The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess: The Desert King. Michelle Celmer

a half-empty piggy bank in her chest. Her nerves kept discharging. Not that having a heartbeat and nervous transmission meant she could move. She couldn’t.

      The split second she could, she’d continue on her way out, show that overbearing lout how things worked. Surely not his way.

      The spike of outrage thawed the grip of paralysis, freeing her legs, fueling three long strides on her charted path out of his trap. On the fourth she faltered.

      What was she doing, walking away? She was here to see about one overripe head. She should go harvest it.

      She turned around, walked back. The hardwood floor beneath her feet felt like soggy sand, and her legs felt powered by someone else’s will.

      As long as it wasn’t his, she was fine with it.

      She crossed the threshold this time, scanned the dimly lit room. For the first dozen heartbeats, she saw nothing.

      Then he seemed to materialize out of nowhere, registering on her retinas, facing her in a high-backed black leather armchair at the far end of the room, framed by French windows that opened to the terrace leading down to the gardens. His body was relaxed, silhouetted in the golden light of a side lamp. His face was in darkness.

      Her heart jangled into a higher gear. He was so still, looked so…sinister crouching there like a supernatural creature, half here, half in another realm, his face, his intentions obscured…

      What a load of spectacular stupidity. There was nothing supernatural about Kamal. Except his supernatural ability to piss her off, playing all mysterious and lordly and…bored.

      She moved, one foot in front of the other, each one a triumph of steadiness, advancing into the field of light cast by another tall lamp, her eyes fixed where his eyes should be, trying to discern whether he was looking at her, or if, as in the past, he was pretending she didn’t exist.

      One thing she did know—he was baiting her.

      Expecting her to lose her cool? Or her nerve, as she had done so dependably in the past? Well, he was in for a surprise.

      Meet the new Aliyah Morgan, buster. Or as it had turned out, Aliyah Aal Shalaan.

      He was moving now, sitting forward as if her every step nearer was tugging at him, light creeping across his face like the sun at dawn.

      She almost squeezed her eyes shut, dreading the moment his eyes would be illuminated. Then they were, striking a flare that knocked the breath from her lungs as he’d once knocked sanity from her mind.

      It was his expression that jogged sanity back into place now.

      Stunned? How could he be, when he’d been ready for her? When he had no human components to stun?

      Now he was getting up, slowly, eyes narrowing to slits below the intimidating brows, a dark, towering force inundating her with emanations she felt would knock her off her feet if she didn’t watch it.

      Had he always been this way? Or had she forgotten?

      With her photographic memory, was that even a question? While it had helped her forge a career for herself as an artist, the inability to forget had always been her curse.

      She’d forgotten nothing. Not an inch, not a hair. He had changed. And infuriatingly, not for the worse as she’d been hoping on the way here. The twenty-eight-year-old sleek panther of a man who’d ruled her emotions for six months then abandoned her to the most chaotic, traumatic time of her life had been upgraded. And how.

      But one thing was the same. His clothes. He was dressed the same way he had been the night she’d first laid eyes on him.

      Had he done that on purpose? Could he even remember what he’d worn then? He’d once told her that he, too, forgot nothing.

      But if he had remembered, had done it on purpose, why? To mock her? To goad her? To rewind to the beginning and start over?

      Heh. Sure. As if.

      He could start over in hell, where he belonged.

      Still, it was the sameness of the sans-tie, formal charcoal suit with its unbuttoned silk shirt that echoed the color of his whiskey eyes that made the change so obvious, that detailed how the leanly muscled, broad-shouldered six-foot-six frame she regretfully remembered in distressing detail had bulked up with premium maturity to reach a new zenith of virility.

      Problem was, the upgrade didn’t stop there. The same magic had taken a chisel to his incredible face, turning his singular features from arresting to overwhelming. Worse still, the jet-black satin that was his hair and that he’d always cropped close to his awesome head now lay in luxurious layers down to his collar.

      Worst of all was the addition of a trimmed beard and mustache. Those betrayed his true nature, showed him for what he really was. One of nature’s most menacing entities. Not to mention one of its grossest examples of injustice.

      No two ways about it. The years had been criminally kind to him. Seemed infinite wealth and power agreed with him. He’d no doubt improve exponentially the longer he had them, the older he got. And judging by his notorious reputation as a womanizer—the double-standard pig had dared call her depraved—every female with a brainwave agreed. And wanted a part of him.

      And they could have him, could pick his bones clean, preferably. He no longer affected her…Liar.

      Fine. So she’d be dead and buried before a male of this caliber didn’t access her hormonal controls. What did it matter that he was the most magnificent male to walk the earth, a species of one? It changed nothing. Out of the few billion men alive, he was the one who she knew from mutilating personal experience was a soulless bastard. She wouldn’t come near him with a ten-foot pole. Unless it was to poke out his eyes with it.

      But none of that mattered now. Now she hoped only that she hadn’t gawked at him too long. Not with her mouth hanging open, at least. What mattered now was that she regained the composure he always seemed to rob her of just by training those eyes on her. For once she needed to stand with him on equal ground.

      She inhaled, cocked her head, forced her gaze to sweep him, down then back up to his eyes, smearing him with disdain.

      “These sure are desperate times we live in.”

      For a moment she was stunned to hear her own voice.

      So it was a husky wisp of sound, but at least she got it to work. Encouraged, enraged further by the way he remained staring at her as if at an unsavory species, she elaborated.

      “They have to be, if your countrymen are scraping the bottom of the barrel to find themselves a king.”

      Kamal almost lurched. At the satin lash of the voice he’d just discovered had never stopped echoing in his mind. At the slap her condescension had landed on his stunned senses.

      He would have if he could.

      He couldn’t even blink, couldn’t access one voluntary action or thought. And the loss of control only spiked his outrage.

      Was he doomed to react this way whenever he laid eyes on her? What was it about this woman that deactivated his rational centers? And activated his incoherent ones?

      And she wasn’t even the same woman. She’d changed, almost beyond recognition. Contrary to his every projection. And, e’lal jaheem…to hell with it, for the best.

      His senses soaked in the changes, making feverish comparisons with her past self.

      Gone were the wild clothes, the reed-thinness and crackling energy. In their place was a superbly dressed woman with a measured grace, a steady gaze and a body that had filled with a femininity so distressing it had everything male in him overriding all. His mind might be averse, but his body roared for its mate….

      She isn’t your mate, ya moghaffal. She’s anybody’s.

      But his body was oblivious, was fighting all connections with his mind, bucking off its