “You don’t consider it your ‘beloved Ossaylan’?”

“With myself and my life divided between the U.S. and Ossaylan, I never attained the unbridled allegiance of a pure native of either. I do love a lot about Ossaylan, but I dislike a lot, too. It’s hard to know what to feel about the place that has seen your best and worst days.”

“The latter being your married days, of course.”

She sighed, still smiling, but as if through—if it could be believed, and it sure couldn’t be—a mist of melancholy. “If you promise not to interrupt with alternate versions in which I’m a succubus, I’ll tell you the whole story.”

“I’ll pass. I’m not into reruns. I know the whole story.”

“Trust me, about this particular story, you know zip.”

“Trust you? Farther than I can throw you, you mean?”

“That would be farther than I hoped because with muscles like those—” her gaze melted gold-hot appreciation down his arms and chest, stopping short of where he was resigned he’d be perpetually distorted in her presence, traveled lazily back up to his eyes “—I bet you could throw me quite far.”

He drank a mouthful of coffee, hoping to scald himself out of his idiocy. His eyebrows rose as the taste hit his tongue. The exact strength he preferred. Which he got only when he brewed his own.

“You like?”

The hesitancy in her soft question baffled him more.

Since he’d stopped being a bleeding heart, no one had come close to fooling him. But even knowing all about her, and setting his renowned duplicity-detection powers to maximum, he couldn’t detect any falseness. How was she doing it?

Not that it mattered. He had to get his plan under way. If he was going to go ahead with it.

Which he had to.

He raised his mug to her. While he hated with a passion having no choice but to proceed with his plan, he did like her offering. “Don’t tell me Aliyah gave you the exact titration of what constitutes perfect coffee for me.”

A flush spread across her sculpted cheekbones. Of pleasure over doing something that had pleased him?

No way. That woman must have the ability to blush on command among her arsenal of seduction weapons.

For good measure, breathlessness entered her voice. “It’s how I like it. I hoped we’d have this in common, too.”

And she’d said he was good? She was superlative. “You mean, before this momentous discovery of our identical taste in coffee strength, we had something else in common? Beside being bipeds?”

She spluttered in laughter. “Ah, I knew it!”

He cocked his head at her. “It’s comforting to know you agree on the bipedal commonality. The world insists I’m octopoid.”

“Would that be four more legs, or two more of each set of limbs?” She started to choke, put her plate down, turned back with mischievousness lighting up her beauty. “I knew if I could just get you talking, you’d be a delight to spar with.”

“Aih, I’m a laugh a second.”

“You certainly are.”

“God forbid I be the source of such entertainment to you. I’ll stop.”

Her crestfallen pout made her a disappointed little girl and an irresistible siren. “Don’t! We were just getting warmed up!”

“Just step outside to get as warm as you can handle.”

“Inside here with you is just fine with me. You can’t beat the combo of cool surroundings and red-hot debate.”

“Since you’re so fond of said combo, I’ll leave you to cool your heels and send one of my men to debate with. You can red-hot his ears off while I go scout the location for the spectator and banquet tents.”

He turned, counting down…three, two, one…

Right on cue, she grabbed his arm. “You wait right here.” She hurriedly unzipped her bag, produced an SPF 50 sunscreen and applied it liberally to her face, neck and hands then smiled up at him triumphantly. “My dermally deficient self can now go ten rounds with Your Hereditarily Impervious Highness.”

He sighed. “On one condition.”

She didn’t hesitate. “Anything!”

At the look of absolute trust in her eyes, a heavy sensation spread through his gut.

What, now he believed what he was seeing in her? Trust didn’t factor into this situation, in her reaction. She must think going with him was a perfectly safe opportunity to work on him some more. But…there had been that incident when she’d risked her life to help him, to be there for others. An instance that contradicted all his understanding of her, that proved she was no self-preserving coward, was capable of stunning courage.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t also a man-eater. Which made her an even more dangerous one for being impossible to categorize, to predict, to despise.

He huffed his disgust with himself. “Anything? And you’re supposedly a phenomenal political and financial law consultant. I thought when your father stopped making the dimwitted state and financial decisions he was famous for and started making choices far above his minuscule IQ, that you were behind it. Now I have to revise that belief, if you, too, go around giving carte blanche to conditions you haven’t heard yet.”

“Anything for you,” she amended indulgently, not bothering to counter his assessment, as only someone secure in her abilities wouldn’t. “I know you won’t make it anything bad.”

“And you know that because I’m the Gandhi of the region? Are you already suffering from sunstroke? Your judgment is evidently impaired.”

She made a hurry-up gesture with those elegant, trim-nailed hands. “Spit out your condition, and let’s be on our way.”

He sighed again. “No complaints. If I hear one, you’re back here.”

She fluttered those thick-enough-to-sleep-on lashes, gave him a mock salute. “Yes, sir.”

He almost groaned. She was making kidnapping her too easy. Anything that started out that way invariably ended in catastrophe. What would that entail in this situation?

He had no choice but to find out.

He looked down at her, exhaled, nodded. To himself. To committing to this path. Wherever it took him.

He only hoped that when catastrophe struck, he’d at least have accomplished his mission.

Maram looked down into those eyes Amjad had damned earlier.

And damn summed them up all right.

She’d had a good-to-great life on the whole. But it was only when she looked into his eyes that she felt aware of every spark of her being, every iota of her potential.

And that was before he’d taken her riding on his horse.

She’d expected him to ride a black stallion. Or a white one. She’d been delighted to find his favorite was a glorious light chestnut mare. Dahabeyah, literally “golden,” would be her twin if she were a horse. She’d held her ponytail next to the mare’s and exclaimed how they were almost the same color. She’d asked if he’d chosen the mare for the animal’s similarity to her, knowing he’d never admit it even at gunpoint.

His answer had been a mere snort before he turned to tacking up the mare, then donned a billowy white abaya and traditional head cover.

Then he’d mounted the mare in a demonstration of power and grace and all she could think of was him mounting her, riding her…

She’d been combusting even before he’d pulled her up behind him. She’d declined to ride a horse of her own, wasn’t such an assured horsewoman that she’d risk it in this terrain. His eyes had said she just wanted to be as close to him as possible. She hadn’t denied the accusation. The truth consisted of both his version and hers.

They’d ridden uphill for twenty minutes at a trot. Every second brought a new level of awareness of the hot, living rock she enveloped, the powerful heart that boomed beneath her ear, the scent that induced a hormonal surge with each inhalation.

By the time they’d reached their destination, she thought she’d melted around him, could never be extricated from his flesh again.

He swung down, leaving her jangling from the loss of him. She wondered if he’d help her down—but he’d already given her too many concessions. He wasn’t about to act the gallant knight.

She didn’t want him to. Not out of, gasp, gentlemanliness. In time, she’d make him wish to offer those gestures out of the consideration he’d come to feel for her.

She was getting down from the horse when she saw his eyes flood with a somberness she’d never seen there before.

It shook her to see into the depths she knew he kept hidden beneath his irreverence and indifference.

Before she could probe, he turned away, went to the edge of the towering dune overlooking the whole area.

She followed him on shaky legs, every wobbling step melting the fraught moment away. The view mesmerized her, a landscape that had been molded by the elements in the crucible of time, powdering mountains into frozen-in-turbulence oceans of gold dust.

“Wow,” she breathed in wonder. “I’ve seen almost nothing but desert vistas since coming to the region. But this beats them all hands down. How did you discover this place?”

“It’s called exploring.”

She smiled at his chiseled profile. “What a novel concept! Would you take me next time you’re scouting new territories?”

He turned his eyes sideways to her, looked down the ten inches between them, his lips twisting. “I don’t do luxury tours. What you see today is for swooning princes’ benefit. When I go out on my own, I don’t lug mock palaces with me.”

“You’re talking to the girl who spent her first twelve years camping in temperatures in the minus, who picked her own food and washed her one change of clothes in freezing streams. I lived out of a backpack for months when I went back to the States, too.”

Another enigmatic layer painted his eyes before he shrugged. “We’ll see how you fare on this mini-excursion before we talk big treks.”

Her heart pirouetted in her chest.

He was not turning her down flat.

Next moment, her heart slowed its spin, wobbled as a sound she’d never heard…felt before, yawned from nonexistence into her ears, through her marrow.

She swung around…and her heart crashed.

On the horizon, a…a…a mountain was charging their way.

It looked like what she imagined a nuclear shockwave would look like. A tidal wave of roiling, pulverized earth.

At the rate it was advancing, it would reach them—bury them—in minutes.

Three

“Sandstorm!”

Maram whirled around to Amjad, her heart bombarding her throat for a way out.

She found him gazing at the horizon, looking tranquil.

Tranquil? He must be frozen in alarm!

She pounced on him. He let her drag him to Dahabeyah, only to start emptying what he’d packed in the horse’s saddlebags.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed. “We have to rush back!”

He shook his head, extracting folded cloth and goggles. “No. We’d only meet the storm and get blasted. If by some miracle we don’t, anything standing still on that low ground—aka our cars—will be buried in minutes, judging by the size and intensity of that haboob. The others won’t wait for us.”

She looked around in panic. In the distance, everyone was sealing the horse trailers, leaping into their cars and flooring it out of the camp.

They were leaving.

“But they…they can’t leave!”

“They have to.” He produced a sacklike thing, draped it over the jittery Dahabeyah’s muzzle and eyes before securing it over her neck, which the mare surprisingly accepted. A similar cover for her body followed. “By the time they reach us, they’d have zero visibility and would probably get lost and be buried in the sand after their fuel runs out. They have to go back and hope the fuel lasts driving against eighty-mile-an-hour winds before they exit the storm.”

“But you’re their crown prince! They can’t leave you behind!”

“Coming after me would mean certain death for them.”

“Not coming after you will mean certain death for you. For us.”

“No. They know I can handle myself.”

“How do you handle yourself against—” a bubble of hysteria expanded below her diaphragm as she flung her arms wide toward the cloud that had now consumed the horizon, like a planet-eating monster “—that!”

“Oh, that.” He handed her a pair of goggles. “Been there, done that. I’m actually thinking it’s a way out of being cooped up for two days with those yawn-inducing royals.”

“Okay, who’s suffering from sunstroke now? Are you out of your mind? This is the freaking mother of all sandstorms.”

He swung over Dahabeyah’s back, grimaced at the incoming destruction. “Aih, it’s a nasty one, isn’t it?”

And she shrieked her frustration and fright. “Amjad!”

He only started wrapping his head and face with the yards of cloth. He was done in moments, left only his eyes exposed. Then he extended his hand to her.

She looked at it, her mind seizing, dread as huge as the menace advancing on them clogging her throat.

“Maram.” She lurched. He’d never said her name. Never sounded so…soft. “Do you trust me?”

Her eyes jerked up, saw him as he was born to be, a desert raider fortified against the elements, calm in his ability to withstand them after many battles where they’d called it a draw. She snatched a look over her shoulder, quailed. That cloud hurtling toward them looked like the end of both their lives.

But if she’d trust anyone to survive this attack of nature, it was him. And she did trust him. With the life he’d saved once before.

“You know I do,” she choked.

His eyes snapped narrower, as if with a stab of pain.

Before she could think, he said, voice solemn, “Then trust me when I say this. I won’t let anything harm you.”

She nodded, accepting his pledge as fact, reached out. The moment the warmth and power of his calloused rider’s hand closed on her clammy, trembling one she felt she was sealing her fate.

But then it had been sealed from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. Then again during that bomb scare. She was choosing his path again, would always choose it, come what may.

She surged up, boosting his tug as he swept her in front of him.

In blinding succession, he removed her hat, wrapped her head and face like he had his and fitted her with the goggles. Before he lowered them over her eyes, he half turned her toward him.

“I’ll enfold you in my abaya, hold you secure, so don’t worry about holding on.” His voice poured in her ear through the layers between them, earnest and fortifying. She shuddered, nodded as he secured her as he’d said. “We’ll descend the dune, which will give us time before the haboob clears it. But it will catch up with us. I want you to be ready for the force of the wind and the sand hitting us even through our protection and with us traveling in its trajectory. But it’s all bark and no bite. I’m proof it’s survivable with no ill effects. I have a nearby shelter. We’ll go there and wait it out.”

She again nodded, noticed that his watch had GPS. He consulted it before he nudged Dahabeyah. Without hesitation, the mare stumbled down the steep slope.

She felt her heart plummet with each footfall. If it weren’t for Amjad’s steel arm and thighs melding her to him, she would have fallen off.

When they reached flat land, he again urged Dahabeyah and the mare broke into a bone-jarring gallop. Maram would have been hammered apart without Amjad raising and lowering her with him to the rhythm of the horse.

Then the sandstorm caught up with them.

She heard its roar like a monster opening its jaws wide to swallow them, felt it snatching her heart out. Then it hit them with the force of a train, engulfed them, overtook them as the roar turned into a soul-splitting wail. The desert disappeared in a limbo of solid yellow dust.

At one point she thought she heard Amjad’s voice, sounding…amused? The sandstorm’s brain-liquefying screeching must have damaged her ear drums.

Then she deciphered his words and knew he was. “One good thing about haboobs, you no longer need your SPF 50 sunscreen.”

She pressed into him, her screaming tension easing gradually. Even if this felt like the end of the world, it couldn’t be too serious, could it? He couldn’t be so devil-may-care in the face of death, could he?

Apparently, Amjad could.

Ride endlessly, endure the harrowing bombardment of the sand and wind, the suffocation of breathing scorching, dry-as-tinder air through cloth and intersperse it all with caustic comments on anything his brilliantly twisted mind could come up with, delivered into her ringing ear. Favorite targets in descending order were her father, Ossaylan, Zohayd, the region, women, men, politics, business and pretty much everything that made the world go round.

Problem was, she couldn’t.

She could only hold herself up, refusing to be the deadweight he invited her to be. She held herself up steadier every time he consulted his illuminated GPS and forged on with total assurance, thinking he believed their destination was drawing nearer.

But their destination seemed to be receding.

She’d weathered the first half-century of the ride relatively well. The next quarter started to take its toll. This last one was becoming unbearable. And she had no idea how many more centuries it would take before they reached his “nearby shelter.”

Couldn’t she just faint? He was doing fine riding and holding her up all without her input. He had told her to nap, as if they were on a long, uneventful journey in the tranquil luxury of one of his limos. He might have had a point.

Might as well let the rest of the ordeal fade away….

Maram came to with a jerk.

Yellowish nothingness greeted her scratching-open eyes.

She thought she was suspended in the limbo between sleep and wakefulness, where everything was a blank sheet waiting for awareness to fill it with the details and depth of perceptions.

Then those flooded in. She hadn’t been caught in a nightmare. She had been in a sandstorm, with Amjad. Still was.

So she’d fainted. Or surrendered to the exhausting-cum-lulling ride and taken the nap Amjad had advised her to. Amjad, who was forging through the brutality of the sandstorm, carrying her like a weightless rag doll as he ascended barely visible steps leading to a columned patio of what looked like a single-story construction. It might be the only visible part of a castle for all she knew. She couldn’t see beyond a few feet.

Not that it mattered what it was. They’d made it.

He had. Gotten them to safety. Like he’d promised.

He was carrying her like she’d told him to ages ago, across the threshold of a refuge. In seconds he slammed a foot-thick door shut behind him, isolating them in the sudden safety and relative silence of a blessedly cool, dark interior.

He held her with one arm for the moment it took to snatch off his goggles. Their shape was imprinted into his flesh, and he looked haggard. But as he hastily removed the coverings off her face, the sight of his eyes sent her sluggish heart revving. Although bloodshot, they glowed an eerie green, smoldered down at her with anxiety and…guilt?

Why guilt, when he’d saved her? Perhaps he was blaming himself for not anticipating the storm and exposing her to the ordeal.

Or maybe, moron, with you slumped like a dead fish in his arms, he thinks you’re dying or something.

She savored his unguarded—and no doubt never to be repeated—expression a moment more before forcing life back into her muscles. She stirred, struggled to pull off her own goggles, half believing she’d tear her skin away with them. They left her face with a pop.

She groaned at having air instead of a semi-vacuum around her eyes. Her sight blurred and adjusted like a lens struggling to find focus. She saw his expression shift back to that projection of indifference he wore like an impenetrable shield.

Then a corner of his now-colorless lips lifted in that world-renowned smirk and he rasped out a bass, “Welcome to my lair.”

Her stinging gaze clung to his until he looked ahead to navigate through a corridor that made her feel as if he were taking her deeper into the arcane sanctum of a wizard.

Which he was. He’d always practiced magic. At least on her.

They entered a spacious rectangular hall with adobe walls and stone floors strewn with hand-woven kilims. Their same combination of bold, dark colors imbued cushions of every size covering one long, low, wooden settee resting against the wall with a huge square oak table in front of it. Flanking the corridor, the hall continued into two more areas. One had a fireplace of yet another mix of rocks and stones, huge cushions on the floor and a tableyah, a foot-high circular table of palm wood that looked handmade, with the anachronism of a sleek silver laptop on top making it look more primal. The remaining area was a kitchen with a brick oven built into the wall, a sink and a cooktop in a huge island with a countertop of unpolished quartz. The rest of the walls were covered by an extensive pantry.

Leading from the hall, she could see another corridor extending to what she assumed were two more rooms. If you could call them that, when neither had a door, just walls forming the corridor and separating them from each other.

Four large, arched windows flanked the open areas, the eerie illumination of the sandstorm seeping through their shutters. They buzzed in their frames with its bombardment. The resoluteness of their seal allowed nothing to penetrate their defenses, or the place would have been knee-deep in sand. Everything looked pristine.

It could have been a dump, and it still would have been the best place she’d ever been for saving them from the death screeching for their souls outside. But even had that not influenced her opinion, it was more evocative and enthralling than all the imposing edifices she’d seen in the region. Being composed of the elements of Zohayd’s nature, reflecting its origins, faithful to its essence, it was real, unpolished and unpretentious. It made her feel as though she’d stepped into the atmospheric setting of one of the One Thousand and One tales with which Shahrazad had assuaged her king and husband Shahrayar’s madness.

Now that she was there, she could imagine Amjad building nothing else as his hideaway from the world. It possessed the rawness of his aura, the unadorned impact of his power…

Her musings came to a halt as his hands changed pressure on her body. She almost cried out when he lowered her to her feet. She swayed, looked up into eyes that had turned golden green in the unearthly light, and quivered with the need to nestle into him again.

Not that he had been letting her “nestle” into him to begin with. He would have carried anyone the same way. So it was hands—and everything else—off until he sanctioned it, invited it. Invited her.

She struggled to step away, to do without his support, quirked her lips at him. “So your lair is from another era. You didn’t tell me you have time travel among your limitless powers.”

He flicked a glance around the place, looked back at her in mocking reassurance. “The place only looks primitive. It’s got every modern amenity, never fear.”

“It isn’t primitive. It’s…authentic.”

“Authentic is a cover word for backward.”

“You think I’d go for a cover word to express an unfavorable opinion?”

“Come to think of it, no. You’d probably ‘smack out’ said opinion.”

“Maybe not as you would. But this place is enchanting. And not only because it’s a sight for my sore eyes after the nothingness we’ve been engulfed in for an eternity.”

“So now we know what eternity is. The four hours it took to get here.”

She groaned, remembering the endlessness. “It felt like four days.”

He removed his abaya, tossed it on the nearest cushion. Sweat had plastered his loose shirt to his formidable torso, a testament to his exertion. The blow-torching dryness had evaporated every drop of her sweat, then dug its tentacles into her body to draw any remaining moisture from its depths. Good thing, too, or she would have drooled at the sight he made right now.

He strode to the kitchen, flicked switches. Droning started, a generator, then a pump. He turned on the tap. After a few coughs and spurts, water flowed. Her parched insides tingled at the sight. She teetered over to him, took the glass he’d filled for her.

“I’ve had the well water tested…” He paused as she gulped it down in one go, continued the assurance she hadn’t needed. “And it passes through filters and purifiers.” He downed his own glass. “And for the record, this place is about forty miles from where we were. We could have covered the distance in less time under better conditions, but as it was, it was a damn good rate. So sorry my efforts didn’t meet Your Royal Grumpiness’s timetable.”

She felt her lips would split if she smiled. She gulped down her third glass of water, settled for twitching them at him. “I wasn’t complaining, Your Royal Snarkiness.”

“Why not? It isn’t as if I can send you back now.”

“Nope.” She chuckled and watched his strong throat work as he drank, wondered how it would feel beneath her lips, if his skin would taste as intoxicating as he smelled. She sighed, knowing it wouldn’t be soon enough before she could find out. “But I would have appreciated it if, among your prolific commentary on the human condition, you’d told me how long you expected our ride to be. Not knowing made it feel like it would never end, made it harder to take.”

“And what would you have done if I’d estimated four hours and those became five or six? You would have spent that extra time going nuts thinking we were lost.”

“Not if you told me we weren’t.”

“As if you would have believed me.”

“I absolutely would have.”

That seemed to do the impossible—had him stymied for a comeback. Those spectacular eyebrows swooped down as if he, too, couldn’t believe it. As if he couldn’t believe she’d trust his word that undeniably. He’d soon learn otherwise.

She saw right through his masterfully off-putting facade to the core of valor inside. She more than trusted him. She believed in him.

She decided to put him out of his sarcasmless misery. “But you wanted to spare me anxiety, so your intentions were good.”

“And we all know where those lead.” He flicked a mocking look around. “Even though there wouldn’t be much worse than here.”

“Stop insulting this wonderful place. If you no longer want it for a lair, I’ll take it off your hands. Just name your price.”

A moment stretched as he brooded at her. “You’re barely standing upright and I’m not carrying you again if you collapse. Do so inside while I take care of business. Help yourself to the jet-powered shower.”

“And you dare badmouth this place. I would have been ecstatic with rudimentary indoor plumbing. A jet shower is nirvana.”

“It’s nothing like you’re used to…” She opened her mouth to remind him that she hadn’t always been a prince’s daughter. He overrode her. “And don’t expect anything fancy to eat. Provisions are all dried, powdered and canned.”

“It comes with food, too? A veritable five-star hotel, then.”

“Go.”

“Why do I get the feeling you want to get rid of me?” He rumbled something dangerous in his gut. She raised her hands in teasing placation. “I’ll go, but only because what you’re offering is irresistible. Rest, cleanliness, anything edible—” and being alone with you, she added inwardly “—constitutes heaven to me.”

With a last impish glance, she did her best not to wobble to the “inside” his stern finger had pointed to.

She entered a shock of a futuristic bathroom encased in pearly black marble, with a white onyx tub and toilet, a tempered-glass sink and a shower cubicle and brushed-steel fixtures and accents. It felt constructed to suit another facet of him, the ultramodern desert knight, where he—

Worry detonated inside her, aborting her fantasies.

She rushed back out. “Where’s Dahabeya?”

Amjad had been standing where she’d left him, staring at the ceiling. Nonchalance descended at her reappearance, masking what she’d seen on his face. But she had seen it. A terrible bleakness.

He shrugged. “In her stable, fed and watered. I’ll go wash her down and treat any injuries she sustained.”

With that he started fortifying himself again. She walked back slowly to the bathroom, her nerves rattling.

What could have warranted such an expression?

He’s exhausted, she answered herself. She’d just caught him not hiding it. She should stop gorging on his every breath and overanalyzing his every expression.

She exited a stinging, reviving shower, was drying herself with towels she’d found bagged and smelling of freshness when another scent hit her. Ambrosia, by the smell of it.

She scooped up her clothes, and the scent of fear and exhaustion rising from them made her groan in disgust. And she’d been clinging to him smelling like that.

She peeked around the wall. Amjad had his back to her in the kitchen. She bolted across the corridor.

She raided his closet, picked a shirt that fell to her knees. She didn’t find any underwear, put her own, washed and wet, on.

She pattered out over the warm, wonderful stone texture of the floor on bare feet, almost dizzy with hunger as the scent intensified on approaching the kitchen.

Her return was rewarded by a look of disinterest.

She smiled. She was on to him. He was anything but disinterested. In anything. From beneath that lazy, bored facade, he watched everything like a hawk, avid, analyzing. And he was anything but uninterested in her. She’d prove it.

“I’ve changed my mind.” She craned her neck around him to get a closer whiff of the edible delight he was stirring. “This place is a hundred-star hotel. It’s got its own crown-prince chef.”

He peered down his sculpted nose at her. “Don’t be so quick to promote me to chefdom. You haven’t tasted this mess yet.”

“Nothing that smells that good can taste bad. What is it?”

“You mean you’ve never seen lentils before? Your diet consists solely of carnivorous delicacies and men?”

He wouldn’t stop goading her about her supposed mandevouring activities, would he? He’d learn different. Until then, nothing he said could touch her. Even if it always tickled her.

“I’ll have you know I’m a vegetarian.” She served generous portions into the bowls he’d put out. “And lentils are one of my favorite foods. I’m asking about the spices that give it that heavenly aroma.”

“You’re asking me to reveal my secrets? Tsk. If you must know, it’s a protective concoction. For XY-chromosome bearers.”

She giggled. “Protecting huge, power-laden you from XX me, now that I got you stranded in the middle of the desert?”

She laughed again at the notion, before a heady sensation spread inside her. She would have been the one fearing for her safety, or at least feeling uncomfortable, with any other man. But with Amjad she felt totally safe, totally at ease.

She blew into her simmering spoon, licked at its surface. She groaned as the complex flavor hit her taste buds. She hoovered the rest, yelping as it scalded her, then did the same thing again and again.

After a moment of watching her ravenous demonstration, he said, “It’s nutmeg, chives, garlic, lime shavings and sumac. But you’ll understand if I don’t reveal the exact ratio.”

“What good would that be, if I don’t know the counter-concoction?”

He gave her a mock-conceding nod, began to eat.

She’d attended banquets he’d organized in the past, forgetting to eat as she lost herself in the pleasure of watching his feline focus and fastidiousness. She suspected he used the absorption in his meal to discourage interaction.

She couldn’t let it discourage her now.

“Thank you.”

She felt her whisper hit him like a jolt of electricity.

He hid his start in a rising movement, took his bowl to the sink, throwing over his shoulder, “Nothing to thank me for.”

“Just the inconsequential matter of saving my life.”

“It was incidental to saving my own.”

“Someone else could have thought taking me along would lessen their chance of survival.”

“I’m the Mad Prince, not the Craven one.”

“We both know you’d go to any lengths to save someone’s life, at the possible price of your own. You did that during that bomb scare. You’re the Hero Prince, too, even if you would rather be steamrolled than called that.”

His eyes flared. He’d never given her a chance to bring up the bomb scare before.

She knew why. Not because her side of the story would destroy the reputation he worked so hard to cultivate. The incident was widely known, yet people dismissed the evidence of his heroism and chose to believe what he wanted them to believe—that he wouldn’t lift a finger to save someone drowning at his feet.

It was because he wouldn’t acknowledge what had happened between them during and after the incident. He wanted to forget the turning point they’d almost reached. Good luck with that. She’d never forget.

He finally smirked. “Watch where you wave those euphemisms. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Oh, just accept my thanks, Amjad. I promise, you won’t hurt yourself if you do.”

“If it’ll make you drop those fanciful interpretations of my actions and character, by all means.” He bowed in mock chivalry. “You honor me with your gratitude and good opinion, Princess Aal Wicked. I’ll do whatever it takes to prove I’m not worthy.”

As she chuckled, he turned, started brewing coffee, tossed back at her, “Now that the interesting part of this escapade is over, we begin the dull part of being safe and bored out of our minds.”

“Trust me when I say this,” she said. “With both of us here, boredom is a literal impossibility.”

“Boor-dom isn’t, so that leaves me hope.”

She laughed again. He wasn’t giving an inch. Which would make it more worthwhile when he gave all seventy-seven of his inches.

A minute later, his back still to her, he said, “I called your father.”

Maram started. She’d forgotten about her father, let alone about reassuring him. “Oh, thanks. He must have been worried sick.”

“No.” He walked back, put the mug in front of her without looking at her. “He hadn’t had news of the sandstorm yet.”

He took his mug to the laptop. Before he sat on the floor, booted it up and ignored her presence, he added, “I told him we’re safe here until the storm subsides.”

And now that they were, Maram was in no hurry for that to happen.

She’d wished for a couple of hours with him over two days. Now she would be secluded from the world with him, all day long, for as long as the sandstorm raged, long may it do so.

She would use every minute to chip away at his condescending resistance and maddening distance. And she would do it.

Four

How would he do it?

That was what Amjad wondered again as he watched Maram puttering in the kitchen, humming perky melodies in her smoky-silk voice.

How would he survive having her permeate his every breath, overwhelm his senses and chip away at his good sense, for as long as it took to see his plan through?

His original plan had been to keep her father here until he was willing to negotiate. He’d estimated one night of isolation with him in the desert, aided by the unrelenting sandstorm outside, would bring him around. Yusuf Aal Waaked wasn’t a strong man, physically or mentally. Amjad had no doubt he would cave.

That knowledge convinced him Yusuf wasn’t the mastermind of the conspiracy. Amjad sensed a more complex, ruthless mind behind it. Probably the informer who’d lured Talia Burke into Zohayd.

Said informer had exposed Yusuf to Talia, Amjad’s brother Harres’s seductress and future bride, probably because he doubted Yusuf would not go through with the dethroning according to the informer’s preferred timetable.

This informer had counted on Talia running to the press with Yusuf’s identity and the news of the jewels’ theft to get back at the Aal Shalaans, whom she’d then believed had been behind her own brother’s arrest and imprisonment. Once exposed, Yusuf would have been forced to fall in with the informer’s wishes, which seemed to be not to wait for Exhibition Day.

But they’d thwarted the informer. Talia had revealed Yusuf’s identity only to Harres, and they hadn’t even confronted him.

Yusuf, secure his plans were safe and bound on pursuing his original timetable, had accepted Amjad’s annual invitation. Once he’d arrived, Amjad would have taken it from there.

That had been his best-laid plan.

Now he had Maram instead, even though he preferred braving the sandstorm naked and on foot rather than risk prolonged exposure to her.

His new plan was to call her father in a few days, when he was sure to be desperate for news, and dictate his terms. The moment Harres and Shaheen confirmed the return of the jewels, he would ride to the nearest town with Maram, have a helicopter fly her back to her father. She’d never know she’d been his hostage. He’d advise Yusuf for future self-preservation to never let her suspect anything.

In essence, he’d keep his word. Nothing would harm her.

And now that she believed her father had been reassured of her safety, that this was an adventure, she was enjoying the situation to no end. He wasn’t.

This haboob would last days. And if her father hadn’t relented by then, he would have to keep her here, unaware of what was really going on, until he did.

It had only been six damn hours.

Two if he didn’t count the four hours she’d slept.

But he did count them. Knowing she was sleeping in his bed, wearing his shirt, with nothing but that wisp of a panty drying on her hot flesh had made him unable to acknowledge his own exhaustion, to get the rest that would put everything back in perspective. He’d kept worrying she might suffer some delayed effect of the brutal ride. But he couldn’t check on her and see her asleep either. What he’d seen of her legs, of her body where the shirt had clung to the panties’ dampness, had been enough. He couldn’t risk seeing more.

He’d come to adopt her view of eternity. It felt as if they’d been there that long.

And that was before she woke up. All tousled and creamy and recharged, the vibes she emanated even in her sleep ratcheting up, deluging him, making him forget the tumult raging outside.

At least now she was fully dressed.

He busied himself around the place, fixing shorted-out light sconces, filling and lighting the oil lamps that Maram said she preferred in the sitting/dining area, making an inventory of the pantry’s contents, tagging each. All through, she was in every cubic inch of air in this insulated, isolated, doorless cabin he’d built with solitude in mind.

He was feeling as if it were she who’d taken him hostage.

He’d just given up trying to work on his computer, gone to stretch out on the settee. He couldn’t concentrate on anything with her singing that medley of sappy songs between asking him about food items and spices she didn’t recognize even with the tags, then about his preferences for dinner.

He would have prepared the meal himself, but he knew she’d “help.” Her radiation was bad enough at this distance.

She’d finally decided to make them black-eyed pea stew, hummus tahini and dried-fruit salad. She went all out with the spices and by the time the food was ready, the aromas had turned his hunger to voracity.

She strolled toward him now, bringing plates and utensils, the flickering lamplight casting her beauty through the prism of its fiery illumination. As always, she hijacked his responses, causing the knot in his gut to travel lower, deeper.

“You know, we’re quite a pair.” She straightened from setting the table, the swish of her hair—which he shouldn’t have heard over the lament of the storm—tightening his lungs. “People call me Shagaret Ad’Durr while you’re known as Shahrayar.”

Amjad knew his namesake. He considered hers as he sat up and she walked back to get the food.

Shagaret Ad’Durr, literally Tree of Pearls, was a historical figure who’d ruled in the region after her husband’s death. After she was pressured to take a husband to rule by her side, she learned his loyalty lay with a first wife and had him killed. She was eventually killed herself, by said first wife and her slave women, beaten to death by their dainty wooden clogs.

Maram served the food, then sat on a pile of cushions on the floor across from him. He eyed the table.

So she could make the best of whatever she had to work with. Not to mention the artful presentation. Not a spoiled princess who needed someone to file her nails for her, like Salmah.

And far more dangerous for it. He’d better never forget it.

He dipped the sun-dried bread in the tahini. “Very apt likenesses. Only I didn’t kill anyone. Not literally anyway.”

She didn’t rise to his dig about her fatal activities, grinned at him as she dipped her own bread. “I don’t think they were going for historical accuracy, just the general slanderous connotation. I certainly didn’t rule alone after Uncle Ziad’s death, didn’t dispatch my next husband either, and there are no first wives looking to off me with their footwear.”

The delicious creamy tahini turned to dust in his mouth. “Do you realize how…creepy it is to hear you call your late-husband uncle?”

She chewed her food for a while, then sat back, leveling her golden gaze at him, serious for the first time since he’d laid eyes on her. “Okay, so you say you know my whole story. Tell me.”

“Maybe I should wait until you digest your food.” She gave him an imperative gesture. He raised his eyebrows with an it’s-your-funeral nonchalance, continued to eat, talking slowly in between bites and spoonfuls of the cordon-bleu-chef-worthy meal. “You and your father managed to make the widowed, depressed and frail ruling prince of your emirate marry you. The marriage bounced your father over the two men who were before him in line to the throne, making him ruling prince after Ziad’s death. End of story.”

“That’s all you have? The rumor mill’s version?” She cocked her head, sending her waterfall of luminous silk swaying over one shoulder. He felt his heart veer in his chest in the same direction. “Gotta say, it has the tinge of fact required for its fabrications to be taken as the truth.”

She continued eating for a while, seemingly deep in unpleasant thought. Then she raised her eyes again, and the shadows there spread tentacles through him of something he’d long forgotten. Shame? Sympathy?

She exhaled. “So what do you know about me? My life before I came to Ossaylan?”

The oppressive feelings made his mockery colder. “You were raised in the States by your single mother till you were twelve and she trapped husband number three, sent you packing to your biological father, Prince Ass-ef. Six years later, he arranged your marriage to his cousin many times removed. Fast forward six more years, ‘Uncle Ziad’ croaked, and your father became ruling prince, per the above machinations. You fled to the States, flaunting mourning laws, found a barely legal loaded stud. After a highly publicized affair of a whole week, you married him, despite his family’s tantrums. Within three months, in their effort to free him from your tentacles, his family disinherited him. It worked, too, because you divorced him almost the next day. After a couple of years during which you set up a booming business peddling sense to senseless politicians and businessmen, you returned to the region to become your father’s missing brain.”

A stream of reactions had flowed across her features as he’d talked. Dejection was replaced by astonishment before amusement chased everything away. When he started eating again, she prodded him to go on. He signaled he was done.

Her face split on a smile that flooded his insides in heat and light. “Phew. You make me sound so…interesting.”

His made his answering smile as demolishing as he could. “You are. As interesting as a fatal disease.”

A laugh burst from her. She really was immune to insult. “And you make me sound so…powerful. So dangerous. I almost wish you were right. But boy, I’m nowhere near that colorful or lethal.”

“Sure. Says the tigress before she devours her next kill.”

Her smile was all forbearance and indulgence. “Would you like to hear the real story?”

She was unstoppable, wasn’t she? “Your version, you mean?”

“Since it’s my story, my version should be sanctioned.”

“If it had anything to do with actual events, maybe.”

“How about you stop me if you think I’m substituting fact with fiction?”

“Ready to be constantly interrupted?”

She gave him that bring-it-on grin of hers, rose to her knees to dish out dessert. She’d soaked the dried apricots, raisins, plums and dates and garnished them with toasted almonds. She served the crunchy dried banana and apple with sprinklings of cinnamon and cloves. Just as he preferred.

Because no one knew that about him, it must be her own preference, too. And that was more disturbing than anything.

She settled back. “During my first twelve years, my mom moved from one minimum-wage job to another, from one city to another—always in the north for some reason—and from one man to another. She kept getting engaged in between her divorces. I had the impression she was always looking for the ‘love of her life,’ who would provide for her and make her life an ongoing romantic adventure.”

“First fictional substitution,” he said. “A desert prince would have provided all she was looking for, and she didn’t snap him up. Or was it that she couldn’t sink her fangs into him, even after bearing his child? If so, then Ass-ef actually has more sense than the frog prince I always believed him to be.”

She gave him a softly chiding look that made him want to take back everything he’d said. “First, my father isn’t as inept as you paint him to be. Second, a ‘desert prince’ doesn’t provide any of what my mother was looking for. As I’m qualified to judge. There’s nothing romantic about being forced to live by a tribal court’s suffocating rules, with you and your husband’s wishes not even coming into consideration from the minutest details of what to wear, who to mingle with, what functions to attend, to the huge decisions, like how many children to have and how to raise them.

“My mother was looking for romance and security, only with the freedom to live her daily life as she pleased, to make her own tiny decisions, to not be shackled down to one place. I guess that was why she never had a career, never tried to buy a house, so she could up and leave if her Prince Charming came along, no regrets. Her one tie was me. But I became independent, then indispensable to her very early on, and she stopped telling me she wished she’d never had me.”

Something churned inside him, more violent than the ideals that drove him to decimate some of the world’s biggest bullies.

He hissed, “She told you that?”

“When I was totally dependent and the going got tough for her. But on the whole she did okay by me. I don’t think there was more that a nineteen-year-old single mother could have done. She eventually became a good mother to my half siblings. She had me too early, from the wrong man, under the wrong circumstances.”

His blood still sizzled. Not even his mother, a renowned Medusa, had scarred her children that way. “I bet you weren’t always so accepting of her self-pitying tantrums.”

“It wasn’t easy sometimes, but she was all I had, and I loved her no matter what.”

He fought the compulsion to lunge, take her by the shoulders, shake her out of her acceptance of the injustice the person who should have been closest to her had dealt her, before crushing her to him.

Had she put something in the food?

Great. He was looking for supernatural reasons for her effect on him. When her spell was all-natural. All her.

He huffed his disgust at his hormonal-driven foolishness. “You disappoint me. I thought you were too shrewd to spout such mushy nonsense, to sanction the stupidity of loving someone who should only be despised.”

“Tell that to the child I was.”

“Then you should at least despise her in retrospect now.”

“She wasn’t perfect, but she wasn’t all bad. She did love me—does love me.”

“That’s why she kept you living in poverty, didn’t tell you you had a rich father who wanted you?”

“It wasn’t that simple. I was the result of a fling she had with my father. An eighteen-year-old who pretended to be older to be with this exotic man who captivated her with his good looks and foreign accent, with his expansive endearments and extravagant gifts and outings. Then he asked her to marry him, took her on a tour of his home. You know Ossaylan thirty years ago was nothing like it is today. She was horrified when she realized what marrying him would mean. No driving, no drinking, no dancing, no friends—no miniskirts, per her specific horror. So, even penniless and with no prospects, she refused his proposal, even when she found out she was pregnant. She informed him she’d have me, yet refused even his financial help. That at least proves she wasn’t mercenary. She wouldn’t give him power over her, over me, and wind up dragged into the country she abhorred.

“She never told me anything about him until my twelfth birthday. You can imagine what it was like to a fatherless girl to hear I not only had a father, but that he was a desert prince and he wanted me to live with him. At that time my mother wanted to marry ‘the’ love of her life. His job entailed continuous traveling, which would have disrupted my life, so it was a perfect solution for me to go live with my father.”

He clutched a pillow, imagining it was that woman’s neck. “So she dumped her only daughter in the country she so dreaded and went off to live her life as if she’d never had you. Admirable. Women like her make child peddlers look humane.”

She shook her head, her expression understanding itself.

Was this real? Did she always search for the best in everyone, in every situation? Did she choose only to see the most favorable angle?

“She didn’t dump me,” she said. “My father assured her that Ossaylan had come a long way since she’d visited, that he would see to it I didn’t miss any of the freedoms I was used to. He’d been begging her for years to let him have me, so she knew he would be good to me. As for me, I was excited, especially since I didn’t like my mother’s fiancé much. I was scared, too, but that disappeared when I met my father and adored him on sight. It seemed like a fairy tale come true, the small-town girl becoming a princess of Ossaylan overnight.

“And there was no rude awakening for the next six years. I was entranced by the incredible differences between my former and current lives, did everything to learn the new culture, language, to blend in with my surroundings even when my father kept telling me not to try too hard, that my appeal, my strength lay in being the child of two worlds. But I wanted to please him so much, to make him glad that he took me in. And the more he deluged me with love and pride, the more I was willing to do anything for him.

“Then I learned why he was so focused on me, and it took the wind out of my sails. He’d married twice, too, but hadn’t had more children. Turned out he’d developed leukemia after his fling with my mom and the treatments affected his fertility. It became clear to him that he’d never have more children.

“I confronted him with my disappointment, accused him of wanting me only because I was his only shot at having a child. In time he convinced me that it didn’t matter why he’d valued me to start with, that he ended up loving me for me.”

“Aih.” His lips twisted. “He loved you for the you he could use. And the moment you turned eighteen, he did.”

She sighed again, unfazed. “When he first proposed I marry ‘Uncle’ Ziad, I was horrified. I didn’t want to marry at all. I had plans, degrees, a career in mind. My father assured me it would be in name only so that he could succeed Uncle Ziad to the throne. Uncle Ziad wanted him to—he believed the first two men in line for the throne would destroy everything he’d strived to build in Ossaylan, and probably Ossaylan itself.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Ossaylan had it bad, didn’t it? Othman, the first in line then, is a lowlife who would have auctioned the emirate and its people to the highest bidder and skipped to the Caribbean. The second in line, Labib, is a dangerous idiot with the emotional continence of a four-year-old. Those two do make your father look like a slightly better fate.”

Her eyes reproached him again, making him feel the moronic urge to qualify his insults.

“But Uncle Ziad could only bypass them if he married me, because the marriage would make his relationship to my father the closest. They told me we had to rush because Uncle Ziad was ill and wouldn’t live longer than six months. I was apprehensive with a capital A. But I wanted to serve my new country and my father, wanted to be there for the uncle I loved in his last days.” She pushed away the plate she’d hardly touched. “But as the princess of Ossaylan, the freedoms I enjoyed as a minor princess went poof. And instead of six months, six years passed by, the last two with me tied to Uncle Ziad’s bedside.”

The churning in his chest and gut intensified.

He could picture her then, this being of energy and enthusiasm, of vitality and vivaciousness, wilting day after day, oppressed by unforgiving custom, imprisoned by the machinations of power-peddling men.

Seemed Yusuf Aal Waaked had more to answer for than he’d thought. And even more, because Maram seemed to exonerate him of any wrongdoing. Worse, kept on loving him in spite of the damage he’d caused her, the exploitation he’d subjected her to.

If any of what she was telling him was the truth.

But if it was, what else had he been misinformed about? What else had happened without her knowledge? Without her consent?

“Once he died, I…went a bit crazy. I felt I’d been…robbed. I wanted to make up for lost time, so I flew back home against my father’s wishes. I backpacked across the States, gulping freedom and just…living. Then I met Brad, and he was everything the men in Ossaylan weren’t. Outgoing and easy to talk to and caring nothing about the world or what it thought of him. After what I’d been through, boy, was that attractive. It didn’t hurt that he was a ‘stud.’ And he wasn’t in diapers. He was two freaking years younger than me. And handsome and enthusiastic and adventurous.”

Every word fell on Amjad like a lash. He imagined himself knocking that “stud” out for every adjective praising his assets.

She went on. “But Brad was…too adventurous. He gambled with just about everything, the worst of it being his and others’ safety. That was why I left him. And that’s what got him disinherited, not me.”

He huffed a humorless laugh. “So the poor jerk tried his all to impress you and you left him for it.”

Again she gave him that soft, chastising look that twisted him inside out. “So when someone acts criminally stupid, you stick someone else with the responsibility for their actions?”

No, damn her. He didn’t. He was trying not to let her drag him into the deep waters of untimely reassessments.

Those dainty lips pouted with self-deprecation. “Not that I’m innocent in this mess. I saw the signs from the start and disregarded them. I knew we were all wrong for each other and still married him. I would have married anyone, to flout the mourning laws, to get rid of that oppressive First Princess title sooner, because it didn’t seem my father would marry again and take it off my back. I only hope Brad grows out of his compulsive thrill-seeking before he harms himself or others irreversibly.”

“Big of you.”

Her eyes said “Jerk,” in the most indulgent way possible, before she went on, “Afterward I concentrated on my post graduate studies and set up my consultancy business. It might seem strange, but my relationship with my father got deeper and better. Yet it wasn’t until four years ago that I decided to go back to live in Ossaylan. And though I don’t agree that his brain is missing, I will take your comment as a compliment to my positive effect on his decisions and Ossaylan since I returned.”

He raised an eyebrow. She shrugged a shoulder. She was done.

He whistled, long and low. “That was some story. You should be renamed Shahrazad.”

“Lulling her Mad Prince with convoluted tales that only segue into more exciting and labyrinthine new ones? But in my case, the tale doesn’t have any more shocking twists to keep the story going.”

“But it does, in the form of your convoluted self, in every word from your lips, scripted by your inscrutable mind and designed for compulsive listening.”

She looked around for a nonexistent audience. “Anyone see anyone being compelled around here?” She looked back at him, eyes singeing him with gold-hot teasing. “Not you, from the way you kept interrupting me.”

“But that was all poor Shahrayar could do as Shahrazad smothered him in her web of mental manipulation. Interrupt with comments and questions she led him into making. Like her, you know how to influence your listeners’ thoughts and sympathies.”

She sat up. “Since you can’t be influenced, if yours have been moved, does that mean you’re considering sanctioning my version?”

He could feel the effect of her words—of her—seeping through his gray matter, altering the pathway of his beliefs. And he was damned if he’d let her change his mind that easily.

She might have been innocent once, but she wasn’t now. She’d learned her father’s lessons well, was adding her own genius and irresistibility to become unstoppable.

There was one way to stop her. Get out of her range.

He rose as if he didn’t want to explode to his feet and storm away, until his muscles hurt with the tranquility he forced into them. He looked down at her, met a gaze tinged with hope, which he believed would have brought a weaker man to his knees proclaiming he’d believe anything she had to say.

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said, injecting his voice with the last dose of nonchalance he had in his arsenal.

He cleared their dinner, cleaned the kitchen, willing the mechanical actions to defuse his disquiet.

Before he went inside, he added, “Don’t hold your breath, though. Estimated response time ranges from a lifetime to never.”

After an endless night during which he felt as if he were sleeping on red-hot thorns, imagining he heard her breathing over the storm’s tumult, felt her body’s undulations transmitted to his every nerve, the next day was worse.

She woke up minutes after he’d given up on sleep and risen, cheery and inviting to his aching and cranky. Not that she was intrusive. She engaged him when he let her, occupied herself in silence, at least in humming, when he didn’t.

At the breakfast he prepared, he was back to full flaying mode. She met his game on the same level, her wit like lightning, blinding, electrifying, magnificent.

Morning passed as if it were a week. Not because it dragged, but for being so full of incident and interaction. At noon, she began to prepare lunch, and he somehow found himself in the kitchen, sharing the preparations, engrossed in the experimentations, eyeball-deep in banter.

He pulled back again while they ate, and she again let him take refuge in detachment, but wouldn’t let his pointed disregard fill the atmosphere with tension, her acceptance making even the tumult-accompanied silence companionable, communicative.

Afterward he found himself about to slide back into a teasing match with her, used Dahabeyah’s care to get away.

He returned from the stable to find her engrossed in a game she’d unearthed on his computer, shrieking in delight as she surpassed a personal best. As she turned to share her excitement, a moronic notion insisted it was only around him that she was this spontaneous.

To compel hours to pass without Maram exposure, he headed inside for a nap. Big mistake.

The sheets smelled—felt—of her. His body throbbed like an inflamed wound for the four hours he forced himself to remain there.

Finally, a hairbreadth from blowing essential physical and mental fuses, he rose and joined her.

He found her sitting on the settee, knees drawn up against her chest, head resting on them. Her face was turned to him, eyes glowing as if waiting to strike him to his core with their lucid beauty and power.

He headed to the kitchen without slowing down. He thought that if he did, she’d drag him deeper into this…affinity he was finding more disturbing than anything he’d ever experienced.

“There is a part of the truth I didn’t tell you.”

His hand spasmed over the coffeepot, almost smashed it.

Her voice, her words penetrated between his shoulder blades, reached inside his rib cage to clutch his heart.

He didn’t turn, threw over his shoulder, “Of course you didn’t, Shahrazad. Never telling the whole story is what you do.”

“It’s just one part. There won’t be more.”

He wouldn’t. He shouldn’t.

He turned to her.

This was ridiculous. He was behaving like Shahrayar for real, unable to bear the curiosity, the need to hear her next account, to hang on to her every word, eating through him to the marrow.

She unfolded her lushness, settling on the settee’s edge. Then she spoke, her voice dark, rich, like a woman confessing her most intimate fantasies to her lover. “I had no intention of returning to Ossaylan. Then there was the Political Dimensions of the Region’s Economic Expansion conference.”

He remembered that conference as if it were minutes ago.

His first exposure to her. He hadn’t recovered since.

“I flew back from that conference bent on relocating my business, selling my house and moving back to Ossaylan to live.”

She fell silent. He stared at her.

When he could talk again, he rasped, “You’re saying it was seeing me that made you decide to move back?”

“Yes,” she simply said. “You were—are the most incredible man I’ve ever met, and I wanted to be where I could get to know you.” She smiled this self-deprecating yet infectious smile, which she seemed to do with her whole body and being. “Not that you’ve made it easy, or sometimes, even possible.”

And rage ignited in his recesses. At the desire to stop resisting. Worse, his inability to remember why he’d been resisting, why he hadn’t long succumbed.

He forced calmness into his steps as he walked back to her, looked down at her with what he hoped was his most annihilating contempt. “How disappointing. Can’t you try a bit harder to be subtle about your mission?”

She blinked. “What mission?”

“The one your father sent you on. To go all out in a last bid to entrap me in marriage before giving up on me.”

Maram stared at him, her face a canvas of stupefaction.

Then she burst out laughing.

When she could finally catch a breath, she spluttered, “You think I want to marry you?”

Five

No woman had ever considered marrying him.

No matter the wealth and power marriage to him entailed, as he’d once told Shaheen, women feared he’d turn Shahrayar or Othello on them. Their families feared their necks would be next on the block of his crazed wrath.

Their horror and rejection had appeased him to no end.

So why would Maram’s incredulous mirth at the idea of marrying him disturb him? Even when he knew she was faking it?

He knew for a fact that she’d marry him, mayhem and madness and all, in a heartbeat. She was the only woman who’d been ballsy enough to not only consider risking it but to also actively pursue it.

The clear answer was that her pretense itself was what bothered him. But that wasn’t why.

He didn’t want her to want to marry him…did he?

Of course he didn’t. He was tired, sleep-deprived. And she was potent. Enough to make him begin to imagine he…felt things, beyond the physical.

He shook his head, deriding himself more than her. “Surely you don’t expect me to answer your stupefaction and let you lead me through another story with your ‘version of the truth’?”

She shook her head, too, still chuckling. “You’re a surprise a second, not only a laugh.”

“Always thrilled to be of disservice.” He gave her a mock bow and turned back to coffee making.

He felt the caress of her eyes before she rose, headed to his computer. In seconds a spine-tingling sonata by Mozart surged, filling every inch of space with its majestic magic, seeming to annul the wrath of nature. His heart expanded as the timeless melody spread through him, one of his absolute favorites.

Before questions formed about why she’d chosen that specifically from his playlist, sensations unfurled through him as she joined him in preparing dinner—feelings besides the usual physical red alert from her nearness. Equanimity? Contentment?

Aih. As if he’d recognize those if they tap-danced on his forehead. Seemed he hadn’t estimated her powers highly enough.

During the evening, she again defied his expectations.

She didn’t prod him into pursuing his accusations so that she could offer counter-explanations. Instead, she played “Frozen.”

The dark electronic undertones, the Far Eastern strings, the hints of Middle Eastern percussion swept through the air, as if made for their refuge. He felt as if the lyrics became tailored to show him how she saw him, what she wished with him, for him. But that was as far as she communicated.

It was past midnight and he’d slammed on his brakes a dozen times so he wouldn’t reopen the subject. He could swear she felt him struggle, was serenely waiting for him to crack.

He didn’t. He finished tidying up and went to prepare the settee for another night in sleepless hell.

She stood at the verge of the corridor until he tossed her his best vacant glance. The enigmatic gleam in her eyes corkscrewed through his restraint. He continued working.

She didn’t move until he straightened, raised an eyebrow at her. What did this mistress of strategy and seduction want now?

She tucked her rainfall of gold-kissed strands behind one ear, before she gestured toward the bedroom. “Please reclaim your bed. I’ll be as comfortable on the settee with my size.”

“No. And before you breed any misconceptions, it isn’t an act of chivalry. I won’t let you quarantine me inside.”

“You don’t have to be quarantined. I’m…well-covered, and I’m a very sound sleeper.”

He could attest to that. She, damn her, slept deep and woke up fully charged. While his batteries weren’t just running low, they were reversing polarity.

He also wouldn’t be exposed to the sight of her as she slept even if she was in a sack from the neck down. And he wouldn’t sleep in his bed and feel her presence all around him again.

“No,” he said again, offering no more reasons, needing to end this endless day. “But I’ll take the bathroom first. Your activities there could be measured on a geological scale.”

He entered the bathroom to the sound of her chuckles, yet again cursing the absence of a door to slam and isolate himself.

He sought refuge in the shower cubicle. It offered none. He could swear he felt her thoughts, her desire trickling down his aching flesh like fondling hands and lips until his body reached critical mass. And it had nothing to do with long abstinence. Had it been any other woman, he wouldn’t have registered her presence. But Maram was setting aflame both his urges and his imagination.

He rested his forehead on the cool tiles, closed his eyes as the water pounded him, and silently sought relief.

Release came almost at once, another of the countless ones fueled by her image. More than ever, it made no difference to his aroused state. The expenditure of a measure of tension seemed to open floodgates to a hunger he’d never experienced, even on her account.

It had been one thing to fantasize about her while he avoided her, but another to surrender to the lust she’d stoked by coming closer to him than anyone had ever had.

Not that it mattered. As he always had, he would hold back.

By the fourth day, Amjad couldn’t hold back anymore.

Morning had started normally enough. If anything in their situation could be called “normal.” After lunch, he’d decided to clean, although between them, they’d kept the place spotless. He needed to do something physical. He’d already exercised, strenuously, which had only escalated his tension when she’d come to watch him, then joined him.

She’d joined him in cleaning, too, with her usual zeal, not questioning that the place didn’t need it. She’d initiated another debate as they finished the sitting area, and they were continuing it across the cabin, he from the bathroom, she from the kitchen.

Her voice carried over the storm’s hubbub and his racket. He now seemed to tune out anything not on her merry, modulated wavelengths.

“If all men, especially princely gods of finance, are doomed for avaricious, cold-blooded women with the wiles and witchcraft to land them, how do you explain your brothers?”

“You want to know how they came into existence?” he called back as he polished the mirror for the third time, trying to delay rejoining her. “Incidentally, they—and I of course—did spring forth from avaricious, cold-blooded women.”

He heard the clang of pots as she giggled. “Tut, tut. Is that any way to talk about your mother?”

“And my stepmother. Just stating facts. To check those, I’ll refer you to sources who can best back up my assessments.”

“Foremost among those sources would be your father, of course. But his testimony would be skewed in his favor and against theirs. I would have to hear more unbiased sources—and the women’s side—before sanctioning any ‘facts.’”

He rinsed and dried the sink again. “In my mother’s case, you need a séance, and a powerful witch to stop her from expelling your soul and commandeering your body. In my stepmother’s, you need a warding spell to keep her from ripping you open and feeding on your entrails.”

The beauty of her bwa-ha-ha lanced through him. He forced himself to rearrange his shaving kit again, glaring at himself in the mirror, trying to force the silly smile off his face.

When he was able to cloak himself in his usual venomous smirk, he walked back to the main area. He found her with her hair up in a high bun impaled with a pencil, tendrils escaping to rain over her flushed face, her sleeves and pants rolled up as she mopped the floor in her utilitarian desert-friendly sneakers. She could have been in five-inch stilettos, thong and push-up bra with the way the sight had hormones thundering through his system.

He ignored his stampeding senses, strolled into the kitchen, started brewing coffee. “According to new evidence your own mother is also a variant of virulent female lifeform.”

She chuckled and recorded her objection to his jaded evaluation by mopping extra hard around his feet. “My mother neither ripped out anyone’s soul nor fed on anyone’s entrails. When I add up my life, where the pros far outweigh the cons, I come out believing she did what she thought was best for me.”

He raised one foot after the other for her to mop beneath, giving her a pitying look. “I’ll believe you believe that Mother’s Day absolutionist crap when we ski on ice in this desert.”

She riddled his vision in the dazzle of her smile. “You still didn’t explain your brothers. Shaheen risked exile and dispossession and Harres defied customs and made many powerful new enemies to be with the women they loved. From all reports they would have happily sacrificed everything.”

He exhaled at the reminder. “Shaheen is a romantic dolt and Harres’s brain is irreversibly fried from a combination of gunshot injury, sunstroke and prolonged fearless-female exposure. We’ll see how they feel after the honeymoon period is over, and what their deified wives will turn into after a few years and kids.”

“You’re certain they’ll turn into succubi, too, huh?”

He nodded. “But even if my brothers deserve it for being such wishful idiots, I hope they don’t get what’s coming to them.”

She gave a semi-snort of delight. “Such an outpouring of oldest brotherly love.”

“I know. I’m a big softie.”

She raised twinkling-with-glee eyes from an imaginary tough spot. “What about Aliyah? With two kids already, she has broken the barrier of the enchanted honeymoon period. I’ve seen it for myself that she and Kamal are more deliriously in love than ever.”

He gave an exaggerated shudder. “Don’t remind me. Seeing Kamal of all men turn into this tail-wagging puppy around Aliyah gives me night sweats. It’s positively creepy.”

“And of course you can’t factor in that she makes him happy and fulfilled, and he finds no reason to turn on his suspicious, ruthless software around her.”

He brooded at her as she turned and her hair suddenly expelled the pencil holding it up. Its coil unraveled, its swish sweeping through his nerves, the settling silk seeming to brush against every one of them. And he had to admit it.

She’d won.

She’d resisted all his indirect attempts to make her broach the one subject he wanted her to tackle. Now the need to hear another story burned a hole in his gut.

He couldn’t hold back anymore, goaded her, directly. “Don’t you think bringing up those examples of matrimonial bliss is too transparent? If I could be, I’d be insulted you think such obvious tactics can aid you in your mission of acquiring me as a husband.”

She turned, eyes acknowledging his capitulation, her triumph.

For heart-pounding moments, he thought she’d ignore his blatant prodding.

Then she rested her chin on both hands on top of the mop, quirked her lips. “Out of the mildest curiosity, where did you get the idea that I want to marry you?”

He almost groaned in relief.

Thanking her inwardly for taking pity on him when her eyes told him he deserved none, he shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe from your constant pursuit ever since that accursed conference.”

She gave him a cheerful glance as she walked away to store the mop. “You got my interest all wrong. You can rest dry at night knowing that marrying you has never crossed my mind.”

“Aih. And your father will fly.”

A laugh trilled from her lips, even as her eyes all but smacked his derriere with that reproach that reminded him that, while she reveled in his caustic humor, it wasn’t fully appreciated when it splattered her father.

“But don’t take it personally,” she mock placated. “In your famous words, been there, done that. Marriage is anathema to me now, just as you consider it up there with contracting a new ‘virulent variant’ of the plague.”

When she didn’t seem about to add more, he handed her her mug of coffee, prodded again, “So you don’t want me as a husband?”

“Definitely and irrevocably not.” She sipped her coffee, gave that tiny, maddening moan of appreciation. Just when he thought she’d leave him hanging with no “story,” her gaze suddenly bathed him in something she’d never exposed him to. The full force of her solemnity. “But I want you.”

It felt like an endless moment before he could retrip the speech fuses blown by the intensity of her words. “As a sex partner?”

Her lashes fluttered down as if the description jarred her. They swept up again, revealing eyes simmering with so many meanings and emotions. “Among other things.”

“What other things? What else could I be to you? A trophy? A sponsor? A watchdog? A bouncer?”

Her lips twitched again. “You’d be superlative at all of the above, but nope, I have no need of any of those. Though if you have to have names for what I have in mind for you, I can come up with dozens, starting with sparring partner and passing by mental stimulator, vitality booster and stress reliever all the way to—” her gaze poured scalding desire down his body to the part she’d visually spanked minutes earlier “—lap dancer.”

He felt his bones vibrate with every role’s impact on his imagination, with the need to haul her off her feet and demonstrate each one’s duties to the full.

She suddenly switched back to seriousness. “I wasn’t bringing up matrimonial examples, but passionate connections that work, that provide the partners with what nothing else could. That those couples chose to put their connection within the socially acceptable frame of marriage is their business. We both tried marriage and know it doesn’t work. Not for us. But I believe we can and would work, in every way that pleases and suits us both. We’re both now in a situation where we can take whatever we want together, with no regard to the demands our culture and status once made on us that spoiled my life and almost ended yours.”

And for the first time he understood. What temptation meant.

It stood before him, made flesh and wit and intellect and desire, making its simple offer of everything, unstoppable and consuming for all its unconditional generosity.

And it shamed him. That even with his past and present convictions, he still considered risking annihilation by grabbing for this land mine.

Aching with the force it took not to, come what may, he said, “So what you have in mind is a no-strings, flagrant affair?”

She rolled down her sleeves, depriving him of her gaze. “If by no-strings you mean no present or future demands to turn it ‘official,’ then yes. If by flagrant you mean splashed publicly for the gossip machine and media to take apart, then no. What we have together is no one else’s business.”

“Clandestine, then.”

“Not that either. Just…private. As I believe any intimate relationship should remain.”

“So all you ever wanted was an affair?”

“I don’t appreciate the word affair either. I don’t have a name for what I want us to have. I want to be with you, be there for you, and vice versa, in every way. I want us to expand on what we’ve been sharing, to take our synergy to all areas of our lives, while being free to indulge in all forms of intimacy and passion without restraints of social interference or conformities.”

He gritted his teeth against the visions, beyond any heaven he’d ever heard of. “So you stand by your assertion that you never and would never want to marry me?”

She grinned at him. “Put a summer melon in your tummy.”

The colloquial expression, the ultimate form of “never worry on that account,” spoken as if unequivocally meant, spread the ink of disappointment through him again. Why, when she was offering him all that a man could dream of from a woman, minus the hassle of formalities and responsibilities, he couldn’t even begin to analyze. It made him madder at her, at himself.

It made him snarl, “Weird, when your father offered you to me in marriage, at any price. Not once, but repeatedly. Before he gave up on me and went after Haidar.”

Maram gaped at Amjad.

His beauty smoldered, as if his resident demon had been roused to full manifestation, his words falling on her like a one-two combo to the head and gut.

Before she let the blows register, she slowed everything down. This was Amjad. The ultimate intimacy-phobe. She’d just told him she wanted all of him in ultimate intimacies. She should expect his struggle against her, against his own need, which she no longer doubted, to become vicious.

Problem was, Amjad was feared for being agonizingly truthful. All his harsh statements were based on fact. Even his view of her as a life-leeching entity was backed up by the general public’s view of her, an image she’d never contested. It had kept at bay those who’d wanted her as a trophy or a sponsor, as he’d said.

Did she scare him so much that he was using falsehoods to push her away, to keep himself from reaching for her?

“We’re still in the land of you-have-to-have-the-last-word, right?” The smile that was her natural state around him wobbled. “I didn’t think you’d resort to fabrications to get it.”

The fierceness setting his beauty ablaze spiked. “I didn’t think you’d resort to denial when you’re caught fabricating.”

“I never resort to untruths in personal relationships. And I never hid what I thought or felt from you.”

His body tightened as if in preparation for attack, his emerald eyes radiating the intent. “So that’s your new story? That your father did it without your knowledge?”

“Okay. Time-out.” She made the gesture, foreboding invading her heart. “You’re still practicing your favorite sport of taking my father’s character and actions apart, right?”

“No.”

The word fell on her like a giant hammer. That, and what she considered her first sighting of true contempt in his eyes.

Air congealed in her lungs, beats in her heart.

He was telling the truth!

She’d thought she’d been working against his general wariness and cynicism. But this was a specific blow to Amjad’s ability to believe in her. It did look plausible that she was in on her father’s machinations.

“When did he do that?” She heard her uneven question.

“As if you don’t know.” He sounded as scary as a predator growling in aggravation.

“I don’t.”

His gaze flayed her with disbelief. She held her ground with sincerity.

He blinked first, exhaled in disgust. “Let’s play this game as if you don’t, then. His first approach was after he foisted you on me at that conference.”

“Can we stick to facts, please? Without dramatic license? He introduced us.”

Amjad’s lips twisted at her admonition. “Aih. Then, after I got a dose of you, he offered you to me. I thought he’d gone out of his nonexistent mind, being the only father to offer his daughter at the altar of my madness. After I walked away, thinking it wasn’t worth the oxygen it would take to slam his offer with the ridicule it deserved, you hunted me down and worked me over. And I realized your father wasn’t so insight-free. He knew exactly what a weapon of mass destruction he wielded in you.”

Her heart fluttered at the scorn that transmitted his loath confession of her equal effect on him. “Nice to know I got to you as much as you got to me.”

He didn’t contest her statement, his eyes eloquent with a more ferocious admission. “I went back to him, told him to keep you away from me, if he knew what was good for both of you. But he gambled on your power to the point that he defied my warning, shoved you under my nose at every opportunity. Every so often, he dared renew his offer, each time adding more incentives to…sweeten the deal.”

“Incentives?” she echoed, her voice as hollow as the heart draining further of blood.

His laugh felt like acid against her nerves. “At least what he thought were incentives. Two hundred acres with a mile of beachfront in Ossaylan for my latest development project. Thirty percent stock in your national cell-phone company. Controlling shares of the emirate’s opera house. His latest offer was adding forty of his most-prized thoroughbreds to your…package.”

She’d already believed him. But knowing the specifics…

His eyes narrowed on her face, which had to be bloodless with the shock expanding inside her. “But come to think of it, the offer was so…lame, it doesn’t suit a mind of your caliber. It smacks of a juvenile, fatally misinformed one at Yusuf’s level.”

She wiped a hand across blurry eyes. “So you think I wasn’t involved only because I would have made an unerringly irresistible offer? You take damning by faint praise to new levels, Amjad.”

“I’m just observing, from what I now know about you, that you wouldn’t have been so…banal. So, I’m revising my long-held belief. You had nothing to do with his offers.” Before relief could register, he went on. “But the last time I chewed him out, I must have scared him so much that he stopped offering. Just as I thought that it was over, he transferred his sights to Haidar.”

Before she could cry out in disbelief, Amjad’s eyebrows snapped together as a new suspicion ignited his eyes. “But maybe this is his new plan. He realized that not even you could change my stance on marriage, so he sent you to secure me as a lover, then obtain Haidar as a husband, collecting the power we pack, clandestine and official, in both your hands.”

Her jaw dropped. “Tell me that now you’re being extra obnoxious.”

He shrugged. “Yusuf is going all out to turn himself from a minor prince into a major king. He has…other venues planned, but even if those work, I—and Haidar—would be bigger assets to him than any throne as long as you were in control.”

She let out a ragged exhalation. “Are you done? Can I have my say now?”

He gestured for her to go ahead, parked his lean hips against the countertop, crossed his endless legs at the ankles, his eyes telling her she’d have to make this exceptional. And it probably wouldn’t make a difference anyway.

She inhaled. “Father never hinted about approaching you with me as a bargaining chip in another bid for more power…oh, God!” Her knees buckled as the extent of her father’s manipulations hit her.

Amjad closed the distance between them urgently, reached out a supporting hand to her elbow. She raised her eyes, afraid to meet his. But it wasn’t contempt seething there, but what looked like solicitude.

Her throat closed tighter. “I can now see how he’s been manipulating things to push us together. I did seek out any way to be with you, but I now realize that when I succeeded, it was his doing. I am guilty of not questioning it, though. This time, although he didn’t look like he was in danger of a relapse, I didn’t even wonder why he said he was. I just grabbed the chance to be with you again.”

She closed her eyes as all the times her father had looked her in the eye and plotted behind her back spooled through her mind.

She opened her eyes. “But even though I want to strangle him for interfering in my life and peddling me to you this way…I can’t feel really betrayed. I think I understand why he did what he did. He must have sensed our compatibility, was in his own misguided way trying to secure for me the only man he thought would suit me.”

Green-cold ice formed in Amjad’s eyes, almost giving her frostbite. “Sure. And now he has another ‘only man’ for you, and no doubt, a long list of ‘only men’ as backup.”

She shook her head. “You must be wrong about Haidar. I never made it a secret that I didn’t see anyone but you. And even if he gave up on you, he knows neither Haidar nor I would ever think of each other as anything more than best buddies. Unless…” The suspicion suddenly provided a new terrible possibility. “Unless he was only pretending to target Haidar. He might believe all you need to overcome your aversion to commitment is the idea of losing me to your own brother. And if that is his plan, then he’s a total snake and someone I don’t know at all!”

As she talked, the coldness in Amjad’s eyes had been evaporating under a blast of…realization? Of temptation?

He finally shook his head. “You confound the devil on a regular basis, don’t you? Too bad I’m a bit more discerning than the old boy.”

She smiled shakily, the need to smooth back the silky hair his headshake had spilled to his slashed cheekbones becoming a pain in her gut. “I used to think you had discernment sandblasted out of your gorgeous head where I am concerned. But now that I know your paranoia was cultivated by my father’s loving help, I fully excuse you.”

“I so appreciate your sanctioning my well-founded paranoia.”

Her heart fired at his savage mockery. She suddenly realized it could mean she might have never had a chance with him.

She swallowed the emotion rising in her throat. “I believed you recognized me as I recognized you from the start, knew we’d share these…flowing channels of communication and appreciation—if you let us. I thought it was only a matter of time until you did. I would have kept trying forever if I thought you one day would. But if you never will, I need to know, Amjad. If you think I don’t feel exactly as I say I do, if you have the least suspicion still, I won’t come near you until this situation is over. Afterward, you’ll never see or hear from me again. It’s now all up to you.”

His eyes went supernova.

Before her heart could explode in answer, he stalked out of sight toward the door. She gaped as she heard him yank it open. Seconds later, it slammed behind him.

He—he’d gone out in the sandstorm. Without protection!

Six

Amjad might be mad and bad, but he was anything but a fool.

He had to come right back. He would.

He didn’t.

Interminable minutes passed as she waited for him to burst back in, before she rushed to the window a few feet from the door. She could see nothing but the now rust-colored limbo that seemed to have replaced the world outside.

She stood trembling, her mind burning circuits as reason braked the hurtling of fright.

He had to have made a dash for Dahabeyah’s stable. It had to be near. Even so, without the goggles and face coverings, he must have inhaled and been blasted with enough sand that he’d feel sorry for his rash action for days.

He’d known that, yet had risked it to get away from her.

She understood. He must be reeling as much as she was from the revelations. But she had it easy. She’d already come to terms with her father’s manipulations. But Amjad had been secure in thinking her an accomplice in the biddings that had so revolted him and fanned the ready flames of suspicion about people’s motives toward him. She was surprised his contempt hadn’t been more lethal, if her father had made him think he—and she—would substitute Haidar for him.

In retrospect, knowing that the tainting effect of her father’s interference had been in full force all along made what they’d shared mean that much more. For they had connected, had come close. Closer than her wildest dreams. Even with his attempting to keep her—and himself—at bay. He’d slipped so many times into ease with her, into showing the man beneath the cold camouflage. She didn’t just admire and desire him; she could also talk to him, laugh with him, say anything to him and have him understand. He got her. And she got him. But would she really get him?

She was no longer confident she would.

And that might be her fault.

Before he could process her “version of the truth,” deal with how it radically changed his long-held beliefs of her, she’d pushed for him to decide if he would or would never trust her.

No wonder he’d walked away.

If he believed her, he would have no more reason to fight their desire for each other. And while that was what she most coveted, to Amjad, it was what he most feared.

Her blood ran cold at the thought that he’d come back, announce that he didn’t believe her and hold her to her promise.

She cursed herself for making it. What had she been thinking, asking for his total trust or else? It was too soon. She had to think of some way out of this without looking like some wheedling grandstander whose word endured for as long as it took to exit her mouth. And she had to think fast, before he came back.

But he didn’t.

Every minute he was gone wound her up tighter. She tried to stay busy and stop obsessing as an hour passed. He had been gone longer than that in Dahabeyah’s stable before. Then another hour passed, still in the range of the acceptable, if he was giving the horse a full grooming. Or was sulking. But waiting for him in the safety and comfort of this cabin was far worse than when she’d been out there being buffeted by nature’s punishment. She hadn’t been scared then. She’d been with him. Now fear suffocated her. For him.

Suddenly, nothing sufficed to explain his absence. Images of him, lying out there, injured, being buried by the sand, reached inside her and ripped her heart out.

She flew to the first aid kit, grabbed their goggles, put hers on and tore out of the cabin.

The storm tore back at her, almost knocked her down. Her face and neck felt bombarded by millions of pins. The only thing keeping her from being blown off her feet was their sinking in the deep sand that had accumulated from the storm. The only reason the cabin hadn’t been buried was because it was on top of a cliff dune. Even so, the steps she’d seen Amjad climb on their arrival had been obliterated.

She didn’t know where to go except in the direction she’d previously seen him heading on his way to the stable before he’d disappeared in zero visibility.

She could barely see two feet ahead, had already lost sight of the cabin. Her nostrils and lungs began to blister. She took off her shirt and wrapped it around her face. She could look for him while being flayed, as long as she could breathe.

After what felt like forever in a fast-forwarding stream of pain, she found the stable, stumbled inside. She wrestled with the pummeling winds to close the door behind her. The moment she did, she tore the goggles and shirt off her face, staggered around looking for him. Dahabeyah started kicking and whinnying as she burst into her stall, the last place she could search.

He wasn’t there!

He was out there, probably unconscious and injured. He might already be…be…

Dread and desperation burst out of her as she ran out of the stable. “Amjad!”

The merciless maelstrom dissipated her screams. She screamed more and more, begging for him to hear, to have enough strength to shout back, for her to hear him, to find him…

“B’haggej’ jaheem! What in hell’s name are you doing here?”

Amjad.

His voice. Drowning out the tumult of wind-propelled agony.

He was safe. Safe.

His presence electrified her, enclosed her, vacuumed away all else. Everything fell away as her legs disappeared from beneath her.

It didn’t matter. She was in his arms. And he was in hers. Nothing would ever matter to her but that.

Then he was carrying her over their cabin’s threshold again. She had no idea how he found the way back.

Inside, he put her back on feet that no longer felt like hers and zoomed away. She shakily took off her goggles, blinked after him, eyes watering. He streaked back carrying a water-filled plastic basin and towels, went to the kitchen and collected containers and bottles. He put his burden down on the coffee table, glowered up and down her nearly exposed half, his skin taut and glistening with inflammation over his masterpiece bone structure.

“And again I ask,” he growled, his voice hoarse, “what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Déjà vu much?” she croaked, lips trembling on reminiscence.

He’d asked her the same thing long ago, a few months after she’d come back to the region. At the now-infamous conference he’d been sponsoring. During the opening reception, a bomb scare had exploded.

As everyone stampeded out, a man had overturned a table on her and almost trampled her.

She’d struggled to push the table off her, panicking, for Amjad as much as herself. Then, as if her worry had summoned him, he’d materialized over her, hauled the table off her as if it were made of cardboard, swept her up in his arms and to the nearest exit, shouted for her to run as far away from the building as possible. Then he’d turned back.

After a flabbergasted moment, she’d catapulted after him, tried to drag him back.

He’d ordered her away, just as he had his guards, assuring them he wouldn’t hold it against them if they ran for their lives. Then, in total disregard for his own safety, he’d gone back to help those who’d been trampled. Needless to say, none of his guards had left. To his fury, neither had she. She’d worked with him until everyone had been evacuated and Zohayd’s elite bomb squad arrived.

The bomb had been a hoax. But the damage the panic had caused had been real. As real as his anger after he’d dragged her to be examined by his physicians before taking her to his offices and blasting her.

He’d made the same delicious sight he did now, majestic in his wrath. She’d believed that while he’d risked his life for others on principle, his concern for her had been personal. His aggression, like it was now, had been relived fright laced with what-if scenarios he found insupportable.

She’d soothed him, asked why he found it strange she’d do what he had for her and for others?

For a magical moment, she’d felt her sincerity tearing down some barrier inside him, about to let her in.

Then the moment had been lost.

She’d never hated the sound of anything more than his phone’s imperative one-note ring, which had called him away to deal with the incident’s repercussions.

To her dismay, she’d found his barricades in place the next time they’d met, and she’d never been able to resurrect that sublime moment of closeness again. Until now.

Not that he looked close to her right now. He looked incensed.

“Very funny, Maram,” he hissed. “Last time you were playing the hero to impress me. What was it this time? You couldn’t wait to have the answer to your ultimatum?”

Suddenly anger injected her bloodstream with a dose of resentment over the echoes of fright and despair.

She glared up at him. “I thought you were at best lying in Dahabeyah’s stall facedown, after she kicked you senseless. As you deserved to be for scaring me this way.”

“Scaring you how? Did you think I left you behind? Is that why you rushed out without protection?”

“It would never cross my mind that you’d leave me behind. You didn’t leave me behind when you thought a bomb could detonate and blow you apart, or bring the whole building down on you.” The fury and exasperation in his eyes wavered, just like it had that time years ago. “Just like I wouldn’t leave you to your fate even if it was one you so stubbornly and recklessly chose. But once I was convinced you were out there injured, maybe critically, every second counted. I couldn’t barricade myself in cloth that would have slowed me down or crippled me when I found you.”

She could feel him resisting, even when logic and the evidence of experience corroborated her words.

He still sounded nothing like his ridiculing self when he finally said, “Aih, of course. It was all for me.”

“So what are you proposing? That I was afraid for you only because I need you to survive? Hate to break it to you, but I don’t. If you were injured or…worse—” she swallowed the pain that choked her even from imagining it “—I’d still be safe in here for months if need be. After the sandstorm was over, a self-serving person would look for you only to get your phone and GPS and get help for herself.”

“Flaunting self-preservation could be on account of unreasonable, self-defeating fear for one’s own…”

He stopped. Distress the likes of which she’d never thought to see in his eyes seethed there, as if it was far more hazardous for him to believe her than to risk nature’s wrath or a bomb’s explosion.

She reached out with everything inside her, gentling his worry, transmitting her certainty.

Belief in him provided her with safety and stability, warded off the world’s betrayals and dangers. Belief in her would be his haven, as he was hers.

He snatched his gaze away seconds before his eyes admitted his capitulation. She almost whimpered from the fracture of the psychic and emotional meld.

His eyes were back to blazing concern as he took in the evidence of her ordeal, before his gaze seemed to snag on her right hand.

Her hand was white-knuckled, still gripping the handle of the first aid kit. She no longer felt like she was holding it.

He groaned as if in pain as he extricated the kit from her spastic fingers, led her to the settee, his hands gentle and unsteady as he pushed her down. He knelt in front of her, so tall that his eyes were level with hers.

His eyes flared and subsided as his gaze swept down her face and body, his own seeming to curve as if he would contain her. For a moment she thought he’d place his parted lips to her aching flesh. She silently begged him to make that connection, to show her he felt as shaken by her peril as she’d been at his.

He seemed to resist their needs with an effort that had him sweating. Before she could lean in and sweep the moisture from his forehead, lick it from his upper lip, he began washing her.

She moaned as her nerve endings welcomed the towel’s softness, the water’s coolness, soaked up his caring.

He suddenly hissed, “B’Ellahi, you were scraped raw, and that was the best-case scenario. If I hadn’t heard you, you could have been roaming the desert, waiting for the storm to finish you.”

And like his distress had been real, so was the anguish in his voice, emanating from his every pore. She couldn’t bear it, had to defuse it. Only one thing would make him forget anything.

Her lips quirked. “What else could I have done when you flounced out to mope in a lethal sandstorm, without any protection, too, I might add, and didn’t seem to be coming back?”

He grimaced as he mixed the containers’ contents, added oils that smelled of almond and lime, whipped it all into a homogenous cream. Then he started to paint her skin with it, massaging downward from her face with feather-light strokes.

She almost cried out. Not because it hurt. Because it impaled her to the heart to have his flesh on hers without barriers, to feel his solicitude seeping into her.

She moaned instead as the cool, floral/citrus-scented mixture soothed relief into her pores. She could swear it healed her skin on the spot. She spread her arms, arched, offering him full access, helping him apply that magical balm.

He was spreading it down her back, and she’d long disintegrated, when he rumbled, “I wasn’t moping. I was coming back when you went on your rescue mission. And even if I hadn’t, you shouldn’t have worried because I certainly am not suicidal.”

“Accidents—” she mumbled around the coal of longing burning in her throat “—especially in these conditions…happen.”

“I wouldn’t be so remiss that I’d have an accident and leave you here alone.” His voice cascaded down her back, spreading a different and far more distressing fire. “Not even if I was certain that you’d simply pick useful articles off my useless carcass afterward.”

His attempt at teasing broke her. She jabbed an elbow back into his steel gut in punishment for the macabre visual, turned to him, cupped his face with one hand, the other scooping up more of his balm. The hands on her froze, dropped to his sides as she started painting his skin with the healing mixture, tracing every line of power, every slash of beauty and jut of distinction that constituted his incomparable face.

She moaned and sighed with every sweep of tactile nirvana. To be touching him, to have him surrendering to her touch, was far more poignant than she’d even imagined. And how she’d imagined.

She’d feared she’d lost him. First a chance with him, then him for real. But she hadn’t. And she had to embrace everything about him, capture every breath, savor every nuance.

“Amjad…”

She closed her eyes on a ragged moan, pressed her face to his neck, inhaled his intoxicating scent. For a long, long moment, he remained as unmoving as a stone statue. Then something fierce and razing emanated from him, shuddering through her every bone.

She raised her face, her lids heavy with need as she trembled up the last inch separating their faces.

His eyes remained cast down as she brushed her cheek against his, before her lips mimicked the poignant motion against his own.

He didn’t turn into her caress, didn’t complete it. But it was enough for now that he let her revel in him.

But soon, she needed one more thing.

She whispered her plea for it against his closed eyes. “Tell me, Amjad. Tell me you believe me.”

He didn’t tell her.

After a heart-hammering moment when she thought he would, he rose, sweeping her up in his arms. She clung to his neck, hope spurting inside her as he took her to the bedroom. But he only placed her on the nine-by-nine-foot mattress as if he was afraid her skin would peel. Then, without looking back at her, he strode out.

She heard him clanging around in the kitchen as distressingly delicious aromas wafted to her churning stomach.

Just as she almost joined him, he came in with a bed tray, placed it across her, instructing her to clean her plate. She just looked at him. He exhaled, went out, came back with his own tray, sat at the end of the bed and attacked his meal. She didn’t know how she got her throat to work through the chokehold of his brooding.

After clearing their dinner away, he prepared her a bath laced with another healing preparation. She thought she’d boil its water with her frustration as she sensed him pacing outside like a caged tiger. He called out every few minutes to make sure she was still awake. As if she’d ever sleep again.

She hadn’t. She lay in bed four hours later, obsessively listening for any movement outside, watching seconds accumulating on the bedside digital clock…

“Tell me, Maram.”

She jerked up, for a second feeling self-conscious. She’d long pushed the sheets away, was down to her bra and panties. There was no hiding in the cloak of darkness either. The room was suffused in the fiery light of the corridor’s oil lamps.

Every worry evaporated when she saw him at the room’s opening, half his juggernaut’s body cast in caresses of illumination, the other plunged into arcane shadow. He wore only his pants.

She’d only ever gotten glimpses of his body beneath clothes. A couple of buttons undone to afford her a stretch of polished bronze vitality. A rolled-up sleeve to tantalize her with the same in cabled sinew and muscles.

Nothing could have prepared her for his unbridled reality. And she literally didn’t know the half of it yet.

Besides a face that would make gods weep with envy, the ancient birthright encoded in its every line, his semi-exposed body made it seem that he’d stepped out of a Middle Eastern fable, an entity of infinite magic. His proportions were…poetic, combining strength with grace, size with agility, endless potential for destruction and protection. He was encased in the flawlessness of burnished coppery velvet adorned by perfect patterns of virile silk. Every bulge and slope of muscle sculpted his shoulders and chest and abdomen from distilled maleness.

Then came the impact of his stance.

He stood as if at the mouth of a cave where unknown but certain danger awaited, legs braced apart, face lowered, chest expanded, fists clenched at thighs bulging with tension.

Her lips and limbs tingled. Her hands and insides itched. Her eyes and mouth watered. Everything else melted.

And he’d asked her to tell him.

Tell him what? How far out of her mind she was for him? If she’d wait forever until he relented, let her in?

He made his question specific. “How are you not afraid?”

Of what? Loving? Him? Loving him?

Whatever the question, the answer was the same. “I’m so the opposite of afraid.”

“You did demonstrate how…idiotically fearless you are. In every sense of the word. But you should fear me.”

Her heart quivered to a standstill.

This was the moment she’d waited and worked for since she’d laid eyes on him. The full disclosure, the terms’ vetting and setting. The final negotiation. Before he surrendered. Before he let her give him herself. Let her have him.

She rose to her knees, trembling so hard that her teeth almost clattered. “I would fear anything and anyone but you.”

“How did you come by this certainty?”

His bass rasp shivered down each quailing nerve. She had to be very, very careful. The wild, wounded tiger was giving her one chance to reach out and pet him. If she got it right, he’d let her do more. He’d be hers for life. She knew it.

But if she didn’t get it right…

She would. At any price.

“Do you have—” she was going to say the rest of your life, but decided to change it to “—a few years? I’ll tell you, show you one way how I did, each day.”

“What if I told you I don’t deserve your trust?”

Her lips trembled on a smile at the ferocity of his last struggle. “Don’t bother. You have it. So if you think you don’t deserve it, how about doing all you can from now on so that you do?”

The wings of his eyebrows snapped lower, his lashes descending to hide those incandescent eyes that seemed to sear the air surrounding them with emerald fire.

It was seconds before he raised his gaze, leveled it on her as if he’d reached a decision. Then he moved. Even though he did with the imperceptible approach of a predator, her heart slammed against her ribs as if he’d already pounced.

Not that she was worried. All she wanted was to throw herself down, arrange herself in the most convenient pose for him to devour properly.

He stalked closer, menace radiating off him. “You should at least be…very worried that you’re going to unleash an unknown force that has been lying dormant.”

She blinked. “You…you mean you haven’t had a…woman in a long time?”

“No, that’s not what I meant.”

Disappointment zigzagged through her. Seemed she’d hoped that he…hadn’t. Not since he’d seen her. Which was ridiculous. Though, not really. She hadn’t looked at another man since she’d seen him. But then, he hadn’t shared her conviction that they belonged together. But still… She bit down on the stupid ache.

He went on. “But that’s right, too. I haven’t. In a very long time. When news of that was added to the pre-pregnant state of my ex-monstress, rumors arose that I’d joined…another team.”

A laugh exploded out of her. “No way. Anyone within a square mile of you would know which team you play for. When you play.”

“When the ‘when’ became never, and no evidence to my…defection was unearthed, it was suggested that I’ve left our species’ mating realm behind altogether. Which I have.” Suddenly his grim lips twisted in mockery. “But I hear it’s like riding a bike.”

Everything inside her stopped. To take in the enormity of what he was confessing so offhandedly. She expected him to laugh and say, “Gotcha.” Or something. He didn’t, just resumed pouring the soul-baring intensity of his gaze over her.

She spluttered. “You’re not joking!” He shook his head. “Just…uh…how long has it been?”

Please, please, say, “Since I saw you.”

He only watched her as if he was trying to read her mind. When she felt she’d burst with anticipation, he shrugged. “How long do you think?”

She suddenly knew. “You—you mean you haven’t since…since…”

One eyebrow rose in wicked prodding. “Go on, you can say it.”

And she whispered what felt like the most painful three words of her life. “Since your w-wife?”

He made a sound of derision. “You’re chronologically right. But wrong about the ‘wife’ part. I didn’t have a wife. I had a disastrous political pact gone murderous. A booby trap. So I hope you’re not going all soap opera on me and thinking I haven’t had a woman since then because of a fatally wounded heart.”

While that made her want to whoop for joy, knowing that he hadn’t suffered the cruelty of someone he’d trusted with his heart, that made his abstinence even more…momentous.

For a man as overwhelmingly sexual to swear off women, on principle, was an even bigger hurdle for her to overcome than a specific connection gone terribly wrong.

On the other hand, knowing that he hadn’t been in love before was huge. Incredible. Unbelievable.

She shook her head dazedly. “Wow. Just…wow.”

He huffed, irony dripping from the sound, from his stare. “Seems I should have come clean from the start. Who knew that was all I needed to…discourage you? Finding out about my defunct sexual status brought you to your senses, didn’t it?”

She gaped at him. And gaped some more. Then she burst out laughing with elation so fierce that her insides ached.

She could almost see the thunderclouds her reaction generated above his head. Before lightning struck her, she rushed to explain her delirious bout. “It actually incinerated them right off.”

She slipped off the bed, feeling she was barely touching the floor as she slinked toward him. She’d always wanted it all, of him, with him. But not in her most far-fetched fantasies had she dared formulate anything that came close to this.

Who knew, indeed? That she’d be the one this…god would unleash all his desires on. It made her feel lucky beyond reason. It made her feel invincible, unstoppable, a goddess of feminine hunger and seduction.

She stopped before him, her gaze sweeping him from his perfect feet to his awesome head, as if with a leisurely lick. Her senses rioted, as if she’d already tasted each part of him, savored all his delights.

Then she finally, finally reached for him.

Her hands slipped around his steel-fleshed waist, spread low on his muscle-corded back, pulled him against her burning flesh.

At the long-coveted contact, she shuddered, looked up into his storming eyes and gasped, “Thanks for saving it up. I’ll now take all you’ve got.”

Seven

Amjad unlocked Maram’s hands from his flesh, pushed away from her embrace.

Before she could protest, he started circling her, like a predator trying to decide where he’d first sink his fangs into the prey begging him to take her down. His eyes burned around her, until she felt flames encompassing her down to her toes.

Then he stopped. Towered over her, from behind. She felt his body compressing the air at her back as he leaned, bringing his force and virility bearing down on her, until she moaned with needing it to be his full weight and greed.

Then his lips were at her ear. She wanted him to close the moist heat of his mouth on it, drive her further out of her mind. He only feathered it as he opened his lips, the phantom contact thundering through her in shockwaves of response.

She felt as if he’d turned into a huge magnet, had her pressing back against him without volition. He only let her get an impression of heat and hardness before he receded, left her with the pounding of her heart, of her core, shaking her. He leaned and let out a slow gust of scorching breath in her ear. It stormed through her, more devastating than the sandstorm.

“If you want all I got, you got it.”

Stimulation ripped through her, spilled from her lips on a sharp cry as she swung around.

Before she could drag him down for that kiss she’d been starving for, her tormentor’s hands on her shoulders aborted her surge.

“On one condition.”

The rumbled qualification corkscrewed through her with danger and dark promise. She panted for it all. “Anything.”

His hands tightened, his voice hitting its deepest recesses, his eyes almost scary in warning and intent. “Again with the carte blanche to conditions you haven’t heard.”

She squirmed, trying to break his ban on making him an unconditional offering of herself. “And again I say, anything for you.” When he didn’t relent, she stopped, exhaled. “State your condition. And hurry.”

Lethal appreciation of her imperative pleading spread on his lips. Hers stung, needing his beneath them. “Tell me exactly how you want…all I got.”

She shivered. “I already told you.”

“You told me a bunch of sentimental euphemisms. I want specifics.”

He wanted certainty. Hers before his.

She placed trembling hands on top of his, pledged it. “I want every inch of you. Against me, around me, inside me. I want every freedom with you, every intimacy. I want us to share whatever would drive us both beyond anything we knew about ourselves and our limits. I want your tenderness and impatience and ferocity. I want the full range and power of your moods and passion and possession. I will revel in it all, as I’ve reveled in every second I’ve ever spent with you.”

His hands clamped her shoulders tighter with each word. They finally clenched, as did his eyes, squeezing her flesh and insides in a vise that accelerated her melting.

The moment she thought he’d haul her against him, he pushed away. She gaped after him as he strode around the bed, put its width between them, leaned a knee on it.

Then, moving in deliberate slowness, as if to underline the seriousness of the action, he drew an imaginary line, bisecting the bed lengthwise, as if he was cutting through reality.

“Cross this line, and there will be no turning back. I give you all I got. And I take all you got. Make no mistake about that ‘all’ part. Every way I want it.”

Imaginings piled on so hard, so hot, they cut off coherence. It flickered back on a wavering whisper. “Trying to scare me?”

He planted both fists on the bed, leaned almost across his line, the vastness of his hunger deluging her. “If it’s working, then you’d better walk away now, before it’s too late.”

She managed a huff and a smirk. “You have it backward. You’re Prince Walks Away.”

He straightened from his crouch. “I’ll be Prince Devours Away if you don’t.” He slid a palm down the chiseled planes of his chest and abdomen, stopping at his low, low pants’ waist, as if demonstrating the extent of what she’d get if she didn’t, his eyes seething with sensual menace. “So what will it be?”

She leaned one knee on the bed before she collapsed in a puddle of longing. “Are we talking…kinky stuff?”

He echoed her movement. “And if we are?”

Her other knee followed, struggling not to fly across the bed and tackle him down on it. “Which part of ‘I trust you’ didn’t you get?”

He again mirrored her action. “And which part of ‘maybe I’m not to be trusted’ didn’t you?”

She braced a palm on the cotton sheet that felt like sandpaper against her sizzling skin. “Here’s the thing. I trusted you with my life, twice. I’m here at your mercy if you so choose, and you made me feel safer than I’ve ever been. Distrusting you becomes impossible, don’t you think? I risked my life for you twice, too. You think anything else compares? So whatever you believe you lack to be eligible for my trust, I know you’ll do whatever it takes to deserve it. Even if you turn out to be the King of Kink and not just the Prince of Snarkiness, I know you’ll make me love it.”

His gaze relinquished hers to lower to the sheet his fingers had bunched up as if it was her hair, her flesh. “You know so many things I know nothing about.” He raised his gaze again, slammed it into hers. “I don’t have the slightest idea what I’ll become the moment I touch you, and worse, the moment you touch me.”

She put her other palm on the sheets before the force of his carnal threat knocked her off balance. She began prowling on the bed, toward his line. “How about telling me what you do know? How you want me? Specifics only, please.”

He let her advance, receding farther. “Sure you can handle those?” She nodded, spilling her hair around her breasts. Those eyes flared, before they glazed over with what looked like aching remembrance. “Since you first trained those reason-destroying eyes on me and had those will-depleting lips spilling witchcraft into my system, Princess Haram, you commandeered every second I used to have for self-generated thoughts, consumed my once-restful nights with exhausting fantasies of you. I understood just how dangerous you were when you forced me to turn to…self-help outlets in your honor. When that only made things worse, when every exposure to you aggravated my condition, you rose to the top of my keep-at-bay-at-any-price list. I would have kept my distance, suffered in resigned sarcasm. But you wouldn’t let me.” He leaned on both hands again, gearing to be unleashed. “So if you give me yourself now, I’ll first take four years of torment out on every inch of your mind-annihilating body. Then I’ll gorge on every spark of your magnificent being.”

She was shaking from head to toe now. With the effort it took her not to charge at him, sink her teeth into his flesh wherever they landed. “And I was…what? Speaking a language you didn’t understand? I told you that’s exactly what I want.”

“Aih, but you left out one thing. A time frame. ’Cause here’s the thing. Once I start, I won’t be appeased.”

This…this was far beyond anything she’d dared wish for.

He was telling her, in his own inimitable way, that he was taking her up on her offer of everything and raising her an open end. Maybe even their own brand of forever.

She trembled forward, a foot from his line now, from everything to make life worth living, from a future he’d always be the major part of. Amjad. The one made for her and she for him.

“Were you there the past four years?” she choked out with the enormity of it all. “And I won’t stop either. I very clearly can’t.”

“No matter what happens? You won’t change your mind?”

“If nothing changed it by now, nothing ever will.”

His palm rose, stopping her before she made that final move across his line. “The words, Maram. Give them to me.”

His bass rasp, laden with a vulnerability, with a need she’d never dreamed he’d bare to her, made her almost weep.

She swallowed the tears, crossed his line, slipped her hands around the chest heaving almost as agitatedly as hers. “If you don’t…if you don’t want me to, I will never change my mind.”

He looked down into eyes she knew were red and filled with tears, and his own darkened with accepting her pledge. She felt everything decelerate, even the storm outside, like a slow-motion sequence from a movie accompanied by frantic heartbeats and labored breathing to emphasize the gravity of the moments.

What he did next almost burst her heart.

His hands closed around her rib cage, raised her until her knees left the bed, until her legs dragged on it. He held her in his power, looking up at her as if she was the most incredible thing he’d ever laid eyes on.

Then he lowered her, buried his face in her bosom. For long moments, he burrowed into her, until she felt as if he’d traversed the physical limits of her body, melded with her, until she felt as if his lips were kissing her heart.

When she thought she would explode for real, he slid her down his body, every curve slotting into his angles until her lips glided over his face to his.

“Maram…” He breathed inside her. The heat and hunger he made of her name made her cry out.

She shuddered harder, her lips trembling over his. “Yes, Amjad, yes…”

He bit into her lower lip with enough force to still it, to show her the power of his craving. His long, deep groan filled her as he applied more pressure until she whimpered, collapsed to her back, the hands clenching around his neck taking him over her.

His chest barely touched her breasts as he loomed over her, plucking at her lips in a maddening tasting too voracious to assuage. She pulled at him harder, crushed her lips to his, her breasts to his chest. His rough rider’s hand slid a path of nerve-combusting abrasion from her waist to one thigh, hooking beneath her knee, bringing it over his hip. Then he ground his hardness against her readiness through the chafing restriction of their clothes. She arched up into him, clamped her leg tighter around him, a carte blanche for anything he wanted to do to her.

Her undulations became quakes as he began suckling her lips, drawing each into his mouth in long, smooth pulls between groans of her name, drawing more plumpness into her flesh, more molten agony from her core. Her whimpers became incessant.

“Please, Amjad, please…”

He stabbed his fingers into her hair at the nape of her neck, secured her head, relinquished her lips to spread his promise against her cheeks, her eyelids, her jaw. “I will…please you until you can take no more, until you can never have enough. I’ve craved you for so long, Maram…too long.”

Then he swooped down, took her lips with the wrenching power she craved. She opened for him, encouraging him to take more, plunge deeper. And he did, thrust inside her welcoming heat, tongue and ferocity, filled her, overwhelmed her.

Her senses rioted at the taste of him, even better than his scent and feel combined. She needed more, more, tried to hurry him, have it. He obeyed, his tongue invading her, dueling with hers, drinking deeper of her essence. Her senses rode rapids of delight as he gave her and took her and finished her, his growls detailing his enjoyment of her, of her frenzy.

Then he tore his lips from hers.

Before she could cry out with loss, he turned her over on her stomach, straddled her hips. She gasped at the thrill of his domination, turned her face to look back and meet his eyes.

The smile crinkling them was feral as he snapped open her bra, slipped the utilitarian garment off her arms. She rose on her elbows to help him free her swollen flesh from its shackles. She arched back when he replaced it with his rough, warm palms, tossed her head, turned farther, begging for his lips. They took hers in a hot, moist vise, groaned his demand deep inside her, “Areeni kamm tebgheeni.”

Hearing him revert to Arabic, demanding she show him how much she craved him, hurled her over another threshold of arousal. She showed him, sucked on his tongue in abandon, writhed beneath him, smashing her breasts into his hands.

He weighed and kneaded her bursting flesh in his hard fingers, gave her unspoken admission back to her, “Abghaki ya, Maram, koll kelmah, koll get’ah, koll naffas. Enti sehr, jonoon.”

As if it wasn’t enough to hear him say, in that moving groan, how he craved her—every word and part and breath of her, that she was magic, madness—his teeth nipped her lips at the same moment that he pinched her nipples. The amalgam of his confessions and the sensations sent a bolt to her core.

She bucked to move him so that she could turn back over and capture him where she needed him most.

He restrained her, the purr of a lustful great cat resounding deep in his chest. “Hadi ma’dobati—this is my feast, you are, in case you haven’t realized.”

She subsided, her lips twitching in humor-laced distress as he ran his hands all over her back, first in gossamer sweeps, then massaging tracings, then blunt nail scratchings until every nerve burst into a conflagration, until she sobbed.

“Aih, cry for me for real.” He ground his hardness against her buttocks, sinking his fingers into her hair, tugging on it as if it was reins. “Do you know how many times your imaginary cries turned my brain to mush? How many times I burned to no avail imagining you cushioning me this way? Or risked damaging my hands so they’d stop giving me phantom sensations of running all over your velvet flesh like this?”

She threw him a smoldering glance over her shoulder. “Thrilled to know you suffered for your pigheadedness as much as you made me suffer.”

“Then let me thrill you more.” He sank his fingertips into her scalp, every press unraveling a new reserve of lust within her. “I woke up hard and in agony every day still fresh from dreams where I felt you quake with pleasure, with need…” He transferred his sensual exploitation to her back, dug pathways of pure pleasure into her muscles until she did. “Like this.” He retraced the path of distressing delight up. “Do you know how many times I was about to deliver killing blows to deserving adversaries only for an image like this—” he swept her hair from her nape, bent and sank his teeth there, like a lion securing his mate for a rough ride “—to invade my mind so that I ended up merely damaging them? I even let a couple go unscathed. Do you know how many times I’ll punish you for each instance?”

She arched her hips up, urging him to fulfill his threat. He stilled her movements, lay on top of her, keeping her eyes captive. She writhed beneath him until he thrust at her, mimicking what she was burning for him to do for real, tremors of receding control traversing his great body.

“Do you feel it, Maram? What you’ve done to me?”

That was what he’d warned her about. That she was undoing the leash of a being of such destructive potential.

She wasn’t worried. She knew things about him he didn’t know himself. She knew he’d never lose control. What he was losing was his distance, his separateness. As he had been since they’d arrived here, succumbing to the power of what they had between them, which would only get stronger, better, the more he did.

He reared up. She moaned at losing his anchoring weight. He didn’t give time for disappointment to sink in, turned her onto her back still trapped between his thighs. She surged, reached for him.

He held out a warning finger. “Don’t touch me.”

Her mouth dropped open. “That is one thing you don’t joke about.”

He caught her grasping hands, slammed them down to the bed in one of his. “No touching. For your own protection. We have no idea what I’ll turn into at your touch, remember?”

She keened as her salivary glands stung. She was literally drooling over him, needed her lips and tongue on his flesh, her teeth in it. “That’s not protection. That’s the punishment you were threatening.”

“That, too.” His ruthless smile had blood thundering in her head, her loins. Then he brought it to a boil as he released her hands only to slide down her body, sweeping her panties all the way off her feet. He rocked back on his heels and stilled as he looked on her full nakedness for the first time.

A frisson of delicious dread sheared down her spine at the look in his eyes. When he finally took her, he would shatter her.

If she didn’t shatter first with wanting him too much.

“Beauty like this won’t go unpunished, ya saherati.”

She sobbed, her delight that he found her as beautiful as everything about him confessed, her protest that he’d call her his witch when he was the one incapacitating her with his spell.

He took her feet in both hands, alternated his lips between them. They quaked at each electrifying touch, at the more enervating thought of having him kiss her feet. He firmed his grip then did worse, forcing her to withstand the sight, the sensations as he suckled her toes, rumbling his enjoyment. “This is another thing I almost had accidents fantasizing about.”

When he made sure he’d blown her every fuse, he moved up to her calves, trailed up a path of sensual destruction to her inner thighs. He opened his mouth over her tender flesh, making her feel he was devouring her for real. “And when this exploded in my mind, I always did something drastic. Now you know why I’m called the Mad Prince.”

Her body contorted under his onslaught, breath shearing its way into her lungs. “You didn’t have to be. I was always yours for the taking, you magnificent fool.”

He looked up, eyes twin emerald infernos, sable hair raining over his leonine forehead. Then, with his mouth set, he slid back up her body, igniting every fuse she’d thought burned out until he thrust at her through his clothing, bent to her breasts and introduced her to a new level of mindlessness.

Between long, hard pulls on her nipples, he swirled them with his tongue, grazed them with his teeth, blew the stimulation of his demands on them. “Why don’t you tell me some more, about how you’re mine? Emphasize the ‘for the taking’ part.”

Her hands trembled between them, flailing over the zipper keeping him from her. “Nothing…to emphasize…I’m yours…so take me.”

In answer he only stopped her fumbling hands, came over her, straddled her midriff, unzipped his pants, slowly. Oh, so slowly.

A clench of intimidation sank its talons in her gut and core at the sight of his girth and length even as everything inside her flooded at his beauty and sleekness. She craved his occupation, not only for the ecstasy it would wring from her flesh, but because she’d also have full intimacy with his desire and essence. With him. Giving her pleasure without that was punishment.

He held his shaft, doing what her hands, now imprisoned by his thighs, burned to do, stroking himself inches from her.

“Is this what you want?”

She had no words to say how much. She nodded frantically.

“Thrilled to know. Because you can’t have it.” A smothered shriek of frustration escaped her as she managed to free her hands. He held them back, kept her from lunging for him, his smile almost smoking with sensual malice. “Not yet.”

Before she could contest his mercilessness, he slid down her body again, his hand gliding over her quivering flesh until he cupped her mound. She lurched up into his hold and his deft fingers nudged her soaked folds apart. The blow of sensation, of having his fingers gliding along her most intimate flesh, paralyzed her. He swallowed her keen, stroked her to the rhythm of his thrusting tongue inside her mouth. She was too inflamed, would find release with just one more touch…

He withdrew before giving it to her. She lay limp, watching him going lower, until he lay on the bed on his stomach, between her thighs, draping both over his back. He breathed her in, growling his appreciation over her engorged flesh. That lashed her out of her stupor, had her clawing at him.

He groaned his pleasure as her fingers sank in his scalp, his shoulders. “I’ve been going insane for four years imagining the scent and taste of you. Good thing I couldn’t imagine it fully, or I would have invaded Ossaylan and claimed you as a war prize.”

She was about to scoff that if she’d known that was how he felt, she would have raided Zohayd long ago and carried him off, when he took her most intimate flesh in a voracious kiss. She keened, arched her hips toward his mouth, giving him every license. He took it all, thrusting light then hard, sweeping short then long, suckling, layering sensation upon sensation until she was buried. He brought her to the edge, snatched her away, never pushing her over, too many times to count.

When her breath fractured, her pleas stifled, he spoke, so close, sending the shock of each syllable throughout her system. “Now give me the sight that I regularly went insane imagining. You, in the throes of pleasure only I can bring you. Come for me, Maram.”

She did, on his command. The discharge of years of craving was so explosive that she writhed with detonation after detonation until she felt her spine might snap.

He had no mercy, slipped two fingers inside her, sharpening her pleasure even as he continued to lap up its flood. He didn’t stop until she slumped in his hold, satiated, soothed.

He loomed over her on all fours, watching as she trembled with what he’d done to her. Mute, saturated with pleasure, hungrier for him, she watched emotions emanating from him, coming too fast and thick for her to decipher. To withstand.

But she knew what he was waiting for. One final offering of herself, after the edge of hunger had been assuaged. An unpressured choice. A certain need for him, not prodded by arousal. And she made him the offering.

She spread shaking thighs, reached out quaking arms for him. “Amjad, I only ever craved pleasure with you. Take me, I beg you. I’ve needed you for too long, too.”

Each word seemed to wrench through him. He dragged her thighs around his hips, bunched her hair in a grip that trembled to quell its ferociousness, securing her for his mouth’s plundering, his other hand clenching her buttocks.

He transferred the hand in her hair to his shaft as he tilted her hips, ran himself through her flowing need, inflaming her, bathing himself, seeming to struggle to temper his ferocity.

She couldn’t bear for him to, cried out, “Come inside me, Amjad, join us. Invade me, ya habibi, fill me.” The words my love fell on him like a whip. His face twisted in carnal suffering as something seemed to shatter inside him and he plunged into her with the force of the snapping momentum.

She screamed, at the excruciating fullness, beyond her capacity…tearing her apart… “Yes, Amjad, yes…”

But he rested inside her, let her flesh ripple and reform around him, bent to crush her lips in another exercise of abandon.

She opened all she was for him, for his potency and need, tightening around his invasion until he growled, “Ya Ullah, so tight, so right. Scorching, Maram, annihilating, like I knew you would be.”

Her head thrashed, words fracturing out of her. “I thought I knew how…you would be. I knew nothing…nothing. Take me, ya rohi, finish me…”

“Sahrah.” His threw his head back at her invocation, calling her a witch on an elemental groan as he withdrew.

Then he rammed back into her, the accumulation of years of frustration and hunger behind the thrust. His hardness scraped against her, abrading her every nerve for the maximum sensation it could take, the rush of response it could yield. She wanted him to occupy her, wanted to capture him forever, but she was overloading. The feel of him, the sight of him, the thought of him, inside her, after so much waiting and craving… Beyond description, beyond her ability to withstand.

She screamed again, at the sensations, with frustration that they were coming so soon. She arched up as she felt her inner flesh rippling around him, everything compacting into a pinpoint of insanity. She felt him everywhere, invading her to her heart, wrapping around her last nerve ending.

And she splintered, ecstasy pulsing from the deepest point inside her, where he was buried, to radiate in one shockwave after another, squeezing her around him inside and out, her arms crushing him to her, satisfaction flooding her along with regret that it would end.

But it didn’t seem that it would. He rode her all through, his words pouring fuel on her conflagration. “Aih, etmatat’ee, ya Maram. Take your pleasure all over me, take it all. Take it.”

With each thrust, the world flickered, diffused, only his beloved face in focus, clenched in pleasure, his eyes vehement with his greed for hers.

She heard her own voice, sobbing her plea. “Habibi…you, too. Take your pleasure inside me…give it all to me…”

And he gave. The sight of his face seizing, the feel of him succumbing to the ecstasy she gave him, him, expanding and throbbing inside her with the powerful pulse of his climax. It had her thrashing, weeping, unable to endure the spike in pleasure.

Everything blurred, wavered, faded…

Heavy breathing and slow heartbeats echoed from the end of a long tunnel. The scent of satisfaction flooded her lungs. Awareness trickled back into a body so sated that it was numb. She felt one thing. Amjad. Still filling her, still hard.

She opened lids weighing a ton each, saw him swim in and out of focus, kneeling between her thighs, her hips pressed to his, one palm kneading her breasts, the other gliding over her shoulders, her arms, her belly, soothing, cherishing.

Everything he’d given her swamped her with amazement, with gratitude. Her most lavish fantasies of being with him hadn’t come close to reality. She felt transfigured, reborn.

She ran a trembling finger down the grooves of his muscles, down to the point where they were merged before looking up at him again, her face quivering on a smile of teasing and adoration. “Overachiever.”

“At your…service. Anytime. Literally. Guaranteed.”

His chuckle made her shudder all over him. He expanded until the fullness turned into an edge of dominance, a sharpness of sensation that was frightening and more glorious for it. The idea of him, melding with her, at her mercy as she was at his, filled volumes inside her, body and mind and soul.

But he was withdrawing. And she felt something. Or rather, didn’t feel it.

When she thought he’d reached completion…he hadn’t!

Eight

Maram struggled up on her elbows, gasped as it drove him deeper, had him almost breaching her womb.

His eyes flared as he instinctively flexed his hips, seeking to complete her domination, before he grimaced, continued withdrawing, left her body on a long groan. “I didn’t mean right now. I’m a beast, but not that much of one. You need to…recover.”

“You…haven’t,” she exclaimed.

His eyebrows shot up. “And here I thought this…” he looked down at his intact erection, his mouth twisting “…means I have.”

She shook her head. He knew what she was talking about, was glossing over it.

One of his eyebrows descended. “Seems you’re not all there. Don’t get me wrong, it was one of my most…ferocious fantasies to make you faint with pleasure, then be in a fugue for a considerable time afterward. I am chest-poundingly…smug I succeeded.”

Suddenly, she felt near tears. He had given her that much pleasure and more. But she hadn’t given him any. He didn’t even want to try again, was pretending it was for her sake that he didn’t.

And why would he try again? Once was enough for him to find out she didn’t fire his blood as he’d thought she would. And that she knew most men didn’t need anyone special to…enjoy themselves…made it worse.

She and her ex hadn’t been very compatible. After him, she’d had two brief liaisons with men who’d considered her a passing fancy, as she had them. All three men had had no problem finding satisfaction with her—it had been she who hadn’t found them worth sticking around for.

Now she knew how they’d felt when they’d realized they couldn’t please her. Only multiplied by a million, because Amjad was the only man she’d ever wanted to please, the one who’d brought her unimaginable pleasure.

Feeling exposed and inadequate, she scrambled for the pillow, ventured a look at him after she’d barricaded herself behind it.

He was rising to his knees, a frown spreading across his face. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Evidently.” She snatched a look at his undiminished arousal, the evidence that underlined her failure even as it made her insides spasm with needing him there again.

After a nerve-snapping moment, he rasped, “Are you sorry…already?”

She winced. “You would be, when after all this buildup, all these expectations, it all fizzled to nothing.”

“It did?”

She gestured shakily at his evidence it had, the…emptiness inside her incontrovertible proof. “You know it did.”

He lowered his gaze to the mattress, his eyebrows obliterating his eyes, his lower lips caught in his teeth.

He finally raked a hand through his hair, brushing it out of eyes that became bleak as he leveled them on her.

“This is one scenario I hadn’t considered. That you’d enjoy it, and it still wouldn’t matter…” He stopped, got off the bed.

He dragged his pants on spastically, having difficulty pulling up the zipper over his still-too-impressive manhood.

He stood bathed in the light of the morning-seeping shutters before he looked back at her, eyes heavy, face shuttered. “So all this was for one roll in the…sand? If that was all you wanted, you should have told me long ago. If I’d known it was a one-off, you wouldn’t have needed to go to these lengths to get me to…oblige you, and I wouldn’t be in this…”

He bit off some vicious self-imprecation, then strode out of the room, brow furrowed, jaw and hands clenched.

She lay staring at the point where he’d disappeared, her heart shriveling inside her. He…he’d looked so…so…hurt.

But…if he was, maybe she’d misunderstood. Maybe he had enjoyed being with her, but had held back, fearing he’d impregnate her? Or something?

As she replayed the scene, it seemed he’d misunderstood, too, thought she’d been talking about herself.

Power poured into her body, propelling her after him.

She found him flat on his back on the settee, one arm thrown over his eyes, the other dangling off its edge. The dejection blasting off him had her heart slamming her forward.

Without taking his arm off his eyes he hissed, “Don’t come near me. I advise you not to again until this damn mess is over.”

She didn’t falter, reached for his arm.

He jerked it away, snapped up sitting in one impossible move, his eyes almost evaporating her with fury as he took in her nakedness. “What the hell do you want now? Feeling aroused again and sorry you prematurely ended my…services?”

She held her ground, even as she quailed at his barely leashed anger. “I wouldn’t end those even at gunpoint.”

Disbelieving disgust crackled from his depth as he started to rise. She put both hands on his shoulders, keeping him in place.

“Take your hands off me, Maram.”

Before he could shake her off she blurted out, “I was talking about you, not me. I meant I disappointed you. You gave me…indescribable pleasure, but then I thought I didn’t give you the s-same…and…I felt…felt…” Her eyes flooded. “Did I? And please, please be your skin-flayingly honest self. I need to know the truth.”

He’d gone still as she babbled, his eyes losing their rage, settling into watchfulness, then slow realization before something blasted from them. Relief?

He placed his hands on hers, not to remove them, but to press them tighter to his shoulders. “If you gave me any more pleasure I would have expired. I came close as it was.”

She believed him, as she always did. But…

She whispered her confusion, “Then…why…? How…?”

It was clear he understood what she meant now, the wickedness dawning in his eyes the most welcome thing she’d ever seen, making her realize how brutally the minutes when it had all seemed to have gone wrong had hit her.

He pulled her down on his lap, his smile sensuous taunting and supreme male satisfaction as she gasped at coming into contact with his revived desire. “It seems you’ve only had experience with…short-term men. I, as you well know, am a very long-term man.”

“I thought you wouldn’t be…especially after so long.”

He took her lips in a fierce kiss that showed her how much those moments of alienation had affected him, too. “It’s because it was after so long of wanting you. When I finally had you, I decided to exercise something I learned long ago, so the pleasure wouldn’t end.”

She keened as he tasted her from shoulder to breast, his teeth grazing her senses into a riot. “It didn’t have to end. We could have started again.”

He hauled her straddling his hips, his hands spread across her back and buttock as he bent her backward. She bowed back, her breasts a wanton offering, her hair touching his thighs at the first pull of his lips on her nipple.

“I wanted it to continue, not end, then restart,” he groaned between suckles and nips. “I never tried this with anyone before, but this…technique was why it appeared I hadn’t almost died of pleasure inside you.”

She still didn’t know what he was talking about, tried to hold herself back until explanations were out of the way. She failed, rocked against him, in a fever for him, gasped, “And that’s the truth?”

“Apart from the very hard evidence—” he thrust himself at her drenched core for emphasis “—when have I ever been less than mutilatingly truthful?”

She ground back at him, words choppy now as she rode him. “Maybe you…suddenly grew scruples about…my sexual sensibilities…after I went to such lengths…to seduce you…only to follow it by this…moronic demonstration of insecurity.”

“First, I’m incapable of growing scruples about anyone’s sensibilities, sexual or otherwise, you included, so never fear.” She giggled, loving his abrasive straightforwardness more than ever. “Second, I let myself be seduced. Third, now that I know what was behind this…interesting incident, I find your ‘moronic insecurity’ a cross between hilarious and endearing, considering you are the goddess of sensuality and seduction. Fourth, haven’t you ever heard of sexual continence? Something all Eastern philosophies advocate?”

She raised her head from her surrender to his pleasuring, the practice coming to her in vague snippets. “Sex without orgasm?”

His lips twitched, a dozen devils dancing in his eyes. “Without…release. Reaching a pinnacle of pleasure that plateaus in intense, sustained ecstasy that can make me go on and on. And on.”

He punctuated each and on with a harder pull on her nipples, a harder thrust against her core. Even without entering her, she knew he’d bring her to completion again.

She pushed away, wanting only the pleasure of his possession. He let her break the rhythm hurtling her to climax, but kept her simmering with caresses and suckling.

She had to force more words out. “I didn’t really think it possible…but if anyone…is capable of anything…it’s you. But…” She struggled to voice her last concern, her belated confession. “If this was in any part because you’re worried, don’t, I’m…safe.”

He raised his eyes from worshipping and tormenting her. She expected him to ask why she was.

He didn’t. “I’m ashamed to say it didn’t cross my mind.” The moment of grimness passed and his eyes were back to tantalizing. “But it’s good to know, in case we feel like…variations.”

“Oh, yes, please.” She longed to have him fill her, in every way. “But for now, I literally can’t wait to explore this ‘on and on. And on’ concept.”

A chuckle revved in his chest as he stood up, wrapping her around him. “I can teach you the technique, and we can keep at it to infinity. We do have years to make up for.”

She laughed her eagerness for anything he’d teach her, show her, share with her, let him arrange her among the cushions, run fevered appreciation all over her, feeling like the feast he’d said she was. Soon, she couldn’t bear not to reciprocate, begged him to let her, made a case for it now that they were sure he wouldn’t turn into some hulking monster at her touch.

And he finally let her touch him. Let her do anything to him. It was even more mind-blowing than having him doing things to her. His size daunted her, his texture amazed her, his scent and taste intoxicated her. And that was before she reached his manhood.

Hunger spiraled from her gut as she flicked her tongue over him, almost passed out as the feel and flavor of his satin and steel eddied in her system. With a cry of urgency, she fell on him, took all she could of him.

He caressed her head and face as he let her feast on him. She was lost in sensation, in his groans of enjoyment when his hand twisted in her hair, stopped her.

At her protest, he said raggedly, “I may be all-capable, but let’s not test me beyond endurance. If you’re up for it, how about we begin your first lesson in on and on, and on?”

She threw herself among the cushions, opened her arms to him.

As he filled them with as much impatience, she moaned, “I heard it can be mystical, unifying.”

“Aih. I never believed that part before.”

“How about we test its accuracy?”

And for the rest of the day and night, they did. With one-hundred-percent positive results.

Maram had gone to heaven, didn’t even have to die beforehand.

Although she’d come close to it, as Amjad had said, from pleasure.

They’d made love everywhere, while cooking, eating, showering, bathing, playing music, even playing video games. Every touch and breath and word, every intimacy and surrender and abandon drove her deeper into addiction. Every sensation, sustained or explosive, left her feeling she’d never hunger again, yet expanded her capacity for more. And more he gave her.

Most amazing of all was the unity his exercise in control and the total rescinding of it to each other brought them.

She was draped over him, wallowing in contentment, savoring him, when something from outside their cocoon registered.

She raised an unsteady head. “Can you hear that?”

He stretched beneath her, making her a more comfortable bed of his body, nuzzled her neck like an affectionate lion. “Besides the bliss humming through our bodies, I can hear nothing.”

“Exactly.” Feeling loath to point it out, as if she’d make it real only when she did, she whispered, “The storm has died down.”

He blinked, as if coming out of a trance.

After a breath-bating silence, he said, “So it has.”

Suddenly she was scared.

The reason for their being here was no more. Would what they had raging between them subside, too?

As if in answer, he swept her around, bore down on her, intimacy and teasing spreading over his beloved face. “Good thing the desert finally deigned to end its tantrum. Now I can show you the rest of my ‘lair.’ Get ready to be devoured in every place I’ve fantasized about having you in.”

She looked into his eyes and knew.

Nothing had changed. Or ever would.

Delight burst out in a giggle as she gave him back his earlier promise. “At your service. Anytime. Literally. Guaranteed.”

Amjad looked at the end of his world as he knew it.

She was pirouetting before him in the rain. Everything he’d never thought existed. Tailored to his ruthlessly specific demands. Femininity and wit and generosity, intelligence and honesty and fearlessness. Hungering for him with her all.

As he did for her with his, and beyond.

He circled her, savoring her from every angle.

In one of his shirts, soaked and transparent, Maram looked like the goddess he’d told her she was. Lithe, graceful, vital. Indomitable, irrepressible, irresistible. Dancing in the deluge that had come to wash the sandstorm away, to reshape the desert and replenish the springs and wells, she was more than this.

She was…everything.

It had been five days since they started. Nine since he’d brought her here. He could no longer remember anything before that time, or that a world outside their seclusion existed. He wouldn’t let it exist, or anything intrude. He had to make sure what they shared was strong enough that nothing ever could.

She’d forgotten the outside world, too, hadn’t even mentioned going back. And he wasn’t bringing up the possibility.

For the past days, he’d been doing what he wished he could do indefinitely—taking her exploring and enjoying his hideaway where he felt most in harmony with himself and all of existence.

He’d thought he’d known this place as intimately as he did his body. She’d made him realize he hadn’t known the potential either held until he’d shared them with her, experienced them through their affinity, through her eyes and senses and wonder.

He’d come to depend on her opinion, her enthusiasm, her pleasure, on knowing he fulfilled her in so many ways, on opening himself for her to take of him what she would. She shook him to his core with the totality of her reciprocation, made him feel invincible.

She’d been right. They worked. Spectacularly. In every way.

Now she was rushing back to him, her strong, smooth limbs glistening as she splashed through the pool that had gathered in the slope of the dune. Her eyes were honey in the cloud-laden light, her smile delight and desire.

She grabbed him, climbed him, tasting and owning him all over, drinking the rain from his flesh, igniting his simmering hunger, boosting his expanded awareness, his very life.

He let her slide down his naked upper body, reveling as the movement peeled up the shirt she wore and her slick flesh glided over his.

He took her lips, murmured inside her, “Thank you.”

She kissed him back with that wholeheartedness that made him feel desired down to his last cell, made him believe he could fly, did fly, as long as he was with her, as long as she wanted him.

Aih, he realized he sounded trite and insipid and ludicrous. He’d wondered many times if his brothers had been infectious and he’d contracted the same malady that had felled them.

But he couldn’t bring himself to find what she made him feel abhorrent or laughable or pathetic. He only found it…miraculous.

She pulled back to smile her ardor at him. “You’re so very welcome. For what?”

He tightened his hold. “For not giving up on me.”

He tried not to shudder as the memory assailed him. When he’d thought she had. Discovering his ex-wife’s scheme to murder him slowly hadn’t been a fraction as brutal.

Her eyes became solemn even as her smile remained impish. “It wasn’t possible. I loved you too much. Or I knew I would love you if you let me close. Now that you have, I know I was wrong. I far more than love you. Ana aashagak.”

Everything inside him hit pause.

He hadn’t given what he felt for her a name. He didn’t want to give it one. A label would taint it with its limitations and specifics. He didn’t want to find himself, or what they shared, trapped in the mold that labels besieged people with.

It disturbed him when she lavished endearments on him. Habibi, hayati, rohi, galbi—my love, my life, my soul, my heart. But he relegated them to hyperbole inflicted by arousal and ecstasy. He’d thought she was as content to revel in what they had without constraining it within a preset concept.

Now she had.

And she hadn’t even named what she felt for him love, the emotion he despised, what in its name people committed and endured stupidities and insanities, even atrocities. She’d gone further and proclaimed it to be eshg. Something far superior to love, more encompassing and profound and unswerving, yet steeped in the most insatiable of carnal desires.

“Hey, don’t look so grim.” She combed her fingers through his hair, gave it tiny tugs until he and his tension melted in her arms. She completed his enervation with a radiant smile. “It’s what I always felt and saying it out loud doesn’t change a thing.”

But it did. It introduced volatile elements and expectations. They worked perfectly as they were. Anything new was bound to introduce imbalance and imperfection. He couldn’t have that. “Love and eshg don’t exist. But this—” he clutched her tighter around him “—what we have, does. And I intend to mine its depths and savor its every last spark.”

Shadows entered her eyes at his vehemence, the honey becoming turbid.

His heart pummeled his ribs. Had she needed him to give her back the words? Would his rejection of their very concepts eat at her certainty until she pulled away, in preparation for an end he might have just convinced her would inevitably come?

He was about to succumb, give her whatever she wished for if it would restore her spontaneity, her confidence in her hold over him, when her face relinquished its disturbance, opening up again.

She bit his earlobe. “I so adoringly approve of your intentions, Your Royal Intensity. How about a demonstration?”

Arousal and relief almost buckled his knees.

He guffawed and swept her over his shoulder.

She screeched in shocked elation, sank her teeth in his shoulder blades. It made him almost throw her down and take her right there.

But he had to last until he got her to the setting he’d arranged early this morning when she’d still been sleeping. The cave at the bottom of the dune cliff that the cabin sat above. He almost felt his feet leaving the ground, the soggy sand no match for his eagerness.

Facing away from storm pathways had always saved the cave from being obliterated, but wind-blown sand had polished the rocks beyond its entrance so that they sparkled like gems in the rain. The palm trees it protected, drinking deep from the spring it enclosed, were verdant and heavy with crimson dates in the cleansing rain. The sight of them had images of Maram climbing the ones behind his cabin as he’d taught her flooding his mind’s eye.

She ratcheted up his inflammation, giggling and wriggling and raining caresses and bites over his buttocks and back, her wet hair swinging over his sensitized flesh more lashes of arousal.

He threw her down on the inflatable mattress he’d placed a dozen feet from the cave’s mouth, the centerpiece of his seduction scene. The wind countering the storm was blowing rain almost to the cave’s center, drenching the mattress. She slid on it, laughed harder, loving his urgency, lunged up, dragged him down on top of her. He sank into her arms and welcome, crashed his hunger into hers.

Addicted. That was what he was. From the first touch. What he’d been afraid of, what he’d warned her about. There was no other word for it. The more he had of her, the more he wanted, the deeper his dependence, the less he could wait to have her.

The only thing that ameliorated the…ache of knowing she’d shared her body with others was that she hadn’t done so since she’d first seen him. The precautions she took had been installed by her second marriage and then maintained in hope of intimacy with him. But what appeased him most was that she said she’d shared passion only with him. He believed her. He could no longer think of distrusting anything she did or said. Which only deepened his surrender to what raged between them.

He tore himself from their fusion, growled, “I hope you’re ready for this demonstration. It’s going to be a doozy.”

She threw her arms over her head, thrust her breasts at him in aggressive surrender, her eyes telling him she knew it would be, but the lips he’d just ravaged crooned, “Braggart.”

He knew he must look like a grinning wolf as he soaked up her ribbing. “Going by your satisfaction ratings, I’d say I’m being annoyingly self-effacing.”

He tore his shirt off her, knowing she’d relish his ferocity. She repaid him in kind, stripping off his jogging pants, which he wore all the time now. He, and she, could no longer bear anything more detaining than elastic waistbands. Then she tackled him to the mattress, sank into him her teeth and nails and craving, struggling to get closer, take first, give more. He loved how she’d become an equal participant in their passionate duels. But her arousal scorched his senses, slashed away the man’s skin, left only a beast in the grip of mating frenzy.

He swept her around again, pressed between her eagerly spreading thighs. “You got this wrong, Princess Delirium, this is my demonstration. I have a record to uphold, allegations to refute. Not to mention threats to fulfill.”

His hand bunched in her soaking locks. His eyes locked with hers as the rain pounded over them to the rhythm of their hearts. Then, as if by agreement, they both looked down to watch the wonder of their joining as he sank into her depths in one fluid thrust.

He swallowed her keen at his invasion, poured out his growl at her captivation as her flesh yielded to his shaft, sucking him into an inferno of sensation. The carnality, the reality, the meaning of being inside her was sometimes too much. He needed to cede his all to her, to pierce her essence and consume her.

He glided out of her tightness, pummeled back just as she pumped up, impaling herself further on his erection. Pleasure detonated, almost blew out his arteries.

“Maram…ma beyseer feeh mot’ah kahadi—there can’t be pleasure like this, there can’t be…” He heard his voice, that of the beast he felt he’d become. “Take it, Maram, give it all to me…”

Her cries rang out at his every thrust, shattering him with bolts of stimulation. “Yes…Amjad…yes—”

She crushed herself against him as if to merge their bodies, catapulting him into a frenzy. He pounded into her now, knowing only his full power would unleash her needs, wring her magnificent body of every spark of pleasure it could yield.

The heat, the friction escalated until he sensed she couldn’t take any more, needed release before the heart thundering beneath his burst from the buildup.

He tilted her hips, angled himself before he sank inside her to the root, hitting her inner triggers in a plunge that had him lodging into her womb.

She lurched like a marionette with her strings snapped, plunging him deeper inside her. Then she shattered around him, her flesh gripping at his shaft, wringing her pleasure from him, the flood of her release razing him, the current of her peak almost agonizing in its pleasure.

He’d been able to practice control, not only to prolong the pleasure, but because he’d been too afraid of himself, of hurting her, of her response if he unleashed his full ferocity. And they’d practiced the incredible experience together, building their pleasure to near-infinity.

But after he’d become secure she could take him, did want him in all of his moods, there had been times when he’d wanted to be rough and wild, no buildups, just abrupt possession and explosive release inside her. Every time she’d read him right, had begged him to let go.

Now was such a time.

She again knew, urged him on. “Give to me, Amjad…fill me.”

Her frenzy snapped his sanity. He detonated inside her, a stream of ecstasy surging through his length, pouring his essence into the recesses of her femininity.

In his long-receded coherence, something niggled. Something that felt like regret. That it wouldn’t take root, wouldn’t bind them in even more profound ways than what they shared now…

Then everything vanished. He heard nothing but his groans echoing her sobs, felt nothing but their flesh straining together, melting into each other in the quivering surplus.

When his senses coalesced, it was dark and it had stopped raining. He lifted his weight from her on shaking arms. She seemed to come to only when he moved, then she whimpered, limp hands trying to pull him back as he left her depths.

He kissed and folded them on her tummy before swaying up to light the oil lamps. He came back, and she stretched up her arms.

He huffed in self-deprecation. “I’ll oblige you. In a while. You can’t have your fill of…cake and eat it, too.”

She chuckled as she rubbed her thighs together. “I don’t think I can have more…cake for a while either. That was one hell of a doozy. All I’m good for now is snuggling.”

He laughed as he bent on unsteady legs, scooped her up and headed to the spring. He stepped into the cool waters, sat in the shallow end with her draped across him, sank into the luxury of her kisses and sighs.

At length he sighed, too. “Snuggling is good. Very, very good.”

She chuckled and dragged him deeper into the goodness.

His time with her was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Better than he’d ever dreamed.

Better than he deserved?

He swatted that thought away. As she’d told him, whatever he didn’t already deserve, he would do what it took so that he did from this time forward.

Anything? A voice scorned. Have you forgotten how this all started? Pride of Zohayd. Her thief of a father. Ring any bells?

It could ring a million bells. More than ever, he had to make sure Maram didn’t get a whiff of the sordid mess. Starting tomorrow, he’d deal with it. And she’d never know a thing.

Everything depended on it.

Maram stretched in bed, gloriously sore and satisfied.

She listened for Amjad’s movements outside. Nothing. She turned her head and saw the note by the room’s opening.

Gone to feed my other Dahabeyah. Will return to feed the feline one I left purring in bed in thirty.

She giggled, hugged herself and again went over the lifetime they’d shared during the past days in stunned wonder.

She’d thought there was nothing to do around here but love Amjad. He’d proved her wrong and then some. He’d taken her hiking through the majestic desert by moonlight, exploring the incredible caves at dawn, climbing palm trees for ripe dates in the afternoon and skating on the dunes and jogging on the hard sand trails at twilight. After each exhausting, exhilarating activity, they’d set up a picnic, replenished and then they’d loved, in every possible way.

It had been better than heaven. Amjad in real life was better than her most exaggerated dreams of him. And how she’d dreamed. She constantly sizzled with the enormity of what she felt for him. Eshg. That emotion that he’d so adorably bared his fangs and growled didn’t exist only to go on and demonstrate in everything he did and said that it did…

A one-note noise jerked her out of the luxury of her musings.

Before she recognized it, it deluged her mind with melancholy impressions. Of lost chances. Of years without Amjad.

Then she realized it was his phone, ringing for the first time since they’d come here. Her unease crystallized into fear. That it would somehow take him away from her like it had after the bomb scare.

Which was stupid to the max. First, of course he’d get phone calls after ten days of absence. He must have turned his phone off after he’d assured everyone of their safety and on again to touch base with his people. Everyone must be eager to contact him. Second and foremost, Amjad might not have said it, but he was hers. Nothing would take him away from her again.

She let it ring. Amjad would call back when he returned.

But the ringing ended only to start again almost without pause, sounding like someone shrieking in ratcheting hysteria.

Maybe it was an emergency. Something that needed his intervention. Something they had to go back for right away.

Amjad hadn’t even brought up their return. He seemed to have forgotten the outside world. As she had.

But it was intruding on them now. He might not have any choice but to let the world crash in on their magic.

She rose, pulled on his shirt and headed outside. Her heart shivered with foreboding as she neared the phone as if it was a grenade with the safety pin missing.

It’s just a phone, you drama queen. Just take it to him.

She picked it up, glanced at the screen, shook her head at her pointless action. As if she’d recognize the number.

As she crossed to the corridor leading to the door, something made her take a closer look and…she did!

It was her father’s.

She froze, her thoughts stumbling over each other, tangling.

Her father must know that the sandstorm had abated. Days ago. He must be very curious to know what was keeping them.

Would she come clean to him?

Why would she? He hadn’t to her. And then he’d probably go all fatherly and horrified on her. The last thing she needed was him butting in on her and Amjad’s relationship. He’d already almost spoiled it once. And if he started demanding that Amjad do “the honorable thing,” she might have to strangle him for real!

She inhaled, pressed Talk, put the phone to her ear, and almost had her eardrum blown out.

She snatched the phone away in shock. And that was before she deciphered her father’s yelling.

He was calling Amjad every filthy name the region had ever spawned. Some she hadn’t thought it had.

With her heart missing beats, she ventured the phone closer to her ear again. The invective continued unabated. Her father was on the warpath. Good thing she’d been the one to get his call.

After many false starts, she shouted, “Father!”

“Maram, b’nayti!” her father exclaimed in surprise. “What did that mad monster do to you? I don’t care how powerful he is or if I’m not in his league. I swear I’ll avenge you. I’ll make him rue the day he brought you into this—”

“Father…Father!” She had to shout again to abort his ranting. “Calm down, okay? Amjad didn’t do anything to me. I’m fine. Better than fine. He saved me—”

“He didn’t save you.”

Here we go. The rant about how Amjad had “ruined” her, how he’d “pay” if he didn’t “fix his mistake.”

She overlapped his rage. “You know he did. But if you’re talking about afterward—”

Her father cut her off, shrieking now. “He didn’t save you! That insane bastard kidnapped you. He’s holding you hostage!”

Nine

After a moment of stunned silence, Maram scoffed, “Overreacting much? So it’s been ten days, but it’s not like I haven’t gone radio-silent for longer, or that I ever report to—”

“I went out of my mind when I heard of the sandstorm.” Her father continued ranting as if she hadn’t spoken. “I thought you were dead until I gathered that no one was looking for Amjad and I realized. It was all a plan. He knows that region like no other, knew the sandstorm was coming, arranged to kidnap you under its cover. I called him hundreds of times to negotiate your return, but that scum never answered. No one connected with him would take my calls. He wanted to wreck me with fear for you first before he made his demands—”

“Holy horror stories, Father,” she exclaimed, cutting him off before he gave himself a heart attack. “Did you have a relapse? This has to be fever-induced.”

“Put that bastard on. Let’s have this out.”

“I’m not letting you talk to Amjad in this state.”

He went silent. Following his uncharacteristic explosion, that unsettled her. Before she could voice her alarm, he spoke again, rage drained, leaving his voice a thread of sound.

“What has that snake told you?”

She exhaled heavily. “He’s told me plenty, but let’s not open that snake pit. You know what you offered him, what you made him think of me, of both of us.”

“And I’m thankful he turned me down and saved me from my folly. I saw the error of my ways, but that didn’t save you. He not only kidnapped you, but he also managed to turn you against me. It makes me ill thinking how far he’s taken advantage of your gravely misplaced hero worship of him.”

That was more like it. Back on the track of her charted expectations. “Amjad didn’t take advantage of me. I’m not some teenager with a crush on a dangerous bad boy. Amjad is—”

He cut her off again, his bleakness more effective in silencing her than his fury. “Is a merciless madman who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. I only wish his original plan, of kidnapping me, had worked, that I hadn’t sent you in my place and put you in his power. I wish he’d scared and repulsed you and made you his unwilling captive, rather than hiding his real face and intentions and conning you into being his willing pawn. It will be so much worse when you realize the depth of his deception and cruelty.”

Man. He seemed to believe the unbelievable things he was saying. That Amjad had planned to kidnap him under cover of the sandstorm, had kidnapped her in his stead when he hadn’t shown up.

But Amjad had said he’d called her father, and his phone hadn’t rung once. Her father said Amjad had not only never called, but had kept his phone off to make him squirm about her fate.

One of them was lying. Who was obvious. Her father.

And though he’d already used—or tried to use her—to his gain, with and without her knowledge, it still crushed her he’d so passionately ply her with such damaging lies to keep her away from Amjad, now that he had a better-for-his-interests groom planned for her….

“From now on, you deal with that turncoat.”

Maram jerked. Amjad.

He closed the door, laughter traversing his beloved voice. “She now wants her ‘girlfriend’ and your girly get-togethers and cooing heart-to-hearts.” He appeared at the edge of the corridor, his beauty blazing with indulgence and amusement. “Call me, the male nuisance, when it’s time for dirty work and heavy lifting, apparently my only use to her n—”

He stopped, his smile fading like drenched embers.

He must have felt her agitation even before his eyes sought its reason, the phone held limply at her side. Her father’s voice was emitting from the speaker, contorted to a cartoonish parody.

Her heart hammered. She didn’t want him involved in this. Didn’t want him despising her father any more than he already did.

“Amjad, let me handle…”

The rest of her words dissipated.

Amjad knew it was her father. It was in his eyes. The venom of abhorrence, followed by the flame of aggression, then the ink of dismay. Now his face was gripped with resignation. That of someone whose plans had been prematurely exposed?

Wow. Her father had gotten to her. Amjad must only think her father was calling to stir up trouble. As he was.

Before she could insist she’d handle this, Amjad moved closer, eyes now heavy with…apology? Anxiety? Anguish?

She wouldn’t speculate. He’d explain everything. She’d believe him as she always did.

He silently held out his hand, demanding the phone. Her hand rose, surrendering it and the whole situation—which she suddenly felt would decide the course of her life—to him.

After a moment’s hesitation, as if he was loath to have her father’s voice sully his hearing, he put the phone to his ear. He turned his face away as he did. But she’d seen it. The transformation that came over him as he geared himself to address her father.

He looked almost…demonic.

She shuddered. And that was before she heard his low snarl.

“Shut up, Prince Aal Worthless. You have something of mine. Return it and we’ll…forget this ever happened. The only call I’ll take again is my brothers’, telling me you’ve come to your senses and complied.”

He almost drove his finger through the screen, hurled the phone to the settee, dragged his hands down his face, reversed the path of exasperation until he bunched his hair in a vicious grip.

She couldn’t even tremble. Couldn’t think. Wouldn’t. If she did…if what she’d heard, what it meant, registered…

He leveled suddenly bloodshot eyes on her. “I’m sorry, Maram. I forgot to turn the ringer off when I last used the phone, forgot to take it with me.”

That was what he was sorry about? That his oversight led to her making contact with her father, hearing his accusations?

Not sorry that they were…true?

And her world collapsed in on her. They were true.

After a frozen eternity, she heard a voice. Alien, and hers. Asking the one thing to be asked now.

“Am I your hostage, Amjad?”

He flinched. “You weren’t supposed to know any of this.”

“I’ll bet. But I know now.”

His looked as if he wanted to hurt himself for being so stupid that she now did. “This is between me and your father. It has nothing to do with you. With us.”

She again heard the lifeless voice that was all she could produce now. “You’re holding me hostage to extort him. How is that nothing to do with me?”

“Stop saying that. You’re not my hostage.”

“What am I then?”

“You’re my…” He stopped, seemed unable to go on.

And she realized. Why he couldn’t bring himself to say she was his lover. Even to placate her.

Because she wasn’t. Never was, never would be.

It had all been a lie.

He spoke again, words sounding like broken glass shredding their way out of him. “However it started, we both know everything has changed irrevocably.”

“Turns out everything I thought I knew is not true.”

“You know plenty that is. What matters. What you don’t know is irrelevant.”

“How can it be irrelevant after you went to such lengths to plan this? Why did you? What is it of yours that my father has?”

“It’s just dirty, petty politics. Please, stay out of it.”

“Even if I wasn’t a ‘dirty, petty’ political adviser, how can I stay out when you’ve dragged me into the middle of it? The least you can do is tell me what you’ve made me a pawn for.”

“You’re not a pawn. Stop saying that. Stop thinking it.”

“I heard you, Amjad. Your implied threat that the return of what’s his—me—depends on that of what’s yours, whatever it is…deafened me.”

His whole face contorted. “That was for your father’s ears only. You know I would do anything to keep you safe.”

She shook her head, numbness deepening. “I thought I knew many things. They were wrong. Maybe all I know is wrong.”

He reached urgent hands out to her. She stumbled back.

Everything was collapsing inside her as this new reality overlapped with her illusion, what she’d been living in so wholeheartedly, what he’d constructed so seamlessly.

And she had to know. The reason behind his systematic deception of her. “It can’t be politics. There’s nothing going on politically between Ossaylan and Zohayd. Is this over GulfTech Futures? You want back the stocks you threw away and he acquired?”

“You think I’d even lift a finger over something so trivial?”

“It isn’t trivial. The stocks have appreciated half a billion dollars since you let them go.”

“They could appreciate a hundred billion and it wouldn’t have made me consider going after your father.”

She shook her head. “I can no longer believe anything you say.”

He looked as if she’d turned a knife in his gut.

Wow. She was still seeing and feeling what he wanted her to see and feel. Even now that she knew the truth.

He finally rasped, “Then believe evidence you can make sure of yourself. I let them go because their growth is based on leaked false data and the conglomerate will crash and burn within the year. I even advised your father, before I knew what he was up to, to cut the stocks loose while he had the chance.”

“What was he up to?”

He held up his hands. “Maram, arjooki, there’s no reason to dredge it all up. I should have dealt with this from day one, should have resolved it by now. But I was bent on seeing through my stupid plans, then I forgot all about them, landing myself deeper in this mess. But I’ll make sure it’s over in no time.”

“You mean if my father ‘comes to his senses and complies.’ What if he doesn’t?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what he does anymore. Maram—”

Everything inside her snapped. “Just tell me!”

After a moment during which his body seemed to expand with the need to force her to relinquish her quest for the truth, he squeezed his eyes shut, let out a ragged exhalation. Then, bleakly, he told her.

She’d thought nothing could be worse than what she’d already learned. She’d been too wrong to bear.

Her father, stealing the Pride of Zohayd jewels, plotting the downfall of the Aal Shalaans to usurp the throne of Zohayd, caring nothing for the devastation he’d cause in his quest for power.

It was incomprehensible that he could formulate a conspiracy of such magnitude. She knew her father. He was incapable of such convoluted coldness and overriding ambition. The most he was capable of had been the manipulations of using his daughter for a promotion up the princely ladder and the entrenching of his standing in the region, things he’d believed had been for the general best, hers included.

But maybe she didn’t know him after all. As it turned out she didn’t know Amjad. Amjad, the man she’d thought incapable of anything but extreme honesty, who’d instead been lying to her with every breath for the last ten days.

She still had to know one more thing. “You thought I was in on my father’s conspiracy? That was why you had no problem with kidnapping me?”

His eyes dulled with what so uncannily simulated dejection. “You know what I thought you were in on.”

“Yeah, my father’s schemes to ‘acquire’ you and Haidar. So you didn’t even need justification to use me as a stick to bludgeon my father with. Everyone always said you were an indiscriminating raider who would do anything to gain your objective. Turns out only I was blind about you.”

He lunged for her as if to stop her conclusions in their tracks, his face clenched with denial and dismay. “You’re the only one who ever saw me for what I really am, Maram. Don’t doubt everything about me or what we shared now.”

She stumbled out of reach, groping for the deadness that was descending on her, needing its oblivion. “What did we share? The prerequisite tryst when a male and female are secluded? A sexual adventure starring the paranoid prince and the promiscuous princess he kept maddened with lust by his calculated elusiveness and—”

He cut across her toneless words. “There was nothing calculated about anything I said or did from that goddamn moment you got down from your four-by-four. But are you taking all you said and did back? You’re saying it was only lust that kept you coming after me until you breached my barriers and ended my resistance?”

His air of hurt—the injustice of it, the sheer undetectable fakeness of it, even now—crested, loomed over her like a tsunami.

Then it all crashed on her, pulverizing the numbness that had encapsulated her so far, decimating her, heart and mind.

From the wreckage, a thick whisper bled from her lips. “Believe what you will. As I will. I’m sure the worst I can believe now won’t be as bad as the truth.”

She staggered around and he caught her arm, the agitation in his touch, in his eyes gouging her with misery.

His hoarse words cut deeper. “You want to talk ‘believing the worst’? How about that it wasn’t even lust that drove you, but an insidious plan to make me send everything but you to hell, starting with my plan and Zohayd’s fate? To tie me up in so many knots I’d be unable to move against your father for fear of losing you, leaving him free to plot the downfall of my kingdom?”

The moment the words were out, Amjad lunged as if he would snatch them back before they reached her ears, sank into her mind. He did bite down on them so viciously that he drew blood.

It was too late. She lurched as if he’d slashed her in two, disappointment and distrust welling like dark blood from a wound in the gaze that had adored and idolized him till an hour ago.

He was losing her. He couldn’t lose her.

He dragged her into his arms, buried his face in her hot neck, shuddered with dread. She struggled to get away, when before she had always tried to get closer, to give more.

And he begged. “Forget what I just said. Forget it all.”

“If only I can forget…everything.”

Her struggles intensified into violence, until it was either he let her go or hurt her to curb them. He let her go.

She flung herself against the wall, stood with her arms spread against it as if she’d melt into it to escape him, watched him with the wariness and hatred of a cornered cat.

He groaned his mounting heartache, “You think I dreamed it could go this far? I had this tidy plan where I’d get your fool of a father to stop the catastrophe he’s set in motion without you being the wiser. But you overwhelmed my intentions and everything else inside me and I literally forgot how we got here. I want you so damn much now it’s an agony with every breath I draw.” Her eyes screamed liar. He winced at the shrillness of her mental accusation. “I never lied about what I feel for you.”

“No. That’s the one thing you couldn’t bring yourself to lie about. You felt nothing, so you said nothing.”

He’d been wondering if that would come back to bite him. Now it had. Right through the heart. He could put a thousand names to what he felt for her now and she’d think him an even bigger liar.

He had to take this away from declarations and denials that would only count against him, tackle the cause of this breach.

His breath left him in a shuddering exhalation. “I know this was a big shock, and I would have given anything to—”

She cut across him in that monotone that pushed his desperation higher. “To keep me cooperative in and out of bed until my father hands back the jewels. I realize how inconvenient it is to be exposed this late in the game.”

He opened his mouth to blurt out a protest, closed it.

Anything he said would only pour acid on her too-fresh wounds. He had to let her go now. Give her time to calm down.

Then she’d remember. Every word and laugh and touch they’d shared. She’d see the true extent of his transgression without the exaggeration of shock and hurt, come to rationalize it like she always did. Then she’d forgive him. She’d let him near again.

He couldn’t contemplate any other possibility.

He’d let Maram go.

She’d passed him like an automaton, gone about her bedtime routines and headed to bed. He hadn’t heard a sound inside since.

It was dawn and he’d gone past breaking point a hundred times. That was how many times he’d stormed to the bedroom only to stop short, almost breaking with the effort not to barge inside and beg her to be his Maram again. To shower him with the exultation and imperviousness of her exoneration and belief, what he realized he’d come to depend on, even more than the magic of her emotions and desire.

“Amjad.”

He jolted upright. Maram.

She was standing at the corridor’s opening, dressed for the first time since their first night together. Her face was deadpan.

“All through the night, I’ve been remembering,” she said.

Yes. Please. Remember, he groaned inwardly.

“Every second we shared. Every word and look and touch.”

What he’d sat out here in hell hoping for. His heart slammed against its confines with expectation.

Then she went on and it almost burst. “And the more I remembered the more the truth spread its poison over everything that happened since I so willingly rushed into your trap.”

No. She should be seeing the real truth. Beyond the damning circumstantial evidence. As she always did.

“Now I see everything in its macabre light, turning my joy to pathetic obliviousness, our passion to humiliation and my love to shame.”

He heaved up to his feet, horrified. “Ya Ullah, la…Maram, matgooli hada… don’t say that. That isn’t the truth.”

“The truth is that your abduction plans went wrong, but you adjusted them on the fly, settling for your second-best hostage. You kept me in the dark, not to spare me as an innocent pawn, but so I’d be easier to handle. When I proved only too easy, you decided to have fun, pretending to resist my advances, enjoying making me pant as I offered you everything I had if only you’d take it. I’m not blaming you for that, though. As you say in the region, ‘the law doesn’t protect fools.’”

“You’re not a fool, Maram. The only fool here is me. I should have told you what was going on.”

“And spoil your game? You know what I thought when you put me through the wringer? I believed you were struggling with your trust issues, coming to terms with your fear of intimacy, that I and only I could help you through them. I applaud your ability not to howl with laughter at my I-would-do-anything-to-heal-you stupidity.”

“This was not how—”

She spoke over his protest again, her voice losing its blankness, claws of pain raking across it. “Then you kept prodding me to see how far I’d go. And like the lemming I am, I breathlessly rushed to my doom, handing you any power over me with the cherry of carte blanche exonerations on top. You must have found me hilarious when you kept telling me the truth—that you’re not to be trusted—only for me to flap around in self-perpetuated blindness proclaiming my unconditional trust.”

“Maram, it wasn’t like—”

“When your sandstorm cover story was about to end, and you needed another excuse to keep me here, you pretended to succumb to my ‘seduction.’” Her every feature began to quiver, as if with the advance tremors of an earthquake that would tear her psyche apart. “How you must have despised me as I writhed in ecstasy at your every touch, in agony at the thought of hurting you. How you must have reviled the hell out of me even more when I pretended the world has ceased to exist to prolong my time with you.”

Her ghastly interpretation paralyzed him. He could only shake his head and pant his denial in choking muteness.

And she cracked, like a compromised dam, tears pouring from her eyes under pressure, her face distorting under a force he felt might rip it apart as it did her weeping words.

“And I would…have done…anything to be with you. I would…have gladly…died for you. Oh, God, Amjad…how I loved you. Kamm ashagtak. You were everything to me…ev-everything. And it made me…even more worthless to you…didn’t it? More worthy of…manipulation and abuse. I was b-begging for it, a-after all.”

He surged toward her, grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her toward him as if he was snatching her from the precipice of an abyss. “Maram, no! You’re just distraught now…”

She tore out of his hold with an explosiveness that sent him staggering. Her weeping escalated.

“Now I hate you with the same totality, Amjad…. I would do anything… to never see you again. I don’t want to…ever see my father either. I was…a fool to think power-hungry monsters like you would want me…for anything but to…use me.”

He stood stunned by the hatred that seemed to metamorphose her face, the color of her tears, heart long burst.

She hadn’t finished. Her hacking sobs continued, even as she continued hacking at him. “But you made a…huge mistake, Amjad. You thought I was important to my father. Sure, I am of potential…use and some…sentimental value. But he proved—to you more than anyone else—that I am the ‘mare’ he…puts forward in his petty maneuvers. You’re a fool if you think…he won’t sacrifice me…for something he values for real…like his shot at the throne of Zohayd.”

He reached out trembling hands to her. “I don’t care what you are to your father, Maram. It’s what you are to me—”

She swatted them away. “I am nothing to you. But seems…I am nothing—period. I was nothing…to my mother, I’m nothing…to my father. I’m…less than nothing…to you.”

“That is not true—”

“I heard what you left out as you…threatened my father. That you’ll keep me captive until he ‘complies.’ Maybe even hurt me to force his hand.”

“Maram, la! No!” He surged to her, wanting her to attack him, gouge his eyes out, relieve a measure of her anguish. “Don’t even put these suspicions into words. Don’t let them sully your mind.”

She thwarted him, went limp in his hold, her eyes going dead. “My mind is already irreversibly sullied. And you…”

Suddenly something worse than anything he’d seen on her face so far crumpled it. Horror.

“You’ve checkmated yourself with my improvised abduction, didn’t you? Now only something drastic will extricate you.” Her voice felt like shrapnel. “Only you and your men know I was ever on Zohaydan soil and you can bury me here and nothing would implicate you in my disappearance…”

And he roared with the agony of her insupportable fear and suspicion. “Maram, atawassal elaiki, kaffa, I beg you…stop! You can’t believe for a second I’d do that! To even my worst enemy. But you? Hada kateer, kateer w’Ullah—this is too much, Maram, too much, no matter how much you hate me now.”

His anguish seemed to douse her sudden paranoia. Her eyes lost their rabid gleam, her breathing slowed down.

She finally whispered, “But you did miscalculate. My father must have realized long ago why you kidnapped me. If his brain is really missing and he didn’t, he now knows. If he cared whether I’m returned to him in one piece, he would have arranged my ransom with your brothers by now. He didn’t. And he won’t. I’m of no use to you.” The tears that had stopped under the surge of dread, then the descent of resignation, flowed again, their unnatural thickness turning his guts inside out imagining her eyes were disintegrating. “Just let me go.”

“I can’t, Maram.”

“Your plan won’t—”

He roared again, sanity long evaporated. “Damn my plan. It was actually the most peaceful resolution I could find. Harres did suggest something drastic. I stayed his hand. Now I know why. I didn’t want to hurt your father. And the only reason I can’t let you go now is because I can’t.”

“I won’t tell. I won’t even contact my father again. I just want to get away from you, and him, and out of this godforsaken region, for good this time. You’ll never hear from me again.”

“Maram…b’Ellahi, esma’eeni…listen to me, I beg—”

She slipped through his fingers, crumpled to the floor, sent his plea lodging in his chest with the force of an ax.

She ended up heaped against the settee, pain streaming from eyes filled with the end of all hope of her forgiveness or the return of her love and belief, her whisper hacked by defeat and despair. “All I ever did wrong was love you, Amjad. Don’t punish me any more for it. I beg you. Let me go.”

He hadn’t let Maram go.

But he was about to.

The hours it had taken to fly back to the capital, with her huddled away from him, had been a new brand of hell.

He’d taken her where she’d demanded. The airport.

She was now walking ahead of him, looking over her shoulder every few steps, as if she couldn’t bear having him shadow her, hating him more for knowing she couldn’t shake him.

Before she entered the main terminal, he caught her arm in as careful a grasp as he could manage.

“Come with me, Maram. My mansion is vast and you won’t see me if you don’t want to. I’ll wait. For as long as it takes. Please, just stay near.”

“I was never near, Amjad. I will now stay as far away as I can until I forget you exist. Maybe I’ll stop feeling so…defiled.”

He couldn’t even flinch, feeling numb with too many blows. He could only do one thing. Curtail the damage, stop gaining more of her disillusion and hatred.

“At least take my jet.”

“Surveillance wrapped in a pompous gesture of fake chivalry?”

He still couldn’t get his head around how she’d turned from total trust to distrust on every level. He reeled with it, felt unable to function anymore without the safety net of her belief.

He exhaled his dejection. “Now you think I’m stupid as well as an all-around monster? If I want to know where you’re going I can no matter what transportation you take.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not without my resources.”

“Will you at least let me know that you’re safe?”

“How touching.” She shook his hand off her arm, turned away. Before she went out of hearing range, she said, “As for safety, who cares. As you say in the region, ‘what does a sheep care if it’s skinned after it’s slaughtered.’”

Amjad sat in the back of a limo, shell-shocked, Maram’s last words, her last look, the way she’d looked as she’d walked away, ravaged by misery, injured beyond healing, expanding inside him like seismic waves.

He couldn’t even hope time would make her see things differently, and him like she used to. Time seemed only to escalate her agony at his deception.

Harres had called him, asking for an update. He’d told him to invade Ossaylan. Or tell their father that come Exhibition Day he’d be minus one throne.

Harres had thought he was being his obnoxious self, had joked that he, Mr. Crown Prince, would be minus a future throne, too.

Amjad had told him in obscene detail that he couldn’t care less.

He’d lost Maram. No other loss would ever matter.

His phone rang. Had to be Harres. Again insisting that he stop fooling around.

He’d almost reached the palace. He’d answer him face to fist.

The phone rang again and again. He fumbled it on with fingers numbed with rage, bellowed, “If I don’t find you dying when I arrive, Harres, and this is not you croaking for help—”

“You are as caring an oldest brother as you are everything else.”

“Maram…”

He couldn’t go on. He suffocated with the hope. That she’d changed her mind. With the fear…that there was no changing it.

“I just wanted to inform you. I’m going back to my father.”

A thousand questions flooded his mind. But one thing trumped all. Relief. That he wouldn’t go out of his mind worrying about where she’d be. That she’d be safe in familiar surroundings, with family, even such as Yusuf was.

Then she dealt him another blow.

“So, how does it feel now that you’ve been had but good?”

Ten

Amjad’s heartbeats piled up.

Maram was taunting him.

Something he hadn’t felt since he was a child burned behind his eyes, almost threatening to liquefy them.

He shut them on the melting, whispered, “It feels…far better than I deserve. To have you talking to me again, even if only to gloat over my gullibility.”

“You bought it, didn’t you?” Her voice was a monotone of emptiness. “My whole breakdown act.”

“I bought it so much, I almost bought it.”

He expected her to scoff his head off at his claims of almost fatal distress at hers.

She only said, “Too bad you’re too hardy.”

He bit his lip. On the surge of agonizing hope. “It would have been what I’ve done my level best to deserve.”

A beat of silence. “You don’t believe I conned you, do you?”

“So I would release you and you could go back to your father and continue your plot? No. Not for a second.”

“Then you’re an even bigger fool than I thought. And you’re a run-of-the-mill man after all. All it took to bring you down was some persistence, a few well-placed touches and a couple of strategically timed tears.”

“There weren’t some or a few or a couple of anything. There were deluges of everything. I was destined to be brought to my knees from the moment you had me in your crosshairs.”

“Interesting that you’re taking it so philosophically.”

His delight at sparring with her again came out on a ragged sigh. “You should have hit me, Maram. Or better still, used some heavy, blunt object and knocked me over my fool’s head.”

“To expend my alleged agony at your betrayal? I guess you haven’t heard anything I said. It seems you’ve been deafened by a lifetime of listening to your own voice booming inside your head.”

“I’ve been listening to you far, far closer than you think, Maram. I may be intractable, but you stuck with me long enough, tried hard enough, you penetrated my foot-thick skull. You rewired me where you’re concerned. And I’m never getting scrambled again. I wish I could have given you your pound of flesh, raved and ranted at your implied ‘manipulation’ and ‘betrayal.’ But I can’t distrust you even in pretense now, not even to appease you.”

Silence unfurled, pulsed, then stormed, until he felt he might crush the phone in unbearable anticipation.

She finally exhaled. “Seems this was the only thing I was right about where you’re concerned. You are a far better judge of character than I am, Amjad.”

A smile trembled on his lips at her implied admission. “You’re no slouch yourself.”

“Oh, but I am. You took me in completely.”

“I didn’t—”

“You just pretended not to see through me from the start.” She drowned out his voice, not interested in hearing his redundant protests. “To make me pant extra hard to ‘convince’ you of my ‘innocence.’ But what’s one more pretense, right? Anyway, now my childish effort to get back at you failed because there is no getting back at a total fraud, taunting you with what you never felt, I return to the real reason behind my call.”

He exhaled in resignation. There was no getting through to her. Not now. But her contacting him again at all gave him hope there might be.

He could only try to keep her involved. “So why are you going back to your father? If you can revise your stance on uprooting him from your life, I submit that I deserve the same leniency.”

“Neither you nor he deserve any. You were the two people I loved and trusted most and you both used and abused my love and trust in ways I’m still unable to fully grasp. I think I will hate you more as the implications hit me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. This he believed.

He tried again. “Then at least try to understand—”

“Of course, I do.”

“You do?” he echoed, floundering.

“You had overpowering reasons.” She thought so? “You, and he, will always have those, in your own minds, to take whatever measures you must to get what you want, no matter who you use or abuse. And I have learned that what I thought to be my bottomless genetic capacity to rationalize and accept being both has come to an end.”

Her calmness drove her pain deeper into his heart.

She went on. “You asked why I’m going back. One reason. To convince Father to give you back the jewels.”

His heart stopped. This time he felt it wouldn’t restart.

His unbelievable, unpredictable Maram.

“You would do that?” he choked, going light-headed.

“I hope you don’t think I’m doing it for you. I’m done doing anything for you. I want to stop my father from seeing through a catastrophe I know he hasn’t fully calculated and can’t handle.”

He digested this for one heart-pounding moment, seeing only one significance. “If you’re worried about what he’s getting himself into, and you’re going back to again act as his misplaced-at-birth brain, it seems you have forgiven him.”

“I haven’t. And I won’t. I’m not doing it for him either. You both can take flying leaps from your respective capitals’ tallest skyscrapers. I’m doing this because I, unlike both of you, am not blinded by my ambition. I am thinking of the whole region. I might emotionally wish it to go to hell as it deserves, but rationally, humanitarianly, I can’t let the situation explode into petty, escalating tribal wars if those damn trinkets aren’t returned to your family’s grimy royal hands.”

Exactly what he thought of the whole situation. Even if she thought he’d done what he had to protect “his” future throne.

His heart swelled with pride in her even as it did with the ache of yet another manifestation of her loss of faith in him.

“But you know me so well, you probably knew I would do this the moment you ‘let me go.’ It’s probably why you did.”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“But maybe you don’t know me well enough.” She steamrolled over his outburst with her tranquility. “If you did, you would have known you didn’t need to kidnap me, but needed only to explain the situation to get me to help you. I would have gone back and squeezed my father until he coughed up the jewels. But no harm done. At least to your interests. I’ll do that now. Once he does, I’ll call you to arrange their return.”

It nearly suffocated him, the need to reach inside the phone and rip her out of her disillusion and into his assuagement.

He exhaled the raggedness of his frustration. “You really expect him to hand them over?”

“If his brain truly is nonexistent and he resists, I’ll do something drastic. I’ll tell him I’m having your baby.”

Before his heart could fracture on the next heartbeat, the line went dead.

The agony and longing and regret of her words echoed inside his head, almost rupturing it.

He’d wondered, when she’d rushed into his trap, what kind of catastrophe would befall him in repayment for that unsettling ease. He’d thought it had hit when she’d found out about his deception and had been inconsolable.

Seemed that had only been the first blow.

Maram looked around the opulence of her father’s stateroom.

She felt as if someone else had inhabited her body when she’d last been here. The Maram who’d left this palace on that Amjad-bound trip hadn’t returned.

She’d been lost in that desert. As she deserved to be. Putting all her faith, emotions, desires and hopes in someone like that. In Amjad, the man the world had unanimously elected its coldest raider.

But that world had also thought him honest to the point of insanity. No one had detected the deception that had created that illusion. He’d conned everyone, not just her. But she’d seen his every vice as uniqueness, wonder. And she’d paid the price…

Running steps beat on the palace’s marble floors before the ornate oak double doors burst open and her father spilled in.

Maram watched the man who’d meant the world to her since she was twelve. Tall and lithe and distinguished, with those eyes that were like looking back into her own, and those streaks setting his temples and trimmed beard on silver fire. Before she’d seen Amjad, she’d thought him the most magnificent man on earth. Yes, she’d been a confirmed daddy’s girl.

Too bad he’d never been a “daughter’s dad,” as she’d so stupidly thought no matter how many times he’d proved he wasn’t.

She observed him from behind her new barrier of frost. It had descended on her after a storm of weeping had almost drained away her sanity after she’d left Amjad. She prayed it would never lift.

Her father’s face shuddered as he snatched her into arms trembling with simulated debilitating relief and draining anxiety.

“Maram, b’nayti.” His voice choked in her ear, his breathing rioted in her hair. “You’re here…”

She removed his arms from her, calmly. “No thanks to you. I could have been fossilized in the desert for all you cared.”

His eyes widened as if she’d punched him. “How can you say that? I’ve been in constant negotiations with Harres and Shaheen.”

She eyed him with detachment, wondering at how different he appeared to her through the dispassionate prism of disillusion. “Right. Negotiating not to ransom me.”

He took an urgent step toward her. Her cold stare aborted his momentum. He stopped, looking suddenly defeated, fragile. “I begged them to convince their brother to return you to me.”

“Sure. Out of the goodness of his heart.”

“It was all I could do. I couldn’t ransom you.”

“Wouldn’t, you mean.”

“No, I mean couldn’t. None of this is as you all think.”

“Okay, rewind and replay here. You’re telling me you have nothing to do with stealing the Pride of Zohayd and replacing them with fakes?”

“That’s…that’s not what I meant.”

“Not the right time to be coy, Father. Just own up.”

“You won’t understand, Maram.”

“Because I never went out on a mile-long limb to understand and accommodate your most self-serving actions? All right, you understand this. Amjad pretended to kidnap me to scare you into handing back the jewels. But because I’m clearly worth nowhere near as much to you, I’ll tell you why you have to return them. I’m…” The word, the lie, the notion lanced through her. She spat it out before it tore through her cocoon of numbness. “Pregnant.”

He staggered as if she’d hit him with a bat. “What?”

“That’s what you always wanted, isn’t it? To use me as an in to the Aal Shalaan gene pool? And when you gave up on that, you adjusted from matchmaking to conspiring. But now, through your power over the future king—aka your future grandchild’s rattle toy—you’ll have all the influence over Zohayd that you wished for, and without pissing off some of the world’s most powerful men and plunging the region into a war whose first casualty would probably be you.”

Her father seemed to age two decades before her eyes. “It—it isn’t as it looks. And it all started with my seeking the best for you.”

“My ‘best’ lay in usurping Amjad’s throne?”

“I mean when I…offered you to him. The world might think Amjad mad, but I’ve always thought him the only one who is man enough for you. So I arranged for you to meet him, and knew I was right when he looked at you with something I’d never seen before in his eyes. I approached him because I knew he’d never make the first move. He refused me, but I knew he was resisting his true desires. I kept trying because you also thought him the only man for you. I was distraught when I failed, and more so when I thought I was wrong all along, when I thought he’d kidnapped you for real.”

Maram contemplated his revelations, discounted the best interpretation, one she would have jumped at a day ago. “So you didn’t hope to gain anything from the alliance?”

“I didn’t say that. Ossaylan is nowhere as powerful as Zohayd, and I need all the backup I can get to keep predators away.”

“That’s why you targeted Haidar when you gave up on Amjad?”

He…blushed? “That…wasn’t my idea.”

“Don’t waste both of our time telling me it was Haidar’s.”

His color deepened. “No.”

“Just…no? Fine, suit yourself. It isn’t your matchmaking efforts I want you to own up to anyway.”

“I am not behind the theft of the Pride of Zohayd jewels.” His eyes grew imploring. “I was just the…tool.”

She almost said, You’re a tool, all right.

She didn’t, shook her head. It would have been funny, if she could feel anything, seeing her father trying to exonerate himself from his potentially region-destroying actions like a kid trying to pin the responsibility of a schoolyard prank on his susceptibility and a bigger kid’s influence.

“It doesn’t matter what you were. You financed the whole thing, you have the jewels—”

“I don’t!”

She stared at him. And no matter how lost her faith in him was, she was certain of one thing.

He was telling the truth.

“You didn’t really believe I had them and wouldn’t ransom you?” he exclaimed. “You think so little of my love, of me? I’ve been trying to contact Amjad to tell him that. I’ve been swearing it to his brothers.”

Something moved in her depths. Curiosity, she told herself. She wouldn’t open herself for anything more…dangerous, ever again.

She held up her hands. “Okay, Father. Tell me the whole story. From the beginning.”

“Did you know my father was quite the Don Juan?”

Amjad watched Maram advance into his office, and the shackles he’d placed on himself so that he wouldn’t rush her, hurl her over his shoulder and take her to his bed threatened to break.

The five hours it had taken her to arrive at his mansion, since she’d called to say she had something important enough to discuss that it required a face-to-face disclosure, had scraped off another layer of his sanity.

He realized she’d said something. About her father.

He didn’t care. About Yusuf or the information.

He only cared that… “I miss you.”

She stopped, the maddening neutrality she’d been eyeing him with wobbling before it slammed back in place.

He bridged the distance between them. “I miss everything about you, with you, from you. The missing is gnawing me hollow, body and mind, Maram. And it’s only been a day since I last saw you. Two since I last touched you.”

She gave him the pragmatic look he’d seen her give others in negotiations. “It’s called frustration. You need to get laid.”

Even though the rebuff was crude and suggested he was as base, it tickled his humor as anything she said always did.

“I will.” He hoped for a reaction. Something to prove she cared what he did. She gave him nothing. He pressed closer until his aching body got gossamer glimpses of her through her business pantsuit. “When I get through to you again.”

She moved away, depriving him of her nearness. “No chance of that. But there’s a chance you can still get to save your throne.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets, to stop himself from grabbing her and doing whatever it took to end their alienation. “You actually got Prince Absent Brain to choke on the jewels?”

“No, but he told me who you can choke for them. Your queen.”

That jolted him out of being lost in her eyes. “Sondoss?”

“Yeah, you had her pegged.” At his mute stare, she raised those beautifully dense arches he couldn’t bear never to trace and kiss again. “You don’t believe me?”

That made him find words. “If you believe it, that’s enough for me.”

Her expression said she thought him patronizing and didn’t appreciate it. “Sure, ’cause my track record of believing the most blatant lies doesn’t precede me.”

Anything he said now would be rehashing his previous protestations. More that she wouldn’t appreciate.

He could say only what had changed him forever, transfigured him from the inability to think the best of anyone, to thinking only that of her. “I believe you, Maram.”

She clearly didn’t believe him. “At least you believe I believe what I’m saying. Or maybe you’d believe anything of your stepmother, the entrails-snacking monstress.”

He exhaled, feeling he’d butted his head against a wall again. “She would have been my first suspect in anything heinous, if she didn’t have just as much to lose as we do. So I believe you in spite of the conflict of interest being inexplicable. And that Lady Macbeth would boil babies if it was in her best interests.”

“She is willing to destroy a region for them. And for the bonus of decimating your father, you and your brothers, whom she hates with a passion far surpassing your collective abhorrence.”

He nodded. “I was only seven when she came here and my own mother was anything but a saint, but that one…phew. She oozed venom. After she had Haidar and Jalal, I’m certain she would have arranged for our deaths if it would have made her sons the heirs. But according to the load of bull that passes for law around here, even if we all drop dead, succession is denied to Haidar and Jalal and their progeny, based on some moldy postulation that only fully Zohaydan Aal Shalaan princes can ascend to the throne. Being half-Azmaharian, they aren’t even fourth and fifth in line. If they were, Sondoss would have been my only suspect.”

“That’s where my father’s story comes in.”

A story. He ached to have her spin tales as she had when she’d soothed his madness and spread her magic through his mind and body. He whispered his need, “Tell me, Maram.”

Her gaze wavered as if with remembrance, before it firmed. “My father said…” Her blankness distorted on a grimace. “He was her lover.”

“Yuck.” He echoed it, raised her a shudder. “Seems he has body parts unknown to men in compensation for his lack of a brain, with which to mate with that…creature. I hear Father is still recovering from the encounter that resulted in Haidar and Jalal.”

Her lips twisted her agreement. “He said she manipulated him into it when he was at his lowest after I left Ossaylan, and he regretted it even as it…happened. Apparently their first fling happened before she married King Atef. Their history, along with his…malleability, among other criteria, was why she zeroed in on him as the main pawn in her plans.

“She coerced him into providing the funds she couldn’t without your suspecting the expenditure. His other role would have been on Exhibition Day, to come forward as the new ruler ‘chosen’ by the Pride of Zohayd. As soon as he was made king, she planned to divorce your father and marry him, remaining Zohayd’s queen, and becoming Ossaylan’s, too. She would have dictated new laws making her own sons eligible for the succession, making them his heirs because I’m his only offspring. She pushed him to pursue Haidar as a husband for me so he could inherit both thrones, keeping the new super-kingdom in the big happy family.”

It explained everything. Most important of all, her father’s pursuit of Haidar. One more proof that everything he’d ever thought her guilty of had been wrong. Not that he’d needed more proof.

He huffed in deprecation, of himself, of the whole situation. “I would almost admire her. Such a supreme snake. Ingenious.”

She sighed in corroboration. “It was only when my father told her he wasn’t going through with it that she implicated him as the mastermind through Harres’s now-fiancée. She wanted you to act against him, forcing him to defend himself, herding him into stepping up the schedule before Exhibition Day. But you did nothing overt, and no one knew that you’d kidnapped me.”

Before he could groan when and how she’d let him live this down, she went on. “She must be waiting for your next move, but needs to stay out of the picture, to keep her image pristine for when she remains the queen of Zohayd. But I believe if she’s cornered she might give it up, might even destroy the jewels, the evidence against her. So I made my father contact her to say you’re threatening him and he has no choice but to do everything she wants. She should be at her most secure now, making it the best time for you to strike.”

Amjad felt his heart expanding, as if it would encompass her. Even after he’d shattered hers, she’d given him everything he needed to bring this mess to an end. But what was that, when she’d given him everything he needed to live?

It was his fault she’d taken it all away.

He could only hope any measure of the unlimited love she’d felt for him would survive for him to revive and nurture.

For now he could only say, “Thank you, Maram.”

She shrugged, turned around. He caught her arm, felt awareness arc through both their bodies. “Will you stay while I plan my ‘strike’ and implement it?”

He expected her to refuse point-blank. She only nodded.

Would he ever chart her unpredictability?

And for the next hour, she sat there on his couch, reading files from her briefcase as he arranged an undetectable siege on the queen and every one of her people, then called his brothers.

They came one after the other, surprised and glad to see Maram. But it was Haidar’s reception that sent Amjad’s blood in a geyser to his head.

“Maram!” Haidar rushed toward her, his strides loaded with delight, his eyes with mischief and intimacy. She’d risen to greet each of his brothers. But with Haidar, she met him halfway, her steps and expression as eager.

Then they met and Amjad’s head almost exploded.

Haidar took her into his embrace, swung her off the ground before he put her down, bent to kiss her once on one cheek, twice on the other, in the region’s intimate salute.

Seeing his brother’s body enfolding her that way—the way he no longer could—sent misery and fury seething through him.

But it was when she surged into Haidar, her face burrowing in the breadth of his chest, that he almost had a heart attack.

He was about to rip her out of Haidar’s arms when she raised a trembling hand to Haidar’s cheek and choked, “I’m so sorry.”

“You should be sorry,” Haidar said, all indulgent admonishment. “You blew me off for two movie dates in a row. But then, I like you sorry. You always make great amends.”

Before Amjad charged his brother and pummeled his suggestive face, he snarled, “Maram is sorry for a slightly less trivial reason. She uncovered the identity of the mastermind behind the conspiracy to depose our father. Your beloved, bilious mother.”

Haidar jerked around, gaped at him. Amjad could feel Jalal doing the same. But it was Maram’s eyes that burned him, for handling this with such insensitivity. He regretted it, too. But the sight of her and Haidar’s closeness had fried his restraint.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Haidar hissed, the temperamental ruthlessness at his core—his mother’s legacy—simmering to the surface.

“And what the hell does it have to do with our mother?” That was Jalal, his default relaxed calculation gone. “Seems you’re all in the know. Why is this the first we’re hearing of it?”

Shaheen, being the middle brother and closest to their younger half brothers, intervened. He outlined in the most neutral way the terrible things their mother had done.

“We’re sorry we kept this from you,” Shaheen said. “But it seemed to involve Johara, then Talia, and we wanted to keep as few people as possible involved. We haven’t even told our father.”

“Bull,” Haidar barked, looking as if he’d been stabbed through the heart. “You didn’t tell us because you thought it wouldn’t matter to us because we’re not the damn heirs to the throne.”

“Or worse,” Jalal seethed, “because you thought we were in on our mother’s schemes so we would become the heirs.”

“We believed nothing of the sort,” Harres spoke for the first time, the one who always brought sibling fights to an end. “Or we wouldn’t be telling you now, before we…” Harres paused, loath to spell it out to Haidar and Jalal’s faces. He exhaled, apology staining his gaze. “Before we arrest her.”

The significance of the situation seemed to descend on Haidar and Jalal only then. They stood paralyzed under its enormity, gaping at their brothers, shock and denial giving way to anguish.

Then those opposite-as-two-people-could-get twins, who had been pretending the other didn’t exist, apart from during emergencies such as when they’d stood together with their brothers to fight against the council who’d been trying to dissolve Shaheen’s marriage to Johara, finally looked at each other. A lifetime of love and empathy, rivalry and bitterness passed between them as if they needed to channel each other’s strengths to grasp how this erased the underpinnings of their worlds and would change their lives forever.

They seemed to come to an unspoken understanding, turned to face the others, Haidar looking at Maram like someone forgiving a surgeon’s decision to amputate his limb. She rushed to him.

“I’m sorry, too, Maram,” Haidar whispered into her hair.

Amjad didn’t care if Haidar thought his world had collapsed. If he didn’t take his hands off Maram, if Maram didn’t step away from him right now, he’d…

“What are you waiting for?” Jalal’s growl yanked him out of his rising aggression. “Get it over with.”

Maram watched in horrified fascination as her plan, implemented with Amjad’s meticulous ruthlessness, worked.

Queen Sondoss was taken by surprise, and placing her under arrest went without incident. It all seemed too easy.

But as Maram looked at the imposing, statuesque figure of the queen of Zohayd, who looked an incredible, flawless forty at fifty-four and whose name meant the most luxurious silk but who seemed to be made of steel razors, she knew the situation couldn’t possibly be as simple as it seemed.

After the initial shock and dismay when the Aal Shalaan men—including her husband, King Atef—entered her quarters in force, realization of her exposure instantaneous, Maram could almost hear Sondoss’s frightening intellect going into high gear, resolving on a way out.

Seeming to find it, she rose from her computer with studied grace and goading tranquility, preceded them out of the room, sparing Maram one annihilating, pitying glance.

Throughout her interrogation Sondoss inspected the perfection of her manicure, the stunning face that was unlined by emotion and frozen by a lifetime of self-serving malice betraying nothing, only her eyes gleaming with venomous whimsy.

Haidar and Jalal, realizing she’d never confess the whereabouts of the jewels for anything, starting with her own well-being, gambled she might still do it for theirs.

She looked at them as if they were two schoolboys begging for hard candy that would wreck their teeth.

Then she spoke, her voice a husky drawl as mesmerizing as it was repulsive. “You’ll thank me later, my sweets.” She dismissed them, turned to the other men. She favored her husband with a baleful glance before focusing her hatred on his sons. “You pompous boys can imprison me and I’ll sit in my prison cell until Exhibition Day. When you have no jewels to show, you’ll be deposed anyway. When someone takes power, he’ll set free everyone whom your regime imprisoned. I might not remain queen, but I’ll have jewels that I can buy a new kingdom with. Even if I don’t, it will be enough for me to spoil your lives and cost you your throne and kingdom.”

Eleven

As days became weeks, with Amjad and his brothers racing to search everywhere the queen might have hidden the jewels in and out of Zohayd, Maram remained in the palace.

He took every opportunity to approach her. But to his horror she became closer and closer to Haidar instead.

His determination to give her time to heal, his willingness to be punished, evaporated at every sighting of her hand in Haidar’s, at every look of empathy she poured into Haidar’s filled-with-gooey-tenderness eyes.

Amjad didn’t care if they were best friends and she was “being there” for Haidar in his most trying time. He wasn’t waiting until their need for solace drove them into each other’s arms.

He couldn’t let that happen.

For Haidar’s sake, really.

He preferred not to have to kill his own baby brother.

“Stay away from Haidar, Maram.”

Maram had shuddered as she’d stepped into the room. She’d felt him there even before she’d heard his rumble in the dark, a leopard lying in wait.

She turned on the light, struggled not to fold to the floor.

He was propped up on his elbow, draped diagonally across the king-size bed she’d been sleeping in alone. His great body dwarfed it, his long legs hanging outside its boundary, feet bare, the steel-gray jacket she’d seen him in earlier tossed at the foot, cream silk shirt unbuttoned to expose the silk-smattered bronze torso she’d spent days worshiping and experiencing the most intense of ecstasies beneath.

“I’m just saying,” he purred as his pupils receded, turning his eyes into bottomless pools of hypnosis. “In the interest of having him retain that face women say makes angels have envious tantrums.”

She tore her gaze away from him, the ultimate in beauty to her, tried to get over the jellifying shock of finding him here.

But why not here? He’d been everywhere, his pursuit of her far surpassing his previous avoidance in persistence.

It made her wonder how he’d been simultaneously pursuing the investigations and seeing to pressing business and state matters. It made her hate him more with every stab of temptation that tore at the dregs of her self-respect, wanting to beg to be with him again.

She crossed to the dresser, tried not to drop her bag on it. “Haidar is magnificent, isn’t he? The perfect male version of his supernaturally beautiful mother, and without the scales, too.”

“Think how you’d be preserving God’s gift to women, then.”

She met his gaze in the mirror. Even in the coldness of the reflection, his eyes belied the mockery in his voice, the nonchalance in his pose, blazed over her with ferocity and possessiveness, craving and entreaty.

Yeah, right. She knew why he was doing this.

Knowing should have wiped her mind of the images. Of streaking to that bed, pushing him back, straddling him, tearing him out of his clothes and losing her mind all over him again.

She tried not to teeter with the force of her fantasies as she turned. “What a quaint caveman variation. And you are…who exactly? To tell me what I can or can’t do?”

“I’m the only man you ever wanted.” He rose to a half-sitting position, lazily dragging a hand through the hair that rained over his leonine forehead with the move. It only sifted back with what she knew was a silky sigh. “The blockhead you’re punishing for the ridiculous plan he forgot all about at your first touch.”

“And I’m still the woman who told you she never wants to see you again. I’m here as part of Team Pride of Zohayd, not Team Amjad.”

“As long as it’s not Team Haidar, I can be…reasoned with.” He rose from his deceptive relaxation in one fluid move, bridged the distance with deliberation designed to lull her. When he was a foot away, he reached out a hand to her face. She pulled back, cursing him again for the thunder in her chest, the shudder in her resolve. He exhaled, seeming to expend his calculation. “Isn’t it time you decided to cut the drama?”

“Drama? Because being kidnapped and having your kidnapper pass the time till you’re ransomed bedding you in every conceivable position is something to get over in a few days?”

His eyes flared. “It’s been three weeks, Maram. Three damn centuries’ worth of agony and aggravation and wanting to kill and quarter my own little brother. You’ve punished me enough.”

“Says who? You? Prince Self-Serving?”

He held back something fierce. “Okay, punish me for as long as you want. Just give me a damn date when you’ll forgive me. Next month? Next year? Next decade?”

“Wow, that’s new. A forgiveness schedule. How about never?”

He folded his arms on his massive chest. “You know I’ll never take never for an answer, Maram.”

“Too bad, because it’s the only answer you’ll get. And I’m not saying that to make you try harder.”

“You promised you’d never change your mind. No matter what.”

“I never would have changed my mind about the you I thought you were. That’s who I gave my promise to.”

She turned toward the door, to make him leave, to escape. He stopped her. Not with his hands. With a ragged, agonized question.

“You’re really giving up on me?”

She choked on regret. Giving up on him felt like giving up on everything she’d ever wanted from life.

She cast him a pained look. “I should have done that long ago. But live and learn, and move on.”

“You can’t, Maram. You don’t give up.”

“I can. I did.”

“You did see things in me that no one else saw, real things, things that spoke to you, suited and satisfied you.”

“I was self-deluding. You can believe anything, it seems, if you want it badly enough.”

“It’s my proof that I’m not all reprehensible. That you wanted me that much.”

“’Cause I’m such a great judge of character? Not.”

“Because you are such a great character.”

“Sure. A month ago, I was a man-eating succubus.”

“A month ago I knew of you. I know you now. And the you I know can’t turn off your eshg—what you professed to feel for me—just like that.”

“What I felt for you was based on a mountain of misconceptions. I loved a man who told me everything he thought to my face, who never hid his opinion or intentions. I trusted that man. I respected him. You’re not that man. You’re a cold, calculating cheat, just like your ex-wife and your mobboss stepmother.”

And the bastard smiled! “Aih, give it to me. Let it all out.”

“I’m done.” She opened the door. “And you’re gone, Prince Amjad.”

“Don’t you mean Abghad or Awghad?”

“Those names were for the man I thought I could share fun with. The man you are can’t be called anything worse than your real name.”

He took the door from her. “You fear I’ll always have reasons to abuse your trust. But I swear I’ll never let anything stop me from telling you the whole truth ever again.”

“Yeah, you won’t because I won’t give you the chance.”

“Listen to yourself, Maram. You are still angry.”

“I’m not angry. I’m…disillusioned. The enchanted haze I saw you through was blown away. The bond I always felt with you was exposed for what it is…nonexistent.”

He closed the door, backed her against it, his face a study in perfection and passion. “It exists. It was there in every second, when we sparred, when we laughed, when we made love…”

She turned her face away as his head descended to capture her in his power again. “Oh, no, you don’t. Love and making it don’t exist, like you said. One of your selective truths.” She glared up at him, hating him for making her so weak, so needy. “Don’t enrage me by suddenly starting to spout euphemisms.”

He melted a smile and a tender finger down her cheek, almost combusting it. “You mean this is you not enraged yet? And they’re not euphemisms. What I feel with you—”

She pushed at him. “What you feel? Holy suspension of disbelief.”

“Give me a break here, Maram.”

“Gladly. Where would you like it?”

His smile took over his face as he hauled her to him, plastered her stiff body against his warmth and intoxication. “Yes, Maram. Flay me with your sarcasm. Hurt me for real, any way you like. It’s as good as an admission that this will pass, that you still lo—”

She socked him. And almost broke her hand against his jaw.

She yelped as she staggered away, trying to shake the pain. “So you are made of stone through and through.”

He moved his jaw from side to side as if to make sure it was still hinged in place. “I am sorry my jaw hurt your hand. I again suggest blunt, heavy objects instead.”

“You don’t get to joke with me. That’s over.”

She turned on spastic legs, feeling she was stomping on her own heart as she rushed to the en-suite bathroom.

“So it was all a plan from the start, just not what I thought. Get the intractable madman to fall irrevocably, then lead him around by the nose wherever you wish, preferably over broken glass. You are a femme fatale after all.”

She turned, all but baring her fangs.

He grimaced a pained, bedeviling smile as he maneuvered her away from the bathroom, back to the bed. “Made you look.”

“Jerk.” She gasped as her knees hit the bed.

She fell back. He caught her mid-fall, rode her momentum, came down on top of her. “I never said I’m anything but. But you made it worse. You seemed to love me more the bigger the jerk I was.”

She pushed against him, and he only bent to take the frantic pulse at her neck in his lips. With each pull on her flesh, each groan reverberating his pleasure at the feel of her, she felt her body melting, the ice around her heart fracturing.

No. She wouldn’t surrender everything she was again.

She buried her hands in his hair, tried to tug his will-draining, body-igniting lips away from her flesh, panted, “The jerk I loved was so truthful it made your jerkiness…exhilarating, so wounded it made it…not only understandable but something…to love you more for. When you take the honesty and wounds away, what remains is an…unfeeling, lying jerk I don’t…and can’t love…”

As if to erase her words, he took them and her lips, thrust deep, breaching her with need, submerging her in his power.

She whimpered, feeling the holes that losing her faith in him had gnawed into her sanity and soul widen. Her heart, her body wept, for him, for what had and could have been.

“Believe me, Maram,” he groaned as he took her thigh, opened her over his hip, until she felt molded around his hardness. “I never lied to you about my feelings. Not for a second.”

“Again, what feelings?” she moaned, trying not to undulate her need against him, drag him inside her.

“As much as it pains me to realize it, not to mention admit it, I’m not dead inside as I thought, as you think now. When it comes to you, I’m anything but.”

She turned her face away, searching for air and her evaporating sense of self-preservation. “Yeah, sure. You were sleeping beauty, poisoned into a long hibernation and woken up by my kiss.”

His smile was insatiable indulgence incarnate. “Exactly.”

Then he dragged her into the depths of his possession.

She started to beg for him, and an override mechanism kicked in, made her pant the only words that might save her now.

“Haidar and I…are announcing we’re getting married…today.”

Maram’s declaration detonated inside Amjad’s head like a gunshot.

He lurched up, stared down at her.

Not even in his worst nightmares did he…could he…

Maram was taking advantage of his enervation, slipping from his hold. No.

He sank his fingers into her shoulders, feeling she might dematerialize if he didn’t hang on tight enough, heard the butchered growl that spilled from his lips.

“You will marry Haidar over my dead body. Over his, too.”

“Phew, so reassuring to know you’re not against killing me.”

It took seconds to recognize the teasing voice.

Bowing over Maram to hide her vulnerable pose beneath him, to keep her away from the brother who was suddenly his worst enemy, he snarled over his shoulder, “Get out of here, Haidar. Out of the kingdom. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going.”

Maram struggled beneath him. He let her up, feeling that if she went to Haidar, it would really be over.

He caught her back against him as she straightened her clothes. “I’m not letting you do this, Maram.”

She knocked his hands off her, heaved up to her feet. “You’re not ‘letting’ me do anything. I’ll do whatever I want!”

He came between her and Haidar. “Then you can’t do this, to us.”

“Kind of creepy seeing you go all territorial, Amjad.” Amjad swung toward Haidar, who danced smoothly away. “And I thought you didn’t care if anyone—especially of the female persuasion—lived or died. There goes another corner pillar of my belief system.”

“This is far bigger than what your exercise-atrophied mind can handle, so butt out, Haidar.”

“Isn’t it about time you decided to cut the drama?” Amjad swung back at Maram’s reprimand. “Now that we have your attention, let me fill you in on the details…”

He couldn’t hear those. “Maram, this is insane. I asked you to punish me, not finish me.”

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m actually feeling sorry for you.” Amjad looked back at the other side of his tormenting duet. “I would love to mess with you some more, get a few tons of flesh back, but the way you look, you might blow something vital for real, so cool it, all right? Our budding romance is for my mother’s benefit.”

“Now…the details your theatrics interrupted.” Amjad turned back to Maram, feeling like a tennis ball being smashed from one pro to another. “We set up a ruse to make her believe her original plan was working, that her son and her planned future husband’s daughter were allying with each other and would still sway my father to take his place in her game.”

“Because she wouldn’t believe I’d turn against you of my own accord,” Haidar said, “we had to convince her that Maram—who now hates your guts—has become sympathetic with her plans, has me so blinded by love I’ll do anything to please her.”

He turned to Maram. “I don’t care why you set this up or what can be gained. End it.”

She scowled at him, clearly not buying his agitation.

It was Haidar who put him out of his misery. “Although you really don’t deserve to get off the hook, big bro, Maram and I don’t have to share melting sighs anymore. My news about our engagement made Mother reminisce about how ‘our love’ must have begun, during an incident when we were fourteen. It was in a cave on the Azmaharian borders. We were almost eaten alive by hyenas and escaped by hiding inside a chamber that a slab of stone closes off when a geyser blows periodically. I told the others to look there and Harres called minutes ago. They found the jewels!”

Amjad grasped what Haidar had said. The conspiracy was over.

All he registered was that Maram had once again done whatever it took to do what her unswerving sense of justice dictated.

All he cared about was that she wasn’t lost to him.

Not yet.

Having made his momentous declaration, Haidar gave them one final excited look, then exited the room, clearly confident they’d follow.

Maram did move to follow him. Amjad lunged after her, intercepted her. “Maram, we must talk.”

She frowned down at the hand trembling on her arm, before looking up at him, her eyes stained with distance and deadness. “There’s nothing more to talk about. Your plan worked, Amjad. Your future throne is safe. Congratulations. You’ve won.”

Before he could grit out that his plan and future throne—his very future—could go to hell, that he cared only about winning her back, she bolted out of his grasp. He forced himself not to pounce on her, drag her back into the room and make her admit her need and give him another chance.

He shadowed her as she followed Haidar. But though he kept no more than a stride between them, he felt her receding with each stiff step, deepening his dread that he might have hoped too soon. That he might lose her anyway.

And with her, everything worth living for.

Amjad watched his brothers walk into their father’s stateroom. He barely noticed Shaheen and Harres as they patted Haidar on the back and thanked Maram for breaking the unbreakable queen’s silence. He barely registered Haidar and Jalal, once again drawn and silent. His focus centered on a more withdrawn Maram.

A hush fell over their gathering.

Jalal suddenly spoke, his voice dark, pained. “I know she doesn’t deserve it, but she’s our mother and we have to ask for leniency for her.”

Haidar moved toward him, as if unable to be near him yet needing to be. “Exile instead of imprisonment. We will guarantee that she won’t cause you or Zohayd trouble again.”

“Are you sure you want to take on such a…responsibility?” Shaheen had clearly already granted them what they asked on his own behalf, but feared the consequences of their misplaced compassion, for them.

“She won’t give up that easily, if at all.” Harres corroborated Shaheen’s view. “Who knows what damages she’ll cause you next as she plots your ‘trio’s’ best interests.”

Haidar shook his head. “We can’t have her in prison.”

“You might not condone, but at least understand,” Jalal said.

“We understand.” Shaheen exhaled. “Ya Ullah, what a mess.”

Harres echoed his sympathy. “I’m more sorry than I can say for the heartache she’s caused you, Haidar, Jalal.”

Haidar huffed a bitter laugh. “We’ll survive. We survived having her as a mother after all.”

“And grew up to be mushy fools anyway, apparently.” Jalal smirked, reminding Amjad too much of himself. “My mind is screaming, lock her in a dungeon, away from any sentient beings she can suck dry and gain more power from, but…” Jalal threw his hands up in self-disgust, cocked his head at them. “So what will it be?”

They all turned to their father, who’d stayed silent, eyes downcast through it all. He hadn’t spoken one complete sentence to any of them since he’d been brought into the situation.

He raised his eyes to his youngest sons. “She’s your mother. I will sanction whatever you decide to do with her.”

Haidar nodded, turned, gave Maram a brief hug and exited the room as if escaping suffocation.

Jalal thanked his father in a more collected way, settling back into his famous nonchalance before he turned to them. “How about we wrap up this disaster?”

Wrapping up the disaster turned out to be far more trouble than anyone had anticipated.

The scandal of the queen’s conspiracy erupted in the region.

As the Damned Prince, and with his father withdrawing from the scene and relegating all his powers to him, Amjad had to be the one to assure every prince and minister and their dog with convoluted new treaties to guarantee that Zohayd wouldn’t seek vengeance on the conspirators’ kingdoms and their allies. His most trying times was with the king of Azmahar, Queen Sondoss’s weakling of a brother.

The man was as whiny and irritating as his sister was ruthless and devastating. Amjad wasn’t in any mood to reassure him he wouldn’t blow him and his kingdom to smithereens in retaliation for exporting the plague of Sondoss to Zohayd all those years ago.

After two weeks of nonstop inanities, Amjad knew he’d become dangerous. Anyone standing in his way to being with Maram would be pulverized. Maram, who’d gone back to Ossaylan. Where he had to get to her before she carried out her threat of disappearing forever.

He’d called Harres and Shaheen from their cleanup assignments. He was waiting for them on the palace’s steps. He had a roomful of delegates to throw in their lap and instructions for his open-ended absence from Zohayd. He wanted to do this in person.

They were getting out of their cars, so slowly, as if taunting him. Then they approached, and he knew they were.

“My, Amjad,” Harres drawled, walking backward once he neared him for good measure. “Aren’t you in deep—”

He bared his teeth. “Don’t. Say. It.”

“—love.” Harres guffawed uncontrollably. “You’re in love.”

Shaheen placed a hand on his heart, pretending to stagger. “You’ve found the woman who makes you want to delete yourself from existence for her.”

Shaheen was taunting him with his own words, from when Shaheen had been about to give up everything he was to be with his Johara.

“Aih,” Amjad harrumphed. “It’s clear that Atef Aal Shalaan can beget nothing but idiots.”

Shaheen laughed at Amjad’s reminder that he’d called him an idiot then, and Amjad considered himself one now. “Happy idiots, though.”

Harres nodded, dreamy teasing lighting up his ruggedness. “Ecstatic morons.”

Amjad gritted his teeth. “Do turn down the blast of your bliss. It’s too abrasive when I’m in the category of inconsolable idiots and miserable morons for now.”

Shaheen tsked. “Man, you are potent, if you managed to demolish her obsession with you.”

Amjad exhaled heavily. “I was actually doing shockingly well until she found out about this trivial matter of kidnapping her.”

“I know you’re insane and all, Amjad—” Harres placed his arm on his brother’s shoulder, as if searching for a visible evidence of his madness “—but you told her?”

Shaheen whistled. “That comes under idiot for sure.”

Amjad’s lips twisted. “That comes under sloppy, actually. I was in no condition to be careful anymore.”

Shaheen shook his head in amazement. “And that’s an admission far bigger than jumping on a sofa and shouting you love her on TV.”

Harres gave him a firm tug. “But chin up, oldest and biggest idiot brother. She’ll forgive you.”

“She says she doesn’t want to see me ever again.”

“Wow, she loves you that much, eh?” Shaheen’s amazement deepened. “I wonder how she did it.”

Amjad sighed his dejection. “She isn’t doing it anymore.”

Harres waved. “Nah, she’s just hurt as deeply as she loves you. It’s like the saying ‘you’re the wound, and you’re the cure.’”

That was what Amjad lived in hope of.

On arriving at the royal palace in Ossaylan, officials stumbled around him, thinking he was there to enforce embargos in punishment for the emirate’s role in the conspiracy.

If only they knew he was here as a supplicant.

He demanded Maram’s whereabouts, and they were only too happy to offer their princess in return for their collective sparring.

He soon walked into Maram’s office. He found her standing by a sofa that echoed the color of her eyes, sorting through envelopes. Eyes that betrayed momentary shock, quickly replaced by realization and resignation.

He rushed to her and she put down the envelopes, turned to him. “Are marriage traditions in Zohayd the same as they are in Ossaylan?”

His advance faltered. She went on and it stopped.

Along with the whole world.

“Provide me with a list of differences. I want to know if there’s anything I should wear or not wear or do or not do for our wedding.”

Twelve

Our wedding.

That was what he’d heard Maram say.

Jubilation detonated…only to freeze in mid-explosion.

She’d said it as if she was mentioning a prison sentence.

“I should have known my father would run to you with the news. He’ll do anything to stack up any good points with you. I wanted to be the one to tell you, but…” She gave a resigned shrug. “Before you make your demands, I’ll state my own terms.”

Terms. She had terms. Her father had news. He had no idea what was going on.

“I wouldn’t have considered marriage as an option again, let alone between us, but what I want isn’t important now.”

It wasn’t?

“As for your own abhorrence of marriage, what you want isn’t important either. It all boils down to what’s best for our baby.”

Our baby?

“Even if you’re not father material, I’m not doing to my baby what my mother did to me. I won’t deprive it of its father.”

Father.

He felt his muscles loosen, losing tension, his mind flicker, his awareness following suit. The world blurred, dimmed.

Was he going to faint?

He couldn’t. He had to say something…even if he no longer found words or thoughts, had lost his voice, his coherence.

From a collapsing tunnel he heard a strangulated rasp. Had to be his. Only from the evidence that no one else was present.

“You’re…you’re pregnant?”

She cast him an irritated look. “You know I am. Precautions were no match for our combined fertility. That’s why you’re here.”

“I’m here to…to…” He shook his head, the revelation reverberating inside him in shockwaves.

Maram was carrying…his baby.

One of those times when she’d begged him to fill her, when he’d felt he wouldn’t survive if he didn’t, they’d forged more than a deeper bond of need. They’d made a miracle. Against all odds and intentions. But no. His intentions had been there. He’d evaded focusing on them, and not because he’d doubted he’d found the woman in whose love and happiness he wanted to invest all of himself. It had been because he’d had no right to wish it, with the deception he’d perpetrated bearing down on him.

Seemed he’d still wished it too hard, it had come true. Which she seemed desolate about, even as she tried to be pragmatic.

While that turned the knife in his guts, it was still far better than anything he’d come here hoping for. He’d feared that she might have kept eluding him until her wounds sealed on forgetfulness and he faded from her mind and heart.

Now he would have a lifetime of closeness, of chances…

She went on, destroying his hopes. “The marriage is only to legitimize the baby, to give it not only a father but an identity, a family, a background. I grew up without any, and I won’t let my baby suffer the same alienation. After the ceremony, I’ll leave. I won’t come back until it’s time to have it. We can divorce after it’s born, but I’ll stay close by so you’d have constant access to the baby, raise it with me, if you choose to.”

So there were more vitals to shred.

“My terms are nonnegotiable. You can make your own now.”

He stared at her, almost huffed with the irony.

Five weeks ago, if anyone had told him he couldn’t have something he wanted a fraction as much as he wanted Maram, he would have brought them to their knees with one of the retaliations that had gained him a reputation for being mad.

Funny how five days with her had transformed him into someone willing to go down on his knees, figuratively and literally, if only she would take him back.

But she wouldn’t. As long as it appeared she was nothing but a chess piece that had the misfortune of being vital to his coups, a catalyst he needed for its impact, not its own value.

And he asked himself. If he abided by her terms, and her hurt and disillusion waned until she was free of him, was there a possibility he’d have the same remission? Would he revert to the encased-in-ice being he’d been content to be?

The answer was unequivocal.

Never.

She was embedded into his being, had become its vital spark.

It would have been funny to contemplate how far he’d fallen if it wasn’t agonizing to be deprived of the freefall of her love, the gravity-defying power of her belief.

That brought him back to the terms she wanted him to state.

He wouldn’t make any. For the first time ever, he would let someone else—her—have all the power.

He rose on legs that felt weaker than when he’d been at death’s door. He stood before her, struggled not to sway with the force of letting go. “If you want to leave after the ceremony, Maram, leave. You never have to return.”

So this was Amjad’s final knife turn.

Apparently Maram had been hoping he’d prove she wasn’t less than nothing to him after all.

But as long as he had—preferably long-distance—rights to his heir, she could go and never come back for all he cared.

Her tormentor was continuing. “You don’t have to come back to have me near. I’ll follow you wherever you go, if you want me to, be there for you and the baby as long as you’ll have me.”

She blinked, and her heart stuttered. Before his fervent words could douse her blaze of misery, mistrust fanned it once again.

“And that’s my cue to say I don’t want you to, and that I won’t have you, so you can pin letting me go on me, and come out the winner, riding the higher moral ground to boot. Ingenious.”

He huffed bleakly. “And I thought I was into extremes of black or white. Congratulations. You’ve just surpassed me.”

“If all you’re going to contribute to this discussion are empty offers and cryptic remarks, I assume you agree to my terms. Guess it doesn’t matter to you, as long as you have your royal and personal tag on the baby you don’t want too near.”

Silence. For a long moment. Then he spoke, his voice the darkest she’d heard it. “You always prove I can never predict anything you’ll say or do. Before or after your turnabout. The contrast never ceases to…jar me. Before, no matter what I did, you were ready with the best possible explanation, loving me more for it. After, you switched to demonizing everything I say or do. But even in your blackest doubts, you must realize even I can’t be that bad.”

He had a look of such…defeat, her heart, quivering with disbelief as it was, lurched in its inability to suffer his pain.

She struggled not to give in to its demands. “Maybe. And maybe you’re worse. That’s the problem with doubt, Amjad. It’s open to just about anything.”

“And there’s no chance of doubting your doubt? Of ever giving me its benefit again?”

“Every time I try, I remember you always had huge things to gain by manipulating me, things you are securing one after the other, with me as the piece you have to maneuver to secure them. A throne, a sibling rivalry with a half brother from an abhorred stepmother and now an heir.”

He winced at every enumeration. She felt his spasms transmit to her own heart.

It finally hurt enough to make her stop.

Was she taking her doubts too far?

But letting go of despair was as difficult as giving up hope. Despair provided a refuge of no expectations and accustomed pain. Letting it go meant relinquishing its shield and possibly sustaining more devastating injuries.

But the temptation to believe again was becoming brutal. She’d always felt he was a part of her. Now a part of him was growing inside her, and she felt that he was integrated into her being more than ever.

But it was also because of that part that she was even more afraid of believing again. She couldn’t gamble with her emotional and psychological survival now that a new life would depend on her.

She struggled to continue. “After what happened, I feel I will never know why you do and say what you…” Suddenly, she reached her limit. Air tore through her lungs, left them on a lament. “Oh, God, Amjad, I want to trust you again. I’m dying because I can’t see my way back to you.”

Grief lashed out of him, enveloped her, had tears welling from her soul. He reached out trembling hands to cup her face, wiping their flow, soothing the dread of surrender.

“You stuck with me through the worst, took my worst and never gave up, got me out of the maze of alienation I was lost in. You pulled me out only to stumble into it yourself. You believed in me so deeply, so completely, when the blow to your faith came, it penetrated you with the same depth and totality.”

His hands dropped away from her face, fisted at his side. “You were right. I was frozen. And you thawed me. Melted me. I thought I was content in my suspended animation until you dragged my eyes open to my wasteland of a soul, of an existence. Then you yanked me out of it all, forced me to see and experience and live through our…togetherness. I can’t be alone again, Maram.”

His voice broke. His eyes filled.

And the shackles holding her back broke, the heart that had emptied of belief, her lifeblood, filled again.

A tear, something she’d never thought she’d ever see, slid from the eclipsed jewel of his left eye. “But I also can’t ask to be with you again either, not when I don’t deserve it yet. But I will, Maram. Like you once told me I would, I will prove to you that I am worthy of your trust, again and forever.”

He turned then, walked away. Every step dragged her heart farther from her body.

And she wailed, “Amjad…don’t go.”

He turned back to her with suffering as terrible as hers muddying his eyes, running down his face.

She flew to him, threw herself at him, weeping, quaking apart. “I can’t be without you anymore. I—I believe you…”

He held her away with hands that shook. “No, you don’t. And you’re right. You have no reason to trust me, not the absolute kind of trust you need to thrive. Not yet.”

“It was my own insecurities that kept fanning the doubts. I take it all back.”

“Don’t. Every word you lashed me with could have been the truth. It’s up to me to prove beyond doubt they aren’t. You gave me incontrovertible proof. I can’t live with giving you less.”

“You don’t have to give me more proof. I do believe you.”

“Still too generous…” He tugged a lock in gentle scolding. “Too gullible. All I gave you was ‘some persistence, a few well-placed touches and a couple of strategically timed tears.’” Hearing her exact taunt surprised her so much, a laugh coughed through the sobs. “All I was here to ask for was a chance. But you again do the unexpected and drown me in undeserved and unreserved pardon. You made it too easy for me for too long, Maram. I had hopes you could develop the grit needed to keep me in line when you put me through the wringer. Don’t go soft on me now.”

“I want to.” She flung her arms around him. The emotions in his eyes were undeniable anymore, fierce and profound, releasing the reserves of love and longing she’d been suppressing. “I’m dying to revert to my natural state and go soft all over you.”

Two more unbelievable tears spilled from his eyes.

Before she could beg him not to punish her with the sight of his suffering, a smile quivered on his lips as he stepped away, brooking no clinging. “Hold that thought.”

He was at the door before she squeaked, “Just what is this incontrovertible proof you intend to provide?”

He looked over his shoulder, and she gasped.

Her Amjad, bedeviling and beloved, looked back at her. “As if I’d tell you and have you meddle with it.”

Her legs gave out at his sudden wink.

She collapsed on the sofa, heard him say before he disappeared, “Stand back and watch the Mad Prince work.”

“What the hell did you do to Amjad, Maram?”

Maram almost dropped the phone. A lion had roared in her ear.

“Harres, is that you?”

“I’m not sure.” His sarcasm almost hurt. “I woke up this morning as me, Zohayd’s minister of interior. An hour ago I found myself its Crown Prince.”

Confusion hit her. “What?” Then alarm rose. “How?” Then dread detonated. “Amjad! Where is he?”

“You tell me,” Harres growled. “He said something about proving to you that only you matter, dragged me to a general assembly council meeting, announced that he was abdicating his title to me effective immediately and irreversibly, terrorized everyone, starting with our father, into supplying their tribal seals on his petition, then disappeared off the face of the earth.”

Maram stared down at the papers clutched in her hands.

She’d gotten them minutes ago. Her mind had already been stalled by the enormity of their contents. Amjad, proclaiming his paternity of their baby, his responsibility, yet forfeiting any rights, giving them to her, also irrevocably. Now this.

“So again…” Harres’s bark jogged her out of her stupor. “How did you drive him out of his mind, for real this time?”

“I—I didn’t…”

She stopped. Because she had. When she’d accused him of using her to secure his throne and heir. Relinquishing both was his incontrovertible proof that, to him, only she mattered.

“Don’t give me any bull, Maram. I’m worried about him for the first time since his ex almost killed him. You may not have hurt him physically, but you did an even worse number on him in every other way. He said he wasn’t coming back, and it scares the hell out of me that I believe him. So whatever you did, Maram, undo it, or I’ll be your enemy for—”

“Harres!” She shouted to stem his ferocity. “Be whatever you wish after we find hi…” Words petered out. She knew where Amjad was. Urgency bludgeoned her heart. “Do you know where he took me?”

A beat of silence. “I’ll look for him there.”

“Not without me, you won’t.”

“Why do you want to see him? To hurt him some more?”

“To undo what I did.”

“Undo it when I bring him back. If he wants to see you.”

“I swear, Harres, I’ll hurt you if you’re not here as fast as one of your state-of-the-art fighter helicopters can bring you!”

And she terminated the call.

An hour and ten minutes later, the sound of a military helicopter interrupted Maram’s feverish plans to hurt Harres.

The second the chopper touched ground, she streaked toward it, uncaring of the maelstrom almost blowing her off her feet.

In two interminable hours they landed outside the cabin that had seen her life’s most ecstatic and devastating times. Where she’d given everything that she was to Amjad.

She now knew he had given her all that he was, too. He was now giving up everything that he was for her.

And she had to stop him.

Amjad wasn’t inside. The stable was empty. And so was the cave. There was no sign of a car.

Had she only made believe she could read him as she’d always thought she could?

No. He was here. And she knew why he wasn’t showing himself.

She swung around to Harres. “Get out of here.”

He gaped at her. “What?”

“Hop on your metal monster and leave,” she hissed. “This is between me and Amjad. He won’t come out until you’re gone.”

“You’ll risk staying here alone on a hunch? I might not be able to come back for you for…a while.”

“Sure. Take your time. Now get.”

He gave her a considering look. “You’re as intractable as he is, aren’t you? You might be exactly what he needs. If you don’t kill him first.”

“I am what he needs, as he is what I need. And I intend to see him to a healthy, happy hundred.”

Harres suddenly guffawed. “Happy idiot hundred.”

She blinked. “What?”

“An inside joke. Ask him to explain it. After you unscramble him.” Harres patted her phone. “If you don’t call, I’ll assume my shuttle services aren’t needed.” He turned, tossed over his endless back. “Salam, ya marat akhi.”

Her knees almost buckled.

He’d called her “my brother’s wife.”

The drone of the helicopter had just faded when she felt…him.

She swung around. And like the magician she’d always thought him, he was there.

Amjad.

He was wearing the same white on white he had when he’d kidnapped her. He hadn’t shaved since she’d last seen him. Shadows darkened his jaw, accentuating his beauty, his eyes, resonating with the emotions roiling through her.

She flew to him, charged him, seared him with longing and scolding. “You overacting, overreacting, over-everything madman!”

He surrendered to her passion, touching her all over as if he couldn’t believe she was in his arms again. “I’ve actually never been more restrained and reasonable.”

She drank of his taste and reciprocation, moaned into his groans. “Whatever. You’re done with mammoth gestures and I better not discover you’ve committed more insanities. I’m not letting you off the hook of sharing every right to our baby. And you’re going back and rescinding your—”

“I won’t.”

“Now look here…”

A fiercely tender kiss aborted her protest. “Let’s revisit the rights thing after a couple of years of exemplary behavior on my part. Nothing else matters to me but being in your heart again.”

“You never left it. You never will. Not in this life or any other. Now…enough.”

“Nothing will ever be enough for you.” She opened her mouth and another kiss closed it for her. “A proof is only a proof as long as it remains in effect. Mine will.”

Frustration and anxiety shot way past the red zone.

He meant it!

Tirades filled her head, of why taking his job back was nonnegotiable, why she wouldn’t accept it as proof, why her doubts had escalated, how they were forever defused…

He went down on one knee before her on the sand, took her hands to his lips, ended coherence. “Imagine any ceremony, wear and do anything, reinvent marriage and being together to your liking. I’m giving you carte blanche with our wedding, our togetherness. With the rest of my life.”

She gaped down at him, everything inside her brimming and flowing over his upturned face.

He closed his eyes as her tears rained down on him, groaned as if basking in a healing downpour.

Then he opened them, his lips quirking. “I take it this is your consenting to a full-service union?”

Delight shuddered on her face. “I take it this is your rescinding your view of said union being in ‘servitude for life’?”

“Of course not. I embrace my servitude. I crave it.”

“Kinky after all, huh?”

He winked, swept himself to his feet and her off hers. “You bet.”

A long time later, maybe a day, maybe another lifetime, she stretched luxuriously in Amjad’s embrace, in their cave.

She now knew impassioned pleas or serious arguments would be met with indulgent or bedeviling dismissals. Maybe teasing?

She slid a leg along his, reveling in how his body stirred. He rumbled, pressed down on the body he’d pleasured to capacity.

“I’m trying to imagine,” she murmured, “what kind of world it will be with the vacuum your declawing will cause.”

His eyes told her he was on to her as he nipped her chin. “The world will remain the same mad place with the same Mad Prince in residence. And if anyone in it, starting with my brothers, dreams I’m declawed around anyone but you, a rag mop will be less shredded than they will be.”

She sighed, acknowledging that method’s failure. “Thrilled to know you’re still my slicing-and-dicing desert lion.”

“I am on a lifetime mission to deserve a fiery, ferocious lioness with an endless fount of mushy forgiveness for a heart.”

She giggled. “My Crown Prince of Snark.”

“Plain Vanilla Prince of Snark, please.”

Before she protested, he rose above her, suddenly serious. “They didn’t exist, Maram.” She blinked her confusion. “Love and eshg. Never to me. Until you brought them into existence, brought me to life. Aashagek, ya marami, ya amaali, ya koll hayati.”

Tears of joy surged, only to dissipate.

Nothing was enough to do justice to hearing him, the man she’d been born for, saying she inspired his eshg, calling her his aspirations and desires, his hopes, his whole life.

It was another lifetime later when she realized.

He’d taken her, body and soul, he’d given her all there was to be given. But he hadn’t taken back his sacrifice, hadn’t given her his word that he would.

But he eventually would. Give it to her along with everything else. As she would. Give her all to her intoxicating, incredible, incomparable desert lion…

Epilogue

“You intractable, infuriating, incorrigible…”

Aliyah, who’d frozen at Maram’s explosion, relaxed, chuckled. “Amjad, right?”

Maram growled, “Who else?” and put the phone back to her ear. “I swear on your ex-Crown Princehood, Amjad, if you try to divert me again…” She fell silent, felt her eyes glazing, her face heating, her core melting. He wasn’t diverting her, he was devouring her. With words. Making her unable to wait until he… “Argh! You did it again. That’s it. Get your luscious hide in here or you’re not enacting any of your ‘diversion’ tactics for—for…a week.”

“But Mo-om.” The family-room’s door opened and Amjad walked in, phone pressed to his ear until his legs rubbed against her knees. “I’ve been such a bad boy.”

She flung her phone aside, dragged him down to her. He chuckled as he met her furious passion with his indulgent one.

“It’s still disturbing.”

Aliyah’s amusement ejected Maram from the spiral of lust her husband had dragged her into. If, after eighteen months—which, according to everyone, was the hardest time in a marriage, and with a first pregnancy and its sequels, too—she combusted, left the world behind at a touch, she wondered if she’d one day overload with desire and eshg.

Aliyah went on. “To see Amjad still Amjad, yet paradoxically, deliriously in love.”

“And Amjad is pleased as always to disturb his little siblings,” Amjad drawled.

Aliyah laughed. “Seems you disturb your little wife, too.”

“I live to disturb her—” Amjad winked at Maram “—if in completely different ways.” He tossed Aliyah his best inflammatory glance. “Ways I’m sure your Kamal hasn’t heard about, or if he has, can’t execute.”

Aliyah gave him such a sweet smile. “Next time you meet, I’ll let Kamal deck you. He says it will rearrange your circuitry into something compatible with human company.”

“Since I care only about that of one specific golden lioness, I’ll take a pass on his fist-induced rewiring.”

Maram tugged at him, urgency hammering in her heart. “They’re coming. And you didn’t only smear all my makeup—you also didn’t give me an answer, you slippery, self-satisfied snake!”

Amjad nipped her earlobe. “I love it when you alliterate.”

She heard voices outside. They were here.

She tugged on his hair. “Amjad!”

“Here my answer.” He looked down at their entwined bodies. “This is all I want to be, together, all I am now—yours, ours.”

“And how will taking your job back stop you from being that?” she seethed. “And it’s your duty, your birthright. You don’t have to ‘want’ it to take it back.”

“I don’t have to take it back. That’s the beauty of having spare heirs. Me, I only want you and your uncanny replica.” He looked over at Wafaa, who was sprawled asleep on a blanket on the floor. He’d picked her name to express what she symbolized, Maram’s faithfulness and loyalty, the things that had taught him to live and love. “Who, by the way, called me baba today!”

Maram dragged his face back even as her insides melted at the adoration that turned him to jelly in their little girl’s grasp. “Tell me you’ll take your job back, Amjad.”

He grinned at her. “No.”

“For me!”

His eyes drained of mischief. “Don’t play dirty, Maram.”

She couldn’t believe she’d never thought of this before!

She pressed her advantage. “For me, Amjad, for me.”

He said nothing. Then it was too late.

The door opened and his family descended on them en masse.

After lively greetings, every couple turned to showing off their baby and cooing over the others’.

Shaheen and Johara’s son, Kareem, who looked like an amalgam of his parents, was fifteen months old. Harres and Talia had postponed starting a family among his demanding jobs as minister of interior and crown prince and her jobs as emergency medicine consultant in Zohayd’s foremost national hospital and field medicine trainer of Harres’s special forces. But they’d arranged their schedules and were expecting their first baby in six months. Aliyah and Kamal’s two rascals were four and two and everything that their parents were.

After the kids had been taken to the mansion’s garden to play, King Atef rose.

“I have an announcement, my children.” All eyes turned to him. “I am abdicating.”

After a stunned hush, everyone but Amjad burst out in protests. King Atef raised his hands.

After everyone quieted, he went on. “It’s time I spent whatever I have left of life serving the love of the one woman I’ve ever loved, the woman I left to serve my kingdom.”

He reached out a loving hand and gaze to Aliyah’s mother, Anna Beaumont. The tall, ethereally beautiful blonde flew to him, seemed to fit into his side. He sighed, hugged her tight.

No one had anything but blessings to this. King Atef had sacrificed his own happiness for far too long for Zohayd. Now that he was free of Sondoss and his health had stabilized, he could finally live his life the way he’d always longed to.

King Atef received everyone’s congratulations and his sons’ ribbings before he turned to Amjad.

“I still want you to succeed me, Amjad,” the king said. “Not because you’re firstborn, but because you are the most accomplished statesman of my sons, the one who will make the best king.”

Amjad’s lips twisted. “It was one thing to be stuck with me as your successor due to some cruel trick of timing, but now that you have a choice, how can you consider the Mad Prince would make the best moderator king?”

“Because you have a surefire method to your madness, Amjad,” King Atef said.

Shaheen nodded. “As much as it pains me to say, Amjad, your brand of madness works so well that it’s insane. You’re the only man capable of bringing our tribes to heel. I bet there won’t be any attempts at uprisings or conspiracies during your reign.”

“I do believe it’s your destiny,” King Atef corroborated. “To bring about a unification to this kingdom the like of which even your previous incarnation couldn’t dream of.”

Amjad snorted. “Ha, bloody, ha, Father. How about we retire this stale Ezzat reincarnation theory?”

King Atef shrugged. “Probably only to replace it with a parallel-lifelines one. Your paths are so similar that it’s uncanny. You might have spent longer resisting your fate, but you, too, have succumbed to it and found perfect happiness.”

Amjad looked over at Maram. “That is one thing I won’t contest.” Before she ran to him, Amjad looked back at his father, eyes simmering with irreverence. “The first decree I’d make as king would be to auction off the Pride of Zohayd. One piece at a time. Just as Ezzat gathered it, I would disperse it.”

A long silence echoed.

Finally the king exhaled. “It is time for radical changes. No one can bring those about but someone as radical as you, Amjad.”

“And since there’s no one as radical as you, just take the damn job back already,” Harres growled. “If you don’t want me to die of asphyxiation in business suits and negotiation halls.”

Amjad looked at Shaheen, who exclaimed, “Don’t even think it!”

“Wuss.” Amjad smirked before transferring his derision to all of them. “I don’t know where you get off lauding my acumen. There was no evidence of basic intelligence when it came to negotiating the most important treaty of my life.” He cast her a look of pained remembrance. “I almost caused an irreparable rift with Maram.”

And she burst out, “Then you created total harmony out of chaos.”

His look poured indulgence over her. “Only because you’re afflicted with this bottomless genetic capacity to forgive me.”

“Look where forgiving you has gotten me,” she exclaimed. “Zohayd can hope to be a fraction as lucky!” He started to shake his head again, and she rushed to him. “You’re my long-term, committed, all-or-nothing man. You’re exactly the king Zohayd needs. And I’m such a phenomenal political and financial law consultant, I will smooth out your reign, manage you so well you’ll have oodles of time for me and Wafaa to wrap you around our pinkies…”

He devoured her in a kiss reminiscent of the passionate demonstration that had rocked the region during their wedding.

She surfaced, breathless. “Will you stop paying tribute at the altar of your guilt already? I couldn’t love you more, if that is what you’re after! Not if you don’t want me to explode.”

“Listen to your wife and owner, Amjad,” Harres urged.

After looking so deep into her eyes that she knew he’d examined her soul, marveled at how kindred it was to his, Amjad sighed, turned to his family. “Take a good look at the king you’ll have. A susceptible madman willingly rolling over at his mistress’s merest command.”

A commotion of relief and elation exploded.

Maram jumped on him in delight. “Merest, you breath-depleting man? I’ve been begging you for eighteen months.”

“You never struck the right chord. You didn’t say ‘for me.’ Then you did, today. All was lost then.”

“You mean you intended to accept ever since I said that?”

“Yes.”

Maram gaped at him. “And you made us beg to convince you!”

His lips quirked on his trademark goading. “Just rubbing your noses in the error of your ways. And messing with you.” He pressed her closer. “And needing to hear once again how much you love me.”

She cried out in chagrin, laughed, hugged him as his family milled around, celebrating what they all felt would be a new era of limitless prosperity for Zohayd under Amjad’s leadership.

For with Amjad there were no limits.

And she could and would love him more. And to infinity.

ISBN: 978-1-4592-0926-8

TO TOUCH A SHEIKH

Copyright © 2011 by Olivia Gates

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[**]Pride of Zohayd

[*]Throne of Judar

†The Castaldini Crown