the serpent’s daughter—a boa constrictor herself who’d squeezed the reason and life out of many a man—was looking up at him with that excitement that always threatened to devour him.
He inclined his head at her, injected his voice with its maximum level of scorn. “Princess Haram.”
Maram blinked. Had he just called her Haram?
The glint in those unique eyes said he had!
Sinful. Wicked. Evil. Taboo.
The word encompassed all that. And more.
And he’d made sure everyone had heard it.
So. How did he expect her to react? Get flustered? Defensive? Outraged?
No. The Amjad she knew would expect her to engage him. And boy, would she.
She gave him a curtsy, fluttered her lashes. “Prince Abghad!”
Amjad’s eyes snapped a fraction wider before danger slithered across his heart-stoppingly gorgeous face, his hand flattening over his heart in mock hurt. “And here I thought you … liked me.”
“I far more than … like you. And you know it.” She grinned up at him. “But a Haram deserves at least an Abghad.”
“Princess Sinful and Prince Hateful,” Amjad said slowly, as if tasting the slurs, his darkest-chocolate voice making them as delicious as the sweetest compliments. “Those do have a far better ring to them than the trite names our pompous parents saddled us with.”
She nodded, enjoyment rising. “They’d sure make for better protagonists in a fantasy novel or D&D video game.”
“They’d also spawn far better descriptions than the ones we’ve earned so far. Instead of the Half-Blood Princess you’d be the Blonde Taboo and instead of the Mad Prince I’d be Bad, Mad and Loathsome. We’d sell millions.”
She grabbed her ponytail, wagged it at him. “I’m not blonde, Your Horrid Highness.”
“Technicalities, Your Venerable Vileness.”
Her grin widened as she noticed that everyone had left their prince to his sparring match.
“Where’s Prince Ass-ef?” he said offhandedly. “Couldn’t wake up early after a nightlong taxing game of solitaire?”
A chuckle burst out of her at his double pun. In Arabic Prince Ass-ef meant the Sorry Prince. In English …
She giggled again. “He is Ass-ef, that he can’t come.”
Everything about him seemed to hit pause. She felt as if the whole desert froze, bating its breath for his reaction.
When it came, it sent a frisson sliding through her spine. His narrowed eyes became laserlike slits. “He isn’t coming at all?”
Weird. That his annoyance would be so great that it would show.
“He recently had pneumonia and his doctors feared a relapse with exposure to unfavorable weather conditions.” She smiled coaxingly. “But isn’t it your lucky day he sent me in his place?”
His spectacularly sculpted lips twisted with disdain. “It feels like every unwanted present I’ve been cursed to receive has burst open in my face at once.”
Relieved that he’d gotten back to searing sarcasm, she chuckled. “Oh, I love it when you try to be mean.”
“I assure you, when I do try, you won’t love it that much.”
“Take your best shot, Prince Abrad.”
At her taunt, another pun meaning meanest or coldest, those obsidian pupils that seemed to respond to his whims overpowered the sun’s constriction, almost obliterating his irises. “You wouldn’t survive it … Princess Kalam.”
She hooted. “I’d thrive on it. Go ahead, see if I’m ‘All Talk.’”
“Where’s the fun if you’re impervious, Princess Rokham?”
She struggled with the urge to reach up to grab his raven mane, drag his witty venom-dripping lips down to hers.
She sighed her frustration. “It won’t be because I’m made of marble that your barbs won’t penetrate me.”
At her last two words, his pupils almost vanished, leaving his eyes blazing emerald.
She hadn’t meant it that way! But she wasn’t babbling a qualification.
“And the pathetic thing is, your tactics work spectacularly with men.” He shook his head. “I’m deeply ashamed of my gender.”
“Don’t be a boor, Amjad,” she chided, fighting another urge to pinch his chiseled cheeks.
“But Mo-om! I am a boor.” His whiney-boy impersonation tickled her. “But chin up, no one has died of my boor-dom. Yet.”
She couldn’t help it. She stuck her tongue out at him.
That stopped him in his tracks.
She pressed her advantage. “You’re delightful when you’re boor-ing, but I’m not as genetically equipped as you are to handle the desert.”
He jerked one formidable shoulder. “You’re standing four paces away from a climate-controlled cocoon. Put one foot in front of the other and take your genetically deficient self into its protection.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Okay, let’s try this again. Do pretend host-dom this time.”
He tsked. “What? You expect me to carry you across the threshold?”
“I drove two hundred miles to come here, after an hour’s flight. It would be the least you could do.”
“First, I’m not this little do’s host, I’m its warden. Second, I don’t lug gate-crashers around.”
“God forbid your reputation be tarnished by an act of chivalry, eh?”
“You got it.”
She grinned. “Oh, well, I guess I can take four more steps under my own power.”
With that she brushed past him, opened the tent’s door and stepped into a shock of blessed dimness and fragrant coolness.
She took in the twenty-foot-high interior with its sumptuous, bedouin-inspired decor and furnishings, heard the almost-inaudible burr of the AC and electricity generators. She swung around, afraid Amjad had let her enter alone. She breathed in relief to find him standing at the tent’s now-closed entrance, thumbs hooked at his waistband, eyes crackling a more intense emerald in the dimness.
Her shiver had nothing to do with the drop in temperature.
She couldn’t fight the urge to counter one of his previous statements/accusations.
