by Olivia Gates
Every word gouged him deeper for being true. “I confess to all my crimes against you, Lujayn. You gave without taking, never gave me reason to mistrust you. You told me why you were leaving, but I couldn’t accept it. All I could think of was my disappointment, my pain. The more I thought about it in your absence, the more I twisted everything to soothe my wounds. I am wired to think the worst of everyone first if it would explain their behavior. It comes from having Sondoss for a mother. But I’m never mistrusting you, and I’m never walking away, ever again.”
Those ready tears filled her eyes, making them flash like diamonds. “For God’s sake, don’t even pretend this has anything to do with me. You only want to marry me for Adam.”
“Legitimizing Adam is only a factor in the timing but—”
“Did you ever think of marrying me before?”
He wanted to say yes. But there’d never be anything but the whole truth between them from now on. “In the past, I never thought of getting married, no. I thought there was no reason to.”
Her lips twisted. “There you go. And there’s no reason still.”
“I didn’t mean it the way you’re taking it. You know now I thought we had it all. I didn’t think marriage was in either of our horizons. We were too busy, and I thought you were too young, and with your career, wouldn’t afford the distraction of marriage let alone the responsibility of a family.”
Her eyes narrowed to silver lasers. “Are you saying you did think of marriage and decided against it?”
“I’m saying I didn’t think of it for all those reasons, not the ones you’re implying. You were my woman, my lover, and I didn’t think of changing the context of our relationship…and I lost you. Then we met again and till yesterday I was struggling to get you to talk to me. I didn’t think beyond getting you back.”
Sarcasm huffed out of her. “You already planned our future liaison, following the same noncommittal pattern of our past one.”
“Because when it comes to you, I’m not the long-term businessman but a beggar who can’t hope enough to plan ahead. I felt I’d be lucky if I even got you to agree to that much. All I knew was that if we got together again, I wanted to be together always. So yes, I would have wanted marriage. Adam just accelerated the process. He’s not the reason I’m proposing, he only gave me the reason to do it now.”
Disbelief still blared from her eyes.
“I can legitimize Adam without marrying you, Lujayn.”
A wave of bristling hurt rose off her, buffeted him. “Then by all means, go ahead.”
He wanted to whack himself upside the head. Would he ever learn to not stoke her insecurity and poke her scars? “I’m only trying to prove to you I want to marry you only for you.”
Cagey as an aggravated tigress, she said, “How would you legitimize him without marrying me?”
“I would say we were briefly married when he was conceived, an orphy secret marriage, or even a regular one, that ended in divorce. It would only take your corroboration, a few retroactive documents and he’d be my lawful son and heir.”
She nodded, slowly, watchfully. “I’ll corroborate anything that will be best for him.”
He gauged the moment when she’d let him approach again, then reached for her. “I only want you to grant me the blessing of becoming my wife.”
He felt her internal struggle, unable to let belief take hold after so many years of letdowns. “Is it my family’s discovered rank that makes it possible for you to consider me for a wife now?”
He almost doubled over with the pain. Hers. What he’d inflicted when he’d made her feel she’d meant nothing to him.
“Let me make this unequivocally clear,” he said, barely curbing the tremor in his voice. “I am proposing to you. If your family were criminals or worse, I would still propose to you. The woman who’s been responsible for my life’s most intense happiness and heartache. The only woman I’ve always and will always love.”
Tears gushed from her eyes as if under pressure, her whole face crumpling under the onslaught of emotions too brutal to bear. “Don’t…don’t say what you don’t mean....”
He cupped her face, hands trembling to the same frequency of her anguish. “It’s another crime, my biggest one, that I never told you how much I mean it. I love you so much I was yours from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” She hiccuped, her eyes enormous, her body shaking. “Even when I thought I’d lost you forever, when I told myself I should hate you, I couldn’t be with anyone else. There is no one else for me.”
And he saw it, the moment her barriers crumbled and belief flooded in, deluging her in its healing rush.
She surged into him, coming apart, burrowing into him, mashing her face into his chest, his neck, singeing his flesh with her tears, his name a litany on her lips. “Jalal…Jalal…oh, Jalal…”
“Baba Lal!”
They swung their heads as one at hearing Adam’s voice.
He was running toward them with a smile showing off all his pearly teeth, his silver eyes crinkled with glee.
He threw himself at their legs, demanding to be picked up. They both bent, took him between their trembling bodies.
In between deluging his family in kisses, Jalal said, “I asked your Mama to marry me, ya sugheeri.”
“Mama Lu!” Adam squeaked triumphantly.
Jalal chuckled, his heart expanding at the unbelievable blessing of having his family filling his arms. “That’s what you’ve reduced us to? Lu and Lal? Sounds good to me.”
Joy shone over her beloved face. “At first he likes to say things correctly, then goes on to interpret them to his liking.”
“He can call me anything he likes.”
“Oh, no, you’re not making up for your absence from his life by letting him walk all over you and spoiling him.” She pinched his cheek playfully. “You’ve been warned.”
“And I’m duly chastised.” He took her lips in a clinging kiss. “Adam is a wonderfully sunny and adjusted child, and I’ll never sabotage your discipline. You show me the ropes until I put in the necessary time and effort to earn my role as his father.”
“Easy for you to say now the sleepless nights are over.”
He squashed her to him, and Adam in between them, who thought it was a game, squealed his enthusiasm. “Losing those months with you will remain a scar in my being, ya rohi. But I promise I’m never losing any more. I’ll always be there for both of you till my dying day.”
“It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there from the start. I…”
His lips silenced her agitation. “You never need to take responsibility for anything we lost. I wasn’t there, didn’t go with you to prenatal visits, didn’t hold your hand during labor, didn’t shoulder my share and yours of every second since when you needed me to. So you’ll let me carry this.” She gave a difficult nod. He quirked his lips, desperate to lighten the moment. “And though I escaped the sleepless nights, I’ll now attend the toilet-training drama from the start.”
She burst out laughing, a desperate edge to the brittle mirth, sounding relieved to leave this behind. “And secreting the keys to locked apartments, playing hide-and-seek with turned-off cell phones and eating breakfast from our golden retriever’s bowl.”
He looked in mock sternness at Adam. “Is that right, ya sugheeri?” Adam smiled unrepentantly and he sighed dramatically. “Seems I have my work cut out for me.” He met her eyes, delighting in seeing the openness of emotion there at last. “But you realize you only soaked my shirt but didn’t actually say yes?”
She flung her arms around him, squeezed him with all her strength, Adam and all. “A million yeses! A trillion!”
He shuddered in her arms, his lips roaming in prayer and gratitude over her and Adam’s faces. “One will do, ya hayati. An irreversible one, my life.”
* * *
Since Lujayn was twelve, she’d lost all those she’d loved.
Her mother and siblings to years of separation, her father to the pur
suit of jobs that never lasted, Jalal to the gulf that had never let her have him in the first place, and Patrick to the end she’d known would take him away from their first day together.
Even when she’d managed to rescue her mother and father, she hadn’t really had them back. The years apart had taken their toll and they weren’t the people she remembered. Her siblings had barely reentered her life, with her brother mainly gone from all of theirs. Then she’d discovered her pregnancy, had suffocated with fear that she’d lose her baby, too. Adam had been born perfect and she’d still suffered panic attacks daily.
She’d hidden her turmoil, for Adam’s sake, for her fragile family’s. But inside, she’d come apart, expended all her energy to look intact. Then Jalal had reentered her life.
Her ferocious resistance hadn’t been fueled by anger, but by fear. Fear of succumbing only to find him a mirage again.
But if she could believe the past twenty-four hours, he wasn’t only real, he was forever.
Surely nothing could be so perfect. She couldn’t really have the completeness of Jalal and his love, the transcendent joy of their united family. Could she?
But he pledged she could have anything she dreamed of. He swore that she not only had him, but had always had him.
And here she was, in the middle of their family room, in the villa he’d bought by a phone call the moment she’d said she loved it, watching him and their son playing and talking and laughing as if they always had.
When Jalal anxiously had inquired about her silence, she’d said she was luxuriating in watching him and Adam together. From then on, he’d stopped worrying and let her indulge her every starving sense and unborn hope in the wonder and beauty of her man and her son forging a lifelong bond.
Dahab came back at night and took a sleeping Adam with her to the hotel, where she told her family they’d all stay the night. She’d cooked up this plan when Jalal had announced his proposal and Lujayn’s hard-won acceptance. After going ballistic, especially with the prospect of preparing a royal wedding, Dahab thought the newly engaged couple needed a night together, before wedding preparations drove them crazy and apart for the duration.
Though all Lujayn wanted the moment they reentered the villa was to tear Jalal out of his clothes and lose her mind all over him, he had other plans.
He wasn’t gulping her down like he had last night, not even if she begged. And how she did. Tonight, he was wooing her, sealing their pact of forever with affection and harmony before moving on to abandon and ecstasy. In short, he drove her insane.
For the next hours till midnight, he and Labeeb—who now answered her every word with “my eyes to you”—collaborated in waiting on her, cooking for her, serving her and just all around spoiling her.
She’d endured it all, reliving every sensation of Jalal’s possession. It all blossomed inside her mind and body, a memory replaying the glide of his flesh on and inside hers, the harshness of his desire biting into it, filling her body, his voice filling her ears, his breath filling her lungs, his taste her mouth. She’d sat there trying not to squirm with rising arousal and was immensely relieved when Labeeb finally disappeared.
Jalal, who’d watched her with knowing indulgence, his eyes promising her the satisfaction of her every hunger, now rose, came around to her. He took her to the middle of the floor, drew her into a gentle yet possessive embrace, danced with her to the thrilling beauty of a dreamy Azmaharian piece.
She laid her head on his chest, swaying to the tempo of his steady heart, her own stampeding, her lips and nipples stinging, every nerve discharging....
“Now to abandon and ecstasy.”
His bass voice caressed her ear, had her core contracting, her toes curling. He’d almost driven her over the edge with just a declaration. Knowing how devastatingly he carried out his promises was enough to unleash the full force of her arousal.
She erupted in his arms, dragged him behind her to the bedroom suite. Theirs now.... She closed the double doors, leaned on them.
“I want you to do something for me.”
His mirth evaporated at her husky words, his face settling into the stark lines of passion—fierce and resolute. “Anything. And everything. Always. Just ask.”
“Let me have my way with you. All the way.”
The flare of sensual savagery in his eyes seared through her already-inflamed flesh until she felt like one exposed nerve.
“Then have it. Any and every way you crave.”
He started undressing as he talked. Her first reaction was to cry out for him to let her do it. But she held back, let him perform that mind-melting striptease for her, watching and burning, her muscles buzzing with the effort not to charge him. Soon, she placated herself. Now, she got to revel in the beauty she’d thought she’d live deprived of.
The night Adam had been conceived and last night had been too mindless and short-lived. She hadn’t had the chance to savor his magnificence. And even this description was an understatement. Time had conspired to turn what she’d thought was virile perfection into something that defied description, even belief.
Burnished bronze skin overlay heavy yet lithe muscles, sculpted from power and symmetry. Broad shoulders flowed into defined chest and abdomen, narrow hips and taut buttocks, dominant thighs and muscled legs, every inch chiseled from maleness and stamina. She knew from experience that even his toes were beautiful. He was a work of divine art down to his pores.
Then he stepped out of his briefs.
Letting her get only a glimpse of what she’d soon, please soon, impale herself on, he turned, simmered an inviting look over his shoulder and sauntered like a smug feline to the bed.
In languorous movements, he propped his great body against the headboard, stretched out his long limbs, his erection hard and long, heavy and thick, ready for her to come ride it.
Feeling that nip of familiar intimidation, she tore things in her haste to get rid of her clothes. She didn’t care. Any slower and she would incinerate them right off, anyway.
Then she bolted for him.
She crawled over him, worshipping him from legs to lips. By the time she straddled his hips, he’d given up any pretense at deliberateness and was panting as heavily as she was, his groans as pained as hers, his hands roaming her in a fever, his body matching her own shudders.
He still didn’t hurry her, didn’t drag her over him and thrust inside her to end their suffering, letting her set the pace. But she only wanted to hurtle through this first joining. So she did.
Digging her hands into his shoulders, crashing her lips down on his, drinking deep of his taste, she bore down, taking him all the way to her womb in one downward stroke.
Agony and ecstasy ripped her apart. The unforgettable, almost unbearable expansion his size forged inside her had her thrashing over him, withdrawing to escape the shredding pain, plunging back to gorge on the maddening pleasure. She was molten yet his girth almost didn’t fit. And still it fit to such levels of perfection, the carnality, the reality of feeling him like that again, now when love had been declared, had her weeping. He licked her tears, growling her name, igniting her fire higher, driving her harder, until she burst into the flames of a devastating completion.
Shock waves expanded, collapsed, then again, milking his hard flesh of every pleasure, for her and for him. She shrieked his name as the detonations of each orgasm severed all her nerves, as his seed shot inside her in one scalding surge after another, bathing her intimate flesh, filling her womb, fulfilling her....
From the depths of boneless bliss, she felt his hands stroking awareness into her satiated body. She was sprawled over him, her flesh still fluttering with aftershocks around him as he remained buried inside her.
A lion’s purr rumbled beneath her ear. “I need you to promise me you’ll frequently override my Neanderthal tendencies to dominate you and just have your way with me like that.”
Her lips spread lazily. “You got it. Very frequently.”
His c
huckle changed into a groan as her inner flesh spasmed over his intact hardness. “Forget what I just said. The need to go all caveman over you is becoming unstoppable.”
She giggled as he heaved up, swung her beneath him and pressed her between the mattress and his hot, hard bulk.
A long time after he’d devastated her, he brought her over him again and sighed in contentment. “You feel…different.”
Euphoria screeched to a halt. “Not as tight as before?”
“No.” All bliss drained away as she wriggled, severing their union. He caught her, turned her on her back, rose above her. “I mean it’s not that. Physically, you’re the same, or it might be a bit less of a struggle to fit inside you. You just feel different.”
Still unsure, still worried, she probed, “Because of Adam?”
“Because of us. You’re different. I am. We’ve matured. We’re certain we want each other, no substitutes. It makes us better at this.” His lips quirked. “Though you must stop improving right here. Any better and I might expire.”
Flooded with relief, hoping she’d soon stop having those attacks of uncertainty, she looked up at him adoringly. “Do you know you have the most beautiful eyes in existence? If we have a girl, I hope she’ll have your eyes.”
He stilled. “You want more children?”
Every uncertainty crashed down on her again. She swallowed. “I’m just saying, if one day you think we should…”
He interrupted her agitation. “I think we should have as many children as you’re willing to have. I want anything you want, whenever you want it.”
Wobbling with yo-yoing anxiety and relief, her hand trembled as she smoothed it down his stubbled cheek. “Then I want to binge on you without interruptions a bit longer before we embark on our next miracle.”
“Then binge away.” His grin was delight itself as he swept her up in his arms and took her to the bathroom.
