“Where’s the fun if you’re impervious, Princess Rokham?”
She struggled with the urge to reach up to grab his raven mane, drag his witty venom-dripping lips down to hers.
She sighed her frustration. “It won’t be because I’m made of marble that your barbs won’t penetrate me.”
At her last two words, his pupils almost vanished, leaving his eyes blazing emerald.
She hadn’t meant it that way! But she wasn’t babbling a qualification.
“And the pathetic thing is, your tactics work spectacularly with men.” He shook his head. “I’m deeply ashamed of my gender.”
“Don’t be a boor, Amjad,” she chided, fighting another urge to pinch his chiseled cheeks.
“But Mo-om! I am a boor.” His whiney-boy impersonation tickled her. “But chin up, no one has died of my boor-dom. Yet.”
She couldn’t help it. She stuck her tongue out at him.
That stopped him in his tracks.
She pressed her advantage. “You’re delightful when you’re boor-ing, but I’m not as genetically equipped as you are to handle the desert.”
He jerked one formidable shoulder. “You’re standing four paces away from a climate-controlled cocoon. Put one foot in front of the other and take your genetically deficient self into its protection.”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Okay, let’s try this again. Do pretend host-dom this time.”
He tsked. “What? You expect me to carry you across the threshold?”
“I drove two hundred miles to come here, after an hour’s flight. It would be the least you could do.”
“First, I’m not this little do’s host, I’m its warden. Second, I don’t lug gate-crashers around.”
“God forbid your reputation be tarnished by an act of chivalry, eh?”
“You got it.”
She grinned. “Oh, well, I guess I can take four more steps under my own power.”
With that she brushed past him, opened the tent’s door and stepped into a shock of blessed dimness and fragrant coolness.
She took in the twenty-foot-high interior with its sumptuous, bedouin-inspired decor and furnishings, heard the almost-inaudible burr of the AC and electricity generators. She swung around, afraid Amjad had let her enter alone. She breathed in relief to find him standing at the tent’s now-closed entrance, thumbs hooked at his waistband, eyes crackling a more intense emerald in the dimness.
Her shiver had nothing to do with the drop in temperature.
She couldn’t fight the urge to counter one of his previous statements/accusations. “By the way, I don’t have tactics.”
His gaze didn’t waver on a change of expression. “You do. They are unique to you, making them even more dangerous—and devious.”
“I’m 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.”