To Touch a Sheikh
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 mouthwatering 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?