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“With myself and my life divided between the U.S. and Ossaylan, I never attained the unbridled allegiance of a pure native of either. I do love a lot about Ossaylan, but I dislike a lot, too. It’s hard to know what to feel about the place that has seen your best and worst days.”
“The latter being your married days, of course.”
She sighed, still smiling, but as if through—if it could be believed, and it sure couldn’t be—a mist of melancholy. “If you promise not to interrupt with alternate versions in which I’m a succubus, I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“I’ll pass. I’m not into reruns. I know the whole story.”
“Trust me, about this particular story, you know zip.”
“Trust you? Farther than I can throw you, you mean?”
“That would be farther than I hoped because with muscles like those—” her gaze melted gold-hot appreciation down his arms and chest, stopping short of where he was resigned he’d be perpetually distorted in her presence, traveled lazily back up to his eyes “—I bet you could throw me quite far.”
He drank a mouthful of coffee, hoping to scald himself out of his idiocy. His eyebrows rose as the taste hit his tongue. The exact strength he preferred. Which he got only when he brewed his own.
“You like?”
The hesitancy in her soft question baffled him more.
Since he’d stopped being a bleeding heart, no one had come close to fooling him. But even knowing all about her, and setting his renowned duplicity-detection powers to maximum, he couldn’t detect any falseness. How was she doing it?
Not that it mattered. He had to get his plan under way. If he was going to go ahead with it.
Which he had to.
He raised his mug to her. While he hated with a passion having no choice but to proceed with his plan, he did like her offering. “Don’t tell me Aliyah gave you the exact titration of what constitutes perfect coffee for me.”
A flush spread across her sculpted cheekbones. Of pleasure over doing something that had pleased him?
No way. That woman must have the ability to blush on command among her arsenal of seduction weapons.
For good measure, breathlessness entered her voice. “It’s how I like it. I hoped we’d have this in common, too.”
And she’d said he was good? She was superlative. “You mean, before this momentous discovery of our identical taste in coffee strength, we had something else in common? Beside being bipeds?”
She spluttered in laughter. “Ah, I knew it!”
He cocked his head at her. “It’s comforting to know you agree on the bipedal commonality. The world insists I’m octopoid.”
“Would that be four more legs, or two more of each set of limbs?” She started to choke, put her plate down, turned back with mischievousness lighting up her beauty. “I knew if I could just get you talking, you’d be a delight to spar with.”
“Aih, I’m a laugh a second.”
“You certainly are.”
“God forbid I be the source of such entertainment to you. I’ll stop.”
Her crestfallen pout made her a disappointed little girl and an irresistible siren. “Don’t! We were just getting warmed up!”
“Just step outside to get as warm as you can handle.”
“Inside here with you is just fine with me. You can’t beat the combo of cool surroundings and red-hot debate.”
“Since you’re so fond of said combo, I’ll leave you to cool your heels and send one of my men to debate with. You can red-hot his ears off while I go scout the location for the spectator and banquet tents.”
He turned, counting down … three, two, one …
Right on cue, she grabbed his arm. “You wait right here.” She hurriedly unzipped her bag, produced an SPF 50 sunscreen and applied it liberally to her face, neck and hands then smiled up at him triumphantly. “My dermally deficient self can now go ten rounds with Your Hereditarily Impervious Highness.”
He sighed. “On one condition.”
She didn’t hesitate. “Anything!”
At the look of absolute trust in her eyes, a heavy sensation spread through his gut.
What, now he believed what he was seeing in her? Trust didn’t factor into this situation, in her reaction. She must think going with him was a perfectly safe opportunity to work on him some more.
But … there had been that incident when she’d risked her life to help him, to be there for others. An instance that contradicted all his understanding of her, that proved she was no self-preserving coward, was capable of stunning courage.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t also a man-eater. Which made her an even more dangerous one for being impossible to categorize, to predict, to despise.
He huffed his disgust with himself. “Anything? And you’re supposedly a phenomenal political and financial law consultant. I thought when your father stopped making the dimwitted state and financial decisions he was famous for and started making choices far above his minuscule IQ, that you were behind it. Now I have to revise that belief, if you, too, go around giving carte blanche to conditions you haven’t heard yet.”
“Anything for you,” she amended indulgently, not bothering to counter his assessment, as only someone secure in her abilities wouldn’t. “I know you won’t make it anything bad.”
“And you know that because I’m the Gandhi of the region? Are you already suffering from sunstroke? Your judgment is evidently impaired.”
She made a hurry-up gesture with those elegant, trim-nailed hands. “Spit out your condition, and let’s be on our way.”
He sighed again. “No complaints. If I hear one, you’re back here.”
She fluttered those thick-enough-to-sleep-on lashes, gave him a mock salute. “Yes, sir.”
He almost groaned. She was making kidnapping her too easy. Anything that started out that way invariably ended in catastrophe. What would that entail in this situation?
He had no choice but to find out.
He looked down at her, exhaled, nodded. To himself. To committing to this path. Wherever it took him.
He only hoped that when catastrophe struck, he’d at least have accomplished his mission.
Maram looked down into those eyes Amjad had damned earlier.
And damn summed them up all right.
She’d had a good-to-great life on the whole. But it was only when she looked into his eyes that she felt aware of every spark of her being, every iota of her potential.
And that was before he’d taken her riding on his horse.
She’d expected him to ride a black stallion. Or a white one. She’d been delighted to find his favorite was a glorious light chestnut mare. Dahabeyah, literally “golden,” would be her twin if she were a horse. She’d held her ponytail next to the mare’s and exclaimed how they were almost the same color. She’d asked if he’d chosen the mare for the animal’s similarity to her, knowing he’d never admit it even at gunpoint.
His answer had been a mere snort before he turned to tacking up the mare, then donned a billowy white abaya and traditional head cover.
Then he’d mounted the mare in a demonstration of power and grace and all she could think of was him mounting her, riding her …
She’d been combusting even before he’d pulled her up behind him. She’d declined to ride a horse of her own, wasn’t such an assured horsewoman that she’d risk it in this terrain. His eyes had said she just wanted to be as close to him as possible. She hadn’t denied the accusation. The truth consisted of both his version and hers.
They’d ridden uphill for twenty minutes at a trot. Every second brought a new level of awareness of the hot, living rock she enveloped, the powerful heart that boomed beneath her ear, the scent that induced a hormonal surge with each inhalation.
By the time they’d reached their destination, she thought she’d melted around him, could never be extricated from his flesh again.
He swung down, leaving her jangling from the loss of him. She wondered if he’d help her down—but he’d already given her too many concessions. He wasn’t about to act the gallant knight.
She didn’t want him to. Not out of, gasp, gentlemanliness. In time, she’d make him wish to offer those gestures out of the consideration he’d come to feel for her.
She was getting down from the horse when she saw his eyes flood with a somberness she’d never seen there before.
It shook her to see into the depths she knew he kept hidden beneath his irreverence and indifference.
Before she could probe, he turned away, went to the edge of the towering dune overlooking the whole area.
She followed him on shaky legs, every wobbling step melting the fraught moment away. The view mesmerized her, a landscape that had been molded by the elements in the crucible of time, powdering mountains into frozen-in-turbulence oceans of gold dust.
“Wow,” she breathed in wonder. “I’ve seen almost nothing but desert vistas since coming to the region. But this beats them all hands down. How did you discover this place?”
“It’s called exploring.”
She smiled at his chiseled profile. “What a novel concept! Would you take me next time you’re scouting new territories?”
He turned his eyes sideways to her, looked down the ten inches between them, his lips twisting. “I don’t do luxury tours. What you see today is for swooning princes’ benefit. When I go out on my own, I don’t lug mock palaces with me.”
“You’re talking to the girl who spent her first twelve years camping in temperatures in the minus, who picked her own food and washed her one change of clothes in freezing streams. I lived out of a backpack for months when I went back to the States, too.”
Another enigmatic layer painted his eyes before he shrugged. “We’ll see how you fare on this mini-excursion before we talk big treks.”
Her heart pirouetted in her chest.
He was not turning her down flat.
Next moment, her heart slowed its spin, wobbled as a sound she’d never heard … felt before, yawned from nonexistence into her ears, through her marrow.
She swung around … and her heart crashed.
On the horizon, a … a … a mountain was charging their way.
It looked like what she imagined a nuclear shockwave would look like. A tidal wave of roiling, pulverized earth.
At the rate it was advancing, it would reach them—bury them—in minutes.
Three
“Sandstorm!”
Maram whirled around to Amjad, her heart bombarding her throat for a way out.
She found him gazing at the horizon, looking tranquil.
Tranquil? He must be frozen in alarm!
She pounced on him. He let her drag him to Dahabeyah, only to start emptying what he’d packed in the horse’s saddlebags.
“What are you doing?” she exclaimed. “We have to rush back!”
He shook his head, extracting folded cloth and goggles. “No. We’d only meet the storm and get blasted. If by some miracle we don’t, anything standing still on that low ground—aka our cars—will be buried in minutes, judging by the size and intensity of that haboob. The others won’t wait for us.”
She looked around in panic. In the distance, everyone was sealing the horse trailers, leaping into their cars and flooring it out of the camp.
They were leaving.
“But they … they can’t leave!”
“They have to.” He produced a sacklike thing, draped it over the jittery Dahabeyah’s muzzle and eyes before securing it over her neck, which the mare surprisingly accepted. A similar cover for her body followed. “By the time they reach us, they’d have zero visibility and would probably get lost and be buried in the sand after their fuel runs out. They have to go back and hope the fuel lasts driving against eighty-mile-an-hour winds before they exit the storm.”
“But you’re their crown prince! They can’t leave you behind!”
“Coming after me would mean certain death for them.”
“Not coming after you will mean certain death for you. For us.”
“No. They know I can handle myself.”
“How do you handle yourself against—” a bubble of hysteria expanded below her diaphragm as she flung her arms wide toward the cloud that had now consumed the horizon, like a planet-eating monster “—that!”
“Oh, that.” He handed her a pair of goggles. “Been there, done that. I’m actually thinking it’s a way out of being cooped up for two days with those yawn-inducing royals.”
“Okay, who’s suffering from sunstroke now? Are you out of your mind? This is the freaking mother of all sandstorms.”
He swung over Dahabeyah’s back, grimaced at the incoming destruction. “Aih, it’s a nasty one, isn’t it?”
And she shrieked her frustration and fright. “Amjad!”
He only started wrapping his head and face with the yards of cloth. He was done in moments, left only his eyes exposed. Then he extended his hand to her.
She looked at it, her mind seizing, dread as huge as the menace advancing on them clogging her throat.
“Maram.” She lurched. He’d never said her name. Never sounded so … soft. “Do you trust me?”
Her eyes jerked up, saw him as he was born to be, a desert raider fortified against the elements, calm in his ability to withstand them after many battles where they’d called it a draw. She snatched a look over her shoulder, quailed. That cloud hurtling toward them looked like the end of both their lives.
