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  Screw that.

  I was just opening my mouth to say something to that effect… when Aziz fell to his knees in front of me, my hands clasped in his, and looked up at me with his soul in his eyes.

  Okay, I hadn’t seen that coming. But I closed my mouth, realizing that he was going to say something—and that it was probably going to be important.

  “Faye,” he said solemnly. “I didn’t intend to be doing this right here. I didn’t intend to be here in Kayyem with you in the first place. I didn’t mean to be here because my dad had a heart attack, due to all that rich food we’ve always been warning him about.” He shot a very meaningful glance in his father’s direction at that. “And I definitely didn’t think I’d be doing this in front of my parents. Of course, I didn’t think I’d introduce you to my mother and have her immediately question my feelings for you, and yours for me.”

  He looked up at me, all dark, smoldering heat, and I felt myself starting to melt.

  “I would never have expected that, because I never questioned my feelings for you. Not for one single moment. From the second I saw you, all glowing gold and pink, from the other side of the room, I knew I had to have you. I saw your smile, I heard your laugh, and I couldn’t help myself. And then we started talking…” He gave me a low, sexy chuckle, and shook his head. “And don’t even get me started on the flash of electricity that happened when we first touched.”

  I heard his mother stifle a gasp at that one, but I didn’t care. I was too busy remembering that flash of electricity myself—and what it had led to. I was also, as it happened, appreciating the electric current running from his skin right into mine at that very moment.

  I didn’t say anything, though. I didn’t think he was finished talking, and there was a selfish, affection-hungry part of me that wanted to hear the rest.

  Okay, sure, that was self-serving. But when a girl gets a chance to hear how much a gorgeous man loves her, she just doesn’t cut it short. She waits to get every last, juicy drop of it before she answers.

  “And then you showed me your mind, and I knew I was lost,” he whispered. “You argued with me the way no one else ever has, and you made me laugh harder than I thought possible. You played drinking games with me. You challenged me to keep you. You got up and left me—and then you didn’t argue when I tracked you down again and told you I wasn’t letting you go.”

  He cracked a crooked smile and glanced up at me from under his eyelashes. “You stole my watch and pawned it, for God’s sake, and you’ll never convince me that you didn’t do it just to make sure I had to track you down.”

  I laughed out loud at that, because it was the furthest thing from the truth, but it would have been an incredibly clever move—and I was quite content to let him think that it was exactly what I’d done.

  Then I fell down to my knees across from him, tired of looking down on him. If we were going to have this conversation, I wanted to be on the same level as he was. I wanted to be able to look right into his eyes. And I wanted him to be able to see into mine.

  “What, exactly, are you saying?” I asked.

  He leaned forward and pressed a soft and incredibly sweet kiss to my lips. One that didn’t insist, didn’t push… but still managed to tell me exactly how much he was holding back.

  If that kiss could have spoken, it would have been screaming that he wasn’t going to let me go.

  “You stole my watch,” he whispered. “And I think you did it because you were trying to take care of me… and also because you needed a way to guarantee that we’d speak again. Let me steal your heart. Let me wrap it around me like a blanket and hold it for the rest of my life, just to keep you with me. Move here with me, to Kayyem. Be my family. Make me laugh for the rest of my life, and let me spend the rest of our lives taking care of you. Say you’ll be mine, Faye. Forever.”

  For a moment, I just froze. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to me—and even more romantic because I could see that he meant every single word.

  “Really?” I breathed.

  “Really,” he answered. “My parents want me to come home and settle down, and the only way I can do that is if you agree to do it with me. I don’t want to face the rest of my life without you. What do you say? Build a family with me and our baby. Be my wife.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then slid my eyes to the left… where I saw his mother and father watching us, their eyes brimming with tears. Another quick shift of the eyes and I saw Khalid grinning at me like he’d absolutely lost his mind with happiness.

  And I knew that Aziz might have been talking to me, that entire speech meant for my ears only. But in finally showing his hand—and forcing me to show mine—he’d somehow convinced his mother that this was actually real.

  When my eyes came back to meet his, they were filled with tears as well. I wasn’t usually a crier, as I said, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

  “Yes,” I breathed. “But I have to admit that you never had to steal my heart, Aziz. It’s been yours from the start.”

  Chapter 27

  Faye

  Seven Months Later

  “Are you sure we can’t get it into the next broadcast?” I asked my assistant, Tamara, who had called me with an emergency update fifteen minutes ago—and then proceeded to give me all the bad news in her usual no-nonsense tone.

  “I already asked,” she said quickly. “They say they just don’t have the time for the entire piece. They could do a shorter piece, but I told them that was inconceivable.”

  The problem was, I’d done an enormous segment on the underprivileged aspects of Kayyem, including the people who couldn’t afford to move out of the old, broken-down buildings where they were living, and how they deserved a better shot at upward mobility, and the whole piece had come out wonderfully. I’d had my favorite camera guy and producer with me, and it had turned out more like a documentary than a feature for the local news station.

  That had also caused a problem with the station itself, because the producers there had taken one look at it and decided that it should, in fact, run as a documentary, free of the news programming. Only there wasn’t funding for that—or at least, the funding would take longer to get into place than they wanted.

  One of the higher-ups wanted to run it immediately because it was so current. Another of the higher-ups didn’t want to put the money into giving it a longer time slot.

  You can see the problem.

  For all those reasons, of course, cutting it down into a smaller segment, and one that would fit into the five-minute slot the news program was probably trying to give me, was a completely nonstarter. Tamara was right; it was inconceivable.

  And that meant I was going to have to pull a card I almost never pulled. One I absolutely hated. Because it meant I was leaning on Aziz’s family name—which I flat-out refused to do unless I had to.

  The thing was, this particular documentary was about Aziz’s current project, though, so I guessed I could probably say that I was doing it for both of us, rather than just for myself. After all, it was good publicity, right? Pull in the fact that Khalid also had a horse in this race, and we were killing three birds with one stone. Or rather… getting publicity for three birds with only one segment.

  Or something.

  “Well, I guess they’re not leaving us much choice, are they?” I asked, annoyed.

  I heard the smile that was the closest Tamara ever got to laughing. “Pull out the big Al-Sharim guns?”

  “Yes,” I said on a sigh. “Tell them Aziz has okayed the expenditure and that we’re doing this as an Al-Sharim family expense rather than one that will come down on the network itself. I hate to do it, but it sounds like they’re not leaving us much choice.”

  “They’re not,” she confirmed. “I’m on it. Stay tuned.”

  I hung up my phone with a laugh at that, because it wasn’t like I could do anything but stay tuned. I was so close to giving birth to our incoming baby girl that I’d been
sidelined. Sent home to Aziz’s mansion on the family estate and told to relax until the little one got here.

  Honestly, it was driving me bonkers. I’d been working for and with the Al-Sharim family network since I arrived in Kayyem, doing segments on the city and its people, and my pieces were getting better and better as I got used to being on camera rather than behind a laptop.

  Aziz himself had taken on several projects doing development for low-income housing in Kayyem, and together we’d become a force to be reckoned with, addressing the areas of the city that weren’t as bright and shiny as everything else the Al-Sharim family touched.

  We’d already finished one entire housing project, and another was well on its way to completion. Khalid was supplementing this with a clinic of his own in the area, and between the four of us—because Khalid’s wife, Amber, had become one of my best writers—we were touching a part of the city that people rarely touched.

  We were beyond proud of ourselves. And we were doing really, really good work. Which made it even harder for me to be stuck at home, doing absolutely nothing.

  Still. It was all worth it when I slid my hands over my now-enormous belly and felt my little girl in there, squirming and shoving and just waiting to come out into the world and start kicking butt. She was going to be a fighter, I was sure of it. One of those that took the world by storm, and made absolutely no apologies for it. She was going to be just like her daddy.

  And, I guessed, just like me, too, when it came down to it.

  We were only days away, now, and my parents were already en route—their house saved, by the way, thanks to Aziz—and their coffee shop thriving with the Al-Sharim name behind the marketing.

  Everything was going so perfectly that it almost frightened me, to be honest. I’d never had things go so good before, and something about it all made me think that at any moment, things were going to go sideways and I was going to have to start thinking on my feet again. Aziz made me feel so safe, so loved, that the thought of handling anything by myself anymore felt… wrong. Even thinking about facing life without him felt wrong. He’d become the most important person in my life.

  I would never want a future without him, and that was all there was to it.

  I was just smiling and reaching for my mug of tea on that thought when my water broke.

  By six in the evening that night, I was looking at my future in an entirely different way.

  Mostly because of the squirming and very smiley bundle currently nosing about my neck, her grunts telling me that she was already hungry again—and that she was bound and determined to find exactly what she was looking for, regardless of what I thought of the matter.

  I laughed with a joy I’d never even imagined, and turned her so that I could see her face again.

  “Hungry again already, little one?” I asked, grinning.

  “That girl is going to eat you out of house and home,” Amber said, bending over us and nudging the little one under the chin.

  Amber and Khalid, the members of the family we saw most often, were our best friends—and therefore godparents to our little girl, which meant they were the only other people allowed in the room. And God, was I glad to have Amber there to tell me what to do. She was a wealth of information—and support.

  She grinned at me like she knew how much I was depending on her. “Believe me, I remember that phase. From now on, you belong to her.”

  “And to me,” Aziz said from my other side, dropping down so his head was even with mine. He gave me a heart-meltingly sweet smile and pressed a kiss to my forehead. Then he turned and did the same to little Ara. “Ara,” he said, his face filled with wonder, “It’s so nice to finally have you here.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. He’d been thinking he wanted to settle down for some time, so having the baby finally arrive, along with the promise of our wedding, had been the culmination of lots of planning for him. Or at least… lots of dreaming.

  Me? I’d never thought about it, honestly. Until suddenly I was pregnant and in love, and staring at my future like I was staring down the barrel of a gun—afraid I wasn’t going to be able to do it.

  Then I’d remembered that I’d never met a situation I couldn’t manage, and I’d never had a dream I didn’t go after. And I’d thrown myself into it with both feet, not caring how deep the water was, because I knew that Aziz would be there holding my hand the entire time. And the moment I heard Ara’s first cry, I knew I’d gone after the right dream.

  Because I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And Aziz and Ara were the people I was supposed to be here with. It had just taken a trip to Dubai, a stolen watch, and a man too stubborn to give up on me to get me here.

  And I wouldn’t have changed one single part of the whole journey.

  Epilogue

  Six Months Later: Faye

  I stared out over the view of the fountain, smiling as the water shot up into the air—as if we weren’t in the middle of a desert and it didn’t matter how much water evaporated into the atmosphere.

  Of course, that was how Dubai felt. Very few people spent their time thinking about the outside world. At least, very few of the tourists. I was sure the businessmen who made and lost fortunes in the city thought about the outside world all the time.

  But I wasn’t thinking about it right now. Because I was here on vacation with my boyfriend and a whole group of his family—including, but not limited to, his cousins Ibrahim and Khalid, and their respective wives, Madison and Amber (both also American). There were a number of children attached to those two couples, and though I adored them, they were mostly just grouped under the heading of ‘the kids’ for me.

  We didn’t have more than one of those, yet, so I wasn’t responsible for keeping track of them. Though I rested my hand on my belly at the thought, enjoying the flatness of it now that Ara had arrived—and the idea that it might not stay flat for much longer.

  It wasn’t going to be long before we had another. And then I’d officially be part of the Al-Sharim gaggle, adding yet another baby to the clan.

  I laughed at that, thinking about how much my life had changed since the last time I was in this hotel. And in this exact room, actually. I was officially a Kayyem resident these days, moving through the city like a native and doing my part to bring publicity to the less-wealthy areas of the town.

  Amber had approached me right away about doing a book with her as well—something nonfiction, with plenty of photographs—and I’d said yes immediately. She and I had formed an immediate bond over language, and though we both loved Madison as well, she was far too practical for the likes of us artists to include her in every conversation.

  My folks were back in LA enjoying the California sunshine and making the most out of their business. They also loved Aziz nearly as much as I did, and already had plans to visit Kayyem as often as they possibly could.

  As for Aziz and I, well, we’d spent the last year actually getting to know each other, and falling more and more in love every day. And speaking of the devil…

  I looked down at the phone in my hand and saw that he’d texted me.

  “Can you come down to the ballroom to meet me?”

  I grinned and responded that I’d be down in a moment. He probably had another lunch planned with his family or something—and though I was sort of hoping we could spend some time to ourselves, I couldn’t complain. His family was the family I’d never had, and the security blanket I’d been wanting for my entire life.

  I was head over heels in love with them, and I couldn’t wait to become an official member of their community once we got married.

  I was surprised when I got to the ballroom and found it completely empty. I’d been so sure that the rest of the gang would be here. And if not them, then a bunch of people I didn’t know. This resort was usually packed full, which made walking into a room without anyone there… weird.

  I looked around, confused, and realized that not even Aziz was there. Weirder.

&nb
sp; Then I got another text telling me to go to the bar, and that he would meet me there.

  When I walked up to the bar, grinning at the thought of what had happened the last time I’d been there, I found a box sitting on the counter.

  “Open it,” a text read.

  I did, reaching out hesitantly and flipping the top open, then gasping. Inside, I saw an engagement ring. The biggest stone I’d ever seen, bright green and set into a solitaire setting in a white gold band.

  At that moment, Aziz popped up from behind the bar, beaming.

  “This is where we first met,” he said, leaning on the counter.

  “I remember,” I said, leaning on the bar as well.

  “And this is where I first fell in love with you.”

  Well, that was new. But it also wasn’t a surprise. The chemistry between us had been immediate—and undeniable.

  “I remember feeling about the same,” I murmured.

  He reached out and took my hand. “Faye, this has been a roller coaster ride for me. I knew from the very start that you were something special and that I wanted to find a forever with you. It just took me a minute to realize it. It took me a minute to realize that I wanted to settle down and stop living in the wide world, and that I wanted to settle down with you. Move to Kayyem permanently. Be mine permanently. Let’s make a home instead of running all over the world.”

  He’d already asked me, of course, but that didn’t make this time any less special.

  Because this time, he was asking with a ring. At long last, I was going to become part of the Al-Sharim tribe. Part of Aziz’s family.

  I leaned in and kissed him. “Yes,” I whispered. “With my whole heart, yes. Though I might still want to run around the world. As long as you’re with me. As long as I don’t have to go by myself anymore.’”