Conveniently His Princess. Olivia Gates
who’d gotten it in his mind to chase her...just for the hell of it.
She snatched another look in the rearview mirror.
Yep. There he still was. Driving safely, damn him, keeping the length of three cars between them, almost to the inch. He’d probably told his pet car how far away it should stick to her car’s butt. The constant distance was more nerve-racking than if he’d kept approaching and receding, if he’d made any indication that he was expending any effort in keeping up with her.
She knew he didn’t really want to catch her. He was just exercising the prerogative of his havoc-inducing powers. He was doing this to rattle her. To show her that no one refused him, that he’d do whatever he pleased, even if it infringed on others. Preferably if it did.
It made her want to slam the brakes in the middle of the road, force him to stop right behind her. Then she’d get down, walk over there and haul him out of his car and...and... What?
Bite mouthfuls out of his gorgeous bod? Swipe his keys and cell phone and leave him stranded on the side of the road?
Evidently, from the maddening time she’d just spent in his company, he’d probably enjoy the hell out of whatever she did. She had tried her level worst back in Johara’s office, and that insensitive lout had seemed to be having a ball, thinking every insult out of her mouth was a hoot. Seemed his jaded blood levels had long been toxic and now any form of abuse was a stimulant.
Gritting her teeth all the way to Johara and Shaheen’s place, she kept taking compulsive glances back at this incorrigible predator who tailed her in such unhurried pursuit.
Twenty minutes later, she parked the car in the garage, filled her lungs with air. Then, holding it as if she was bracing for a blow, she got out.
Out of the corner of her eye she could estimate he’d parked, too. Three empty car places away. He was really going the distance to maintain the joke, wasn’t he?
Fine. Let him have his fun. Which would only be exacerbated if she made any response. She wouldn’t.
When she was at the elevator, she stopped, a groan escaping her. Aram had frazzled her so much that she’d left Johara and Shaheen’s housewarming present, along with the Arabian horse miniature set she’d promised Gharam, in the trunk.
Cursing him to grow a billion blue blistering barnacles, she turned on her heel and stalked back to the car. She passed him on her way back, as he’d been following in her wake, maintaining the equivalent of three paces behind her.
Feeling his gaze on her like the heaviest embarrassment she’d ever suffered, she retrieved the boxes. Just as the tailgate clicked closed, she almost knocked her head against it in chagrin. She’d forgotten to change her sneakers.
Great. This guy was frying her synapses even at fifty paces, where he was standing serenely by the elevator, awaiting her return. Maybe she should just forget about changing the sneakers. Or better still, hurl them at him.
But it was one thing to skip around in those sneakers, another to attend Johara and Shaheen’s chic party in them. It was bad enough she’d be the most underdressed one around, as usual.
Forcing herself to breathe calmly, she reopened the tailgate and hopped on the edge of the trunk. He’d just have to bear the excitement of watching her change into slightly less nondescript two-inch heels. At least those were black and didn’t clash like a chalk aberration on a black background.
In two minutes she was back at the elevators, hoisting the boxes—each under an arm. Contrary to her expectations, he didn’t offer to help her carry them. Then he didn’t even board the elevator with her. Instead, he just stood there in that disconcerting calm while the doors closed. Though she was again pretending to be busy with her phone, she knew he didn’t pry his gaze from her face. And that he had that infuriating smile on his all the time.
Sensing she’d gotten only a short-lived respite since he was certain to follow her up at his own pace, she knew her smile was on the verge of shattering as Johara received her at the door. It must have been her own tension that made her imagine that Johara looked disappointed. For why would she be, when she’d already known she hadn’t found her file and had been the one to insist Kanza stop searching for it?
Speculation evaporated as Johara exclaimed over Kanza’s gifts and ushered her toward Shaheen and Gharam. But barely three minutes later, Johara excused herself and hurried to the door again.
Though Kanza was certain it was him, her breath still caught in her throat, and her heart sputtered like a malfunctioning throttle.
Ya Ullah... Why was she letting this virtuoso manipulator pull her strings like this?
The surge of fury manifested in exaggerated gaiety with Shaheen and Gharam. But a minute later Shaheen excused himself, too, and rushed away with Gharam to join his wife in welcoming his so-called best friend. She almost blurted out that Aram was here only to annoy her, not to see him or his sister, and that Shaheen should do himself a favor and find himself a new best friend, since that one cared about no one but himself.
Biting her tongue and striding deeper into the penthouse, she forced herself to mingle, which usually rated right with anesthesia-free tooth extractions on her list of favorite pastimes. However, right now, it felt like the most desirable thing ever, compared to being exposed to Aram Nazaryan again.
But to her surprise, she wasn’t.
After an hour passed, throughout which she’d felt his eyes constantly on her, he’d made no attempt to approach her, and her tension started to dissipate.
It seemed her novelty to him had worn off. He must be wondering why the hell he’d taken his challenge this far—at the price of suffering the company of actual human beings. Ones who clearly loved him, though why, she’d never understand.
She still welcomed the distraction when Johara asked her to put the horse set in their family living room away from Gharam’s determined-to-take-them-apart hands. The two-and-a-half-year-old tyke was one unstoppable girl who everyone said took after her maternal uncle. Clearly, in nature as well as looks.
She’d finished her chore and was debating what was more moronic—that she was this affected by Aram’s presence or that her relief at the end of this perplexing interlude was mixed with what infuriatingly resembled letdown—when it felt as if a thousand volts of electricity zapped her. His dark, velvety baritone that drenched her every receptor in paralysis.
It was long, heart-thudding moments before what he’d said made sense.
“I’m petitioning for a reopening of my case.”
She didn’t turn to him. She couldn’t.
For the second time tonight, he’d snuck up on her, startling the reins of volition out of her reach.
But this time, courtesy of the building tension that had been defused in false security, the surprise incapacitated her.
When she didn’t turn, it was Aram who circled her in a wide arc, coming to face her at that distance he’d been maintaining, as if he was a hunter who knew he had his quarry cornered yet still wasn’t taking any chances he’d get a set of claws across the face.
And as usual with him around, she felt the spacious, ingeniously decorated room shrink and fade away, her senses converging like a spotlight on him.
It was always a shock to the system beholding him. He was without any doubt the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen. Damn him.
She’d bet it was beyond anyone alive not to be awed by his sheer grandeur and presence, to not gape as they drank in the details of what made him what he was. She remembered with acute vividness the first time she’d seen him. She had gaped then and every time she’d seen him afterward, trying to wrap her mind around how anyone could be endowed with so much magnificence.
He lived up to his pseudonym—a pirate from a fairy tale, imposing, imperious, mysterious with a dark, ruthless edge to his beauty, making him...utterly compelling.
It