Shaheen wiggled one eyebrow. “That worry would motivate you not to mess it up, wouldn’t it?”
He tore himself away. “Shaheen!”
Shaheen laughed. “I’m just messing with you. You’re on your own. Just don’t come crying one day that you are.”
“I won’t.” He tsked. “And quit making this what it isn’t. I only want to put my finger on what makes her so…unquantifiable.”
Sighing dramatically, Shaheen played along. “I guess it’s because she’s nothing anyone expects a princess, let alone a professional woman, to be. Before she became Johara’s partner, I only heard her being described as mousy, awkward, even gauche.”
“What? Who the hell were those people talking about?”
“You had that Kanza the Monster conviction going, too.”
“At least ‘monster’ recognized the sheer force of her character.”
Shaheen shrugged. “I think she’s simply nice.”
An impressive snort escaped him. “Who’re you calling nice? That’s the last adjective in the English language to describe her. She’s no such vague, lukewarm, benign thing.”
Shaheen’s lips twitched. “After an evening in her company, you seem to have become the authority on her. So how would you describe her?”
“Didn’t you hear me when I said that I don’t know what she is? All I know is that she’s an inapproachable bundle of thorns. An unstoppable force of nature, like a…a…hurricane.”
“That’s more of a natural disaster.”
He almost muttered “smart-ass” in the exact way Kanza had to him. He was exasperated with having his enthusiasm interpreted into what Shaheen and Johara wanted it to be. When it was like nothing he’d ever felt. It was as unpredictable as that hurricane in question.
One thing he knew for certain, though. He wasn’t trying to define it or to direct it. Or expect anything from it. And he sure as hell wasn’t attempting to temper it. Not to curb Shaheen’s expectations, not for anything.
“Whatever. It’s the one description that suits her.”
“That would make her Hurricane Kanza.”
With that, Shaheen took him back to Johara, where he endured her teasing, too. And he again made her and her incorrigibly romantic spouse promise that they wouldn’t interfere.
Then as he left the party, he thought of the name Shaheen had suggested.
Hurricane Kanza. It described her to a tee.
After he’d compared her effect on Johara’s office to one a lifetime ago, she had proceeded to tear through him with the uprooting force of one. All he wanted to do now was hurtle into her path again and let her toss him wherever she would.
But she wouldn’t do it of her own accord. She must still be processing the revelations that, given her sense of justice, must have changed her opinion of him. But it no doubt remained an awkward situation for her, since her prejudice had been long held, and Maysoon was still her half sister.
Not that he would allow any of that to stand in his way. He fully intended to get exposed to her delightful destruction again and again, no matter what it took.
Now he just had to plan his next exposure to her devastation.
*
Aram eyed Johara’s office door, impatience rising.
Kanza was in a morning meeting with his sister. Once that was over, he planned to…intercept her.
He’d done so every day for the past two weeks. But the sprite had given him the slip each time. He never got in more than a few words with her before she blinked out on him like her fellow pixies did. But what words those had been. Like tastings from gourmet masterpieces that only left him starving for a full meal again.
He’d let her wriggle away as part of his investigation into her components and patterns of behavior. It had pleased the hell out of him that he still found the first inscrutable and the second unforeseeable. But today he wasn’t letting that steel butterfly flutter away. She was having a whole day in his company. She just didn’t know it yet.
Johara’s assistants eyed him curiously, no doubt wondering why he was here, again. And why he didn’t just walk right into his sister’s office. That had been his first inclination, to corner that elusive elf in there.