by Sophia Lynn
Sheikh’s Lost Triplet Baby Girls
A Secret Baby Sheikh Romance
Sophia Lynn
Copyright © 2020 by Sophia Lynn
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This story is a work of fiction and any portrayal of any person living or dead is purely coincidental and not intended.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
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Chapter 1
Abir
Abir had been smiling for what felt like twenty-hours, the muscles of his face a little sore and a growing tension hovering at the back of his neck.
Now, he thought. Be fair. The reception has only gone on for an hour. It's the two weeks before this that have been tripping you up.
It had sounded like such a simple thing when the trip had been proposed a few months ago. Go to the United States, make a few goodwill gestures in the capital, see the sights, meet with a few investors that would certainly be flattered by his attention, perhaps take in some of the barbecue that he had liked so much while he was there, and come home.
Simple.
At least, it had sounded simple while he was still at the palace in Shujae, and while he still knew exactly who he was and what he had to do. In Shujae, there was no question of what the right course of action was. In the United States, which Abir had not visited for some four years or so, well. Things were different.
Since coming to New York City two days ago, Abir had not been able to avoid the very memories he was afraid of, and as he had thought they would be, they were damned near overwhelming. Every time he turned a corner or caught a familiar scent, it was as if he was being assailed with the past. Every time he saw a woman with dark curly hair making her way down the street, he thought it was her.
We are never as over things as we would like, he thought darkly, even if he did keep smiling.
It was true. He was grateful to be on the jet returning home tomorrow, but before he could do that, he had another two hours to survive.
The party was a lively one, bright and chatty and excited, and Abir had to admit to a stab of pride that it was all about a young Shujae-American writer.
Alina Massoud was a shy young woman with enormous eyes and when she had been introduced to Abir, she had nearly dropped the copy of her own book that the publisher was debuting that night.
"Oh!" she said, stunned. "I had not thought – you are the sheikh!"
Abir's chuckle had been real, the first time he remembered laughing genuinely in far too long a time, and he had shaken her hand with grave courtesy.
"I am," he said kindly. "Your uncle was good enough to alert me to your work, and when I heard that this event was taking place during my visit, I managed to finagle myself an invitation."
He winked at her as if they were old friends, and she nodded, still looking star-struck. Her parents had come from Shujae to the United States just a few years after she was born, but it did not change the fact that she was of Shujae, the beautiful country off the coast of the Arabian Sea. She came from Shujae, and he ruled it; why wouldn't he want to look in on her and make sure she was doing well? Her uncle was the director of palace security and her name had come up months ago.
I am glad I am here, but won't I be grateful to be on a plane for home in less than a day.
He had to shake his head at that in wry amusement. There was a time when leaving the United States had been nothing but a nightmare for him, but that was long ago. He was glad to be looking around with the eyes of a wiser man.
The publishing crowd didn't quite know what to make of him when it wasn't trying to swarm him for some kind of line on a biography or memoir. Abir was amused to find that he was either left alone or being asked rapid-fire questions about the publishing scene in Shujae, as if he had any idea.
He was just wondering whether he had put in enough time to be polite when there was a ripple in the crowd, and Alina was back, her dark eyes sparkling, and a small woman in a distinguished blue silk suit in tow.
"Sheikh Abir," Alina said, addressing him with care and precision. "I would like you to meet one of the people who made this book possible. This is Lia, my editor."
There was a moment, taking in the woman's curly brown hair, her diminutive but voluptuous figure and even her name, where Abir only thought that it was a strange coincidence. It could have been, just one of those things that make life a little more mysterious. Then the rest of his brain caught up, and he stared, because this was no coincidence. Instead it was a wonder, and his breath caught in his chest.
Lia looked, no, not the same as the woman he remembered from four years ago, but he doubted he looked the same either. She was rounder and more plush, and he could not remember if her chin had been that stubborn or her shoulders that squared. She was older, her hair was held back in a jeweled clip rather than a handkerchief or being allowed to fly loose, but it was still her. There was something about Lia that made his heart beat faster, that made him feel as if all the blood in his body had started to pulse through him twice as hard.
Somewhere, in some distant part of his mind, he knew that it would not matter how long it had been since they’d met, or how old she was. He would always feel that way about her – and then he snapped out of the trance slightly, in time to catch Alina's words.
"—ever so good, and she has been so kind and so generous with her time," Alina was saying. "Honestly, she has pushed for this book as hard or perhaps harder than anyone. If it was not for her—"
"That's nonsense," Lia scoffed, never taking her eyes away from Abir's. They were as bright and blue as a May day sky, and Abir's breath caught in his chest.
"It's not," Alina objected, but Lia shook her head.
"No, Sheikh Abir, I hate to contradict a writer as talented as Alina, but the truth is that she wrote a novel to which no one could say no. I have never been more proud to work with an emerging novelist, and I know that we at River House Books cannot wait to see what she is going to do next.”
It was the perfect answer, warm and kind and forwarding the glowing young writer at her side, but Abir could see the sharp glint in Lia's bright blue eyes. It might have taken a moment for him to come out of his social stupor and realize it was really, really her, but apparently she had taken no time at all. Somewhere in the back of his mind where his thoughts and feelings hadn't collided in a terrible tangle, a spark that he had thought long dead lit up.
Just at that moment, an older woman dressed in devastating black came to take Alina's arm.
“Come over here, Alina, there's a representative from Allene Books you simply must meet...”
With nothing more than a bright and slightly nervous smile, Alina was whisked away, and then there was absolutely nothing left in all the world between Abir and Lia, nothing more than a few feet of space and the drink she held tightly in her hand.
“Well,” she said, abruptly. “It was good t
o see you again.”
Lia turned on her heel, and Abir knew that the smartest thing, the most clever thing in general, would be to let her go. What they had had together was in the past, and if he valued his heart, if he valued his sanity, and possibly even his crown, that was where it needed to stay. Lia represented a part of his life that was over, and he should simply allow her to walk away.
Instead, instinct overrode everything and his arm shot out to grab her by the elbow.
You can't go, he found himself thinking desperately. You can't. You can't. I just found you again. You can't.
Lia drew her breath sharply, and she turned just enough so he could see the glint of her eyes through the strand of hair that had come loose from her clip.
“Abir,” she hissed, and even that was familiar enough to make him ache.
What am I doing?
Abir dropped Lia's arm, a red and humiliated blush coming up on his cheeks. He wasn't a savage. He would never force a woman to stay when it was too clear that she wanted to go. When he let her go, he thought for sure that she would plunge into the crowd and he would never see her again, but instead, she hesitated, poised on the verge of storming off.
“Lia,” he said softly, and she drew a careful breath as he said her name.
“Abir, we shouldn't—”
He braced himself to hear what they shouldn't, because after all, he deserved it, but then a young man Abir had been introduced to earlier that evening approached them. He was Mark someone or other in marketing, and Abir hadn't liked him much earlier, and that dislike only increased when he put an arm around Lia's waist.
“Lia! Are you telling Sheikh Abir about our new push into international young adult fiction?”
There was an instant, just a brief flash, where Abir might have given up a rather lot to simply tear Mark Someone or Other's arm off of Lia's body. He likely would have given up a great deal simply beat the man, but then Lia was unwinding herself from him with a bright laugh.
“As a matter of fact, Mark, I was speaking with him about Alina's book, which is not young adult at all. No one here is talking about young adult fiction.”
“But maybe we should be,” Mark said with palpably insincere sincerity. He turned expectantly to Abir.
“Sheikh Abir, don't you think—”
“As a matter of fact,” Lia continued, “I was just going to take Sheikh Abir out for a breath of fresh air. We were talking about book tours for Alina and coordinating them with local bookstores in Shujae. Please, excuse us.”
It looked as if Mark had no intention of doing anything like excusing him, but then his gaze roamed from Lia's diamond hard eyes to Abir's towering height. Abir was a big man, and he usually didn't like to let his size intimidate other people, but right now, he didn't care. Between the two of them, they sent Mark scuttering away, and Lia turned to him again.
He thought she might give him a nod and be off, but instead she raised one dark brow as if in challenge.
“Alina does have a very bright future,” she said. “About those bookstores?”
“Of course,” Abir said, gathering what scraps of coherence and dignity he had. Damn it, he was actually the ruler of a small country. There was no reason this one woman should fluster him so much, but then why should anything have changed? He was still the man he had been, and she was still the woman she was, that was to say, the woman he had fallen in love with four years ago.
He followed her through the crowd, and he wondered if he was simply getting ready to tear his heart to shreds again.
Chapter 2
Lia
As the editor who had been primarily involved with Alina's book, there wasn't a lot that Lia wasn't willing to do for her.
Demand that her book got the marketing budget it deserved from the publisher?
Done.
Promote her book every single day on as many as four different social media accounts?
No problem.
Come down with the force of an avenging angel on people who tried to bash the book before it was even on shelves?
All in a day's work!
Confront her ex?
Well.
I really don't have an excuse for this, Lia thought as she led Abir through the rear door of the glittering party space and through a darkened corridor that was mostly used by waitstaff and maintenance.
Shirley is looking after Alina, and all Mark needs is one more drink before he's really only a problem for his wife and his own dignity. No, everything is well in hand. There's nothing going wrong here for me to worry about.
They took the freight elevator up to the small courtyard that was hidden up on the fourteenth floor. Where some other buildings in the city chose to secret a pool or a playground on their upper levels, apparently this one chose instead to hide a small fountain, bordered with greenery that was, at the moment, slowly browning in early fall chill.
It wasn't until the elevator doors had closed behind them, cutting off even the noise from the maintenance floor behind them that she realized something very important.
That means... if I'm not looking after Alina or getting away from Mark, that means that the only reason I'm here at all, is because I want to be.
Suddenly, she was very aware of Abir behind her, how silent he was, and how, even though she wasn't turned to face him, his presence brought out a strange warmth in the core of her, something that made her want to turn to him, to bury her face in his chest.
“So,” he said, and away from the noise and the distraction of the party, it was so clear that he was exactly as she had remembered him, exactly as she had been dreaming him, and she hurried to cut him off before it made her any stranger.
“So,” Lia said, her voice a little strained even in her own ears. “So this is the fountain I was telling you about.”
She gestured towards the fountain, which was, in all fairness, pretty nice. It was stone with a figure of a mostly nude woman pouring water endlessly out of her jar, and the sound of the water moving was a startlingly sweet counterpoint to the sounds of the city far below.
“It's very nice,” Abir said after a diplomatic silence, and Lia almost laughed.
She couldn't quite bring herself to turn and face him just yet, so she went to the edge of the fountain, looking down to see the blanket of change that people had thrown in.
“We. Um. We used to have fish, but then people threw too many coins in and it killed them.”
“That sounds sad,” Abir said, and most people would have thought that he was gravely commiserating with the situation of no longer being able to have fish on the eighteenth floor fountain. She knew him a little better than most people, however, and she could hear the humor in his voice, as well as the soft tread of his foot as he came closer.
"It was!" Lia said defiantly. "They were imported all the way from China, and because people couldn't resist throwing their damned spare change into the water, they all died. It was pretty upsetting."
Henry had been so upset. She still winced to think about it, and she shook her head.
"Either way, it's not... not appropriate," she managed, and in the time that she had been ranting about imported carp, Abir had come up even closer, so close that if she turned, she'd be able to lean forward and press her face into the fabric of his shirt. God he smelled so good, he always had. Why could she still remember his smell when these days, it felt as if she lost things unless she wrote them down twice?
The wind shifted, and she stirred uneasily, clasping and unclasping her hands in front of her.
Yeah, that's the same cologne, she thought, feeling more than a little aggrieved. How dare he still smell so good?
"I am deeply sorry for the fish," Abir said gravely, and Lia lifted her chin.
"You don't need to pretend," she said stiffly. "No one else here does. Now we just let people dump whatever they want to in there and the poor maintenance guys have to fish it out."
"Lia."
Just that single word, her name on his
lips, brought her to silence. Suddenly, it felt as if every nerve in her body was tuned to him, to his warmth, to the tingling memory of his mouth on the side of her neck, to how good she knew his hands would feel on her soft and tender skin. Lia's eyes tried to drift shut, but she forced them open again. She didn't think she could force herself to stop shivering, so instead she simply hoped he didn't notice.
She uttered a small cry as his large hands settled on her shoulders. It was light enough that she knew that she could move away if she wanted to, heavy enough and warm enough that she had no idea why she might do so.
Oh it's been so long, Lia thought, and she banished that line of thinking immediately.
"Abir," she said, and she had no idea if the quaver in her voice was a warning or a plea.
"I have something to ask you, Lia," Abir said softly.
"You ... you do?"
"Yes. Something very important."
Her mouth had somehow gone dry. When she licked her lips regardless of the lipstick she knew was there, it felt like her tongue was made of sand paper.
"What?"
Abir's feet shifted as he leaned in. Now she could feel the soft whisper of his breath against her ear, and the gentlest brush of his five o'clock shadow next to her throat. The sensations combined with her memory to make something potent that made her want to whimper with pleasure, and it felt as if it was only by a supernatural effort that she was able to keep herself standing.
"Abir, what?" she asked more urgently.
"I just wanted to ask..."
He shifted so he was whispering into her other ear. She would have sworn he nuzzled the back of her neck as he went from one side to the other, but it was so light she couldn't say for certain.
