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Aation “But that heroic existence cao What re cousin all of a sudden? And made you not only look her way this time, but decide to take her off the shelf, and in record time, too?”
He decided to tell both of them the truth about this at least “The reason I never looked at you—” he turned his eyes to Laylah, whose eyes filled with tears and wonder as she heard his confession for the first time “—wasn’t because I didn’t notice you, or wasn’t interested I was, painfully so But I wasn’t worthy of looking in your direction then”
Auffaw “And you think you are now?”
Laylah stepped between the, or do you need to release some more testosterone? Why don’t you just beat each other black and blue and get this ‘who’s the bigger, badder alpha’ thing out of your systems?”
Rashid watched as Amjad looked doith extreme amusement at Laylah, who cared not a bit that he was one of thehi—and younger—relative and not her king
Jealousy radiated up Rashid’s spine Cousin or not, he wanted her to s save her a hts, and any other physically expressed stupidity, I’ll refer you to Harres Or Jalal Me,the need to shove hiine you wield such weapons, when it’s your status that stops people froht”
A back in respect for led his eyebrows at him “I hereby decree you’re free to do your best Or is it only your worst?”
Again Laylah came between the thehed “Okay Just because Rashid is an endangered species and we need him alive and able to breed I don’t think we’d find you another ut, her s Rashid to share the joke He only wanted to poke A to Amjad, she asked, “Is my father here?”
“You expected hiht you were above such sentimental tripe If you haven’t yet, it’s tieneration only one apple didn’t turn out rotten My father is all we got in the way of a parent around this place”
An incensed step brought Rashid sla into Amjad chest-first “Even if she knows the truth about her father, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt her You don’t have to be cruel”
“Oh, I assure you, I have to” A besides h love, and she’s better off considering both her parents as dead asmy uncle makes me want to kick his useless ass, or anyone’s who hts out, Laylah growled, “I swear, oneeach of you in a corner at the ends of this palace Ya Ullah—now I re and hor women around here?”
“All the women who’ve invaded the Aal Shalaan male maze will be here tomorrow,” Amjad said “For today you can seek the feminine amelioration of my Maram, of course, and Johara”
She whooped “I can’t wait to meet the phenoain And the children You know, so individuals”
A expressions in his arsenal and shooed her away “Skip along, then Rashid and I have h I have to drive him to within an inch of his sanity before I even look into his application to acquire our last rees—Aal Shalaan treasure”
Laylah grinned up at Rashid “Guess you were right about lance on A on to your treasures, as evidenced by what happened to the Pride of Zohayd, your fore on to your sanity, Amjad Rashid is a world-renowned authority in sanity extraction, as I leave you to his not-so-tender mercies, taal o the king’s hail of “” to her irreverence Then she stood on tiptoe and pressed a clinging kiss to Rashid’s lips
Before he forgot Amjad and the watchful eyes of the palace dwellers and crushed her to him, she dreith a s away
Feeling bereft already without her, his gaze clung to her as she receded And he registered where they were for the first tiht up there with the Taj Mahal in splendor and intricacy of design, and even more extensive The mid-seventeenth-century palace that had taken more than three decades and thousands of artisans and crafts with Haidar and Jalal froht to twenty He’d taken as much pride and pleasure in it as they had before his stays here had declined until they’d stopped altogether, around ten years ago
It felt so strange to be back after everything that had happened since to pollute his ia was like a wave that crashed down on hiain, felt its history and the grandeur saturating its walls, per his senses with bittersweet e where chunks of his life had been played It had been mostly here where he’d seen her and dared not dreaain sopoignant
Anancy disperser, flicked a hand at Laylah as she disappeared around a bend “Are you as viciously intelligent as you look? Did you latch onto Laylah when you thought you were ‘worthy’ of her for the right reasons? Do you realize what a miracle she is? The product of Medusa and Narcissus should have been ato walk the earth That she’s female, too, makes her a veritable impossibility”