the dig she’d heard a thousand times infused heat into her chilled bones, steadiness in her voice. “I’m as much an American as I am a Zohaydan, even if in reverse to what I thought. So don’t play the turning-my-back-on-my-roots card.”
His lips stretched on a silent snarl. “How about the turning-your-back-on-your-family card?”
“Oh, no, not that one, either. You don’t know anything about me or about how it’s been with my parents, not in the past when there were only two, and surely not now there are four of them. You have nothing to do with any of it, so don’t you dare even have an opinion on how we all deal with it. Keep out of it and it’ll turn out fine. The only person I’m turning my back on here is you.”
His eyes narrowed, intensifying his menace. “I know far more than you so obliviously think. About you, and about what you put and are still putting your parents through. And though there’s nothing I want more than to watch you leave thinking you’ve gotten your own back, I’m not letting you walk away.”
“Aren’t you going too far into the realm of irrationality to enforce your will? To put through this ridiculous ‘deal’? You walked away from me calling me a depraved slut, if you remember. You’d make a slut your queen and the mother of your heirs?”
His gaze froze as silence stretched until it almost snapped every nerve in her body. Then he turned his face away, presenting her with the precision and power of his profile. Just when she thought he had nothing more to say, that she’d rested her case, his voice poured into the night, as deep and permeating.
“I remember one sunny day seven years ago, here in L.A. I was getting into my car when you threw yourself at me right in the middle of the street. After I pried you off me, you stalked me, did it again everywhere I went, not caring who saw your exhibitions or heard your shameless pleas, probably wanting to publicly embarrass me enough so I’d give you the chance to work on me again in private. If your memory is as intact as you claim, you surely remember what you said. Things along the lines of ‘I need you’ and ‘I’ll do anything.’ Ring a bell? You make it sound as if I was insulting you, calling you what I did. Try to put yourself in the position of an unbiased observer and tell me, how would you describe your behavior as anything other than depraved and slutty?”
Had she burned to ashes? How had she not, after he’d shriveled her up once again with the memories? Of her own condition then, her actions, his reactions?
She finally rasped, “Depraved is right. As in out of my mind. But I’m very much in it now.”
He turned back to her, his gaze the essence of ridicule. “A piece of precious advice. Drop the act. I had to tear your talons out of my flesh to make you let go. You want me with the same ferocity still.”
A surge of scalding acknowledgment had her on her feet, quaking with mortification. That he was right, that her hated hunger had never died, the weapon he’d damaged her with. That he knew. Before any defense took shape in her mind, he rose to his feet, too, slow, measured, pitiless.
“In case you’re preparing to launch into empty posturing and pretense, save it. I can feel it, coming off of you in waves. All this ‘I’d rather die than marry you’ is to goad me into giving you what you want, isn’t it? A game of pursuit? With some reluctance and dominance thrown in? Go ahead, admit it and I’ll promise to give you what you know will leave you gasping within an inch of your life with satiation, and let’s move on to something important.”
She shuddered with rage. At herself, at his unjust words and malice. Was this how people had arteries burst in their heads? She felt herself going numb, her tongue filling her mouth, swollen with the incoherent need to lash out.
Nothing came to her rescue. Nothing but, “You…bastard.”
His lips pressed together for a moment. Then they spread on a heart-wrenching parody of a smile. “It’s not me who is one.”
She almost doubled over.
She didn’t, stood there feeling as if he’d just punched through her, stared his cruelty full in the face. After all he’d done to her, she still hadn’t thought him capable of such a level of heartlessness. Her mind emptied, her heart flooded. With the acid of desperation. For something to deflect the pain with, to send it ricocheting into his black heart, to not let him have the final word. Not when it was that.
But what could be enough to answer a stab through the heart?
She shouldn’t have walked into his trap. Should have known how this would end. Shouldn’t have taken him on, shouldn’t…
Just get out of here.
She staggered around, felt the floor turning to quicksand, struggled not to sink into it.
Suddenly something sank into her—the fingers that an hour ago had barely touched her on the elbow and disrupted her balance and wrenched a response from her, that had once stripped away whatever control she’d developed before she’d met him. She wished they were violent. They were only inexorable in intent, cruel in effect.
He aborted her momentum, kept her on her feet, turned her around to meet his wolf’s eyes as they flared with antipathy. “You’re not walking out on your responsibilities like you have all your life. It’s time you behaved like the princess you regretfully are. You will honor your duties and for once be of use to others.”
“Use?” she threw at him, hating him even more for the quaver that robbed her pain of any retaliatory effect. “That’s all you think people are for, don’t you? To be used. Well, as you say, I had one use to you in the past, and damned if I’m ever going to be of any use to you again. It’s not dramatizing to say I’d rather die.”
“You think it’s any kind of life for me to be forced to make use of you? Do you think I want to marry you? The woman I found out was too depraved to be even one of my sex partners? But I will marry you. For the throne of Judar.”
Every word lodged into her with the force of an ax in the chest. And for the millionth time, the frustration, the sheer mind-con-suming confusion reverberated inside her.
Why all this revulsion? All this fluency of abuse? All she’d ever done once was lose her mind over him….
And it was there again. Like the ocean, advancing on her with its endlessness and blackness, the tide of volatility. Her vision, her emotions began to distort, to fracture, the swirling black hole she’d once been unable to exit staring at her, pulling…
No. She would not let him do this to her.
She wrenched herself from his hands, spat, “You and your throne and your Judar can go to hell.”
He seemed to expand, his hands fisting at his side. She knew that if she’d been a man of equal size he would have pulverized her.
Finally he ground out, “What about Zohayd? And your father and king? You probably care nothing if they go to hell, too, but before you consign them there, give it some thought. Think what you’ll lose, if Zohayd is dragged into civil war.”
“Civil war? What are you talking about?”
“The war that will break out in both our kingdoms if our union doesn’t come to pass.”
She stared at him as if he’d started talking a language
