The Sheikh's Destiny (16 page)

He knocked Amjad’s arm off his shoulder. “No wonder your ex-wife tried to off you.”

Amjad’s grin was as unrepentant as ever. “She did when I had some propriety. Imagine what she would have done now.”

“Shoot you, most probably.”

“Is that what you feel like doing?”

“I would gladly kill anyone who would stand between me and Laylah. Or at least make him wish he was dead. Care to try?”

Amjad pretended horror. “You’ll add me to your inventory of revenge? Will I tail the list after Haidar and Jalal?”

“Come between Laylah and I, and you’ll reserve your spot at the top.”

Amjad stuck his face into his. “You think you can take me?”

“I don’t think. I know. And there wouldn’t be much left of you once I’m done. And you know it.”

Amjad’s guffaw boomed again. “And he wins himself a doll.”

“I swear, Amjad, if you don’t stop yanking my chain,
taal omrak
won’t be a concept that will apply to you anymore.”

“You know, Rashid, I would have kicked you out on your ear with the first sign of kissing up. But you threatened to kill me instead, so I think I’m in love. Yep, rejoice. You passed.” His arm was over Rashid’s shoulder once more. “How about we go pretend that family ‘tribunal’ of mine actually matters?”

Still afraid to rejoice, Rashid hissed, “Didn’t you say your word is everything, O king of all you survey?”

“It is. But you’ll be king of the headache-inducing but inevitably inseparable Azmahar soon. You will be the one constant partner in my political bed. I’m doing myself a favor showing you the ropes of kingship. Yeah, I’m into training allies to my preferences. I’m charitable like that.”

Rashid stilled. That was totally unexpected. That Amjad would bring up the idea of Rashid becoming king of Azmahar. And in this way. What was his game?

He probed, hoping to gain more insight. “It’s strange that you’d assume I would be king with your two brothers running against me.”

Amjad gave a dismissing wave. “Haidar and Jalal would make decent kings, I guess, but their hearts aren’t really in it. Yours is. You have more at stake in Azmahar and that is why you’ll reap the votes.”

Digesting this unforeseen development, Rashid put all his cards on the table, even if it was for a game he no longer cared about in the least. “I wouldn’t without your alliance. Which
they
have in full.”

Amjad gave a masterful imitation of affront. “Because they’re my brothers? Nepotism?
Moi?
Tut-tut, shame on you. Have you forgotten they’re only my
half
brothers? With Sondoss’s blood running in their veins, actually half demon. Considering you’re only half oaf, you win in that context, too.”

Rashid looked heavenward. “Do you ever stop?”

“No. Maram won’t let me.”

Rashid tried one last time. “Are you
ever
serious?”

Those impossibly green eyes smoldered with a complex intelligence that had Rashid realizing this man saw and understood everything. “I’m
always
serious. I say what others are too shy or cowardly or merciful to say. Think back and you’ll find I said nothing but the whole truth all through this bracing encounter.” He clapped his hand once. “Now, from a full-fledged king to an embryonic one, let me give you an introductory course in dealing with pompous asses.”

Rashid let Amjad put an arm around his shoulder this time. “You must be an authority on your own species.”

Amjad chuckled. “I
can
still give you a hard time, you know.”

“Knock yourself out. Name whatever price or mission. I’ll surpass any so there won’t be any shadow of owing you a thing.”

“You can never repay what you’ll owe me. Your eternal happiness with Laylah. Face it, Rashid. I own you.”

He shrugged Amjad’s arm off again. “Tell you what. Save it. I’ll take Laylah up on her offer and elope.”

Amjad’s considering glance lengthened this time. “She’s your Achilles’ heel, isn’t she?”

“You’re all Greek mythology today, aren’t you?”

Amjad gave a mock serious nod. “I’ve expended the Indian and Middle Eastern myths on Haidar and Jalal in the past two days.”

After that, Amjad remained miraculously silent as they passed through the majestic marble corridors adorned in the most intricate and magnificently designed colored mosaics toward the palace’s great hall.

As they approached the hall’s twenty-foot gilded double doors, Amjad suddenly spoke again, continuing his previous point seamlessly. “It balances you, grounds you, being so totally vulnerable to her.” He winked. “It makes you a man at last.” At Rashid’s exasperated exhalation, Amjad added, “It’s not a slur on your manhood.
This
time. I think a man can’t call himself that until a woman has him totally whipped.”

Unbelievable as it was, this Amjad was turning out to be one insightful and romantic fellow. “Like Maram has you?”

The smile that wreathed Amjad’s face was the very essence of longing and indulgence, as if he was transmitting it to his wife. Rashid somehow believed Maram
would
feel it. “And then some. I gave up everything I had and was for her. I would give up far more if she’d let me. You’d do the same for Laylah, wouldn’t you?”

“I would.”

At his nonnegotiable answer, Amjad patted Rashid on the back as they entered the grand hall. “Then there’s no rush with those seven tasks, Hercules. You’ll be spreading them out throughout your lives together.” He suddenly shuddered. “Just seeing her in labor is going to teach you the meaning of terror and take you to the limit of your endurance and beyond.” They’d stopped in the middle of the expansive hall, below the hundred-foot central dome where Laylah’s male kin were gathered in rows like a Roman senate, when Amjad gave him a playful punch. “You lucky bastard.”

* * *

It was a marvel watching Amjad in action.

As he informed the Aal Shalaan elders that Rashid was going to marry Laylah, Amjad did the opposite of what kings, or anyone sane, should and had been known to do. In the past twenty minutes Rashid had watched him put down, make fun of and alienate everyone in the hall, including his father, in lieu of courting their favor. It was staggering how fluently and inventively he did it. But what was truly flabbergasting was that everyone loved him for it. They not only obeyed him, they practically invited him to walk all over them some more.

Maybe he should take private lessons in Amjad’s School of Kingship, after all.

Suddenly, every thought in his mind dispersed as they walked out of the hall, only to be filled with one thing. Laylah.

She was striding toward him from the other end of the grand corridor, her dress’s looseness only emphasizing her lethal curves, its cream color accentuating her sunlit hair, skin and eyes.

She had a taller woman with her. Maram, Amjad’s wife and Queen of Zohayd. But though Maram’s flawless complexion and silky hair approximated Laylah’s hues, they didn’t strike anything inside him like the burn of appreciation Laylah’s did.

The moment it took to register Maram dissolved, everything gravitating to the center of his universe again. It struck him again how pleasurable it was to behold Laylah, how beautiful he found her. How terrified he was that this miracle wouldn’t come to pass.

Suppressing the need to run to meet her halfway, he watched her and Maram approach, weighed down by the worry that kept ambushing him—that it would be impossible for everything to keep going so smoothly, incapacitating him further with each attack.

Maram flowed into Amjad’s arms as if slotting into her other half. Then Laylah, flaunting tradition and inciting kingdom-wide wagging tongues, did the same with him. It was frowned upon for married couples to indulge in physical affection in public. It was unheard of between the unmarried.

Most likely presuming his stiffness was caused by his sense of propriety, Laylah grinned up at him. “Did those fossils agree to let you take me off the shelf or do I have to go in there and show them what the last remaining, if fraying around the edges, Zohaydan treasure will do if they snap her last decaying nerve?”

Maram groaned. “Those expressions reek of Amjad.”

Laylah giggled. “Discipline him for me, will you?”

“It’ll be my pleasure.” Maram chuckled. “Though I suspect it will be his, too. I think he misbehaves on purpose.”

Amjad pulled his wife deeper into his embrace. “Like any love-slave worth his salt, I live to provoke my next punishment.”

As Maram laughed her pleasure, Laylah prodded him. “Well? Any need for drastic action on my side?”

Before Rashid got his constricted throat to work, Amjad produced the phone his
kabeer al yaweran—
his head of royal guard—had handed him as they’d exited the hall.

He gave it to Laylah. “I thought you should have an audio memento of me kicking our family’s ass as I acquired for you the groom who’s going to save you from a fate worse than death.”

“You recorded the meeting?” Laylah exclaimed as she pounced on the phone and a chill assailed Rashid when she let him go. Then he once again heard the medley of abuse Amjad had exposed his family to. Amjad hadn’t even introduced Rashid’s proposal, had only pulverized everyone to their true size before announcing the upcoming marriage as a fact, and announcing that he’d be passing the royal decree documents for everyone to stamp with their house seal.

After gaping through the playback, Laylah squealed, “Amjad! You insane, incredible man, you!”

Amjad waved her delight away. “I don’t do presents, so consider this my gift for the duration of your dual lifetimes.”

Laylah gave him a squeezing hug. “Oh, Amjad, I love you!”

Amjad pushed out of her arms, a stern finger raised at her. “Don’t do or say that again. And I mean
ever.
”

Laylah winked at Maram. “Your mistress/owner will sanction the occasional hug from the universal kid sister around here.”

Amjad’s head jerk indicated Rashid, who’d taken an involuntary threatening step closer. “It’s someone twice her size and who packs the wallop of a weapon of mass destruction that I’m worried about. Explaining this kid-sister thing to that monolith you brought home might not work. Or it might, and he’d still take my head off just because I’m male and you came in contact with me.”

Laylah laughed, her whole face alight with elation as she looked up at Rashid. “Don’t worry. He needs you in one piece.”

Amjad tutted. “Not a good enough deterrent with that berserker. So let’s play it safe.” He pulled Maram back into his arms, shared with her that look of total allegiance that Rashid had unbelievably found with Laylah. “I have a wife and kids who’d like me around for half a century or so.”

With the trio indulging in more banter, Rashid walked with them to Amjad and Maram’s private quarters, still struggling with the ominous sensation settling deeper in his bones. It just didn’t seem right that everything would go so wonderfully.

When would the other shoe drop?

It did, partially, in the evening.

More Aal Shalaans kept showing up to congratulate them, with their delight and acceptance only setting him further on edge. Then he announced the wedding would be in Azmahar a week later.

It was then that everything went wrong.

Maram and Aliyah led the women in insisting there was no way they’d put together another royal wedding in a week, like they recently had Jalal’s. They’d take a month. And that was final.

When Amjad corroborated his wife’s desire, and Laylah herself didn’t protest for long, Rashid felt that if he did, they’d wonder why he was so nervous about postponement, and grudgingly succumbed.

From then on, he felt each moment as if it were counting down to an explosion that would go off and destroy everything.

Eleven

“Y
ou know, there’s this age-old invention. It’s said to have endless merits.”

Rashid gritted his teeth as Laylah whispered in his ear. It had been ten days since they’d come to Zohayd. All the wedding preparations on the Zohaydan side had been concluded. They’d move to Azmahar in a couple of days to start the preparations there, where the ceremony would be held. A couple of days when Laylah wouldn’t be with him.

She’d played a ruse on her companions to get him into her private quarters alone. Normally he would have objected, even refused. Not this time. He had to talk her out of her potentially disastrous decision.

He stiffened when her arms came around him from behind, her hair spilling its fragrant silk over his shoulder as she leaned over the couch where he sat in her old bedroom suite.

She nipped his earlobe. “That invention is called a smile.”

Unable to hold back, he swung around, took hold of her and swept her over the couch and onto his lap.

Giggling, melting in his embrace, her fingers traced his tight lips, tried to spread them. “You do it like that. C’mon, you can do it. I promise you, your face won’t crack.”

He caught her hands. “It’s not the right moment to ask me to try this trick.”

Her face lost its impishness as she sighed. “I’m going to visit my mother, not going on a suicide mission.”

“You mean there’s a difference?” he asked, feeling himself spiraling out of control.

“You were the one who insisted I bring my family into this.”

“I meant the nonvenomous ones only.”

She chuckled. “I
am
one-quarter serpent.”

“The gene bypassed you.”

“But it might be a good idea to keep in touch with its literal mother lode, just to keep abreast of how to manage it. Said gene might not miss the next generation.”

“It will. That gene stops with your mother and aunt.”

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.”