“I’m not just having second thoughts. I’m certain I don’t want to get married.”
That was it? A case of commitment phobia? That was something he could deal with.
He drew a breath of relief into his tight chest. “I can understand your wariness. You struggled for your independence. You might think you’d lose it with marriage. But I’ll never encroach on your freedoms....” At her baleful glance, he insisted, “Whatever my transgressions, they were unintended. Guide me in navigating your comfort zones and I’ll always abide by them. If I pushed you into a commitment too soon, I’ll wait until you’re ready.”
“I’ll never be ready to marry you.”
He stared at her, beyond shocked, the ferocity of her rejection an ax cleaving into his heart.
Just yesterday, he’d thought everything was perfect between them. And she’d had all this resentment seething inside her? How had he been so oblivious?
This led him to the only possible explanation. A dreadful one. “Have you received a better offer?”
At his rough whisper, she turned away again. He wanted to pounce on her, to roar that she couldn’t do this to him, to them. He remained paralyzed, sick electricity arcing in his clenched fists, jumbling his heart’s rhythm.
He forced more mutilating deductions from numb lips. “Since this is coming right after you visited Najeeb, I assume he finally popped the question.”
She bent to pick up her laptop, as if she’d already dismissed him from her life. Heartache morphed into fury, all his early, long-forgotten suspicions about the nature of her relationship with Najeeb crashed into his mind.
“That’s why you wheedled into his life, isn’t it? But then he left, and you thought he wouldn’t come through, and you were...what? Keeping me as plan B in case he didn’t propose? And now you got the offer you were after all along, the one where you become a future queen, and I’m suddenly redundant?”
She turned the eyes of a total stranger to him. “I’d hoped we could part on civil terms.”
“Civil?” His growl sounded like a wounded beast’s. “You expect me to stand aside and let you marry my cousin?”
“I expect you to know you have no say in what I do.”
And he went mad with pain and rage. “You can’t just toss me aside and hook up with him. In fact, you can forget it. Najeeb will withdraw his offer as soon as I tell him how I made you...ineligible to be his princess. Regularly, hard and long, for five months. That I even took you after you said yes to him.”
Her eyes filled with something he’d never dreamed he’d see in them. Loathing. “And I expected you to take my decision like a gentleman. But I’m glad you showed me how vicious and dishonorable you can be when you’re thwarted. Now I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was right to end this.”
His blood congealed as she turned away. “You really think you can end it...just like that?”
Hearing his butchered growl, she turned at the door. “Yes. And I hope you won’t make it uglier than it has already become.”
His feet dragged under the weight of his heart as he approached her. “B’Ellahi...you loved me.... You said so.... I felt it.”
“Whatever I said, whatever you think you felt, it’s over. I never want to see you again.”
He caught her, the feel of her intensifying his desperation. “You might think you mean it now, but you’re mine, Jala. And no matter how long it takes, I swear to you, I will reclaim you. I will make you beg to be mine again.”
“I was never yours. If you think you have a claim on me, I will repay you for saving my life one day. But not with my life.”
His fingers sank into her shoulders, as if it would stop her from vanishing. “I don’t care who Najeeb is. I’ll destroy him before I let him have you. I’ll destroy anyone who comes near you.”
The disdain in her eyes rose. Everything he said sent her another step beyond retrieval.
“So now I know why you’re called Al Moddammer.” The Destroyer. The label he’d earned when he’d decimated conspiracies and terrorist organizations. “You annihilate anyone who becomes an obstacle to your objectives. Not to mention anyone who comes close to you.”
His heart seized painfully. He’d never thought she’d ever use that knowledge against him. What else had he been wrong about?
Her disgust as she severed his convulsive grip told him this was it. It was over. Worse still, it might never have been real. Everything they’d shared, everything he’d thought they’d meant to each other might have all been in his mind.
Before she receded out of his life, she murmured, “Find yourself someone else who might have a death wish. Because I don’t.”
One
Present day...
“Do you have a death wish?”
Mohab almost laughed out loud. A bitterly amused huff did escape him as he rose to his feet to meet the king of Judar.
What were the odds? That these exact words would be the first thing Kamal Aal Masood said to him when they’d been the last thing the man’s kid sister had flung at Mohab?
Guess it was true what was said about Kamal and Jala. That the two youngest in the Aal Masood sibling quartet could have been identical twins—if they hadn’t been born male and female and twelve years apart. Their resemblance was uncanny.
With the historical enmity between their kingdoms, Mohab had only seen Kamal from afar. He’d last beheld him at the time of his joloos—as he’d sat on the throne, five and a half years ago. Not that Mohab had manipulated his way into Judar that night to see him. Jala had been his only objective. But she hadn’t attended her own brother’s wedding. Yet another thing he’d failed to predict where she was concerned.
Something else he’d failed to predict was how it would feel seeing this guy up close. Kamal looked so much like Jala, it...ached deep in his chest.
It was as if someone had taken Jala and turned her into an older, intimidating male version of herself. They shared the same wealth of raven hair, the same whiskey-colored eyes and the same bone structure. The only differences were those of gender. Kamal’s bronze complexion was shades darker than Jala’s golden flawlessness, and at six foot six, the king of Judar would tower over his sister’s statuesque five-nine, just as he once had. Her big brother was also more than double her size, but they shared the same feline grace and perfect proportions. While all that made her the embodiment of a fairy-tale princess, Kamal was the epitome of a hardened desert raider, exuding limitless power. And exercising it, too.
At forty, Kamal was one of the most influential individuals in the world, and had been so even before his two older brothers had abdicated the throne of Judar to him in a chain reaction of court drama and royal family scandals that still rocked the region and changed its course forever.
Now Kamal’s lupine eyes simmered with the trademark menace famous for intimidating anyone he seared with his gaze. “Anything you find particularly amusing, Aal Ghaanem?”
“Your opening remark revived a memory of another...person mentioning death wishes.” At Kamal’s fierce glower, Mohab’s smile spread. “What? You think I find you, or being escorted here like a prisoner of war, amusing?”
He’d expected worse arriving in Judar, with tensions between Saraya and Judar at a historic high. In fact, just yesterday, his king had all but declared war on Judar during a global broadcast from a UN summit. For Mohab, a prince of Saraya second in rank only to the king and his heirs, to land uninvited on Judarian soil in these fraught times was cause for extreme concern. Especially when