She cupped his face in her hands. “And you know what? I almost believe you’d will that to happen.”
“I would.”
“You’ll make an incomparable king, you know that?”
The fist around his heart squeezed. This subject of kingship had become the one thing he dreaded thinking or hearing about. “Let’s not put me on a throne just yet.” He caught her face in urgent hands, needing to defuse this catastrophe in the making. “Don’t go, ya rohi. I don’t want anything to poison your mood, ya hayati, not now, not ever.”
She flushed in pleasure, her eyes filling with joy.
Amjad had been right. The words of love, as deficient as they were, had come to mean more, just because he said them to her, poured his emotions into them. She delighted in hearing him call her his soul and life. As she was.
After pressing a fiercely tender kiss on his lips, she withdrew. “It’s why I’m going, ya habibi. Because there’s this lingering bitterness that I want to get rid of. It will only go away if I see my mother again, talk this out with her.” She sifted her fingers lovingly through the inch of hair he now had. “I also have this unstoppable need to brag that I not only amounted to something when left to my own devices, but I’m getting myself a husband worth millions of the men she tried to set me up with.”
Struggling with the urge to bundle her up and hide her away, preferably forever, so nothing and no one could hurt her, he mumbled, “Icebergs will tumble in Azmahar’s desert before she shares your opinion of me.”
Her laugh tinkled over his overstrung nerves. “She might not admit it at peril of her life, but she must appreciate the hell out of what you are today, bless her power-hungry soul.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. “But no matter what she’s done to me, it has been her own misguided way of loving me. And no matter what she is, she’s my mother...and I love her.”
What could he possibly say to that? That she shouldn’t give her mother any of her love because the woman didn’t deserve it? When he didn’t deserve it, either, yet wanted her to give him all the love she had?
He found himself groaning, “Don’t go, if you love me.”
He winced at how petty that had come out. How desperate.
She caressed his scar, deluging him in tenderness. “That’s going to be a problem, since I don’t ‘love’ you. You’re just the sharer of my soul, and so far the owner of my heart.”
His heart squeezed. “So far?”
“I’m assuming little Rashids will share your status one day.”
The concept of children with her muted him.
Her touch ameliorated his upheaval, boosted it. “My mother won’t attend our wedding, won’t be able to practice her saboteur tricks. I’ll see her in the safety of her exile and be back in less than forty-eight hours. And no, you can’t come with me. I’m not so foolish that I’d put you in her range. And you have much to do. I know. I’m the one who set up your schedule.”
He couldn’t stop her without admitting what he would take to his grave. How this had started. And why he would prefer a worse scar than what he had to having her mother near her, and therefore them, again.
So she’d go. And he’d spend forty-eight hours going insane. More insane than he already was.
He heaved to his feet, taking her up in his arms, rushing to her bathroom. “If you must go, then I must have you first.”
“I should punish you for the celibacy you imposed on us,” she teased as he locked the door. “But I’m just too hungry for you.”
He took her lips, his tongue thrusting deep into her eager warmth. “Not as hungry as I am for you.”
He dragged her down to a fluffy cream mat, tore her clothes out of the way, freed himself. He was heavy and hard and maddened for her molten depths. Ten days since he’d last been with her, inside her, had driven him to the edge.
He entered her in one full thrust, forging into the inferno of pleasure that was her welcoming flesh.
Her cries of pleasure drove him into a frenzy. He buried himself in her over and over, each plunge a shockwave of mindlessness from his loins to his every nerve.
Too soon the friction and ferocity drove them over the edge of insanity and into ecstasy. He poured himself into her depths, transfigured yet again with the power and totality of her desire, with the purity of passion she bestowed on him.
As she trembled and keened her satisfaction beneath him, blind possession overcame him. For a mad moment he wanted to force her not to leave him. He could keep her his willing prisoner...
Her lips opened over his scar, crooning his name, her love. Heat blossomed behind his eyes, burning away the instability.
Nothing would ever mean a thing if she didn’t give it freely, breathlessly. He had to let her go.
As he took one last kiss, as if he could transmit his unspoken plea to never stop wanting him, he prayed.
That nothing would ever come between them.
* * *
Rashid had been right. She shouldn’t have come.
Laylah was realizing that with every second. Her mother was even more difficult than she’d remembered. Somayah’s exile, though it was a luxurious one in Jamaica, had brought out the worst in her.
As majestic as ever, looking more beautiful than she remembered, her mother had received Laylah in full regalia, her hair blonder now but still in that signature chignon. She hadn’t even pretended any pleasure to see her daughter, let alone to hear her news.
The news her mother had already known.
Somayah now looked down the four inches between them, disdain rising. “You think you’ll...what? Impress me? Show me how you’ve succeeded against all my expectations? You think you did?”
Laylah’s heart squeezed. She would have given anything to have what most people had. A mother who was on her side.
“My business is taking off, and I’m marrying the man who’ll be your motherland’s king. I’d say I did.”
Her mother’s glance grew more irritated. “You know what burns me? Since you were born, an Aal Shalaan female anomaly, I dedicated my life to making the most of this miracle, while trying to cure you of your Aal Shalaan defects.”
Laylah’s shoulders slumped further. “Yeah, you wanted to excise my Aal Shalaan half, turn me into a pure Aal Munsoori.”
“I certainly wasn’t after that. Though the Aal Munsooris are my father’s house, the mundane, inept genes in our branch of the family are abundant. Just look at your uncle Nedal and his moronic sons. I always belonged body and soul to my mother’s family and I wanted to polish you into an Aal Refa’ee gem. I wanted to raise you from the second-class princess I was to a queen. I worked tirelessly to plan you a marriage that would put you on a throne.”