by Sophia Lynn
Mother.
The term felt so strange, so alien, that he had to push it aside. Though he had bought her services as a mother to raise his children, there was still a part of him that couldn't see her in the role.
The file told him that she had given birth in a small but excellent hospital, and that she had had three girls. Their names were Tabitha, Tonya, and Talia, and a part of him ached at that idea. They were the names of the daughters that he had never seen. If he allowed himself to give into the titanic rage that was threatening to fight its way to the surface, who knew what could happen.
There were a few other things. She took advantage of a maid service. She had some essentials delivered. All in all, she lived a modest life, and cynically, a part of him wondered if she had somehow managed to squander all of the money he had given her.
However, just as quickly as he had had the thought, he knew it wasn't true. He turned to the next to last page and had it confirmed. The vast majority of the money that he had paid her was still right in the bank account where it had been deposited. She had used a small amount to create a comfortable life for her daughters, and he somehow knew that the rest was being saved for the girls when they came of age. He didn't know where the certainty came from, but it was there.
The last page was the picture from the article that had alerted Basaam. Three girls, and the woman that he had loved.
Had loved?
He told himself firmly that that was the way it had to be. She had already proved herself duplicitous beyond words. In the ancient world, if she had stolen his children away from him, she would have been tracked down and punished severely. She had betrayed his trust, and that was the end of it.
However, as the plane touched down, he couldn't stop himself from being excited to see her. There was a part of him that seemed to think that they were simply going to pick up exactly where they had left off, that wanted nothing more than to feel her in his arms again. The rest of him knew that that was an impossibility.
In the rental car to her modest house, Askari forced himself to calm down. He told himself that he would confront her coolly and with as much force as was warranted. He would be the picture of proportionality, and perhaps most importantly, she would know how very little he cared for her. She would learn that he could no longer be manipulated.
Of course, all of that went out the window the moment that she appeared in the door.
Askari was almost floored by the powerful rush of emotions that surged through his body when he saw her. It would never be any different, and he had been a fool to think that it would be. She was the woman he had dreamed of for weeks after she went away. It wasn't just her still image, it was Erin in the flesh, the same sweet face, her red hair pulled back in a low ponytail, the same green eyes that haunted him.
Then the first thing she said to him was the name of another man, and red had tinged his vision.
"Who is Peter?" he had asked, and even in his own ears, his voice had sound distant and tinny.
"Oh my god," she said weakly. "Askari..."
"I asked you a question," he said, stepping inside the door before she could close it. "Who is Peter?"
"He's the mailman," she said, as if she could sense that she was treading on dangerous water. "He's... he's the mail carrier who brings me the delivery items I need."
She seemed to pause for a moment, as if she needed to collect herself.
"Askari, what are you doing here?"
Almost as if on cue, a small baby started crying, and she flinched.
"Do you have to ask?" he asked, his tone low and threatening. "Woman, take me to my children."
Erin wisely kept her silence, and slowly, she closed the door and led him into the house. A detached part of him thought that while it was certainly an attractive and comfortable home, there was something missing. It did not seem as warm as he would have thought. Then she led him into a sunny living room where three tiny girls gamboled on a foam play mat, and he forgot all about everything else.
It was suddenly as if all the air had been forced out of his body, and Askari almost had to sit down on the couch. They were utterly perfect, two with dark hair, one with red, and one of the ones with black hair looked slightly tearful, looking between him and her mother.
With a look that was somehow both nervous and defiant, Erin skirted around him and went to her – their - daughter, scooping her up and stroking her dark hair.
"There we are, darling, you're fine," she said, and Askari noticed that though she flinched a little when he stepped close, she didn't move back.
"Who's this?" he said. For some reason, Askari kept his voice low, as if there was something sacred about the moment, something profound.
"This is Tonya," she said softly. "She's still the smallest of the triplets, and she's the one who's always prone to fussing. See, she's just fine, I think she just needs a little more encouragement and comfort than the others."
Even as her mother held her, Tonya grew more confident, and then she was twisting to look at him. He realized suddenly that her eyes were as dark as his own, even if her skin was as pale as her mother's.
With a soft coo, she waved her hand at him, and almost hypnotized, he reached out to take it. Her hand was absurdly small even as it grabbed at his fingers. Then she smiled, and he knew that this child would rule in his heart forever.
"Please," Askari said, not caring if he sounded overly humble, "will you introduce me to the others?"
"Of course."
She sat down on the mat, and after a moment, he copied her. When she put Tonya back on the mat, it struck him all over again how small they were.
"Are they all healthy?" he asked, and to his relief, Erin nodded.
"They are. Triplets are always a little smaller than other babies, and they were a little premature, but they are very healthy. They always have been."
They were still so young, he thought. One of the babies, the one with red hair and dark eyes, gazed at him and made a sound that he could only describe as frustrated. She was not able to crawl yet, but still she plopped down on her belly, trying to get to him.
Hesitantly, he scooped her up, but unlike her sister, she did not smile. Instead, she studied him intently for a long moment, and Askari could not get over the idea that she was assessing him, trying to figure out what he meant in the world, what she could learn of the world through him.
"What a little philosopher," Askari murmured, and Erin smiled a little.
"Be glad Talia likes you," Erin advised. "If she didn't, she'd be screaming the house down."
He passed Talia to her mother, and he would have reached for Tabitha, but then he saw that the last little girl, red hair with dark eyes, had somehow rolled over to him and that her little fingers had found his shoelace. As he watched, her tiny fingers plucked at the lace and then with deliberation, pulled the bow free. Only then did she look up at him and smile.
"That's something I've had to get used to," Erin sighed. "Tabitha's a big fan of untying things and taking things apart."
"She's brilliant," Askari declared, and Erin laughed a little.
"I personally think so," she replied, and on instinct, he smiled at her.
Then Askari remembered that these were his children, and it was this woman who had cost him the start of their lives. He would never see them as newborns, and from here on out, there would always be a piece of them that he was missing. That he could not forgive. He could not allow himself to forgive it.
"Askari."
"No," he said, his voice as cold as ice. "No. You don't get to bargain any longer. You do not get to plead or to tell me anything. I am going to tell you what is going to happen."
He saw her face turn pale, but he was pleased that she did not burst into tears, scream, or cry. That would have made things much more difficult.
"I am taking my children back to Hazn. That is their heritage, one that you would have stolen from them, and believe me, Erin, when I tell you that that is a greater cr
ime than you actually stealing my children from me. I am taking them, and there is nothing that you can do to stop me.
"However, I am not a cruel man. I am not even as cruel as you are. I will allow you to come with us if you wish. You can look after these girls, but you will consent to do it while being kept under lock and key. You will be able to mother them for an amount of time that I deem fit.
"Alternately, you can refuse to come with us. You can stay here, and after that, you can do as you like. Perhaps at some point, if the girls are curious, I will bring you to visit, and once again, these visits will be supervised. Or perhaps they will not care one way or the other."
Erin had gone even paler as he spoke, but then she took a deep breath. Her voice was a little higher than he thought it usually was, but other than that, she was steady.
"If I come with you, I can stay with my daughters for the amount of time you deem fit. How long will that be?"
"That is my decision and only my decision," he said coldly. "That is not something that you can affect at this time. I will warn you, Erin, that my patience for you is very finite right now. Once you have made your choice, it is final as far as I am concerned."
He waited, wondering whether she would fly into a rage or demand that he leave or hurl abuse at him. Askari had been prepared for that.
What he was not prepared for was the faint smile on her face, the one that was shockingly beautiful even in defeat.
"I think you are very new to parenting," she said softly. "Once you have been with the girls as long as I have, you will see that you have given me absolutely no choice at all. Of course I will come with you."
"If it was not for the decisions that you made," he retorted, "I would have been able to spend the time with them that you did. Get packed. I want us heading back to the airport within three hours."
"Three hours?" Erin said in shock. "But there's so much I need to do."
Askari's temper, hanging on by a thread, snapped abruptly.
"No," he snarled. "Three hours. Everything in this house can be sent for if you need it. If there is anything you need that cannot be packed away, make a list, we will order it on the plane, and then it will be waiting for us.
"You have kept me from my children for god knows how long, and I will not allow you to separate them from me any longer. Do as I say, or I swear to you that I will forget how merciful I have been and take them away from you completely!"
She gasped at his words, and one of the girls, Tonya, started crying.
Finally, Erin lowered her head and nodded.
"All right," she said, and he knew that once again, the world between them had changed.
Chapter Eleven
Erin thought distantly that she was probably in shock. That was the only way to explain the fact that she had somehow kept moving throughout the last few days.
It had been easier than she had thought, getting her daughters onto a plane and to a different country. For a brief time, she had worried about passports and travel, but she had forgotten how rich and powerful Askari was. He was one of the most wealthy men in an exceedingly wealthy area of the world, and there had been no problems at all.
Talia and Tabitha had both fussed over the altitude change in the car while Tonya had slept through it like a champ. Some distant part of Erin's mind thought that Askari's shock at the noise two little girls could make was hilarious, and with a boldness that surprised her, she plopped Talia into his hands while she rocked Tabitha.
"If you think this is bad, you should have seen them when two out of the three had colic in a cycle. There was always someone crying, and I thought I would go crazy from lack of sleep."
"What do I do?" he asked, holding Talia a little nervously, but then the little girl gave an abrupt hiccup and settled against them.
"That's about it," Erin said with a slight smile. "They're remarkably easy, though I will say that having another pair of hands is making this a lot easier."
He scowled at her, and she bit her lip. She expected him to shout at her again about abandoning him and taking his children, but at the moment, he seemed disinclined to do so. Instead, he went back to rocking Talia against his chest, crooning to her a little bit in Arabic.
They had barely spoken the rest of the flight. There were cribs for the babies, and with a pang, she realized that he had intended to return with them one way or another. However, when the time came for them to go to sleep, he nodded towards the sleeping compartment.
"Take the main bed," he said. "It's closer to the girls."
"But what about you?"
"There is a bed that folds out of the couch if I want to sleep, but right now, I don't feel as if I ever will again."
Erin was shocked at how her first instinct was to reach out to him and to comfort him, but she knew that it would not be welcome. Instead, she nodded hesitantly and went to lie down.
After checking on her girls one more time, she changed into her nightgown and slipped into the bed. After the day she had had, she figured that she would slip off to sleep immediately. She had not, however, realized that she would be flooded with memories.
This was the bed where she and Askari had spent their first night together. She remembered how tenderly he had touched her on this jet and how he had pulled away when she had revealed how inexperienced she had been with sex to him. When Erin closed her eyes, she could still feel his expert hands gliding over her body, still feel the way he had risen over her to touch her more intimately.
The moment he had heard her say another man's name, she knew that he was jealous, but she could have told him not to bother. There was no other man in the world that could compare to him, and she had known that it would be a very long time before she would even try.
Of course, he has some really incorrect ideas about what women go through during childbirth if he thinks that I was looking for a man while I was pregnant with three kids, she thought wryly, and finding a bit of humor in the situation felt good as well.
Erin knew how the situation looked to him. To Askari, she had all but robbed him. She had kidnapped his children, and she had no intention of returning them to him.
There were explanations she could have offered to him, reasons for why she did what she did. However, she knew that he would never understand them, never forgive them. Now he was back in her life and in her children's life, and she had no idea what was going on.
The entire day, Erin had told herself that she was being strong for the girls. She had sternly told herself that if she got upset, if she fell to the ground and simply started weeping the way that she had thought she might, they would only be upset, and who knew what would happen then?
Now, though, her little girls were tucked away in travel cribs that were far more luxurious than what she had bought for them, and she was alone.
Erin uttered a small and miserable sigh as hot tears started to slide down her cheeks. She thought that she had known what loneliness was during the first days that she realized that she was pregnant. Now though, with the only man she had ever loved just a few short yards away and with the knowledge that he hated her, she realized that she had never even begun to encounter the emotion.
Erin curled herself into a tight little ball on the bed, and keeping her voice low, she cried until she fell into an exhausted sleep.
***
Askari had called the property he took them to the cottage, but it was bigger by far than the house that she and the girls had been living in. It was a gorgeous open-plan modern home, with tall windows and white linen curtains that fell straight to the ground. The windows opened to let in the strong sunlight, and the entire place gleamed with its own beauty.
Beyond the windows was a private beach, a part that had been separated from the rest of the oases when the resort town had been built nearby.
The night Askari had brought them to the cottage, he had told her that there was an excellent hospital serving the resort town and the people who lived there.
"If you and
the girls need any kind of care at all, that is where you should be going. I have programmed the instructions into the GPS unit installed in the car."
He paused, and then his gaze turned sterner.
"And the hospital has been ordered to give me notice whenever you go there."
She had gaped at him.
"You can't do that," she hissed. "That's an insane invasion of privacy! That has got to be illegal."
"Not for me, not here," he said harshly. "If you think that you can stand against me on this or on any other measure, Erin, you are very wrong. In the past, the word of the sheikh was law, and some things have changed very little."
They locked eyes, and Erin wondered what would have happened if Tabitha hadn't started plucking at his shoelaces again.
She tensed, unsure of how a man as angry as Askari would take to having his shoes untied by a tiny little girl.
To her amazement, his expression softened entirely, and he reached down to scoop her up. For a moment, he seemed enchanted by the way she babbled happily to be picked up, and then he returned his gaze to her, his eyes darker than the pits of hell.
"Do not make the mistake of thinking you can cross me," he said, and she had nodded.
The house was beautiful. She had a number of bedrooms to choose from, and the girls' room had been set up to her specifications. It was right next door, and there was even a double bed in their nursery for her if she wanted to sleep closer to them.
There was a housekeeper that came in twice a week, a chef that showed up every morning to deliver her meals, and a nutritionist who came by to deliver her hand-made baby food that was designed to be especially nourishing.
Askari had told her that she was free to order whatever she liked for herself or the girls... and after that, he had told her nothing.
Erin was reasonably certain that he was getting reports from everyone who was ever in the house or interacted with her, Tonya, Tabitha, and Talia, but the man himself never showed up at all.
For the first day or so, she tried to simply continue her life as she had before. She tried to live with the Askari-shaped hole in her universe the way that she had for more than a year.