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One
“You want me to marry Kanza the Monster?”
Aram Nazaryan winced at the loudness of his own voice.
Not that anyone could blame him for going off like that. Shaheen Aal Shalaan had made some unacceptable requests in his time, but this one warranted a description not yet coined by any language he knew. And he knew four.
But the transformation of his best and only friend into a meddling mother hen had been steadily progressing from ignorable to untenable for the past three years. It seemed that the happier Shaheen became with Aram’s kid sister Johara after they had miraculously reunited and gotten married, the more sorry for Aram he became and the more he intensified his efforts to get his brother-in-law to change what he called his “unlife.”
And to think he’d still been gullible enough to believe that Shaheen had dropped by his office for a simple visit. Ten minutes into the chitchat, he’d carpet bombed him with emotional blackmail.
He’d started by abandoning all subtlety about enticing him to go back to Zohayd, asking him point-blank to come home.
Annoyed into equal bluntness, he’d finally retorted that Zohayd was Shaheen’s home, not his, and he wouldn’t go back there to be the family’s seventh wheel, when Shaheen and Johara’s second baby arrived.
Shaheen had only upped the ante of his persistence. To prove that he’d have a vital role and a full life in Zohayd, he’d offered him his job. He’d actually asked him to become Zohayd’s freaking minister of economy!
Thinking that Shaheen was pulling his leg, he’d at first laughed. What else could it be but a joke when only a royal Zohaydan could assume that role, and the last time Aram checked, he was a French-Armenian American?
Shaheen, regretfully, hadn’t sprouted a sense of humor. What he had was a harebrained plan of how Aram could become a royal Zohaydan. By marrying a Zohaydan princess.
Before he could bite Shaheen’s head off for that suggestion, his brother-in-law had hit him with the identity of the candidate he thought perfect for him. And that had been the last straw.
Aram shot his friend an incredulous look when Shaheen rose to face him. “Has conjugal bliss finally fried your brain, Shaheen? There’s no way I’m marry
ing that monster.”
In response, Shaheen reeled back his flabbergasted expression, adjusting it to a neutral one. “I don’t know where you got that name. The Kanza I know is certainly no monster.”
“Then there are two different Kanzas. The one I know, Kanza Aal Ajmaan, the princess from a maternal branch of your royal family, has earned that name and then some.”
Shaheen’s gaze became cautious, as if he were dealing with a madman. “There’s only one Kanza…and she is delightful.”
“Delightful?” A spectacular snort accompanied that exclamation. “But let’s say I go along with your delusion and agree that she is Miss Congeniality herself. Are you out of your mind even suggesting her to me? She’s a kid!”
