“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 objective to get inside … your personal space? You do look in the mirror on occasion? And you have an idea of how you look now?”
For the first time, she focused on how she must look. How she felt. Tiny and defenseless without her towering heels, business clothes and makeup, with her hair drying in a rioting jungle around her shoulders. With the added vulnerability of being just a bathrobe away from total nakedness.
She could almost feel his gaze slipping beneath the terry cloth to explore, reminisce and appraise the changes eight years had wrought in the flesh he’d once thoroughly possessed and pleasured.
Judging he’d disrupted her to the desired level, he gestured, encompassing her. “Add all that to the delights of your tongue of mass destruction, and you’re wondering about my motives?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Quote, ‘How creepy can you get,’ unquote. You think I’ll invite a man twice my size, twenty times as strong and two million times as powerful in every other way into my ‘personal space,’ after he’s made his lewd intentions clear?”
His face lost all lightness. “You think you won’t be safe with me?”
Haidar might be many things, but to women he would always be master through pleasure, not pain; seduction, not coercion.
Unable to get rid of him that way, she exhaled. “No. But you are trying to persist your way in when I don’t want you here.”
A smile transformed his face back to the supreme male who knew the exact level of estrogen overproduction he commanded in females. “You do. I remember, in unfailing detail, how you want, Roxanne. My knowledge of your mind may be deficient, especially with eight years of maturity and experience, but your body hasn’t changed, and I know everything about it. I can sense its every nuance, decipher its every signal.”
She wrestled with the overwhelming urge to knee him.
Knowledge glittered in his eyes, threatened to snap her control. “My sudden appearance rattled you. That made you defensive, and that made you angry. You want me to go only so you can regroup.”
One little kneeing. Surely it wouldn’t be too damaging. To her position.
His grin was designed to loosen her restraint another notch. “But you can get yourself together while I’m around. I’ll make myself a cup of tea until you do. You can even dress