To Touch a Sheikh (15 page)

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.”

A
s 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.”