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They’d find out soon enough.

Luciana met his gaze and he wondered if he looked as terrified as she did. She nodded, and rallied around his challenge. ‘I’d like to see that.’

He pressed his lips against Angelique’s temple for a moment, tightened his hold, flung his head back and roared. Full volume, holding nothing back. Not the pain nor the joy of living and loving as he would, not the agony of seeing the woman he loved in pain. Suffering, for him.

Luciana joined in.

‘You’re both mad.’ But Angelique pushed and joined her voice with theirs and twenty seconds later his daughter was born.

‘Well, that’s one way of doing it,’ offered the midwife dryly as she handed the baby to the doctor and went back for seconds.

Not three minutes after that, his son arrived in the world, his voice almost as loud as the rest of his family’s. Someone placed his daughter on Angelique’s chest, skin to skin, and it was an image he would carry with him for ever. There were tears. Some of them might have been his.

Then the midwife was ordering him to stand up and take his shirt off, and Angelique lay smiling, and Luciana started laughing like a loon before leaning over to kiss her sister’s cheek before stepping away. ‘I’m out of here to tell the family the good news.’ They were all out there—every last Cordova, and Benedict too, and Valentine’s sister and her family and probably the ghosts of all the rulers of Thallasia. ‘A future queen for Thallasia. How about that?’

How about that, as the midwife showed him how to hold his son and cradle him to his chest.

‘Don’t drop them,’ said Luciana, and then she was gone.

‘I’m going to kill her,’ Valentine announced, now terrified of dropping his baby. ‘Are they healthy, the babies?’ And hot on the heels of that thought, he turned to Angelique. ‘Are you okay? Is my wife okay?’

Angelique’s ‘I’m okay’ got lost beneath the midwife’s answer that she was doing very well.

He couldn’t stop looking at the two tiny miracles in their arms. ‘They’re so beautiful.’ He should have expected as much, given the gene combinations involved. God knew, he and his sister had been feted for their looks from the moment they were born, and still were. As for Angelique, some would say her looks had been her downfall. ‘How do we make them plainer?’

‘We don’t.’ His birth-battle-hardened wife smirked at him. ‘We all have our burdens to bear. Take me, for example: I have a husband who’s never having sex again.’

About that... ‘I could be persuaded to revisit that particular edict.’

‘You do that.’

‘I love you, you know.’ The words came from deep down inside. ‘You’re everything I’ve always wanted. You. Them.’ He nodded towards the babies. ‘Us. I’m never letting this go.’

Smiling eyes regarded him fondly. ‘Good thing I’m in it for the long haul, then.’

A fact for which he was eternally grateful. ‘Together, then.’ So many blessings had been bestowed upon him. ‘Let’s go rule the world.’