first skirmish was about to begin.
Her GPS said she was minutes from the battleground, a five-mile solid-earth flat track among the dunes. Amjad’s location of choice for the region’s royal horse race. Zohayd hosted the race annually on the last day of fall. This year, due to unchangeable commitments, Amjad had brought the date forward.
Everyone had been horrified at his proposal to hold the race midsummer. In response, Amjad had sent taunting letters, something only he could get away with, considering the recipients were hard-hitting royals with egos to complement their lofty status.
She’d seen his letter to her father, could hear his lazy, lethal voice in her head as she’d read his elegant, forceful handwriting.
Was her father afraid of roughing it in the sun, outside his rarefied cocoon of luxury? Was the big, tough man afraid of some sweat, when he wasn’t even racing?
He must have tailored his missives to each recipient’s idiosyncrasies. Her father was too wary physically, too fastidious about his neatness. Not that anyone knew this. Her father recognized these characteristics as a potential source of ridicule, projected the opposite. But Amjad Aal Shalaan was infallible in deciphering people. That was just one among the endless weapons that made him unstoppable in the worlds of highest-level finance and politics.
Needless to say, everyone had succumbed to his wishes. He’d specified three o’clock for arrival.
It was noon. She’d just called her father to tell him she’d arrived. He’d exclaimed his anxiety that she’d gone alone, had left behind the entourage he’d tried to saddle her with. She’d told him they could catch up, that she had no problem going back with them. But she was getting some one-on-one time with Amjad first, before the desert became a forest of people for him to fade among.
She eased her foot off the accelerator to savor the last moments of approach. The sight warranted the most leisurely of zooms, to savor its every smidge of magnificence.
And no, she didn’t mean the majestic desert with its undulating dunes surrounding the naturally flat land. That and the canopy of bleached-blue sky, painted in wisps of incandescent white, were indeed glorious. But it was the sight of him that spread firecrackers of pleasure through her system, had flutters of anticipation accumulating in her rib cage.
He stood in front of one of the huge tents. Dozens of his men flitted around him. She saw only him. Standing half a foot taller than anyone else, broad, lean and loaded with inborn grace and inimitable power, uncaring of the mercilessness of the sun beating down on his raven head, indifferent to existence in its whole.
The man was so aptly named “most glorious.”
And that was before you took into account the difference in him today. She’d only ever seen him in hand-sculpted suits that looked to be made of living silk, designed and delighted to worship his body. She’d thought that nothing could look better than that.
He did now. All in white, his billowy shirt tucked into skintight pants and those into tan boots, he was … description-defying.
She parked beside the other cars, grabbed her bag and hat and hopped down from the steel behemoth her father had bequeathed her for the trip. She slung her bag across her torso and hid from the sun’s pummeling rays beneath the hat, willing the necessities to cool down her urge to run to him.
Not that Amjad was in any rush to acknowledge her. It was only when she slammed the door that he glanced sideways at her in that maddeningly delicious, delightfully nonchalant way of his.
From beneath the arch of world-famous eyebrows, legendary emerald eyes documented her approach with ponderous detachment. She felt them drilling into her recesses, taking her apart one cell at a time. His ruthlessly sensuous mouth was set, every hollow and slash of his masterpiece bone structure showcased by the almost-perpendicular sunrays. While the harsh shadows they cast turned others into grotesque caricatures of themselves, they made him into the god of vengeance that he was. The ultimate yum that he was.
As she closed the last feet between them, he sort of faced her, looked at her in his patented insignificance-inducing way.
Undeterred as usual, she waved a salute to all present, then focused on him, gave him her brightest smile and said, “I’m here!”
She is here.
The words reverberated inside Amjad’s mind.
B’haggej’ jaheem! What, in hell’s name, was Princess Aal Waaked doing here? He’d invited Prince Aal Waaked.
Yet Maram Aal Waaked was here. As she’d so triumphantly announced after walking up to him with all the mesmerizing intent of a stalking, starving tigress.
Amjad forced every muscle in his body into neutral as Maram’s every detail surged through his awareness.
Lushness encased in a loose beige pantsuit that still did nothing to obscure each long limb and ripe curve, each undulation of feminine assurance and fluid grace. A ponytail that would cascade into a waterfall of gold-shot butterscotch when released. Eyes as hot as the sun, as fathomless as the desert, deep-set in mystery and self-possession. Features sculpted from cream flawlessness by a higher god of beauty. A bearing of one who knew her worth, wielded it like a weapon, cast it like a spell.
His lungs burned.
It was seconds before he realized why and breathed again.
Seemed being male was incurable.
Problem was, his maleness only manifested around this manifestation of brazen womanliness.
There was no mistaking it. Maram Aal Waaked was a hazard wherever creatures of the XY persuasion trod.
And that wasn’t his “paranoia” talking.
At thirty, Maram had already gone through two men. Officially. A prince and a business-empire heir. One older than her father, the other young enough to be her kid brother. Off the record, dozens were no doubt scattered on either side of the swath she’d cut through the male population.
She now had her eye on him. Both of her dipped-in-molten-gold-and-captured-sunshine eyes.
Before that implied he was anything special, he had to amend the statement. She had her eye on him and his brother.
Whichever fell into her honey trap would do. She probably wouldn’t mind and could handle it just fine if they both did.
She’d sooner entrap the devil than him. But his half brother, Haidar, while a wily, temperamental fiend in his own right, wasn’t as impervious. He’d shared some syrupy friendship with her since they’d been young, and she might penetrate his defenses through nostalgia. Not that he could see any man other than himself even considering resisting her if she made her desire evident.
She was her name, after all. The aspired to. The coveted.
But never by him. And she was now more off-limits than ever before.
If he’d once put her on his most-abhorred list due to her own actions, he now put her on the list of his most-bitter enemies due to her father.
Yusuf
