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Unable to bear that she’d feel that way, he caught her back, holding her in the persuasion of his hands and eyes. “How can you even doubt that I do?”
That precious blush that he’d seen only since last night blazed all over her body. “It’s not you I doubt, I guess.”
He squeezed her tighter, getting mad at her. “How can you doubt yourself? Are you nuts? Don’t you know—”
“How incredible I am? No, not really. Not when it comes to you, anyway. I couldn’t even dream that you could have emotions for me. That’s why I kept it so strictly chummy. I didn’t see how you’d look at me as a woman, thought that I must appear a ‘sexless tomboy’ to you.”
“I was afraid you thought you were that. This wasn’t how I saw you.” He filled his hand with her round, firm buttock, pushed the evidence of how he saw her against her hot flesh.
As she undulated against him, her voice thickened. “I was never sexless where you were concerned.”
“Don’t go overboard now. You were totally so at the beginning. Probably till last night.”
Her undulations became languorous, as if he was already inside her, thrusting her to a leisurely rhythm. “If you only knew the thoughts I had where you were concerned.”
“And what kind of thoughts were those?”
She rubbed her breasts against him, her nipples grazing against his hair-roughened chest. “Feverishly licentious ones. At least I thought they were. You proved me very uncreative.”
He crushed her against him to stop her movements. He had to or he’d be inside her again, and they wouldn’t get this out of the way. “If you’d had thoughts of even wanting to hold my hand, you hid them well. Too well, damn it.”
Her hands cupped his face, her eyes filling with such tenderness, such remembered pain. “I couldn’t risk putting you on edge or having you pull back if you realized I was just another woman who couldn’t resist you. I was afraid it would mar our friendship, that I wouldn’t be able to give you the companionship you needed if you started being careful around me. I couldn’t bear it if you lost your spontaneity with me.”
The fact that she’d held back for him, as he’d done for her, was just more proof of how right they were for one another. “When did you start feeling this way about me?”
“When I was around seventeen.”
That flabbergasted him. “But you hated the sight of me!”
“I hated that in spite of all your magnificent qualities you seemed to be just another predictable male who’d go for the prettiest female, no matter that she had nothing more to recommend her. Then I hated that you also seemed so callous—you could be cruel to someone who was so out of your league. But mostly, I hated how you of all men made me feel, when I knew I couldn’t even dream of you.”
“I beg you, dream of me now,” he groaned, burrowing his face into her neck. “Dream of a lifetime with me. Let yourself love me, ya kanzi.”
“I far more than love you, Aram. Ana aashagak kaman.”
To hear her say she felt the same, eshg, stronger than adoration, more selfless than love, hotter than passion, was everything. What he had been born for. For her.
Lowering her onto the bed, he gazed deep into her eyes as she wound herself around him. “I’ve been waiting for you since I was eighteen. And you had to go get born so much later, make me wait that much longer.”
Tears streamed among unbridled smiles. “You can take all the waiting out on me.”
Taking her lips, her breath, he pledged, “Oh, I will. How I will.”
*
Floating back to her father’s house, Kanza felt like a totally different woman from the one who’d left it over twenty-four hours ago.
She was so high on bliss that she let her family subject her to their drama with a smile. She might have spent three years living autonomously in New York, but once on Zohaydan soil, she must act the unmarried “girl,” who could do whatever she wanted during “respectable hours” provided she spent the nights under her father’s roof.
To shut them up, she told them of Aram’s proposal.
Her news boggled everyone’s mind. It seemed beyond their comprehension that she, the one undesirable family member they’d thought would die a spinster, hadn’t gotten only one, but two incredible proposals in the space of two days. One from a prince, which she’d dared turn down on the spot, and the other from Aram, someone far bigger and better than any prince. It seemed totally unacceptable to her sisters and stepmothers that she’d marry the incomparable Aram of all men, when they had all settled for far lesser men.
At least Maysoon was absent, as usual, pursuing her latest escapades outside Zohayd and unconcerned with the rest of her family or their events. Kanza would at least be spared what would have been personal venom, with her history with Aram.
Feeling decidedly Cinderell
a-like, she thought it was poetic when her prince strolled in. Reading the situation accurately, Aram proceeded to give her family strokes. Showing them he couldn’t keep his eyes or hands or even lips off her, he declared he wouldn’t wait more than three days for their wedding. A wedding he’d finance from A to Z—unlike her sisters’ grooms who divided costs—and that the nuptials would be held at the royal palace of Zohayd.
