To Touch a Sheikh (Pride of Zohayd 3)

Aching with the force it took not to, come what may, he said, “So what you have in mind is a no-strings, flagrant affair?”

She rolled down her sleeves, depriving him of her gaze. “If by no-strings you mean no present or future demands to turn it ‘official,’ then yes. If by flagrant you mean splashed publicly for the gossip machine and media to take apart, then no. What we have together is no one else’s business.”

“Clandestine, then.”

“Not that either. Just…private. As I believe any intimate relationship should remain.”

“So all you ever wanted was an affair?”

“I don’t appreciate the word affair either. I don’t have a name for what I want us to have. I want to be with you, be there for you, and vice versa, in every way. I want us to expand on what we’ve been sharing, to take our synergy to all areas of our lives, while being free to indulge in all forms of intimacy and passion without restraints of social interference or conformities.”

He gritted his teeth against the visions, beyond any heaven he’d ever heard of. “So you stand by your assertion that you never and would never want to marry me?”

She grinned at him. “Put a summer melon in your tummy.”

The colloquial expression, the ultimate form of “never worry on that account,” spoken as if unequivocally meant, spread the ink of disappointment through him again. Why, when she was offering him all that a man could dream of from a woman, minus the hassle of formalities and responsibilities, he couldn’t even begin to analyze. It made him madder at her, at himself.

It made him snarl, “Weird, when your father offered you to me in marriage, at any price. Not once, but repeatedly. Before he gave up on me and went after Haidar.”

Maram gaped at Amjad.

His beauty smoldered, as if his resident demon had been roused to full manifestation, his words falling on her like a one-two combo to the head and gut.

Before she let the blows register, she slowed everything down. This was Amjad. The ultimate intimacy-phobe. She’d just told him she wanted all of him in ultimate intimacies. She should expect his struggle against her, against his own need, which she no longer doubted, to become vicious.

Problem was, Amjad was feared for being agonizingly truthful. All his harsh statements were based on fact. Even his view of her as a life-leeching entity was backed up by the general public’s view of her, an image she’d never contested. It had kept at bay those who’d wanted her as a trophy or a sponsor, as he’d said.

Did she scare him so much that he was using falsehoods to push her away, to keep himself from reaching for her?

“We’re still in the land of you-have-to-have-the-last-word, right?” The smile that was her natural state around him wobbled. “I didn’t think you’d resort to fabrications to get it.”

The fierceness setting his beauty ablaze spiked. “I didn’t think you’d resort to denial when you’re caught fabricating.”

“I never resort to untruths in personal relationships. And I never hid what I thought or felt from you.”

His body tightened as if in preparation for attack, his emerald eyes radiating the intent. “So that’s your new story? That your father did it without your knowledge?”

“Okay. Time-out.” She made the gesture, foreboding invading her heart. “You’re still practicing your favorite sport of taking my father’s character and actions apart, right?”

“No.”

The word fell on her like a giant hammer. That, and what she considered her first sighting of true contempt in his eyes.

Air congealed in her lungs, beats in her heart.

He was telling the truth!

She’d thought she’d been working against his general wariness and cynicism. But this was a specific blow to Amjad’s ability to believe in her. It did look plausible that she was in on her father’s machinations.

“When did he do that?” She heard her uneven question.

“As if you don’t know.” He sounded as scary as a predator growling in aggravation.

“I don’t.”

His gaze flayed her with disbelief. She held her ground with sincerity.

He blinked first, exhaled in disgust. “Let’s play this game as if you don’t, then. His first approach was after he foisted you on me at that conference.”

“Can we stick to facts, please? Without dramatic license? He introduced us.”

Amjad’s lips twisted at her admonition. “Aih. Then, after I got a dose of you, he offered you to me. I thought he’d gone out of his nonexistent mind, being the only father to offer his daughter at the altar of my madness. After I walked away, thinking it wasn’t worth the oxygen it would take to slam his offer with the ridicule it deserved, you hunted me down and worked me over. And I realized your father wasn’t so insight-free. He knew exactly what a weapon of mass destruction he wielded in you.”

Her heart fluttered at the scorn that transmitted his loath confession of her equal effect on him. “Nice to know I got to you as much as you got to me.”

He didn’t contest her statement, his eyes eloquent with a more ferocious admission. “I went back to him, told him to keep you away from me, if he knew what was good for both of you. But he gambled on your power to the point that he defied my warning, shoved you under my nose at every opportunity. Every so often, he dared renew his offer, each time adding more incentives to…sweeten the deal.”

“Incentives?” she echoed, her voice as hollow as the heart draining further of blood.

His laugh felt like acid against her nerves. “At least what he thought were incentives. Two hundred acres with a mile of beachfront in Ossaylan for my latest development project. Thirty percent stock in your national cell-phone company. Controlling shares of the emirate’s opera house. His latest offer was adding forty of his most-prized thoroughbreds to your…package.”

She’d already believed him. But knowing the specifics…

His eyes narrowed on her face, which had to be bloodless with the shock expanding inside her. “But come to think of it, the offer was so…lame, it doesn’t suit a mind of your caliber. It smacks of a juvenile, fatally misinformed one at Yusuf’s level.”

She wiped a hand across blurry eyes. “So you think I wasn’t involved only because I would have made an unerringly irresistible offer? You take damning by faint praise to new levels, Amjad.”

“I’m just observing, from what I now know about you, that you wouldn’t have been so…banal. So, I’m revising my long-held belief. You had nothing to do with his offers.” Before relief could register, he went on. “But the last time I chewed him out, I must have scared him so much that he stopped offering. Just as I thought that it was over, he transferred his sights to Haidar.”