Amjad nipped her earlobe. “I love it when you alliterate.”
She heard voices outside. They were here.
She tugged on his hair. “Amjad!”
“Here my answer.” He looked down at their entwined bodies. “This is all I want to be, together, all I am now—yours, ours.”
“And how will taking your job back stop you from being that?” she seethed. “And it’s your duty, your birthright. You don’t have to ‘want’ it to take it back.”
“I don’t have to take it back. That’s the beauty of having spare heirs. Me, I only want you and your uncanny replica.” He looked over at Wafaa, who was sprawled asleep on a blanket on the floor. He’d picked her name to express what she symbolized, Maram’s faithfulness and loyalty, the things that had taught him to live and love. “Who, by the way, called me baba today!”
Maram dragged his face back even as her insides melted at the adoration that turned him to jelly in their little girl’s grasp. “Tell me you’ll take your job back, Amjad.”
He grinned at her. “No.”
“For me!”
His eyes drained of mischief. “Don’t play dirty, Maram.”
She couldn’t believe she’d never thought of this before!
She pressed her advantage. “For me, Amjad, for me.”
He said nothing. Then it was too late.
The door opened and his family descended on them en masse.
After lively greetings, every couple turned to showing off their baby and cooing over the others’.
Shaheen and Johara’s son, Kareem, who looked like an amalgam of his parents, was fifteen months old. Harres and Talia had postponed starting a family among his demanding jobs as minister of interior and crown prince and her jobs as emergency medicine consultant in Zohayd’s foremost national hospital and field medicine trainer of Harres’s special forces. But they’d arranged their schedules and were expecting their first baby in six months. Aliyah and Kamal’s two rascals were four and two and everything that their parents were.
After the kids had been taken to the mansion’s garden to play, King Atef rose.
“I have an announcement, my children.” All eyes turned to him. “I am abdicating.”
After a stunned hush, everyone but Amjad burst out in protests. King Atef raised his hands.
After everyone quieted, he went on. “It’s time I spent whatever I have left of life serving the love of the one woman I’ve ever loved, the woman I left to serve my kingdom.”
He reached out a loving hand and gaze to Aliyah’s mother, Anna Beaumont. The tall, ethereally beautiful blonde flew to him, seemed to fit into his side. He sighed, hugged her tight.
No one had anything but blessings to this. King Atef had sacrificed his own happiness for far too long for Zohayd. Now that he was free of Sondoss and his health had stabilized, he could finally live his life the way he’d always longed to.
King Atef received everyone’s congratulations and his sons’ ribbings before he turned to Amjad.
“I still want you to succeed me, Amjad,” the king said. “Not because you’re firstborn, but because you are the most accomplished statesman of my sons, the one who will make the best king.”
Amjad’s lips twisted. “It was one thing to be stuck with me as your successor due to some cruel trick of timing, but now that you have a choice, how can you consider the Mad Prince would make the best moderator king?”
“Because you have a surefire method to your madness, Amjad,” King Atef said.
Shaheen nodded. “As much as it pains me to say, Amjad, your brand of madness works so well that it’s insane. You’re the only man capable of bringing our tribes to heel. I bet there won’t be any attempts at uprisings or conspiracies during your reign.”
“I do believe it’s your destiny,” King Atef corroborated. “To bring about a unification to this kingdom the like of which even your previous incarnation couldn’t dream of.”
Amjad snorted. “Ha, bloody, ha, Father. How about we retire this stale Ezzat reincarnation theory?”
King Atef shrugged. “Probably only to replace it with a parallel-lifelines one. Your paths are so similar that it’s uncanny. You might have spent longer resisting your fate, but you, too, have succumbed to it and found perfect happiness.”
Amjad looked over at Maram. “That is one thing I won’t contest.” Before she ran to him, Amjad looked back at his father, eyes simmering with irreverence. “The first decree I’d make as king would be to auction off the Pride of Zohayd. One piece at a time. Just as Ezzat gathered it, I would disperse it.”
A long silence echoed.
Finally the king exhaled. “It is time for radical changes. No one can bring those about but someone as radical as you, Amjad.”
“And since there’s no one as radical as you, just take the damn job back already,” Harres growled. “If you don’t want me to die of asphyxiation in business suits and negotiation halls.”
Amjad looked at Shaheen, who exclaimed, “Don’t even think it!”
“Wuss.” Amjad smirked before transferring his derision to all of them. “I don’t know where you get off lauding my acumen. There was no evidence of basic intelligence when it came to negotiating the most important treaty of my life.” He cast her a look of pained remembrance. “I almost caused an irreparable rift with Maram.”
And she burst out, “Then you created total harmony out of chaos.”
His look poured indulgence over her. “Only because you’re afflicted with this bottomless genetic capacity to forgive me.”
“Look where forgiving you has gotten me,” she exclaimed. “Zohayd can hope to be a fraction as lucky!” He started to shake his head again, and she rushed to him. “You’re my long-term, committed, all-or-nothing man. You’re exactly the king Zohayd needs. And I’m such a phenomenal political and financial law consultant, I will smooth out your reign, manage you so well you’ll have oodles of time for me and Wafaa to wrap you around our pinkies…”
He devoured her in a kiss reminiscent of the passionate demonstration that had rocked the region during their wedding.
She surfaced, breathless. “Will you stop paying tribute at the altar of your guilt already? I couldn’t love you more, if that is what you’re after! Not if you don’t want me to explode.”
“Listen to your wife and owner, Amjad,” Harres urged.