Her lips twisted, with derision, with the twinge that still gripped her heart. “I don’t. I’m still playing for the same team.”
His eyes turned pseudo-amazed. “You never even … went on loan? I would have thought someone with your … needs wouldn’t mind widening her horizons where the pursuit of pleasure was concerned.”
“Why? Have you? Widened your horizons?”
He let out another bark of distressingly virile amusement. “How can I, when I’m a caveman who’s unable to develop beyond my programming? The only thing I managed was to take your advice—purged myself of any trace of ‘creepy territorial crap.’”
She reciprocated his razzing, sweeping his six-foot-five frame with disdain. By the time she came back to his eyes, she was kicking herself. It didn’t do a woman’s heart or hormones any good, getting a load of how his sculpted perfection filled, pushed, strained against his black-on-black clothes. Inviting touch, inciting madness …
She gritted her teeth against the moist heat spreading in her core. “And that must be the legendary eidetic memory some of you Aal Shalaans are said to possess. As if you need more blessings.”
He slid an imperturbable glance down the foot between them. “If you feel we’ve received more than our fair share, you can take up your grievance with the fates.” A sarcastic huff accompanied a head shake. “But if you think perfect recall is a blessing, you have evidently never been plagued by anything like it. True blessing lies in the ability to forget.”
Her heart squeezed with something that confused her. Regret? Sympathy? Empathy?
No. That would indicate she was responding to something he felt. And everyone knew that the ability to feel was not among his abilities or vulnerabilities.
She narrowed her eyes, more exasperated with the chink in her resolve than with him. “Come to think of it, it must be terrible to have an infallible memory. There must be so much you would have preferred to forget, or at least blur enough to rationalize and romanticize.”
All traces of devilry vanished as he thrust his hands into his pockets. Her gaze dragged from his stunning face down to the silky material stretching across the potency she remembered in omnisensory detail …
“I can certainly do with some blurring to take the edge off at times.” The predatory challenge flared again. “But one thing about possessing clarity that time doesn’t dull—I make one hell of an unforgiving enemy, if I do say so myself.”
She snorted. “Yeah. And I hear so many love you for it.”
“Does it look like I’d want or even abide ‘love’?”
His mock affront would have been irresistible if it wasn’t also overwhelmingly goading. She felt just a second away from venting her unearthed frustration in a gnawing, clawing physical attack on this unfeeling monolith!
She exhaled. “That simpering, useless sentiment, huh? No. From what I hear, you want only obedience, blind, mute and dumb.”
His smile was self-satisfaction itself. “And I get it, too. Very useful, and blessedly soothing, for someone in my position.”
“Your mother’s son to the last gene strand, aren’t you?”
“I like to think I’m the updated and improved version.”
His smirk made her want to drag him to her by the hair to taste those heartlessly sensual lips—and to bite them off.
Had he always been this … inflammatory?
He had been exasperating, unyielding in demanding his own way. And getting it. One way or another. Mainly one way. But she’d been so in love—or so in raging, blinding, enslaving lust—that the edge of fury his overriding tactics kept simmering beneath the blissful surface had only made everything she felt for him more explosive.
But now the addiction had been cured. Now that she knew what he was without a trace of the “rationalizing or romanticizing” she’d been guilty of heavily employing, she was reacting to him as she should have all along.
Yeah? With thinly suppressed hostility overlying a barely curbed resurgence of lust?
“Invite me in, Roxanne.”
Her heart choked out another salvo of arrhythmia.
The electrifying invocation he made of his demand, her name.
She swallowed, trying to extricate herself from his influence, damning him and herself for how effortless it was for him, what a struggle it was for her. “You … you want to come in?”
“No, I came to conduct a verbal duel on your doorstep.”
He moved forward and she surged to abort the step that would have taken him over her threshold. “I couldn’t care less what you came to do. But said duel is done. Not so nice of you to drop by, Prince Aal Shalaan. Hope I don’t see you again.”
He resumed his former position, feet braced farther apart, hands in pockets again. “Tsk. All those reports lauding your ability to deal with the most thorny situations and the most exasperating individuals must have been exaggerated.”
“No one factored you in when they were gauging thorny exasperation. Even my super diplomacy powers have a limit.”
“Or maybe I’m your kryptonite.” His smile was now the essence of patience. A hunter with unlimited time to set up his quarry’s downfall. “As much as I enjoyed our opening skirmish out here, I would continue our battle in a more private setting. For your sake, really. You’re the one who lives here. Surely you don’t want your neighbors to witness our … escalations?”
“Since those won’t occur, there’s nothing for them to witness. Nothing but your departing back.” She started to shut the door.
The polished, maple surface met a palm with two-hundred-pounds-plus of sinew, muscle and maleness behind it.
“You know who I am, right?”
Her eyes widened. “You’re pulling rank?”
“You think I use my status to get my way? How boring and juvenile would that be?”
“If you’re not referring to being the all-powerful Prince of Two Kingdoms, what the hell was that threat about?”
“No threat. Just statement of fact. Take all the trappings away and who am I?”
The most magnificent male in history.
Out loud she seethed. “A huge pain?”
The look he gave her had all her hairs standing on end. “The son of the queen of bitches.”
She stared at him. She couldn’t agree more about his mother. But she hadn’t thought he had that brutal clarity about her, either, let alone would admit it.
She exhaled. “That you are.”
Unperturbed, even satisfied by her agreement, his smile widened, raising the voltage of her distress. “So you realize how far I’ll go to gain my objectives. Or do you need a demonstration?”
The seventy-five-hundred-square-foot apartment at her back closed in on her.
“Why is coming in even an objective? If I’ve aroused your confrontational beast, tell it to go back to sleep. We’ve used up all the digs we can make at each other. Anything else would be redundant, and neither of us likes to waste time.”
His shrug was dismissal itself. “First, we’re just getting warmed up. Second, surely you don’t think I’ll allow another abrupt ending between us? Eight years ago, you took me by surprise. And I was young and soft. Third, that was a rhetorical question, right? About why it’s an