he had to make sure she’d stay.
One
Kamal ben Hareth ben Essam Ed-Deen Aal Masood’s fist smashed into his inert opponent with a bone-crunching crack.
The bag swung away in a wide arc before hurtling right back at him like a battering ram.
Snarling, imagining it one of the people who had put him in this predicament, this disaster, he met it with a barrage that would have left anything living a mass of broken bones and mangled flesh.
A full thirty minutes into his rampage, his punching bag seemed to grin back at him, pristine and unimpressed with either his strength or his punishment. Leave it to something inanimate to point out the futility of his fury.
He caught it on its last rebound, leaned his face on its cool surface on a harsh exhalation of exertion and resignation.
It was no good. He was still mad as hell. Madder. The edge hadn’t even dulled. Would the rage ever lessen? Would the shock?
The king of Judar was dead. Long live the king. Him.
Blood surged in his head again. His fingers dug into the bag.
The bag should have been his brothers. He’d bet they would have stood there and taken whatever he dished out.
And why not? After all, they’d gotten what they’d wanted. First Farooq, followed by Shehab, his in-total-control brothers had done the unthinkable—forsaken the world for love and dumped the succession to Judar’s throne in his lap. Then, two days before he’d gone through the succession transfer ritual, the king’s long-expected death had come to pass.
Now he would participate in a ceremony of a different kind. An ascension—or rather, as it was known in Judar, a joloos—a sitting down on the throne. Farooq and Shehab had become the crown prince and the spare, and they kept patting him on the back for taking the throne off their hands so they could live in a perpetual haze of domestic lust and breed princesses for Judar at light speed.
How he wanted to batter sense into them, to bellow that the women for whom they’d forsaken the throne would end up tearing out their hearts and treading on them. He had made his augury unadorned and brutal. He’d gotten identical answers from the brothers he’d once thought the most discerning men he knew. Serene glances and pitying voices telling him time would show him how wrong he was.
Malahees.
Muttering his verdict—that his brothers had had their minds licked away by the honeyed tongues of two sirens—he tore his soaked sweatshirt over his head, balled it up and slammed it against the wall on his way into the shower/sauna/dressing area.
If all Farooq and Shehab had done was set themselves up for destruction, he would have kept trying to save them. And as victims of witchcraft, they could have had his forgiveness if all they’d done was shove him onto the throne.
But now he had to marry the woman who came with it.
He still might have accepted this fate worse than life imprisonment had it been any other woman.
Any woman but Aliyah Morgan.
Ya Ullah, when would he lurch awake to find all this another nightmare featuring the woman he’d been struggling to forget for the past seven years?
But it wasn’t a nightmare. It was far worse. It was real.
And in this nightmare of a reality, by a macabre twist of fate, Aliyah had become the woman the future king of Judar had to marry, to fulfill the terms of the peace settlement that would secure the throne and restore balance to the whole region.
He should refuse his brothers’ abdication, insist one of them take back the throne. Then one of them would be forced to marry Aliyah, even though he had another wife…
He stopped in midstride, stared through the flawless Plexiglas wall into the marble and stainless-steel shower compartment, a fist balling in his gut, images deluging him.
Aliyah…marrying Farooq or Shehab, in either of their beds, writhing beneath them, driving them wild…
The fist tightened, wrenched, forcing a groan from his lips.
B’Ellahi, had he lost his reason again? How could he still feel the least possessive over a woman he’d never possessed in truth, who wasn’t worth possessing?
He entered the shower, turned the heat up to rival his internal seething, hissed his pain-laden relief as needles of scalding water bombarded his flesh and steam billowed around him, engulfing him in its suffocating embrace.
Damn his power of flawless recall. It gave him an edge that made him rise in every field he’d decided to enter, to conquer. It was also a curse. He never forgot. Anything.
He had only to close his eyes to feel it all again. Every sensation and thought since the moment he’d laid eyes on her.
Until that moment, to him, women had been either beloved family, cherished friends, potential-mate material, or self-acknowledged huntresses who understood that he had no needs, only fancies to be roused with utmost effort and appeased, swiftly, irrevocably. He had yet to meet a woman who hadn’t fallen into one of those categories.
Then he’d felt her gaze on him, and all his preconceptions had been blasted away. He’d approached her at once, and her cutting intelligence and crackling energy, her exhilarating openness about his equally powerful effect on her, had deepened her impact on him by the second.
Fearing his unprecedented involvement, his aides had cautioned him. Aliyah wasn’t using her modeling profession to insinuate herself into the highest tiers of society, hunting for sponsors—she was doing far worse. Not only was she exploiting her unconventional beauty, but also her status as a princess of Zohayd, violating the rules of her culture and rank to catapult herself to stardom through scandal and controversy.
But Kamal, for once out of his controlled, focused mind with hunger, had rejected the cautioning. To him she’d been a miracle, something he’d thought he’d never find. A woman created for him. One who lived in the West but had her roots in his culture, an equal who “got” him and mirrored him on every level—the duality of his nature, the struggle between the magnate who abided no rules with the prince who knew nothing but. He’d thought it was fate.
And it had been. Fate at its cruelest, setting him up for the biggest fall of his life.
The ugliness of the discoveries, of that last confrontation, still lashed him. But only with anger at himself, for blinding himself that much, that long, for still being so weak he’d counted on others to make it impossible for her to reach him again.
Now it was others who’d given her access to him for life.
The accursed Carmen and Farah, who’d ensnared his brothers. His idiotic brothers, who’d succumbed to their wives’ influence. The damned Aal Shalaans, who’d demanded this marriage on threat of civil war. And the miserable Aal Masoods, who’d considered the marriage a peaceful solution. But it was originally the king of Zohayd’s fault.
King Atef was the one who’d fathered Aliyah then refused to acknowledge her. Then her American
