Prince's Triplet Babies

by Sophia Lynn

  Erin put it all out of her mind, and if Askari never took her to explore Hazn as he had promised her he would, she told herself that she got plenty of exploring in on her own. She walked in the bazaars, she attended artistic events, and she did her best to stay occupied.

  She told herself that it would all change when she had a baby with Askari. Surely he would be more invested when they had a son or a daughter, wouldn't he? He spoke of it wistfully enough, and the fact that he returned to her bed every night, whether they made love or not, surely meant something. That was what she told herself and what she tried to believe, at least, until one fateful day three months after her arrival in Hazn.

  It was a gorgeous day, with a blue sky that was utterly cloudless and bright. Askari had left particularly early, leaving her with a lingering kiss that she could still feel on her lips. The kiss had made her smile, but it seemed particularly hard that he was working late again that night. She told herself that it would all change again when she had children, but sometimes, she truly wondered. Would he be as negligent of his children, leaving them for hours upon hours at a time, letting others see to their care?

  Erin pushed the idea out of her head.

  I swear, I am going crazy here without anything to keep me occupied, she thought. I need to go learn something and give my brain something to do...

  An opportunity presented itself in Hazn's largest art museum, which had recently opened up a large exhibit. Askari had gone on opening night, and after he had told her about it, she had been eager to go see it herself.

  As Erin walked between the tall stone columns and furnishings of Hazn's golden age, she found herself thinking wistfully of how much she would have liked to see this exhibit with Askari. The idea of walking in among the artifacts of his dynasty’s distant past would have been fascinating. She stopped to examine a gorgeous celadon vase and smiled at the gold collar of an ancient sheikha's tame lion.

  I wonder what kind of sheikha I would have made, Erin mused. It seemed almost dangerous to contemplate things like that, as if she was getting ahead of herself or putting herself above her station, so to speak. Then she told herself that she was American, and that she was certainly welcome to aspire to whatever she wanted, as long as she kept it to herself.

  This wing of the exhibit was dedicated to the great sheikhas, the ones who had so often stood behind their husbands and written policy and laws just as their husbands had. There were portraits and sculptures of these women, and though it was always hard to tell from an ancient art style, Erin thought that she could see traces of their personality in each one. She found one or two that definitely looked little too stern for her, their dark brows straight and glaring. Some of the sheikhas looked as if they were trying to conceal smiles even as they were being painted, and she liked them much better. There was one that apparently loved cats; her display box contained a row of gold and coral collars worn by her gorgeous little black cats.

  Erin liked looking at the exhibit on the sheikhas, but then she came to another smaller room and realized that she would never have been associated with them at all. Instead, if she had a place in history, there was a good chance that it would be back in the small room here, the one that sported a sign that said, “The Politics of Desire: The Mistresses of the Sheikh.”

  For a moment, Erin thought about simply leaving. Whatever she found in there was not likely to make her feel better. Instead, there was a good chance it would make her feel worse.

  But... it might tell me something true...

  She had always been drawn to the 'realer' side of things. Erin had always wanted to know the truth behind it all, and perhaps this exhibit could shed some light on her situation. After taking a few moments to compose herself, Erin stood up straight and walked in.

  At first, she was surprised to see that in general, the mistresses and courtesans of the sheikhs lived as well as some of the sheikhs' wives had, if not better. Everything that Askari had told her was true, and she saw that many of the women lived protected, uneventful lives that were full of luxury and wealth.

  As she went farther in, however, Erin noted that the stories did get darker. This one was executed for treason, this one was whipped publicly in the square for some imagined slight. One placard told her that by being independent women, they were free to live as few women dared, but they also lacked a great deal of the legal protections that even the wife of a tradesman might have received.

  This is awful, I have to get out of here, Erin thought, but before she could make good on her plan, the small portrait of one dark-eyed woman seemed to leap out at her. According to the placard, the woman was gazing at her from a space across four hundred years, but her story was eerily familiar.

  Feeling her nerves wind up tighter and tighter, Erin read about the young woman who had been taken in a raid. How afraid she must have felt when she was chosen for the sheikh himself, but then how wonderful it must have been when it turned out to be a love match.

  Things went well until the normal course of things ran on, and she fell pregnant. When she delivered a fine baby boy, she was given a week to love her child before her child was taken away. The woman was locked in a tower, and as far as the history books could tell, she never saw her son again.

  Erin couldn't tell if it was strange hormones or just human sympathy that made her eyes well up. It was horrid, the idea of being locked in a tower and forbidden from seeing her child, and then she read on to discover that the woman had had two other sons with the sheikh while she was virtually imprisoned. They were taken away from her as well, and sickened, Erin lurched out of the gallery.

  A museum worker called after her to figure out if she was all right, but she kept walking. If she sat down, she might start weeping and refuse to stop. She couldn't afford that, she decided, and kept walking instead.

  Erin told herself over and over again that that was an ancient story. Askari wasn't some medieval sheikh who would lock her in a tower. He was a modern man who would allow her to raise her child...

  At least for a while, she thought with a chill, remembering their conversation about how children needed their mothers when they were young. What happened after that? Would she be allowed to continue to live with her children? Would she be allowed to continue to speak with them? Would they even know who she was?

  She didn't realize that she had broken into a run until she was nearly falling over, exhausted. People were walking around her, giving her a wide berth and rather suspicious looks. Erin shivered. She had been a stranger in many places, but eventually, she made friends. She had made no friends in Hazn, and she felt it very strongly.

  Her hands shaking, she called a cab, and as it drove her back to the townhouse that she shared with Askari, she knew that she had to make a plan. Askari was going to be gone until after midnight, and that meant that she had time to decide what to do.

  She knew that that was a lie. She knew exactly what she had to do.

  Her mind still echoing with the fates of the former sheikhs' mistresses, she realized that she had to be free. She could not be bound to a man who would take her children. She could not bear to have her children taken away from her, no matter how wealthy their circumstances would be.

  Someday in the future, she would meet a man who wanted all of her, someone who wanted her to share his entire life. Now though, she had simply stumbled into an arrangement that she had thought out poorly and that she had not considered well.

  That meant that she needed to get out.

  Somehow, Erin managed to thank the cab driver and tip him before sending him on his way. As she unlocked the townhouse, she was a little startled to feel so very clearheaded and calm. Now that she knew what to do, she was resolute.

  Somewhere deep inside her, something was screaming. There was a little part of her - really, a surprisingly large part of her - that was head over heels in love with Askari. She had resisted giving it a name for a very long time, because after all, what could come of it? However, now that she wa
s leaving, there was no harm in giving it a name, and that name was love.

  She took a deep breath and resolutely ignored the screaming inside her. Right now, she needed to plan and put that plan into action, and she could not afford to be distracted.

  Chapter Eight

  The blonde was beginning to make a nuisance of herself. The grand opening of Hazn's opera house after extensive renovations was meant to be a good occasion to network and to see and be seen, but Askari was managing to do precious little of any of that with the blonde in deep blue following after him.

  It seemed as if everywhere he looked, she was there, trying on that ridiculous sultry smile, offering to get him a drink and wanting to try a few phrases of hilariously bad Arabic with him. Askari realized not long after her first approach that she was the young wife of one of the members of the opera's oversight board, and when he saw her husband, at least double Askari's own age and ridiculously self-satisfied, he had an idea of what was going on.

  Of course, simply knowing what was going on might not have stopped me all that long ago, he mused.

  Her husband had come to speak with her about something, and he took a moment to study her undisturbed. She was stunning, with movie-star good looks and a kind of grace that likely took years to polish. She was precisely the kind of woman that drew him, in, but apparently, it had been a miss tonight.

  Askari would have pushed it off, but then it occurred to him that it wasn't just tonight. They had been misses for quite some time, and he frowned.

  Erin had changed his habits, but he wasn't aware that she had changed his inclinations as well. He had meant to stay exclusive to her while they were working on producing a child, but he had always had a roving eye. That was one of the things that made a standard marriage so laughable. He would not have wanted a wife who did the same, and the idea of doing it to a woman whose heart it would break left him cold. It shouldn't have been a problem with Erin, who was not and would never be his wife, but now he wondered at it.

  Ever since they had fallen in together, he had had no interest in anyone else. In fact, most nights, he was eager to get home simply because he knew she was there. There was something strangely and quietly incredible about being greeted by that riot of red hair and those joyous green eyes. Her warmth touched a place inside him that he had never known had been chilled, and when they touched, it was fireworks over and over again.

  He had never had this with a woman and had it last before, and he wondered if it was some kind of sign, some kind of marker he had crossed in his own life.

  The blonde saw that he was free, and she had apparently managed to break away from her own husband again. She came towards him with a hopeful look in her eye, but moving just a little faster, Askari made his apologies and swept out. Normally, he might stay a little later, but with a slight smile, he realized that there was a far better time waiting for him at the townhouse.

  It was late, but the twenty-four-hour bistros in Hazn were quite good. Askari stopped at one that did excellent fried spinach patties and asked for a large order. They were Erin's favorites, and he could imagine her blushing prettily as she greeted him at the door. Perhaps she would ask what the occasion was, and in response, he would simply kiss her.

  There doesn't need to be an occasion, he would say.

  The small paper bag was warmly settled in the crook of his arm as he sat in the car. Askari was already looking forward to seeing his beautiful red-haired siren when his phone rang and her name popped up. For a moment, he considered simply answering it when he got back to the townhouse, which was only fifteen minutes away, but he placed the food on the passenger side seat and hit the answer button.

  “Evening, beautiful,” he said. “I am on my way back to the townhouse right now...”

  “I'm sorry, but I won't be there.”

  Her voice was so flat and grim that for a moment, Askari could not tell that it was her at all. He was too stunned to be numb, and it felt like a small eternity before he was able to understand what it was she had said.

  “What do you mean, you won't be there?”

  Askari somehow felt very distant from himself. He understood the words that she was saying, but there was no thought in his head of what she could mean, how she could be saying the thing she was saying.

  A stab of fear lanced through him, bright and clear as a moonbeam, and Askari took a tighter grip on his phone.

  “Are you all right? Did you hurt yourself, or...”

  “No, no, I'm fine... Just... god, please, just listen to me right now. This is not going to be easy as it is. Please, will you listen.”

  “Well, you are the one that called, and I would very much like to hear why you did...” Askari could hear the edge in his voice, but he knew that there was more than just irritation there. There was a kind of fear that he was not very used to feeling at all, and now he needed to make sure that it didn't overwhelm him.

  “I've been thinking...” she said, and for a moment, she simply paused, as if saying those words had tired her, had made her unspeakably weary. For the first time, he could hear voices in the background. Wherever she was, she wasn't at the townhouse.

  “I've been thinking that this isn't working,” she said at last. “There's... Askari, we went into this assuming that everything was going to be okay, and the truth is that it is not. What we are doing is irresponsible at best and dangerous at worse.”

  “You mean... our bargain.”

  “Yes, our bargain. Where you were going to pay me to give you a child for your country. I... I can't do that.”

  “You were happy enough to do that when I offered you three million dollars,” he snapped, and then, even under a layer of pure anger, he flinched. That made her sound like some kind of mercenary monster, and that wasn't real or true.

  “I will get the money back to you as soon as I can,” she said quietly. “As soon as I get back to the United States, as soon as I can, I'll talk to my bank...”

  “I care about the money less than I care about the fact that you are breaking a deal that we both decided was mutually beneficial,” Askari growled. “You knew perfectly well what you were getting into.”

  “No,” Erin said, her voice gaining in strength and confidence. In a distant part of his mind, Askari was somehow impressed. There were grown men who ran countries who would slink away with their tails between their legs when he spoke like that, but Erin was fearless. He had expected no less from the woman he had chosen to bear his children.

  “No?”

  “No, I didn't. I thought I did. I thought that I could give you a child and walk away if needed, but now... now I know I can't.”

  A terrible fear clutched him.

  “What are you saying, Erin?” he asked, his voice ominous. “Are you telling me that you are pregnant now? Is that what has changed everything?”

  “No!' she said, and the startled sound of her voice told him that she was telling the truth. “I've been taking the tests every day or every other day, just as the doctor recommended, and no. Oh god, please don't think so badly of me. I would never do that. If that were the case, we would be having a very different conversation right now...”

  “And instead we are doing this on the phone,” he said bitingly. “Where are you right now, Erin? You sound like you are somewhere busy.”

  “I'm at the airport in Dubai. My flight to New York is going to start boarding in just a few minutes.”

  He barked out a laugh, sounding bitter even in his own ears.

  “You have truly considered this fully, haven't you?” he said, no small amount of spite in his voice.

  “I have,” she said, and there was no hint of regret in her voice. “I've had to. If there's anything I've learned about courtesans and mistresses, it is the fact that they have to be on the ball. They have to be very independent, and they have to be very aware of what is going on around them. This is not a place I can live, Askari.”

  The last line was delivered with such an amount of pain t
hat Askari was momentarily stunned. Despite his rage at what she had done, at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to reach for her, to touch her and to tell her that it would be alright. It didn't matter that she was doing this to herself just as surely as she was doing it to him. There was a part deep inside him that wanted to comfort her, and he had a feeling that no matter what, that would always be the case.

  “Erin... there is nothing that cannot be undone at this point,” he said, trying to keep his voice level. “Do you understand that? So far, all you have done is taken a random day trip to Dubai. If I wished, I could come and join you before midnight. Think about what you are doing. There is no reason to throw this all away.”

  I love you.

  The words echoed in his mind, but they did not come out of his mouth. Even so, Askari was stunned. He could barely understand how it had come to pass that he had fallen in love with the red-haired woman who had so unexpectedly and literally crashed into his life in New York all those weeks ago. However, once the thought had occurred, it was utterly inescapable. It was the truth, and his heart felt as if someone had taken hold of it with claws of fire.

  “I will always treasure the time that we had with each other,” Erin said quietly. “I don't know if you understand what a difference you have made in my life and how very differently I see things now because of you. I... I am so grateful, and I am so sorry. Goodbye, Askari.”

  The call disconnected, and he was left staring at his phone. When he tried to call her back, the call went straight to voice mail, and he felt as if a delicate connection between them had been cut. He tried calling again because he felt numb, and then stopped himself from doing it again.

  “You can't do this,” he said, his voice tinny and distant, and then he screamed it.

  ***

  In Dubai, Erin's tears finally spilled down her cheeks, and she hid her face in her hands. She had rehearsed what she was going to say to him for hours, but it hadn't gone the way she had thought it would at all. Regardless of what their arrangement had been, she could sense a real pain in his voice, and a part of her felt ripped apart at the idea of leaving him.