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 only time he had, it had almost cost him his life. Now the fate of Zohayd itself hung in the balance.
But he had no choice.
If he couldn’t have her father, he’d kidnap Maram instead.
Two
How do you kidnap the willing?
The answer: Easily.
Or that should be the answer.
It remained to be seen how this kidnapping would turn out.
Amjad brooded after Maram’s lithe figure, his mind racing to adjust his original plan.
Her father had said he’d come early, after Amjad had hinted he was willing to negotiate the terms for the dealership he’d been coveting. That Yusuf had agreed to come at all had made Amjad certain he had no idea the Aal Shalaan brothers had discovered his leading role in stealing and counterfeiting the Pride of Zohayd jewels.
Due to an inane tribal law, the jewels were necessary for the Aal Shalaans to remain rulers of Zohayd. The law sprouted from equally lame legends that said that King Ezzat—Amjad’s ancestor and supposed doppelganger, or as the harebrained public liked to tell it, Amjad was Ezzat reincarnated—had united the tribes under his rule and founded Zohayd through their power.
The dimwitted story became more established the more the world around them advanced. It didn’t matter to Zohaydans that the Aal Shalaans had made their country one of the most prosperous nations in the world. All they cared about was that the royal family make good treasure keepers. The kingdom’s most important event was Exhibition Day, when imbecile representatives of the moronic public came to ascertain the jewels’ safety. The legends claimed the demon-spawn jewelry wouldn’t remain in the hands of anyone who no longer deserved the throne.
Yusuf Aal Waaked and his cohorts were using that entrenched superstition, biding their time until Exhibition Day to expose the jewels currently in the Aal Shalaans’ possession as fakes. When Yusuf produced the real ones, no one in the brainless herd would accuse him of theft but would hail him as the new ruler the jewels had “chosen.”
Idiots. All of them. Including his own family.
He was tempted to leave the whole region to muck around in its Dark Ages rot. His father could be better off retiring, and he would prefer to never again have to endure being around some of the world’s sleaziest creatures—without ripping them apart—to serve trivial things like world peace.
He’d always found this royalty gig a pain anyway. Sure, he did his job because he did nothing if not to the best of his abilities, and his father needed him more since his heart attack. But being first in line to the throne was synonymous with being the same in front of a stampeding herd or a firing squad. He’d gotten nothing for it but slaughter attempts in the boardroom and murder schemes in the bedroom, interspersed with persistent conspiracies to trap, bankrupt or implicate him in crimes he’d never be stupid enough to contemplate. Not to mention the infringing fascination of the public.
But he and his brothers had made their fortunes unaided by their status. None of them would lose anything but boatloads of burdens if they woke up tomorrow a royal family no more. And it would serve the ingrate nation right if, after all the royal family had done for the kingdom, they chose criminals over the Aal Shalaans because of some trinkets.
But—and it was a gigantic but—it wasn’t as simple as that.
Even if the people were stupid enough to bow to the rule of legend, they wouldn’t find an outside force easy to accept. Yusuf, a man who ruled only a tiny emirate, couldn’t hope to control a kingdom of Zohayd’s size and complexity. He’d be overthrown, and the true catastrophe would begin.
None of the tribes had enough clout to claim the throne alone. They could all get a piece of the action only through a democracy. He needed no foresight to know how that would turn out. A look at the so-called democracies in the region said it all.
So, like it or not, the Pride of Zohayd jewels were vital, making his mission unavoidable. He had to get them back.
He’d intended to make Yusuf ransom himself with them.
But the weasel had sent his daughter in his stead.
Yusuf didn’t suspect exposure, or he wouldn’t have sent his only offspring, the daughter he called “the heart outside my body.” But Amjad knew why he had.
Yusuf knew Amjad opposed a union between Maram and Haidar. Yusuf must think Maram could sway Amjad if she got him alone, facilitating her acquisition of Haidar