Sheikh's Lost Triplet Baby Girls: A Secret Baby Sheikh Romance

by Sophia Lynn

  Chapter 5

  Lia

  For all that she had wanted to be close to him since she had seen him again, there was a part of Lia that was grateful that Abir stayed at the table, even if he did watch her with eyes as sharp as a hawk's. She needed a little bit of space between them, or it felt as if the past would overwhelm them both, just rise up and drown them.

  In a flash, it occurred to her all at once how often she had imagined this. How many times in the last four years had she thought about what she might say if she had Abir in front of her again, after everything she had gone through, everything that she had accomplished? She must have had dozens of ways to open this conversations, but when she opened her mouth, nothing she had practiced came out.

  "You left," she said, and to her surprise, something anguished flashed across Abir's face, there and gone again to be replaced with something far more stoic.

  "I did," he said. "I had a duty."

  "I know you did," Lia said tersely. "You had a duty, and that duty just happened to be another woman."

  If she had expected Abir to flinch away from the reality of it, she was wrong. Instead, he only gave her a level look that was as calm as a mountain. One of the things that had drawn her to him in the first place was his steadfastness, and she pushed away that old fondness because God only knew she could ill-afford it now.

  "My arranged marriage, yes," he said. "I explained this all to you, both that it was a surprise to me, and that it was the wish of my parents."

  "And to hell with your wishes and with mine," she said, bitterness leaking through her words. She supposed that there were people who would look down on her for how bitter she was about the whole affair still, several years on, but those people had no idea how very deep her feelings for Abir ran. How deeply they still ran.

  Abir shook his head.

  "I want to hear about what happened next," he said firmly. "We're not talking about what I wanted or what you wanted."

  A petulant part of Lia wanted to ask why not, but she told herself to be fair. She wasn't the one who had just found out she had kids, so she supposed she could give him this.

  "Do you remember that cold I had a few weeks before you left? The one that you were so worried about?"

  She expected him to say no, but instead Abir nodded immediately.

  "You had a fever and you couldn't sleep because you ached so much," he said. "I certainly remember how I had to fight to get you to the clinic."

  "I would have been fine," she couldn't help putting in, but she shook her head. "The cold isn't important. What is important were the medications that the clinic put me on. I didn't really want them, but you know, doctor's orders. I took them, and I was a little too dazed to realize that they could interfere with other medications – like, say, my birth control."

  Abir stared at her in dismay, and she was grimly amused at how very much like her own reaction that had been.

  "Yeah, it was a pretty hectic two months for me. I got sick, got bullied to a clinic for meds, you told me you had a fairytale wedding that you had to catch—"

  "Lia."

  "And then about three weeks after you left, I realized that I had missed my period. Well, I went to that same damn clinic again, got the good news, and. Well."

  Abir rose from the table, and Lia stood her ground. She hadn't gotten as far as she had by being afraid of things in her own kitchen. However, Abir's touch when he took her hand was gentle, and she saw nothing but compassion in his dark eyes.

  "You must have been so afraid," he murmured, and Lia swallowed hard, tugging her hand out of his and retreating a few steps. She wasn't afraid of him, but there was too much of the past welling up between them again, that same sweetness and heat that had almost derailed her life the first time, and she needed some distance.

  "Of course I was," she said. "But I was lucky, too. God, I can't tell you how lucky I was. My stipend paid for my rent, and I was almost seven months pregnant when I defended my work to graduate, but I did it. People thought I couldn't, that I would drop out, but I didn't."

  She uttered the last fiercely and defiantly, as if she expected Abir to disbelieve her, but he was only nodding as if he would expect nothing less.

  "I wish you would have called me. No matter what else happened between us, you should have called."

  "And interrupt your wedding preparations?" she asked. "I would rather have died."

  "You might have," Abir said severely. "This country is not the kindest to young mothers, especially young mothers without partners and without a great deal of money. You should have—"

  Lia made a cutting motion with her hand, shaking her head hard.

  "I did what I had to do," she said. "I moved back in with my parents for a year, and then in with Lauren and Tony. I had help. I had just barely enough money to scrape by, and then I got my job with the publisher..."

  "You're skipping things," Abir pointed out. "The children."

  She stilled for a moment, because she had, hadn't she?

  "They're incredible," she said softly, looking down. "They're perfect. All three of them. I thought there were only two at first. That was what the ultrasound said. Then, it was the moment of truth, and there was a third, so small and arranged so we never saw her. Viola. She was such a surprise. She always has been. Sometimes, you think she's just being overwhelmed by Hunter and Henry, and she just pops up—"

  "I'm looking forward to getting to know her. To getting to know all of them," Abir said, and Lia's head snapped up.

  "What are you talking about?" she asked in shock. "You're going home to Shujae, you've got—"

  Abir's face went hard, and for a moment she was barely sure it was the same man at all. When she had met Abir, he had been taking some classes at the university where she had been getting her master's degree. He had been sweet, different from all the boys she had ever dated before.

  The night he had told her about his arranged marriage, she had met someone else, someone who was surely hard and cold enough to run a country. She was looking at that man now.

  "The wedding never happened," he said, his voice cool. "It may please you to know that the bride wanted nothing to do with me."

  "She... ran out on you?"

  Abir's laugh was low and unpleasant.

  "Oh she did rather worse than that. After we had gone through most of the traditional preparations for a Shujae wedding, after I had earned her parents' blessings, after the money and the expense of it all, she decided she would rather have her Belgian boyfriend than be the Sheikha of Shujae."

  Lia stared.

  "She... she dumped you? You're not married?"

  "To put it very bluntly, yes. I am not married. She broke my parents' hearts. The scandal sent my father into a worse decline, and I don’t think he ever recovered from it. He died two years ago."

  "Oh... I'm so sorry."

  "It is the thing it is. But no. I am not married."

  The weight of the last four years rested between them, stifling for such a small space. There were still so many questions spinning between them, still so many unresolved emotions. One moment it felt as if she could just reach across that space to take his hand, banishing them with nothing more than a touch. The next moment, it felt as if there was far too much to ever cross.

  "Abir, why—"

  "Mama, does Abir want to watch ninjas with us?"

  They both jumped and took a few steps back. Lia knew that she didn't have anything to feel guilty about, but that was hard to remember when she looked down into Hunter's innocent and inquiring face.

  "I'm still talking things out with your mother," Abir said, "but later, yes, I would like to. Very much."

  That appeased Hunter for the moment, and as he trotted away, Lia blinked at Abir.

  "You're going to stay to—"

  "Lia."

  The tone of command in his voice was enough to make her bristle, and at the same time, she knew that it was nothing to be tested. Abir seemed to have made up his mi
nd, and she didn't know what was happening at all any longer.

  "They are my children as well," he said. "I will spend time with them, and I will learn about them."

  "And I don't have any say in that at all?"

  Abir was silent a long moment. When he looked up at her again, there was something apologetic in his eyes, but there was also a resolution there that told her he would fight and he would win if he was forced to do so.

  "You will always have a say," he said. "You are owed that as their mother. But I am their father, and I will not be kept from them."

  Lia felt the world shift underneath her. Just when things were settling, just when she thought she was getting her feet underneath her with regards to raising her kids, to working out her career, everything was changing again.

  Chapter 6

  Abir

  The house was easy. Lia didn't live in a terrible neighborhood, but just two blocks away, the houses became much nicer and much larger. Two days after their conversation in her kitchen, Abir invited Lia and the children – their children, a thrilled voice in his head reminded him – over to see it.

  It was still empty, but he could change that quickly enough, and as the children went shrieking through the empty halls, thundering up the stairs and down them, Lia looked around in surprise.

  "You're not serious, right?" she asked. "You're just going to... buy a house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Queens?"

  Abir raised an eyebrow at her.

  "And why wouldn't I be serious?" he asked politely. "I want to spend more time getting to know the triplets. Your house is small so I couldn't ask to stay, let alone to conduct my business from your living room. Here, we have all the space we need to get to know each other."

  "But to buy a house? I guess I was thinking that we would just... I don't know. That you might come to visit sometimes. With a hotel room, and all that. That's what most people would do in your situation, I guess."

  Abir let himself smile a little at her surprise, shrugging.

  "I think there are very few men in all the world who have ever found themselves in my situation," he said with amusement. "Thank you."

  Lia shot him a startled look. He still loved doing that, surprising her. Her blue eyes were like the ice off the northernmost lakes, and when that ice cracked, you could see all the way to the depths at the bottom.

  "Very few men would say thank you for being suddenly surprised with a pack of kids."

  "Three is hardly a pack, and they are my children, Lia. They're not some puppies that I can simply send back to the kennel or some clothes that I can send away if they do not fit. They are a part of me. They're children, and that means making space in my life, in shifting my life however I need to to have them."

  And perhaps... perhaps that space might include you as well.

  Lia was looking over the gleaming kitchen, taking in the marble countertops and the glass doors leading to the small yard in the back, complete with a playground specially designed for toddlers, and his eyes followed her as if they had been starved for the sight of her. He supposed that he had been.

  The conversations the last few days had been charged and strange. The surprising part of it all had been the fact that it wasn't the triplets that had made things strange. No. They were mostly on the same page regarding the three little lives that they had created between them. They wanted the best for Hunter, Henry and Viola, and they were both willing to do whatever it took to make it work.

  No, the strangeness came whenever they were together in this situation, whenever talk ranged to the past. Abir had once been told that the past was more than a foreign country – it was a lost one, and there was no returning to it, none whatsoever. He had always thought that it was a rather obvious sort of statement, but now, watching Lia in the flesh again, he understood it with a kind of hammering insistence. The Lia that lived in his memory was gone, and he realized that he was willing to let her go if he could have this one – real, vital and here – instead.

  Finally, Lia turned to him, her hands on her plush hips as if she had made a decision.

  "All right," she said. "Do you promise me, promise me, that you are in this for the long haul? You're not just here to play daddy for a week and then to leave when it gets too hard?"

  Abir blinked at her in shock.

  "I would never. Of course I promise you that. I'm their father."

  A smile, not really a nice one, played on her lips.

  "Ask Lauren sometime what that means. Her father literally left on a trip one day and didn't bother coming back."

  Abir's look of horror must have answered her, because Lia nodded.

  "One thing working in your favor; you do what you're supposed to do," she said. It could have been cruel, but there was something wry about it instead. He started to ask her what she meant, but she only shook her head.

  "Are you ready to tell them?"

  "You mean now?"

  She grinned, that impish girl still there and still making his heart beat double time.

  "What, are you getting cold feet?"

  She waved away his protests.

  "I'm teasing. But seriously. The sooner they know, the better. Kids are smart, and I don't think I'm just being a doting mother when I say that these kids specifically are smart. They're young, so they're at an age where they're going to accept what we tell them. So why not tell them?"

  "Do you think it will really be that easy?" Abir asked, and Lia only shrugged.

  "I don't think it will get easier if we wait, and it could get whole lot harder. If you have a reason not to tell them that I haven't thought of—"

  "No," Abir said, and then with growing resolve, "No. Shall we do it now?"

  Lia grinned.

  "Let's."

  Together, they made their way up the stairs. It was a five-bedroom house with the master suite on its own landing. The three smaller bedrooms were open with the children dashing between them excitedly, and as they came into the hallway, Henry poked his head out from one of the doors.

  "This is the best bedroom!" he crowed. "You can see the street!"

  "It could be yours if you wanted it," Abir said, and then Lia was calling the other two out. Hunter came first with Viola right after him, and suddenly Abir's heart swelled at the thought that these children were his. He had missed so much, but if the world was kind, if they could somehow make this work, he wouldn't miss anything else.

  "Okay kids, there's been a lot going on lately," Lia said. "And Abir has something to say to you."

  She and the children turned to him expectantly, and over the three small dark heads, Abir shot Lia an exasperated look.

  Was that all the preparation you were going to do?

  Her grin was unrepentant.

  Sink or swim, pal.

  "All right," he said, going down into a crouch to put himself on level with the three. "This is my house, but it's your house too."

  "I own a house now?" asked Hunter in awe, and Abir started to respond but Henry spoke first.

  "We all do!" he said gleefully, and Abir couldn't help laughing.

  "Well, I'm not going to make you pay rent so, yes. We all own this place. But more importantly. I'm your father. I'm going to be looking after you from now on."

  A silence fell over the three, and as one, they turned to Lia. She smiled at them, touching a head here, squeezing a shoulder there.

  "That's right," she said. "He's your father. We're going to be seeing a lot of him. He's our family. He always has been."

  Something about the simple answer warmed Abir's heart, and he had to swallow against the sudden lump in his chest.

  "Yes," he said, and then after another awkward moment of silence, Viola was the one who spoke up.

  "What should we call you?" she asked, her voice soft and as sweet as he’d imagined it to be. The question made him pause – there really was a lot he hadn't thought of, wasn't there – and then he cleared his throat.

  "I would like it very muc
h if you would call me Baba," he offered. "That's what I called my own father when I was your age."

  Viola nodded seriously, and Abir thought that his heart would break from the sweetness of it. There would never be another moment like this in all his life. There would never be anything like this again and—

  "Choose what room you want!" Henry suddenly shouted, almost deafening in the hallway. "I want this one!"

  He thundered into his chosen room, his siblings on his heels, and suddenly Abir was alone with Lia in the hallway again. To his surprise, he saw that she was wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. When he rose to reach out to her, however, she shook her head briskly, offering him a smile.

  "And that's the way it goes," she says. "Beautiful moment, followed by shouting, and if you're lucky, no puke or spit or anything. Welcome to fatherhood, Abir."

  Chapter 7

  Lia

  It wasn't all easy. Sometimes it was downright weird and unsettling and even upsetting. More than once there were tears and shouting, and a few times, Lia could practically see Abir wondering what he had gotten himself into. The truth was that no matter how big your house was, no matter how much money you had to spare or how prepared you thought you were, three lively kids were a lot. Viola might have been a little more retiring than her brothers, but she was an avid climber who loved to get up top of high things, often things that did not really want to bear her weight. Hunter had a million questions to ask at once, and when he didn't get the answer that worked well in the world as he saw it, he had a million more follow-up questions to better understand. Henry could be wild sometimes, hard to corral when he wanted to run and play, always ready to get loud when he thought something wasn't fair or when he was having a good time.

  Throughout all of it, however, Abir was patient and stalwart, conducting whatever business he had to conduct via the phone or the Internet at his home office. Most of Lia's work was done at home as well, from her phone or her old workhorse laptop. When she couldn't be at home with the kids, Lauren was happy to step in for some cash, or perhaps one of the college girls who lived down the block.