Haidar vibrated with a charge that seemed as if it would burst his every cell if it wasn’t released. “And you know all about her supposed turmoil because you’re her selfless confidant, right? And you want to take your so-called friendship from your squash dates into her bed. Well, hard luck. That’s where I am. Constantly.”
Jalal’s snarl felt like an uppercut. “Very gentlemanly of you, to kiss and tell.”
“No need for evasions since you know we’re intimate. And still you try to take her away from me.”
“You don’t even want her,” Jalal hissed. “You seduced her to beat me. She’s just a pawn in another of your power games.”
“You were the one who started that game, as you’ve conveniently forgotten.”
“I forgot about that silly bet in five minutes. But you took it like you take everything, with obsessive competition. You went all out to entrap her.”
“And you’re out to save her from monstrous me? You’re admitting you want her for yourself?”
Jalal’s jaw hardened. “I won’t let you use her anymore.”
Rage blotched Haidar’s vision. He wanted to pulverize Jalal’s convictions. Arguments and defenses pummeled his mind. Then he opened his mouth and something from the repertoire of his lifelong rivalry with his closest yet furthest person came out.
A taunt. “How are you going to stop me?”
Jalal shot him a lethal glance. “I’ll tell her everything.”
His head almost burst.
Out of the rants clanging there, he snarled only “Good luck.”
If he’d thought he’d seen antipathy in his twin’s eyes before, he was wrong. This was the real thing. “Nothing good can come of this. You’re not only like Mother—you inherited the worst of both sides of our families. You’re manipulative and jealous, cold and controlling, and you have to win no matter the cost. It’s time I exposed your true face to her.”
Haidar’s blood charred with the futility of watching this train wreck. “There’s one hitch in that plan. If you do, it won’t only be my face she won’t want to see again, but yours, too.”
“I’m okay with losing Roxanne, as long as you lose her, too.”
The detonation of fury and frustration shattered his brakes. “If you tell her, Jalal, never show me your face again.”
Bleakness spread in Jalal’s eyes. “I’m okay with that, too.”
A door closed, aborting the salvo of reckless bitterness he would have volleyed at his twin’s intention.
Roxanne.
As she walked into the sitting room, his blood heated, his breath shortened. Her effect on him deepened with every exposure. Even when he had thought theirs would be a mutually satisfying liaison that would end when his fascination dissipated. Until her, he hadn’t suspected himself capable of attaining such heights of emotion, plumbing such depths of passion.
She was fire made flesh, incandescent in beauty, tempestuous in spirit, consuming in power. And she was his.
He had to prove it, know it, once and for all.
The fear that she had feelings for Jalal had been compromising his sanity. His mother’s passing comment about how Roxanne and Jalal shared so much had colored his view of their deepening closeness. But dread had taken root when he’d realized Roxanne had revealed the essence of her self to Jalal but not him. That had snapped his restraint, forced him to have this confrontation with both of them.
Jalal had made his position clear.
But it wouldn’t matter, not if she chose him. As she had to.
He tried to get confirmation from the hunger that always ignited in her eyes at the sight of him. But for the second she spared him the touch of her focus, her eyes were blank. Then they swept to Jalal.
Haidar pounced on her, his fingers digging into her flesh, almost vicious in their urgency, his heart thundering. “Tell Jalal that he can’t come between us no matter what he does or says. Tell him that you’re mine.”
Her face became a canvas of stupefaction. Then it set in hardness, her eyes becoming emerald icicles. She knocked his hands off as if they soiled her. “That’s why you so imperatively demanded I drop everything? How creepy can you get?”
It was his turn to gape. “Creepy? And this is imperative. I’ve sensed Jalal developing…misconceptions about you. I had to nip them in the bud.”
Her eyes narrowed into lasers of anger and disgust. “I don’t care what you ‘sensed.’ You don’t get to summon me as if I’m one of your lackeys, and you can’t trick me into a confrontation where you go all territorial on me and demand I parrot back what you say. You’re the one who’s under the misconception that you have any claim to me.”
His heart slowed to an excruciating thud, the pillars of his mind shuddering. “I have a claim. The one you gave me when you came to my bed, when you said you love me.”
“You do remember when I said it, don’t you?” When he’d been arousing her to insanity and driving her to shattering orgasms. “But thanks for bringing things to a head. I’m going back to the States, and I was debating how to say goodbye. You men always take a woman walking away as a blow to your sexual ego, and it gets messy. I was worried that it would get extra messy with you, being the Prince of Two Kingdoms with an ego the size of both.”
His shook his head, as if from too many blows. “Stop it.”
She gave a careless shrug. “Sure, let’s do stop it. You were the best candidate for the exotic fling I wanted to have while living here. But since I decided to move back to the States, I knew I had to end it with you. I have needs, as you know, and no matter how good in bed you are, I’m not about to wait until you drop by to satisfy them. I have to find a new regularly available stud. Or three. But a word of advice—don’t pull that territorial crap on your new women. It’s really off-putting. And it makes me unable to say goodbye with any goodwill. Now that I know what kind of power you imagined you had over me, I’m so turned off I don’t want to ever see or hear from you again.”
He watched her turn around, walk in measured steps out of the room.
In seconds the penthouse door closed with a muted thud, the very sound of rejection, of humiliation.
From the end of a collapsing tunnel he heard a macabre distortion of Jalal’s voice. “What do you know? She has sharper instincts than I gave her credit for, took you only as seriously as you took her. Seems I shouldn’t have worried about her.”
He looked at Jalal through what felt like a stranger’s eyes. “You should worry about yourself. If you ever show me your face again.”
The twin he barely recognized now looked back at him with the same deadness. “Don’t worry. I think it’s time I detoxified my life of your presence.”
Haidar stared into nothingness long after Jalal had disappeared. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Jalal should have told him he’d never trespass on the sanctity of his relationship with his woman. Roxanne should have denounced his doubts as ludicrous.
He should have had his twin back and his lover forever.
Those he’d thought closest to him shouldn’t have walked away from him. But they had.
Trust no one.
His mother’s words reverberated in his head. She’d been right.
He’d ignored her wisdom at a cost he might not survive.
Never again.
One
The Present
It wasn’t every day a man was offered a throne.
When that man was Haidar, it should have been a matter of never.
But the people of Azmahar—at least, the clans that made up a good percentage of the kingdom’s population—had offered just that.
They’d sent their best-spoken representatives to demand, cajole, plead for him to be their candidate in the race for the vacant throne of Azmahar. He’d thought they were kidding.
He’d kept his straightest face on to match their earnest efforts, pretending to accept, to brainstorm his campaign and the policy direction for a kingdom that was coming apart at the seams.
When he’d realized they were serious—then he’d gotten angry.
Were they out of their minds, offering him the throne of the kingdom that his closest maternal kin had almost destroyed, and his paternal ones had just dealt the killing blow? Who in Azmahar would want him to set foot there again, let alone rule the damn place?
They’d insisted they represented those who saw him as the savior Azmahar needed.
One thing Haidar had never imagined himself as was a savior. It was a genetic impossibility.
How could he be a savior when he was demon spawn?
According to his estranged twin, he amalgamated the worst of his colorful gene pool in a new brand of bad. His recruiters had countered that he mixed the best of the lofty bloodlines running through his veins, would be Azmahar’s perfect king.
“King Haidar ben Atef Aal Shalaan.”
He tried the words out loud.
They sounded like a premium load of bull. Not only the “king” part. The names themselves sounded—felt—like lies. They no longer felt as if they indicated him. Belonged to him.
Had they ever?
He wasn’t an Aal Shalaan, after all. Not a real one like his older brothers. Without the incontrovertible proof of their heritage stamped all over Jalal, he’d bet cries would have risen that he didn’t belong to King Atef. From all evidence, he belonged, flesh, blood and spirit, to the Aal Munsoori family. To his mother. The Demon Queen.