The Sheikh's Claim (Desert Nights 2)

A wave of bristling hurt rose off her, buffeted him. “Then by all means, go ahead.”

He wanted to whack himself upside the head. Would he ever learn to not stoke her insecurity and poke her scars? “I’m only trying to prove to you I want to marry you only for you.”

Cagey as an aggravated tigress, she said, “How would you legitimize him without marrying me?”

“I would say we were briefly married when he was conceived, an orphy secret marriage, or even a regular one, that ended in divorce. It would only take your corroboration, a few retroactive documents and he’d be my lawful son and heir.”

She nodded, slowly, watchfully. “I’ll corroborate anything that will be best for him.”

He gauged the moment when she’d let him approach again, then reached for her. “I only want you to grant me the blessing of becoming my wife.”

He felt her internal struggle, unable to let belief take hold after so many years of letdowns. “Is it my family’s discovered rank that makes it possible for you to consider me for a wife now?”

He almost doubled over with the pain. Hers. What he’d inflicted when he’d made her feel she’d meant nothing to him.

“Let me make this unequivocally clear,” he said, barely curbing the tremor in his voice. “I am proposing to you. If your family were criminals or worse, I would still propose to you. The woman who’s been responsible for my life’s most intense happiness and heartache. The only woman I’ve always and will always love.”

Tears gushed from her eyes as if under pressure, her whole face crumpling under the onslaught of emotions too brutal to bear. “Don’t…don’t say what you don’t mean....”

He cupped her face, hands trembling to the same frequency of her anguish. “It’s another crime, my biggest one, that I never told you how much I mean it. I love you so much I was yours from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” She hiccuped, her eyes enormous, her body shaking. “Even when I thought I’d lost you forever, when I told myself I should hate you, I couldn’t be with anyone else. There is no one else for me.”

And he saw it, the moment her barriers crumbled and belief flooded in, deluging her in its healing rush.

She surged into him, coming apart, burrowing into him, mashing her face into his chest, his neck, singeing his flesh with her tears, his name a litany on her lips. “Jalal…Jalal…oh, Jalal…”

“Baba Lal!”

They swung their heads as one at hearing Adam’s voice.

He was running toward them with a smile showing off all his pearly teeth, his silver eyes crinkled with glee.

He threw himself at their legs, demanding to be picked up. They both bent, took him between their trembling bodies.

In between deluging his family in kisses, Jalal said, “I asked your Mama to marry me, ya sugheeri.”

“Mama Lu!” Adam squeaked triumphantly.

Jalal chuckled, his heart expanding at the unbelievable blessing of having his family filling his arms. “That’s what you’ve reduced us to? Lu and Lal? Sounds good to me.”

Joy shone over her beloved face. “At first he likes to say things correctly, then goes on to interpret them to his liking.”

“He can call me anything he likes.”

“Oh, no, you’re not making up for your absence from his life by letting him walk all over you and spoiling him.” She pinched his cheek playfully. “You’ve been warned.”

“And I’m duly chastised.” He took her lips in a clinging kiss. “Adam is a wonderfully sunny and adjusted child, and I’ll never sabotage your discipline. You show me the ropes until I put in the necessary time and effort to earn my role as his father.”

“Easy for you to say now the sleepless nights are over.”

He squashed her to him, and Adam in between them, who thought it was a game, squealed his enthusiasm. “Losing those months with you will remain a scar in my being, ya rohi. But I promise I’m never losing any more. I’ll always be there for both of you till my dying day.”

“It wasn’t your fault you weren’t there from the start. I…”

His lips silenced her agitation. “You never need to take responsibility for anything we lost. I wasn’t there, didn’t go with you to prenatal visits, didn’t hold your hand during labor, didn’t shoulder my share and yours of every second since when you needed me to. So you’ll let me carry this.” She gave a difficult nod. He quirked his lips, desperate to lighten the moment. “And though I escaped the sleepless nights, I’ll now attend the toilet-training drama from the start.”

She burst out laughing, a desperate edge to the brittle mirth, sounding relieved to leave this behind. “And secreting the keys to locked apartments, playing hide-and-seek with turned-off cell phones and eating breakfast from our golden retriever’s bowl.”

He looked in mock sternness at Adam. “Is that right, ya sugheeri?” Adam smiled unrepentantly and he sighed dramatically. “Seems I have my work cut out for me.” He met her eyes, delighting in seeing the openness of emotion there at last. “But you realize you only soaked my shirt but didn’t actually say yes?”

She flung her arms around him, squeezed him with all her strength, Adam and all. “A million yeses! A trillion!”

He shuddered in her arms, his lips roaming in prayer and gratitude over her and Adam’s faces. “One will do, ya hayati. An irreversible one, my life.”

* * *

Since Lujayn was twelve, she’d lost all those she’d loved.

Her mother and siblings to years of separation, her father to the pursuit of jobs that never lasted, Jalal to the gulf that had never let her have him in the first place, and Patrick to the end she’d known would take him away from their first day together.

Even when she’d managed to rescue her mother and father, she hadn’t really had them back. The years apart had taken their toll and they weren’t the people she remembered. Her siblings had barely reentered her life, with her brother mainly gone from all of theirs. Then she’d discovered her pregnancy, had suffocated with fear that she’d lose her baby, too. Adam had been born perfect and she’d still suffered panic attacks daily.

She’d hidden her turmoil, for Adam’s sake, for her fragile family’s. But inside, she’d come apart, expended all her energy to look intact. Then Jalal had reentered her life.