the farthest thing from either,” she said patiently. “And what would I need tactics for? They don’t work on the only one of your ‘gender’ I’m interested in. You.”
Her straightforwardness gained her a grimace. “And the only one of your gender I’m interested in is—wait! I’m not interested in any of you.”
She nodded vigorously. “With good reason.”
One eyebrow rose in mockery. “Ah, so kind of you to sanction it. It is the best, isn’t it?”
“Ingeniously evil, yes.”
“Indeed. But you don’t think I’m so pathetic that I’d hang on to my ‘complex’ for this long, hold one woman’s crimes against the whole sex, do you?”
She advanced on him, secure that he wouldn’t step back to keep his distance. “No. You’re too penetr … uh … discerning, too cerebral to turn your deservedly atrocious opinion of one into a generalization you know is bound to be faulty.”
He didn’t need to back off. The look in his eyes was enough to keep her paces away. “Problem is, I only stumble across women who reinforce my ‘deservedly atrocious opinion.’ Not that they’re cold-blooded criminals. Seems I’m not about to get that lucky twice in one nearly aborted lifetime. But I draw only those with a toxic level of self-serving cunning and hunger for power. So my generalization has yet to be proven faulty.”
“You mean women—other than me—were brave enough to come near you?”
“Some, under the compulsion of my status and holdings, were as foolhardy. Very briefly, though. Their survival instinct kicked in, overwhelming even their avarice.”
“Doesn’t one exception prove the generalization wrong?”
He barked a denigrating laugh. “You being said exception?”
She smiled into his eyes, unfazed by the expected ridicule. “I certainly don’t have a toxic level of anything, and I have levels in the negative when it comes to avarice and power hunger.”
“Says the woman who married a ruling prince and then an heir to a shipping empire. Killed one off and divorced the other after getting him disinherited.”
That made her smile falter. “Uh … we’re still in the zone of obnoxious one-upmanship, right?”
“We’re in the zone of stating facts.”
She raised both eyebrows in answering challenge. “My killing off Uncle Ziad and getting Brad disinherited are ‘facts’? On the M-class Planet Paranoia, where you make up a population of one?”
He put a hand to his left shoulder, gave a bow of mock contrition. “My apologies. You had nothing to do with either’s literal or financial demise. Both were stupid enough to marry you and cause their own destruction. An ill man older than your father, trying to keep up with a sexual ego-crushing bride, and a barely out-of-diapers babe who destroyed his future to impress a seductress a hundred years his senior in maturity.”
Her mouth dropped open. She closed it. It dropped open again.
Then she burst out laughing. “Oh, boy, you’re good. Do you even think of the things that stampede out of your lips, or do you just open your mouth and they lash out into existence?”
He inclined his head. “Thanks for sparing me the hackneyed act of indignation and sanctioning the truth.”
“You’re so far from the truth you could be in another nebula. But you’re still so good, you’d be a global success in scripting satires, too. You entertain me to no end even while you try to insult me.”
“Meaning I’m failing to? I must be losing my powers. Do you have arsenic on you?”
Another chuckle burst out of her, even as the reminder of his ordeal sent empathy shearing through her. “Your kryptonite, eh? Nah. I’m as nontoxic as it gets. But insults are insulting only when they contain painful truth. Yours don’t have even a trace of it, are so far-fetched, they’re purely hilarious.”
He suddenly took a step forward. She almost fell flat on her back in surprise.
“You know what’s hilarious?” His drawl was laced with danger. “Your calling your deceased husband ‘uncle.’ Was that his fetish?”
She waited, not breathing, to see if he’d close the remaining gap between them. He didn’t.
She let out a shaky exhalation. “He was my uncle, although not by blood, as you know. You of all people should know that political marriages are not what they seem.”
The cruelty and calculation in his eyes spiked, and with them her temperature. “I wasn’t my political wife’s uncle, so I wouldn’t know. But then it seems you succeeded where she failed. You offed your hapless spouse without a hitch.”
She pulled herself up to her full five-foot-eight height. “If you call him dying six years after the wedding ‘without a hitch,’ I’d like to look through that warped lens you hold up to the world.”
He shrugged. “Aih, that wasn’t an efficient rate. I started my marriage as healthy as an ox and was almost dead in six months. But in your defense, you started yours too young, were still learning the ropes of femme fatalism. But you’ve made up for lost time and then some.”
The man was unmovable. Or so he thought. She had two full days to launch on her campaign of getting him to budge.
The intention spread across her lips. “And you might have started your marriage a trusting pushover, but you’ve mastered the tropes of male chauvinism since. But don’t despair. Your condition, according to the best of authorities, isn’t incurable.”
He answered her smile with one that could eat through metal. “Aih, so I’ve heard. All a man needs to revert to being a gullible mark is a woman who’ll imprison him in her loving servitude for life.”
She guffawed. “You’re just too delicious. So delicious you make me hungry.” She waited until a scowl started to dawn across his face, chalked a point up for herself and swung around. “You have anything to eat around here?”
Amjad stared after the chuckling Maram, trying to figure out what had just happened here.
She’d had the last, and totally unexpected, word?
Worse, she’d dragged him through this compulsive confrontation, volleyed his salvos—which seemed only to whet her … appetite for him even more—with a huge grin …
What was he thinking?
None of that mattered. Only one thing did. That she was here in her father’s stead. That messed up all his plans.
No. This was his only opportunity to see them through.
But his plans had hinged on her father’s presence.
He had to improvise.
His gut tightened. He never took a step without calculating the minutest consequence. The
