Sheikh's Unexpected Triplets

by Sophia Lynn

  “But I do mean it. Bedelia, the things that you make me feel, the love that you bring to me, this is a gift beyond measure, beyond words, and I was a fool to deny it as long as I have. I love you, and I want you as my wife.”

  She stared at him, and she started to shake. This couldn't be true. It couldn't be. “Jahin...”

  “Say yes,” he said softly. “Say yes, and I will marry you, and we will belong only to each other. We will love, and fight, because we are only human, and we will teach our children to do the same. Only say yes, Bedelia. Say you love me, and I will make the world yours.”

  She felt as if the breath was caught in her throat, but her heart was shouting it so loudly that she was almost surprised he couldn't hear it.

  “Yes,” she whispered, tears in her eyes, and then he was standing, crushing her in his arms. “I love you, and all I need is you. I don't want the world, I just want you...”

  “Thank you,” he said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “Thank you, I love you, and you will be mine for as long as the sky lasts, as long as the mountains stand.”

  She laughed a little. “That sounds like something out of a story. Like I've just woken out of a hundred years of sleep, and you're the one who has awakened me.”

  He grinned, and she was shocked to the core by the tears in his eyes. She had traveled the world and seen many things, but this was possibly the most rare and wonderful thing.

  “This is a fairytale,” he said tenderly. “Yours and mine.”

  Epilogue

  Bedelia paused as she entered the triplets' bedroom. There were three beds, but all three of the children were clustered around Jahin on one of them, listening with fierce intensity as he read to them from a book of traditional Muneazil stories.

  In this rare moment of quiet, she stood in the shadows to watch them.

  Anwar, the oldest, leaned in as if there were secrets in the story that might reveal the world to him. It was an old story, and she could see him mouthing the words along with his father, not reading yet, but Bedelia thought that wouldn't be far off.

  Rahi sat back, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked more skeptical than her brother, and from the moment she had learned to talk, she was always asking why and how.

  Hadya, youngest of the three, smaller and more delicate than either of her siblings, simply curled up against Jahin's hip, eyes half-closed and content. She was Bedelia's dreamer, the one who felt things more strongly, who was always ready to play pretend.

  Jahin looked up when she came into the room.

  “Hello, love,” he said, and suddenly there were four pairs of copper eyes watching her, and the love she felt for all of them was almost too much to bear.

  “Hello,” she said with a soft smile, coming properly into the room. “How's story time going?”

  “Baba is telling us the story of Meelia, the flower girl,” Anwar said. “She is crying so much that the valley is full of flowers, but we don't know how it is going to end.”

  “Oh that's easy, my dears,” she said, coming to sit with her husband and children. “They all lived happily ever after.”

  THE END

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  Sheikh’s Untouched Mistress

  By Sophia Lynn

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  Sheikh’s Untouched Mistress

  By Sophia Lynn

  All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2016-2017 Sophia Lynn.

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  Chapter One

  Danielle loved the marketplaces of Dubai. They reminded her of her childhood roaming the various marketplaces of the world, darting toward vendors that were always selling something to delight a small child, looking about for the treasure that she knew was just around the corner. There was something splendid, too, about hearing the mixtures of languages, and as she walked, she absently identified them one after another.

  There was Arabic of course, but there was also English and French, Chinese, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, and a few others that were still tantalizingly foreign to her. It made sense why her talents were so needed here, but it also made her realize that she needed to get better than she was. One of the women in the translators’ cooperative spoke twelve languages, and it made her own five look like child’s play.

  The day was warm, but Danielle Jennings was swathed in black. In her long black tunic and long swishy skirts, she dressed enough like the older natives of Dubai that some of the fashionable young women looked at her with a superior sniff. The only splash of color on her at all was her headscarf. It was a silvery blue that made her gray eyes startlingly clear, and though there was always a strand that escaped, it generally kept her hair out of her face.

  Danielle was a slight woman who looked younger than her twenty-four years. She was of less than average height with a figure that had more than once been called boyish, and when a teacher had once asked her her favorite trait about herself, she had said that it was her invisibility. No matter where she went in the world, Danielle was unremarkable, and even if it had taken a fair amount of time to find pleasure in that, she had still managed it.

  The marketplace was at its busiest right now, but she knew that she would have to hurry. Soon enough, the day would turn hot, and then everyone would retreat indoors for a nap and a cool snack. She took another moment to decide and then approached a vendor with a turning spit.

  “Hey, pretty girl, you want some pork? Eh? Very good!”

  “I would like two skewers, please,” she said in slightly accented Arabic, and she had the pleasure of seeing the man’s face light up.

  “You speak Arabic very well, miss!” he exclaimed, going to carve some meat off the spit with an enormous gleaming machete. “You sound like you were born here.”

  As a matter of fact, she had been born halfway around the world, in a place where there was only ever one language spoken and where wanting to know more was considered to be putting on airs. She didn’t say that, however, instead taking the meat skewers wrapped in wax paper from him with a thank-you and a smile.

  The shops were already closing fast, and on impulse, she managed to grab a small box of lokum, a kind of rose-flavored candy she had fallen in love with since coming to Dubai.

  Well, if I get a box, I’ll be sure to share it with everyone, she thought, slightly guilty.

  She carried her purchases carefully back to the office building where she worked. It was a lovely building, glass and steel, but when she looked around at the monstrous high-rises that dotted the face of Dubai, she knew that she was far from hitting the big time. Still, for her first assignment outside of North America, she decided that she could feel proud of herself.

  The Transglobal Translators office was a snug one on the fourteenth floor, a pleasant operation where things buzzed along smoothly. While some of the translators worked from their own locations, many, like Danielle, needed to work in-house due to the sensitivities of their documents. That security was something that Melinda Meyers was very proud of. She was the woman who had looked over Danielle’s transcript, observed her lack of experience on the international market, and still took a chance on her. Danielle was very grateful to Melinda, so of course seeing the other woman looking so frazzled and frustrated was alarming.

  Danielle froze in the doorway, her food in her numb hands, as she saw Melinda catch Ulf’s arm, talking to him softly but urgently. Ulf, a tall lanky blond from Sweden, was never one of Danielle’s favorite people, but right now, the rage on his face made her flinch away. She had never seen him so angry before, with red splotches looking like stains on his fair complexion.

  Finally Ulf shook Melinda off, but h
e looked calmer. Instead of storming out of the office, he stalked back to the interior offices, his hands clenched into fists and his face set into a mask. Danielle didn’t have any time to figure out what might have happened, because Melinda was turning toward her.

  “Danielle! There you are. Quick, remind me what languages you’re certified for.”

  Danielle blinked, and for a moment she was completely at a loss; she wasn’t sure she could recall English at that point. Then, as Melinda started scowling, she found her tongue again. When she spoke, there was more of a squeak in her voice than she would have preferred, but she was audible enough.

  “Um, English, of course, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and French…”

  Melinda made a face, which made Danielle shrink back even further. She didn’t know what she had done to disappoint her boss like this, but it couldn’t be good.

  “Well, that’s only as many as Ulf had, but still, not terrible. Give me that food, you need to get into an interview right this moment.”

  Helplessly, Danielle gave her the food, watching it go with more focus than even her hunger warranted. She knew what she was doing right now. She was focusing on inconsequential things because it was far better than focusing on what was happening to her at this moment. If she thought about how unfair it was that she couldn’t have the lunch she had promised herself, she didn’t have to think about how she was getting shoved into an interview room like she was some kind of bait getting stuck in a trap.

  She was alone for the moment, and Danielle took a few moments to breathe. Her acquaintances back in Iowa had said that she was so brave when she went off for a job in the Middle East, but she knew they were wrong. As long as she didn’t have to speak to too many people, as long as she didn’t have to worry about disappointing others personally, she was fine. Living in Dubai was different from living in Cedar Rapids, but in the end, there was Internet, good food, interesting things to see, and good money coming in.

  Her job as a translator was mostly performed for written works. Once in a while, she was called in to interpret as well, but verbal translation was a different skill set that she didn’t really enjoy. Of course, none of that made her feel better about being in the interview room right now.

  She could feel how damp her palms were with nerves, and she rubbed them against her thighs restlessly. The room was plain, with just a narrow table in the center with two chairs on either side. She sat down in one, gingerly, as if it were hot, and then she decided that she didn’t like the idea of waiting for the door to open behind her. She considered the chairs opposite, and then she wondered if that would make her look like she thought she was the boss. That sounded fairly disastrous.

  She had always been like this. The moment that pressure was applied in anything except her very narrow field of interest, she turned into a nervous wreck.

  Well, at least I don’t cry when I’m upset anymore, she thought desperately. Of course, the truth was that she simply almost cried now, but she hung on to the improvement with her fingernails. It was something. It had to be.

  She had just hopped up from her chair like a bird when the door behind her opened. She spun to face them, or at least, she would have spun to face the intruders if her foot hadn’t caught on the leg of the chair. Danielle gasped as she felt her weight pitch forward. In that moment, she knew she was going to go sprawling on her face in front of the very people that she was trying to impress, and there was not a single darned thing she could do about it.

  In the split second where she was bracing herself to hit the carpeted floor, however, she was suddenly caught in mid-air. A powerful pair of arms wrapped around her, she heard a swear that was definitely on the colorful side muttered close to her ear, and then she realized that she was being held like a recalcitrant kitten in a strange man’s arms.

  With a surprising amount of care, he picked her up a little so he could set her more firmly on her feet, and she stared when she got her first glimpse at the man who had saved her.

  He was tall, six feet if not taller, and his dark skin had a kind of warmth to it that made her automatically want to touch him. His brows were dark and arched, making her think for a moment of the wings of birds, and somehow, his eyes were a bright and unlikely blue. He was handsome in a way she associated with movie stars, and when he set her on her feet, she felt as if her tongue had become somehow stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  Danielle wasn’t sure she had ever understood the term animal magnetism before today. Now she understood it well enough to speak about it, perhaps even in several different languages. She felt a deep instinctual pull toward the man who still had his arms around her, and despite having only just laid eyes on him, she wanted him closer still.

  For a single bare moment, just long enough for him to meet her eyes with his own, she was dead certain that he felt the same way. His eyes widened, the blue giving way to suddenly blown pupils, and the straight line of his mouth gave way to slight softening that was less than a smile but still enough to warm her to her toes.

  Then he scowled, his dark brows coming together, and stepped back, straightening his dark suit as if he had brushed against something distasteful. For her part, when she saw him step back, Danielle felt as if she had crashed. When he had been looking at her like that, as if she was fascinating and precious and amazing all at once, she felt as if she had been soaring high above the world. When he took that away, she fell back into the dim morass of self-deprecation and doubt where she lived.

  “Um… um, hi,” she said brightly, resorting to English in her shock. “Um, I’m… I’m Danielle Jennings, and Melinda told me, that is… she said…”

  It was perhaps the worst impression she could have made as someone who was going to be translating documents and texts for the men in front of her, but she didn’t expect the look of dark disdain that suddenly colored her rescuer’s face. Instead of acknowledging that she had spoken at all, he turned to the man next to him.

  Danielle hadn’t really registered the second man at all, but now she could see that he was slighter and shorter than her rescuer, with a wing of gray hair that suggested he was older as well.

  “So this is what Transglobal has to offer us? First the pompous Swede, and now this stuttering little mouse. I had expected far better,” he said in Arabic.

  “Well, perhaps you should give her some time to actually make a fool of herself before you judge,” said his companion. “It’s a little harsh, don’t you think, to simply dismiss her for being a little clumsy?”

  “My God, look at her. If someone saw her working on my documents, they would think that I had hired children to work for me. Or elves, perhaps. Really, I don’t know what Miranda is thinking. What do you think this one is, some recent graduate from the United States with a year’s worth of classroom French under her belt…?”

  “I have four years of Arabic,” Danielle spat angrily. She had listened in shock as they had discussed her while she stood all forlorn in front of them, but now she could take no more. She drew herself up as tall as she could, while understanding that that was not very tall at all, and met the eyes of the startled man who had saved her.

  “I have worked a similar amount of time with Hindi and Urdu, and I have had even longer with French. If you would care to test my proficiency, I will help you with that, and if you want to see my certifications, I can offer those as well.

  “However, I will not be insulted to my face for no cause at all, and I can see why Ulf called you…”

  Here she spat out a long stream of Swedish, which she did not understand herself, but which she had heard Ulf use on her way in. There was no doubt in her mind that it was profoundly awful, and the man with the blue eyes raised his eyebrows.

  In the aftermath of her tirade, the room was silent, and just as quickly as it had arrived to save her, her anger rolled out like the tide. In its wake, it left a crushing fear and nervous shudder. What the hell had she done? These were obviously important clients, or else Melinda would not ha
ve been so frantic. Had she lost her company this account entirely? Had she angered clients they couldn’t afford to lose?

  It was on the tip of her tongue to apologize, but she bit down on her lip. They could demand an apology all they wanted, but she wasn’t going to give in…

  To her surprise, instead of breaking into an angry tirade, the men glanced at each other. The smaller man raised his eyebrow, and the taller, the one who had accused her of looking like an elf, nodded.

  “All right, it’s good to get that over with,” he said in English. “Very well, Miss Jennings, come take your seat, and we can continue.”

  While she watched mutely, he and his friend came to sit on the other side of the desk, and it was only when they were seated and looking at her expectantly that it occurred to her to fall into the chair across from them. She felt as if she had been blown around by hurricane winds, and somehow, all unexpected, she had been deposited gently and safely on the ground again.

  “Excuse me,” she said cautiously, gazing at the both of them, “get on with what?”

  The shorter man leaned back in his chair, smiling a little.

  “With the interview, of course. You’ll have to forgive Faris, he prefers to court everyone in his employ through trial by fire.”

  “Trial by–?” Understanding bloomed in her mind, and she looked at the taller man with accusation.

  “You insulted me… to find out how I would act?”

  There was a hint of a smile on his sensuous lips, something that touched in her a way that was wholly new, but she pushed it aside with shock and with anger.

  “But of course,” he said, and now she could detect an accent to his English. There was a crispness to it that told her he had not learned it in the States, and something a little heavy about it as well, sweet as honey.

  “I am a busy man, Miss Jennings,” the man–Faris–continued. “I do not have time to see people offer me their best and then to break when things get tough or when they realize that they are out of their depth. That Swede who was in here before you, he was reduced to sputtering and calling us names.”