He couldn’t! He couldn’t live at all.
Janaan’s child wasn’t his.
She’d forgotten him in days—days. Had craved another, had opened her body to his invasion, taken his seed, wanting it to bear fruit not his.
He heard something crackling, congealing with agony and madness, a butchered maniac ranting his last breaths away.
“All for nothing. All the certainty, the invincibility in her—for worse than nothing. For an illusion. Not mine—not mine …”
Jay reeled as Malek fragmented before her eyes.
But this isn’t what I meant to do, she wanted to scream.
She’d die to never see him in pain.
She flew after him, threw herself at his feet. He staggered, looked down at her with the eyes of a man in the process of losing his coherence. And she begged.
“Forgive me, Malek, please, please—forgive me. I lied, lied—only to set you free. I thought you’d just despise me, walk away, be free of me. I swear I never dreamed it would hurt you this much. My baby is yours, Malek, as I am, as I will always be. I just want you strong and in peace—please, Malek, please …”
The look in his eyes changed to the wild one of someone way past his limit, the tears she’d never thought to see pouring from them, and she panicked, her words colliding with each other in her fright.
“You said I had to have a family, and now I do, Malek—I do! Your child will be all the family I need. You shouldn’t worry about me, about us. I’m a good provider and I’ll be a good mother. I am nothing like my mother—please, please, never worry on that account. And if you want and find it possible to participate in your child’s life in any way, you can. You can do anything you want or see fit to. Anything at all.”
Malek looked down at Janaan, his salvation and destruction, demolished twice over. With the devastation of her sacrifice, after the devastation of her attempt to drive him away.
He fell to his knees before her, shaken to his foundations that she was all he’d believed and more, that he’d never be able to love her hard or long enough, never have enough, never.
“Hada kateer—kateer. This is too much …” he reiterated as it all merged into a dream sequence, after the harrowing plunge into the nightmare of annihilation, and she was cleaved to him, her tears mingling with his, her passion a chain reaction with his, melting their barriers, their flesh together.
Then he went home, plunged inside her, drove in a ferocious rhythm, weeping at the poignancy of union, of reunion, of souls and bodies sundered and now remade into one.
At the peak he drew away to watch her, his Janaan, his heart and mind and soul in name and reality, taking her fill of him, at the mercy of the pleasure he inundated her with, magnanimous with her captivation of him, with her surrender.
Only when she started tumbling down the vortex of pleasure, crying out her love, convulsing around him, wrenching his release from his every cell, he joined her, spilled his seed, branded her as his forever, only sorry that he couldn’t give her another child right now.
Then there was peace. For the first true time in his life.
Their union had started with their first eye melding, but this was the beginning of an inseparable life together.
He lay curved around her, his lips traveling over her neck and shoulders, her hand luxuriating in the evidence of his love growing inside her, pride blazing through him, spilling on words of worship, pledges of forever.
Her quivering finally stopped, her caresses, too. He growled with deprivation, took her hands back to his body, urged them to resume their ownership. She resisted him. A black spot began to grow in the perfection again. He drew himself up on one elbow.
“Malek—this was a lapse …”
His heart contracted at her choking statement.
He no longer understood anything. There was no logic to grasp at here. He gathered her tighter to his body. “The most powerful intimacy we’ve ever shared, a lapse?”
She was panting, peach-flushed, her eyes turquoise in the bedside light, slumberous with the drug of pleasure, bleak with the admission of defeat. “Yes—one I’ll keep making if you don’t leave me alone. I know what you came to offer me, and I can’t accept. So, please, leave me alone, Malek, please …”
The black spot was expanding, about to consume his world again. “You’re having my child, you say you’re mine forever, you just made soul-shattering love with me, but you won’t marry me? Is this what you’re saying? What is this? Pregnancy hormones?”
She turned her face into the pillow, bit her lip to stop its trembling. “I’m trying not to intrude in your life, take you from your duties and your wife. I can’t be the other woman in your life. It will destroy me as it destroyed my mother.” She turned a tear-drenched face of overpowering beauty and poignancy to him. “If you stay away long enough, we may be able to grow a thick scab over the wound to live with it, but if you keep reopening the wound, letting the hunger bleed out, it will keep eating at us until nothing is left. I want to have your baby, Malek, I want to be whole and strong and nurturing. Please, my love, help me retain my sanity, don’t keep reminding me how much I’m losing, how much I can’t have.”
Malek reeled, everything inside his head in chaos. “What are you talking about? What duties? What wife? You said—at least implied—that you’d seen the ceremony! The ceremony where I abdicated and handed the crown to my cousin!”
∗ ∗ ∗
Jay was convinced now. This was all a psychotic breakdown.
She couldn’t have heard Malek correctly.
“Abdicated?” She heard the explosive word, realized it had just erupted from her lips. “I thought you meant a marriage ceremony and … Abdicated! God—how? Why? How could you?”
The distressed bewilderment in his eyes slowly gave way to amusement. Then suddenly he threw his head back and laughed. Peal after peal of cruelly masculine merriment that was all him.
Her inarticulate cry of chagrin and impatience brought a reluctant end to his fit.
He still chuckled as he trailed a hand heavy with possession over her ripeness. “Ahen ya habibat galbi. If you only saw what I see now, you’d excuse me if I made love to you again now and explained later.” At her warning growl he took his hand off her, held it up. “All right. As for how, not at all easily, and that was what kept me the past six months from tearing the world apart with my own hands to find you. I had to make everyone agree to my decision, to agree on who best to replace me. They were so desperate for me to remain on the throne they even agreed to let me take you as my wife.”