by Lynn, Sophia
“And what’s that?
“Bath time and bedtime! You’ve never seen resistance until you’ve told a toddler it was time to go to bed!”
***
In the end, it was far less rough than she had feared. Rose, bless her, had worn the girls out with a visit to a park before Myriah and Halil had returned home, and after the bath, which Myriah had to admit was easier with four hands than with two, the three girls were tucked into their cribs with relative ease.
Before she closed the door, Myriah stood at the doorway, looking in at the three young sleepers. She jumped a little when she realized that Halil was standing close to her.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice a low summer thunder rumble.
“Oh! Um, it’s silly . . .”
It might have been silly, but from Halil’s expectant look, it was clear he was waiting for an answer. She sighed.
“All right. This is something I’ve done every night I’ve tucked the girls to sleep. I always just . . . stop. And look at them, and really drink in how far they’ve come and how far they are going to go. When I brought them home from the hospital, God, they were so tiny, you know? It felt that every day that the four of us, five when Rose was around, got through was such a victory. And now I can’t help but stop and realize all over again . . . well . . . how lucky I am. And how much I need to keep them safe. And how I love them.”
Myriah laughed at herself. “Silly, huh?”
Halil shook his head.
“Not at all. May I join you?”
She blinked, and then nodded. Together, they stood at the door, matching their breathing to that of the girls, and at some point, Myriah found her hand taken into Halil’s, held gently and kept warm.
When they closed the door behind them, they hesitated in the hallway. Myriah smiled a little when she saw the slightly dazed look in his eyes.
“It’s something else, isn’t it? The girls, I mean. They’re a lot to take in at first.”
“They’re amazing,” Halil said with a slight bit of awe in his voice. “I didn’t know what I was expecting, but . . .”
He shook his head, and to Myriah’s surprise, he pulled her into his arms. She was wearing one of her faded maternity dresses, her hair might have actually still had a pea in it from dinner, and she had never felt less sexy in her life, but something in her opened and responded to the heat in Halil’s embrace.
“They are incredible, and I have them because of you . . . Thank you, Myriah.”
She started to tell him that there was nothing he needed to thank her for, but then his mouth swooped down, claiming hers, and there was nothing else that mattered. Her hands came up, not to push him away but to dig into his shirt, holding him close, anchoring herself.
The kiss was hungry and perfect, awakening something in her that felt as if it had been asleep for too long. She had become so used to thinking of herself only as a mother, only as a person who provided, that the reminder of who she really was came almost as a shock.
This isn’t me! Myriah thought with shock, but then she realized that this latest thought was very wrong. The woman she was in Halil’s arms was who she had always been underneath, and who she would be again. She was still a mother, she still loved her daughters beyond all sense, but she was also this, the woman who clung to Halil as if he could save her from drowning, the woman who murmured into his lips, who tasted him as eagerly as he was tasting her.
It should have been different, kissing him in her small townhouse close to Boston instead of kissing him in the rain in London or in the penthouse in Ealim. However, it was the same. This was the same man, and he reminded her of the woman that she always had been.
Myriah didn’t ever want the kiss to end, but at last, she pushed him away, shaking her head. She almost couldn’t take the concerned look on Halil’s face.
“Did I hurt you? Was that too fast? Too loud?”
“No . . . No, Halil. We need to talk.”
“Words that no one wants to hear,” he quipped, but he followed her to the kitchen.
Chapter Eleven
Myriah
Once she got to the kitchen, however, Myriah was unwilling to break the fragile peace that had sprung between them. The joy that they had taken in their girls and the peace that had been established between them still felt too tenuous, too new for her to want to smash it up right now. Halil took a seat at the kitchen table, and she busied herself with making them some tea.
“Just like old times,” Halil observed, and she half-turned to him as the water heated.
“Oh?”
“Back at the cafe. I was coming in and having coffee every day. You were the one who got me on tea.”
“Is that what happened?” she asked. “I don’t recall.”
That was a lie, of course. She remembered being fascinated by the brooding young man who came to sit in the corner almost every day, ordering nothing but the harshest black coffee the cafe had to offer. She remembered one day bringing him her favorite tea, a blend from Afghanistan that tasted like licorice, and how surprised he had been when he tasted it.
“No? Perhaps it made a bigger impression on me than it did on you.”
She wasn’t sure she liked that either. She hadn’t wanted him to think that she was one of those foolish girls that hung on the words of handsome men who seduced him, but neither did she want him to think he was utterly inconsequential in her life. There was no way that that could be.
“Myriah.”
When he said her name, it made a sweet and silvery shiver run down her spine. She turned to stare at the tea and the tea balls on the counter instead, concentrating on getting just the right mixture of tea into each perforated ball. When she dunked them into the two mugs of steaming (but not boiling!) water, the water turned a dim amber almost immediately.
“Here,” she said, ignoring Halil’s inquisitive look. “Give this at least five minutes, and then we can drink.”
He touched the warm surface of the mug, but he never took his eyes off of her.
“Myriah . . . what is this?”
“Well, I suppose it’s you.”
He tensed more than she thought he would, and she wondered what power he thought she had here. Surely he knew that he was the one with all the money and all the power, the one who could force her hand if he wished to do so.
“Explain.”
She gazed down at the steam blowing off her tea, wondering if there were any answers sketched in heat and steam before it dissipated. There were none, and she guessed that she would have to figure it out on her own.
“So I was in London for almost two years, and that was really good for me. I don’t know if I would have wanted to stay forever, but I am . . . so grateful I went. I used to be really shy, did you know that?”
Halil would have been well within his rights to tell her to get to the point, but instead there was something soft in his eyes just then, something easy in his smile. For just a moment, she thought that he was going to reach forward to take her hand, but then he obviously thought better of it.
“No. I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“Well, I was. People kept asking me if I would rather go work in Boston, or maybe in some place in upstate New York. And it was kind of them. but they didn’t realize how much I needed to be someplace where no one knew me, where I could figure out for myself who I really was.”
“I . . . think I might understand something about that.”
She grinned at him, because after all, he had done something very similar, though of course he had done it after behaving badly and with a much bigger bankroll than she had had.
“I’ll bet. So I came to London, and it was amazing. I met some people who are still very much my friends today. I learned things about myself, and I had so much fun. Despite all of that, though, I was ready to come back to the United States even if . . . even if I hadn’t gotten pregnant.”
“You were?”
“Yes. I liked London, loved it, ev
en, but the truth is that at the end of the day, it wasn’t where my real home was. And you were a part of that.”
Something flashed across Halil’s face. For a brief and dizzying moment, Myriah wondered if it was somehow hurt, but she knew that couldn’t have been the case. There was no way a man like Halil was going to be hurt by anything she had to say. She knew it as well as she knew her own name.
“And what does this mean? For us, for me?”
“It means that . . . this is definitely going to take some getting used to. It’s like in my head, you’re part of my life in London. If I close my eyes, I can still see you in the corner, watching everyone as if you knew all our secrets, smiling at me when I passed by. You were a memory, and now you’re sitting in my kitchen, at the table that I inherited from the woman who moved out next door, drinking tea out of the mugs that I’ve had since I was a teenager.”
Halil tilted his head at her, and she remembered how he had looked at her once, how speculative his gaze had been and how very sweet it was when he had smiled.
“And . . . it is displeasing to you?”
She bit her lip. That was the problem. Perhaps it would have been easier to tell him yes, to make him keep his distance. She knew it would have. She had seen something in Halil today, something in the gentleness and the sweetness with which he cared for the girls. He would never hurt their daughters, and he would never want to hurt her. That gave her some leverage, but the idea of using it sickened her in a way she didn’t quite understand.
“It’s not displeasing,” Myriah said quietly. “Really, just the opposite. But . . . it’s strange, isn’t it? Us being together after all this time, you coming to Boston, you and the girls . . . It’s very new.”
“It won’t be bad, however,” Halil said firmly. “We will not allow it to be so.”
Myriah smiled wanly.
“That sounds like a very good intention, and here in the United States, we have a saying about which road is paved with good intentions.”
“That’s a saying I know very well, and it’s one my father impressed upon me as well. However, I will promise you here and now that I will always do what is best for our daughters. I will never hurt them, and I will never do anything that will harm them.”
“I knew that,” she said with a slight smile, and Halil gave her a quizzical look.
“Then . . . ?”
“Then the question is us. We . . . we have history, and even if we were a very brief part of each other’s life, those memories are very strong.” She hesitated. “At least, they are for me . . . I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”
To her surprise, Halil snorted.
“I remembered you seducing me over tea. Obviously, you could not remember that, so I don’t think you get to doubt how powerful my memories for you were.”
She laughed at his mock offense, but she continued.
“No matter what shape it takes, we have history. And that means that we’re going to be . . . to be prone to doing certain things . . .”
Halil grinned suddenly, and she realized all over again how white and sharp his teeth were, how his dark eyes could make her feel as though every part of her were a few degrees warmer.
“You are afraid that I am going to kiss you.”
“No! I’m not . . . I’m not afraid that you are going to kiss me! I’m afraid of how carried away we might get, and how easy it is to get carried away when the person doing the carrying is you!”
Halil looked startled by her pronouncement, but she forged on. God, she had to get through this, because if she didn’t, she might never be able to.
“The chemistry between us, the sheer magnetism, it’s so intense, that I don’t always know what to do with it. And that may be fine for a young girl who’s serving up tea and coffee in London, but that’s not who I am anymore. I’m a mother, and that means that the number of times I can . . . give way to passion is approximately nil.”
She took a deep breath.
“My girls come first. Our girls come first. That’s the bottom line, and anything that gets in the way of that, it needs to go. Does that make sense?”
Halil hesitated for a moment, but he finally nodded.
“Yes. And that is the way it should be. I have heard of too many children who have ended up in a world of hurt when their parents made them a second or even third priority, and I would never want that to happen to our girls. So what does that mean for us?”
“It means that what happened in the hallway . . . it cannot happen again.”
Halil raised his eyebrows at her.
“Never?”
She might have excused him if he had said it flirtatiously or even if he had said it lewdly. Instead he said it with such a degree of doubt and skepticism that she gritted her teeth.
“Are you asking me for a timeline, because—”
She gasped because Halil had dragged her out of her chair to stand between his legs. While she was still trying to figure out what was going, he pressed her down until his lips were at her throat, trailing a line of fire from the point of her jaw to the base of her neck. Her cry of protest was stifled by the pleasure that raced through her, and she found her hands on his shoulders, hanging on to him for dear life—but it was more than that, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t just that she needed something to steady herself. Instead, it was that she needed to be close to him, as close as she could get. She needed him, needed this pleasure that only he could give her.
Myriah pulled herself back from Halil with a short soft cry.
“Halil!”
“I was proving a point,” he said.
“A point with your tongue licking my neck?”
“Just so.”
For a moment, there was such a dark flame in his gaze that Myriah thought that he would simply lean in again, kiss her like he had before, waking up that fire that was sleeping within her again. She thought that that was what he was going to do for sure, and if he did that, she wasn’t sure that she had the strength to stop him. She was almost certain she didn’t want to stop him . . .
Instead, Halil rose and pulled back, putting some space between them. It was effective; without his warmth, Myriah felt almost cold, and she looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“What in the world were you trying to prove?”
“That some things cannot be turned off and on again like a light switch,” he said, and she realized that he was not looking at her. Instead he turned to look out the kitchen window, which led to the small yard in the back. There was absolutely nothing of interest to see back there; he was avoiding looking at her.
“We’re adults,” she said, aware of how unconvincing she sounded even to her own ears. “We can most certainly say we are not going to do something and then not do it . . .”
“I do not think it is that easy,” he said, and to Myriah’s shock, she understood that he did not think that he could control himself if he were looking right at her.
She understood that, at least. Looking at him right now, it was all she could do not to wrap her arms around his waist, to bring him close and to nuzzle him between the shoulder blades. She knew how good he would feel, how very delicious he would smell, and the moment she had that thought, she could imagine herself doing it.
The power of the thought woke her up, and she took another step back. This could be a very dangerous game that she and Halil were playing, and at the end of it, the ones who might end up paying for it were their three beautiful girls.
“Easy or hard, we are going to have to deal with it,” she said, and she was relieved when her voice came out brisk and bright. It was the voice she used for clients and for her employers, and it was a relief.
Halil looked at her, and this time, she couldn’t read his expression at all.
“Do you think we can?”
“We’re going to have to. Our girls are too important to sacrifice to . . . to a night of passion or just some fun.”
“It wouldn’t be just fun . .
.”
“It doesn’t matter. There’s just . . . so much going on right now. In the space of a week, you’ve found out that you have three daughters and I’ve found out that the only fling I’ve ever had is the Sheikh of Ealim. At this age, the girls are growing by leaps and bounds, and every day is a new joy, but yes, also a new challenge. We just . . . we just can’t.”
She had started out strong, but by the end, Myriah was aware that there was something fragile in her voice. She sounded tired, even a little afraid, and though she hated sounded to like that, it was the truth. Being a young mother of triplets, she understood what it was like to be brought to the edge of her tolerance, and she knew she was close now.
She looked down at the linoleum floor, thinking blankly that Rose had mopped it before she had gotten home. She felt as though the walls were closing in on her, and then she blinked because Halil had come close without her awareness, putting his arms around her.
This time, there was no burning need, there was no insistence. Instead, there was something comforting in his embrace, comforting and tentative.
“Is this all right?” he asked gruffly, and after a moment of consideration, Myriah nodded.
“It . . . it is, but . . . should we be doing this?”
“The other . . . maybe not. You may well be right, Myriah. There is simply too much on the line right now for me to risk acting like an idiot teenager.”
She laughed a little at that, because Halil’s teenage years must have been a wonder if it was enough for his father to suggest he take his carousing out of the very country.
“But this? This is different. This is something else. Please, Myriah. If you ask me to let you go, I will. I always will. But this is different. I cannot bear to see you in pain and not reach for you, not want to hold you.”
Myriah’s heart contracted painfully at his plain words, because it was the honest and raw truth. He wasn’t touching her with passion, but instead with comfort, and it brought home the fact that it had been a very long time since she had been held like this.