inclined her head as she straightened, the movement emphasizing the elegance of her swan neck, the perfection of her raven chignon-wrapped head.
Her cool tranquility was a superb act, but her shock registered in something beyond her acting abilities. The pupils of uncanny irises, as silvery as the meaning of her name did that thing that had enthralled him when she was agitated or aroused, expanding and shrinking, giving the illusion that her eyes where emitting bursts of light.
The need to look closer into those eyes propelled him forward. Then words he hadn’t known he’d been thinking, taunts that segued from his opening salvo, spilled from his lips.
“Not that I’m surprised. You’ve managed to fool the most suspicious and shrewd people I know, including myself. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that not even New York’s Finest were a match for your cunning.”
“What are you doing here?”
Her voice jolted through him. Once a caress of crimson passion, it had filled with dark echoes, deepening its effect.
She shook her head as if exasperated with the inanity of her own question. “Scratch that. How did you get in here?”
He stopped two feet away, though every cell was screaming for him to keep going until he’d pressed his every inch to hers. Like when they’d been lovers. When she’d always met him more than halfway, impetuous, tempestuous …
Cursing inwardly, he shoved his hands in his pockets in feigned nonchalance. “Your housekeeper let me in.”
She shook her head again, as if finding his answer ridiculous. Then her eyes widened with harsh accusation. “You intimidated her!”
Something twisted in his gut. In the past, she’d made him believe she thought he walked on water. Now the first thing that occurred to her was that he’d done something reprehensible. Worse, criminal.
But why would that upset him? He’d long accepted that her early adoration had been an act. One she hadn’t been able to maintain once she’d suspected it wouldn’t fulfill her purpose. Though he should marvel that it had taken over two years before she’d begun to slip, for instances of discord to accumulate.
He’d still refused to see that for what it was, pure manipulation. Instead, had assigned it all to the stress of her competitive job and the provocation of the dominant personality he became with her. He’d thought friction had only fueled their already incendiary relationship, had reveled in it to the point of instigating it on occasion. He’d misguided himself so thoroughly, that final explosive confrontation had utterly shocked him.
But after two years of dissecting the past, he now saw it clearly. He’d dismissed all evidence of the truth to maintain the illusion because he couldn’t live without her passion. Or so he’d thought. He had. Hadn’t he?
She now pulled herself to her full statuesque height, six feet in her two-inch heels, her pose confrontational. “You might have scared Zahyah, but you must have forgotten all about me if you thought your arm-twisting tactics would work. You can walk out as you walked in, under your own power, or I’m calling security. Or better still, the police.”
He flicked away her threat, his blood heating with the challenge and ardor she’d always ignited in him with a glance, a word. “What would you tell them? That your housekeeper let me in without consulting you and left you alone with me in an empty mansion?” Any other time he would have recommended the housekeeper be sternly chastised for such a breach of protocol and security. For now he was only glad she’d acted as she had. “On questioning, she’d swear there’d been no intimidation of any sort. As one of your mother’s former colleagues, it was only natural for Zahyah to let me in.”
“You mean because as my mother’s former colleague, Zahyah was one of your mother’s servants, too?”
He stiffened at the mention of his mother. The knowledge of her conspiracy to depose his father, King Atef, and remove his half brothers from succession to the throne of Zohayd was a skewer constantly turning inside him.
But Lujayn knew nothing of the conspiracy. No one but he and his siblings and father did. They’d been keeping it a secret at all costs until they resolved it. And resolution would come only when they discovered where his mother had hidden the Pride of Zohayd jewels. It was a backward and infuriating situation, one dictated by legend and now enforced by law—possession of the jewels conferred the right to rule Zohayd. Instead of calling for whoever had stolen them to be punished, Zohayd’s people would decree that his father and his heirs, who had “lost” them, were unworthy of the throne. The belief that the jewels “sought” to be possessed by whoever deserved to rule the kingdom was unshakable.
But even when threatened with life imprisonment, his mother wouldn’t confess to their location. All she’d told him and Haidar was that she would continue to destroy their father and brothers from her prison, that when the throne became Haidar’s, with him as his crown prince, they would thank her.
He shook away the gnawing of ongoing frustration, leveling his gaze at the current cause of it. “I mean that Zahyah, as an Azmaharian who spent years in the royal palace of Zohayd—”
“As a virtual slave to your mother—as was mine.”
The knot in his gut grew tighter as yet another of his mother’s crimes sank its shame into him.
Ever since the exposure of Sondoss’s conspiracy, they’d been realizing the full extent of her transgressions. Slave might be an exaggeration, but from recent findings, it had become evident she’d mistreated her servants. Lujayn’s mother, as her “lady-in-waiting,” seemed to have borne the brunt of her ruthless caprice. But Badreyah had left his mother’s service as soon as Lujayn had left him. Seemed she could afford to when Lujayn had married Patrick McDermott.
That was probably one reason Lujayn had married him. Not that it made him any less bitter about it. She should have told him if she’d known Badreyah had been suffering at his mother’s hands. He should have been the one she’d gone to for help.
He answered her cold fury with his own. “Whatever views Zahyah holds of my mother, she evidently still considers me her prince. She welcomed me in accordingly.”
“Don’t tell me you think people really buy this Prince of Two Kingdoms crap.”
Her sneer had blood surging to his head. As half-Azmaharian half-Zohaydan princes, he and Haidar had been dubbed that. He couldn’t speak for Haidar, but he’d always felt like a prince of neither kingdom. In Zohayd he was cut off from succession for being of impure stock. In Azmahar … well, he could count the reasons that no one there should consider him their prince.
The grandiose slogan that had been plastered over them from birth had always felt—as she’d pithily put it—like crap.
But then their mother decided to make it a reality. She was out to mangle and reform the region in order to do so.
He exhaled. “Whatever I am or am not, Zahyah welcomed me, and so did your guards before her. I’ve been welcomed here enough times that they didn’t think twice of continuing the practice.”
“You conned them using a defunct relationship with Patrick—”
“Who’s no longer with us, thanks to you.” He cut her off, the bile of pent-up anger welling again. “But you didn’t prepare for developments as I thought you would. You didn’t make allowance for my reappearance, didn’t revoke my standing invitation.”
“Like I would a vampire’s, huh? Though one would be preferable to you since you’re a soul sucker. And you’re harder to banish. But I’ll rectify that oversight right now.”
He caught her arm as she strode past, felt awareness fork in his body. He gritted his teeth against the response, kept his breathing shallow so her scent—that of jasmine-scented twilights and pleasure-drenched nights—didn’t trigger full-blown arousal.
“Don’t bother. This delightful