it had helped her forge a career for herself as an artist, the inability to forget had always been her curse.
She’d forgotten nothing. Not an inch, not a hair. He had changed. And infuriatingly, not for the worse as she’d been hoping on the way here. The twenty-eight-year-old sleek panther of a man who’d ruled her emotions for six months then abandoned her to the most chaotic, traumatic time of her life had been upgraded. And how.
But one thing was the same. His clothes. He was dressed the same way he had been the night she’d first laid eyes on him.
Had he done that on purpose? Could he even remember what he’d worn then? He’d once told her that he, too, forgot nothing.
But if he had remembered, had done it on purpose, why? To mock her? To goad her? To rewind to the beginning and start over?
Heh. Sure. As if.
He could start over in hell, where he belonged.
Still, it was the sameness of the sans-tie, formal charcoal suit with its unbuttoned silk shirt that echoed the color of his whiskey eyes that made the change so obvious, that detailed how the leanly muscled, broad-shouldered six-foot-six frame she regretfully remembered in distressing detail had bulked up with premium maturity to reach a new zenith of virility.
Problem was, the upgrade didn’t stop there. The same magic had taken a chisel to his incredible face, turning his singular features from arresting to overwhelming. Worse still, the jet-black satin that was his hair and that he’d always cropped close to his awesome head now lay in luxurious layers down to his collar.
Worst of all was the addition of a trimmed beard and mustache. Those betrayed his true nature, showed him for what he really was. One of nature’s most menacing entities. Not to mention one of its grossest examples of injustice.
No two ways about it. The years had been criminally kind to him. Seemed infinite wealth and power agreed with him. He’d no doubt improve exponentially the longer he had them, the older he got. And judging by his notorious reputation as a womanizer—the double-standard pig had dared call her depraved—every female with a brainwave agreed. And wanted a part of him.
And they could have him, could pick his bones clean, preferably. He no longer affected her…Liar.
Fine. So she’d be dead and buried before a male of this caliber didn’t access her hormonal controls. What did it matter that he was the most magnificent male to walk the earth, a species of one? It changed nothing. Out of the few billion men alive, he was the one who she knew from mutilating personal experience was a soulless bastard. She wouldn’t come near him with a ten-foot pole. Unless it was to poke out his eyes with it.
But none of that mattered now. Now she hoped only that she hadn’t gawked at him too long. Not with her mouth hanging open, at least. What mattered now was that she regained the composure he always seemed to rob her of just by training those eyes on her. For once she needed to stand with him on equal ground.
She inhaled, cocked her head, forced her gaze to sweep him, down then back up to his eyes, smearing him with disdain.
“These sure are desperate times we live in.”
For a moment she was stunned to hear her own voice.
So it was a husky wisp of sound, but at least she got it to work. Encouraged, enraged further by the way he remained staring at her as if at an unsavory species, she elaborated.
“They have to be, if your countrymen are scraping the bottom of the barrel to find themselves a king.”
Kamal almost lurched. At the satin lash of the voice he’d just discovered had never stopped echoing in his mind. At the slap her condescension had landed on his stunned senses.
He would have if he could.
He couldn’t even blink, couldn’t access one voluntary action or thought. And the loss of control only spiked his outrage.
Was he doomed to react this way whenever he laid eyes on her? What was it about this woman that deactivated his rational centers? And activated his incoherent ones?
And she wasn’t even the same woman. She’d changed, almost beyond recognition. Contrary to his every projection. And, e’lal jaheem…to hell with it, for the best.
His senses soaked in the changes, making feverish comparisons with her past self.
Gone were the wild clothes, the reed-thinness and crackling energy. In their place was a superbly dressed woman with a measured grace, a steady gaze and a body that had filled with a femininity so distressing it had everything male in him overriding all. His mind might be averse, but his body roared for its mate….
She isn’t your mate, ya moghaffal. She’s anybody’s.
But his body was oblivious, was fighting all connections with his mind, bucking off its reins, struggling to break its control and claim the body that had stopped him from finding anything beyond frustration with others.
It was merciful that she contributed her own deterrent as she now made a dismissive, derisive gesture in his direction.
“That they’ve stooped to settling on you is the loudest possible statement that this world is going to hell in a handbasket. Judarians must be mourning not only their king’s death, but their once-great nation’s future.”
There they came again. The insults. White-hot pokers designed to prod him into an uncalculated response.
He bit into the surge of tingling in his lower lip, into the urge to retaliate, to override.
So, that had changed, too. Her methods. Her approach. There’d clearly be no more breathless adulation spilling from those deep rose lips. Instead she seemed bent on bombarding him with condescension and contempt. And she was letting him know right off the bat, in lieu of the greeting they didn’t owe each other. She had even before she’d laid eyes on him, coming all the way here only to turn around and hurl his parting words back at him, and through his men, too, just to make sure the slap landed effectively.
He’d bet she’d calculated, even counted on that to ratchet up his interest. That had remained the same, then. The masterful manipulation. In the past, her machinations had worn the guise of erratic spontaneity and had wrung the same response from him. She’d just changed her strategy to suit their tarnished status quo and the new poised creature she was now projecting.
And b’Ellahi—it was working. Spectacularly. When it shouldn’t. When he shouldn’t let it.
He could do nothing else. She’d walked in here training those fathomless eyes on him, her gaze familiar yet someone else’s, throwing his own choice of cruelty back in his face and taking the wind out of his sails. Worse, she’d knocked him off course.
He’d intended to railroad her, unilaterally charting the rest of their regretfully unavoidable union. He’d summoned her here to inform her of his plans, and her role in them: to abide by them.
But she’d thrown down the gauntlet. And he could no more not pick it up than he could stop breathing.
It was beyond him not to engage her.
Shaking off the last of his paralysis, realizing he was
