She gaped at him for a long moment.
Then she shook her head on a bewildered, belligerent chuckle. “You should have been a diplomat. You’d hog-tie anyone in a net of platitudes and persuasions so thick, they wouldn’t see the way out and would soon stop wanting one. But it’s too late with me, so save it.”
His gaze lengthened in turn. She could swear he was struggling not to smile again. At last he exhaled, like a man bound on tolerating a nuisance for life, leveled that supernatural gaze on her. “You believe you have reason to hate us. Tell me.”
“I’m telling you nothing. As far as I’m concerned, you’re no better than my kidnappers. You’re actually far worse. My enmity with them was incidental. I was just the source of damaging info to their hereditary enemies. But with your family, my enmity is very specific. And don’t play the ‘I took a bullet saving you’ card. I now realize why you did. You want what they wanted. And my answer to you is the same one I gave them. You can go take a flying leap from one of your capital’s world-record-high skyscrapers.”
“Is that how you always reach your verdicts, Talia? You judge by symptoms that have many differential diagnoses and insist on the first one that occurs to you and explains them?”
She gritted her teeth against the urge to punch him again. The man made perfect sense every time he opened his mouth. Was there no provoking him into making his first mistake? “Oh, don’t start with the professional similes. You know nothing about me.”
“I may not know the facts about you, but I know a lot about the truth. I’m certain of everything I know, through the proof of your actions in the worst possible conditions. You’re brave and daring and capable and intense. You’re passionate in everything you do and about everything you believe in, most of all your sense of justice. Be fair with me now. Give me a chance to defend my family. Myself. Please, Talia, tell me.”
His every word expanded in her heart like a compulsion trying to spread out and take hold of her. She resisted his influence, slammed him with her frustration. “I told you not to call me that. But since you’re breath-depleting and you can talk me under the sand, just call me T.J. if you must call me at all. Everyone does.”
This time he let that smile spread on his lips again. “Then something’s wrong with everyone you know, if they can look on your beauty and think something as sexless and characterless as T.J., let alone articulate it. I’m calling you nothing but Talia. Or nadda jannati. It’s impossible for me not to. Deal with it.”
She gave a smothered screech. “For Pete’s sake, turn off your female-enthrallment software. It won’t work anymore. It’s making me so sick that I’d rather you use your fists like my captors did.”
It was as if she’d hit a button, fast-forwarding his face from teasing to ominous. He rasped, “They hit you?”
She instinctively rubbed the lingering ache in her gut, which had been swamped by far more pressing urgencies. “Oh, a couple did, just for laughs. It wasn’t part of the interrogation, since those jerks weren’t cleared to engage in that, and I bet their orders were not to damage me. But they couldn’t resist bullying the smaller man they thought I was. One made it sound as if it’s some duty a true Zohaydan owes any foreigner messing in the kingdom’s business.”
His teeth made a bone-scraping sound. “I wish I had used something other than tranq darts to knock them out. Something that would have caused permanent damage”
She gave an impressive snort. “Stop pretending to care.”
“I can’t stop something I’m not pretending. And I would have cared had you been a man, even the spy with the multiple agenda I thought you to be. Nothing is more despicable or worthy of punishment than abusing the helpless. Under any pretext. Those men aren’t patriots as they pretended, they’re vicious, cowardly lowlifes who can’t pass up a chance to take their deficiencies out on those who can’t retaliate.”
“Right. Like you’re the defender of the weak and the champion of the oppressed.”
He gave a solemn nod. Then, as if he was renewing a blood oath, he said, “I am.”
And she couldn’t hold back, blurted it all out. “Like you defended my brother? Like you championed him against the bullies in your family who abused their power and threw him in jail?”
Four
Harres had thought he’d been ready for anything.
He had made peace with the fact that he would never know what to expect next from Talia Jasmine Burke.
But this was beyond unexpected. And he wasn’t ready for it.
He stared into her eyes. They were flaying him with rage. But now anxiety muddied their luminous depths. It fit what he knew of her, that his first sighting of the debilitating emotion there wouldn’t be on her own account, but on a loved one’s.
Her brother.
So that was it. Why she was here.
He knew she’d been determined not to tell him, hated that she had, was madder than ever, at herself. But it was out.
At least, the first clue was. He realized she was talking about the same T. J. Burke he’d investigated. There couldn’t be another one who happened to be in jail, too.
That still didn’t tell him why she’d implicated his family in her brother’s imprisonment. And it was clear he had another fight on his hands until she gave him anything more.
After a long moment of refusing to give an inch, her whole body started shaking from escalating tension, her eyes growing brighter as pain welled in them. His insides itched with the need to defuse her agitation. But he was the enemy to her now. She wouldn’t let him console her while she considered him—however indirectly—the cause of her brother’s suffering.
Struggling not to override her resistance and to hell with the consequences, maybe even letting her vent her surplus of anguish by lashing out at him, he let out a ragged exhalation. “You’ve come this far. Tell me the rest.”
She glared defiance at him then echoed his exhalation. “Why? So you can tell me I got it all wrong again? You’ve said that a few times already. I’ll cut and paste on my own.”
“Oqssem b’Ellahi, I swear to God, Talia, if you don’t start talking, I’ll kiss you again.”
Outrage flared in her eyes. And, he was certain, unwilling remembrance and involuntary temptation, too. That only seemed to pour fuel on her indignation. He would have been thrilled that her attraction was so fierce it defied even her hostility. If the grimness of the situation wasn’t mounting by the second. Then she thrilled him anyway.