“You’re my Jenan. My madness. Anyone else who trifles with your name and that meaning of it will regret it.”
“Don’t go all Terminator on me, or I will end up without relatives.”
“Relatives who provoke you and sneer at your name and character? They certainly deserve terminating.”
“Let me fight my own battles, okay?”
His ominous expression eased as he bowed his head in concession. “Until you call on my intervention.”
She rewarded his newfound flexibility with a loving nip of his chin. As he groaned, tried to deepen the intimacy, she pulled away with a sigh of regret.
“About Zee and Fay... Since they were babies, they adored that I came up with abbreviations for their names. Especially Fayza. She hates her name even more than I do mine.”
“You’re more a mother to them than an older sister.”
It was a statement. A very astute one. Though the girls’ mother—her stepmother—was alive and well, she wasn’t maternal in the least, and she’d left both girls to the care of relatives and hired help from birth. Jen had intervened early, making them her responsibility. Even after she’d left for the States, she’d had them with her there every summer and holiday possible. She sure had the lion’s share in raising the girls.
She sighed. “They’re my girls. I’m the one who’d do anything at all for them.”
Something...enormous flared in his eyes.
She was thinking she’d only guess at its significance, unable to trespass on what felt like an intensely personal reaction, when he ended any speculation.
“I feel the same way about my brothers.”
She blinked. “I thought you were an only child.”
“I am. Those brothers are ones of my choosing, our bond not one of blood, but forged in trials of fire.”
“Your Black Castle partners.”
She wasn’t asking, just stating. He nodded. She wished he’d elaborate about them, about how he’d chosen them, about their trials.
But she was never one for probing such deep privacies. He’d tell her when and if he wished.
“So Fay and Zee? Will you call them that? For me?”
“For you. You’ve invoked the binding spell that makes me do anything.” Indulgence and self-deprecation twitched on his lips. “No one has ever made me change my mind once it’s made up. You’re seriously messing with it, ya jenani.”
Her heart hitched again. “Only fair, since you’re scrambling mine big-time.”
He opened his mouth to object, and she rose on tiptoes and closed it with an ardent kiss.
Before he deepened it, she stepped away, giggling. “You probably don’t have to worry about them anyway. I bet being exposed to you will excite them so much, they’ll be exhausted in a couple of hours.”
That lethal smile of his dawned again. “In that case, let’s go get those girls of yours, and let me proceed to knock them out of our way.”
Giggling again, feeling as though she was perpetually a few inches above ground, she called out to her sisters.
In a minute, Fayza and Zeena came sauntering in, their eyes widening again as they fell on Numair, no doubt stunned all over again by his sheer physical presence.
She understood the feeling exactly. Every single time she looked at him, it was a total shock to her system. Just like that first time. Even more each time.
Numair invited them all to take their seats, then gave the order to take off. Little was said until the jet was done climbing and was cruising almost imperceptibly.
Then Fayza turned to him. “So you’re the ‘undisclosed businessman’ this jet was sold to a couple of months ago.”
Numair turned his focus on her, and Jen felt that Fayza regretted inviting it, struggled under its impact.