He surrendered to her passion, touching her all over as if he couldn’t believe she was in his arms again. “I’ve actually never been more restrained and reasonable.”
She drank of his taste and reciprocation, moaned into his groans. “Whatever. You’re done with mammoth gestures and I better not discover you’ve committed more insanities. I’m not letting you off the hook of sharing every right to our baby. And you’re going back and rescinding your—”
“I won’t.”
“Now look here…”
A fiercely tender kiss aborted her protest. “Let’s revisit the rights thing after a couple of years of exemplary behavior on my part. Nothing else matters to me but being in your heart again.”
“You never left it. You never will. Not in this life or any other. Now…enough.”
“Nothing will ever be enough for you.” She opened her mouth and another kiss closed it for her. “A proof is only a proof as long as it remains in effect. Mine will.”
Frustration and anxiety shot way past the red zone.
He meant it!
Tirades filled her head, of why taking his job back was nonnegotiable, why she wouldn’t accept it as proof, why her doubts had escalated, how they were forever defused…
He went down on one knee before her on the sand, took her hands to his lips, ended coherence. “Imagine any ceremony, wear and do anything, reinvent marriage and being together to your liking. I’m giving you carte blanche with our wedding, our togetherness. With the rest of my life.”
She gaped down at him, everything inside her brimming and flowing over his upturned face.
He closed his eyes as her tears rained down on him, groaned as if basking in a healing downpour.
Then he opened them, his lips quirking. “I take it this is your consenting to a full-service union?”
Delight shuddered on her face. “I take it this is your rescinding your view of said union being in ‘servitude for life’?”
“Of course not. I embrace my servitude. I crave it.”
“Kinky after all, huh?”
He winked, swept himself to his feet and her off hers. “You bet.”
A long time later, maybe a day, maybe another lifetime, she stretched luxuriously in Amjad’s embrace, in their cave.
She now knew impassioned pleas or serious arguments would be met with indulgent or bedeviling dismissals. Maybe teasing?
She slid a leg along his, reveling in how his body stirred. He rumbled, pressed down on the body he’d pleasured to capacity.
“I’m trying to imagine,” she murmured, “what kind of world it will be with the vacuum your declawing will cause.”
His eyes told her he was on to her as he nipped her chin. “The world will remain the same mad place with the same Mad Prince in residence. And if anyone in it, starting with my brothers, dreams I’m declawed around anyone but you, a rag mop will be less shredded than they will be.”
She sighed, acknowledging that method’s failure. “Thrilled to know you’re still my slicing-and-dicing desert lion.”
“I am on a lifetime mission to deserve a fiery, ferocious lioness with an endless fount of mushy forgiveness for a heart.”
She giggled. “My Crown Prince of Snark.”
“Plain Vanilla Prince of Snark, please.”
Before she protested, he rose above her, suddenly serious. “They didn’t exist, Maram.” She blinked her confusion. “Love and eshg. Never to me. Until you brought them into existence, brought me to life. Aashagek, ya marami, ya amaali, ya koll hayati.”
Tears of joy surged, only to dissipate.
Nothing was enough to do justice to hearing him, the man she’d been born for, saying she inspired his eshg, calling her his aspirations and desires, his hopes, his whole life.
It was another lifetime later when she realized.
He’d taken her, body and soul, he’d given her all there was to be given. But he hadn’t taken back his sacrifice, hadn’t given her his word that he would.
But he eventually would. Give it to her along with everything else. As she would. Give her all to her intoxicating, incredible, incomparable desert lion…
Epilogue
“You intractable, infuriating, incorrigible…”
Aliyah, who’d frozen at Maram’s explosion, relaxed, chuckled. “Amjad, right?”
Maram growled, “Who else?” and put the phone back to her ear. “I swear on your ex-Crown Princehood, Amjad, if you try to divert me again…” She fell silent, felt her eyes glazing, her face heating, her core melting. He wasn’t diverting her, he was devouring her. With words. Making her unable to wait until he… “Argh! You did it again. That’s it. Get your luscious hide in here or you’re not enacting any of your ‘diversion’ tactics for—for…a week.”
“But Mo-om.” The family-room’s door opened and Amjad walked in, phone pressed to his ear until his legs rubbed against her knees. “I’ve been such a bad boy.”
She flung her phone aside, dragged him down to her. He chuckled as he met her furious passion with his indulgent one.
“It’s still disturbing.”
Aliyah’s amusement ejected Maram from the spiral of lust her husband had dragged her into. If, after eighteen months—which, according to everyone, was the hardest time in a marriage, and with a first pregnancy and its sequels, too—she combusted, left the world behind at a touch, she wondered if she’d one day overload with desire and eshg.
Aliyah went on. “To see Amjad still Amjad, yet paradoxically, deliriously in love.”
“And Amjad is pleased as always to disturb his little siblings,” Amjad drawled.
Aliyah laughed. “Seems you disturb your little wife, too.”
“I live to disturb her—” Amjad winked at Maram “—if in completely different ways.” He tossed Aliyah his best inflammatory glance. “Ways I’m sure your Kamal hasn’t heard about, or if he has, can’t execute.”
Aliyah gave him such a sweet smile. “Next time you meet, I’ll let Kamal deck you. He says it will rearrange your circuitry into something compatible with human company.”
“Since I care only about that of one specific golden lioness, I’ll take a pass on his fist-induced rewiring.”
Maram tugged at him, urgency hammering in her heart. “They’re coming. And you didn’t only smear all my makeup—you also didn’t give me an answer, you slippery, self-satisfied snake!”