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  Sheikh’s Unexpected Triplet Babies

  By Sophia Lynn

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  Sheikh’s Unexpected Triplet Babies

  By Sophia Lynn

  All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2017 Sophia Lynn.

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  Chapter One

  Bedelia adjusted her headscarf for what felt like the millionth time, aware that she was drawing curious looks as she did so. It was bad enough that the only headscarf she could find to buy was a floral monstrosity that was really only ever seen on the heads of grandmotherly ladies carrying their wares on their back, but it seemed to add insult to injury that she couldn't even wear it right. When she felt that it was close enough to snug, she lowered her hand and looked around, finally able to pay attention to the thing she had come for.

  The people of Masir had been interested in the arrival of a foreign woman in their midst for at least a little while. But then there was a commotion from the end of the track, and she was promptly forgotten as the crowd burst into excited cheers. Even if she was there only as an observer and researcher, Bedelia couldn't help but get caught up in the excitement, craning her head from her place on the straw bale bleachers to see the horses brought out.

  Bedelia had been raised in farm country out in Iowa in the US, so horses weren't new to her. Even if they didn't pull plows anymore, she had friends and acquaintances who did trail rides or worked at stables. However, the Quarter Horses of her childhood had nothing to do with the lean and gleaming horses that she saw now.

  Led by their proud grooms, the line of horses were trotted out onto the track in front of the audience, and to her each one seemed more beautiful than the next. They were as lean as whippets, and their coats had a mirror-bright sheen that barely seemed believable. They were the horses that were owned and prized by the nomadic nations that had come to settle the United Arab Emirates, and even here in the obscure corner of the emirate known as Muneazil, they still received their due.

  She snapped pictures as quickly as she could, desperate to catch the beauty of the animals on display, their smooth gaits, their narrow and noble heads, the way they seemed like stars brought to earth and given the forms of horses.

  Of course, just when she was getting into the picture-taking process, her phone rang. For a moment, she thought of ignoring it, but then with a sigh, she brought the phone to her ear.

  "Lindow. For the love of all that is holy, tell me that you are at the horse show right now. Don't tell me that you got delayed or in an accident, because so help me God, I will fire your ass so fast..."

  "Don't worry, Mr. Miller, I promise, I am at Masir and working hard. I promise that you will have the pictures you want in just twelve hours."

  "Damn right I will. Make sure you keep your word, Lindow, I have a very poor tolerance for liars."

  "I know you do, Mr. Miller," she said soothingly, and after a few more similarly threatening phrases from him, her boss hung up.

  Bedelia sighed. Some days, she wanted nothing more than to tell her boss to research his own novel. If he had the money to pay her to roam the world, surely he had the money to see it himself. But then she supposed that would bite into his self-pity time as an unappreciated genius.

  Still, if she hadn't fallen into the gig as Jacob Miller's personal assistant/wandering pair of eyes, she would likely still be scraping a living together in New Hampshire, and that was no one's idea of an exciting time.

  She forced her attention back to the track where riders were beginning to mount up. On a word, the horses broke into a trot, then a canter, and then they were brought up to a full gallop, their bodies as streamlined as a ray of sunlight, dashing along the track with a grace like flight. She barely remembered to get video of the performance before it was over. Somehow, seeing them made her heart take flight, and she knew there was something magical about it, something splendid and wonderful.

  The horse fair at Masir had been operating for more than three hundred years, and this was always the start of it. The horses that were for sale, the stars of the show, would be displayed like this before the rest of the fair took place.

  She stiffened when a shout went up, and she saw a commotion go up from the horses, now being slowed again to a halt. While the main body of the small herd scattered away, two horses--one a midnight black and the other a bright gold--screamed challenges at one another, their proud heads snaking back and lunging forward again as their riders tried to fight them.

  From the babble of Arabic around her, Bedelia heard quick speculation that these were both young stallions, full of fury and pride. They snaked and bit at one another, and Bedelia covered her mouth when one rider slid off his mount to the ground below. There were hands to pull him away before he was trampled, but the other one clung on until a particularly powerful lunge flung him off.

  Bedelia felt frozen and helpless as people tried to grab at the rampaging giants, and buckets of water and shouting did nothing to make them lose their deadly focus on one another. The black latched his teeth into the shoulder of the gold, and she felt faint when she saw blood drawn.

  It was all chaos and fear and shouting, but then a man stepped out onto the track. For some reason, Bedelia found her eyes drawn to him even before he did anything. He was a tall man, lean, and like the other men, he wore the black trousers and close-fitting, dark tunic that was the general garb of the region’s horsemen. However, there was something about him that made him stand out to Bedelia, that made a strange shiver run through her body.

  When he moved, he was at least as fast as the horses themselves. Darting between the two horses, he handily caught the reins of the black. At first, to Bedelia it seemed as if he had somehow forced the enormous horse to turn with the strength of his body alone, but then after a moment, she realized he had simply redirected the horse's force. A slight change in the lunging horse's trajectory turned it away from its adversary, and while it was still blinking in surprise, the man took a firmer grip on its bridle and whipped out a dark scarf. It was the work of a moment for him to blindfold the horse, which calmed almost immediately, while a half-dozen men calmed down the gold.

  Bedelia couldn't help herself. She leaped to her feet and brought her hands together in excited applause. The rest of the crowd followed suit, and soon cheering had taken the place of the horrified shouts when the horses had started to fight.

  The man who had calmed the black horse looked up once others had the giant in hand, and even from where she stood, she could see the look of surprise on the man's face. He was handsome, as handsome as a movie star, but what captured her attention were his eyes. In a region where most people had eyes as dark as night, his were an extraordinary copper, a bright color that glinted in the sun.

  Dragon eyes, Bedelia thought with a shiver, and perhaps there was something of the legendary beast in the man who now faced the crowd.

  With a slight smile on his face, he gave a quick bow before disappearing back into the crowd of trainers, riders and owners. Bedelia wondered if he was one of them, but something made her doubt it. There had been something, something indefinable, that had set him apart, that had made him stand taller than those around him.

  She shook it off. Whoever he was, it wasn't important. She was here with a job to do, and she had to do it.

  ***

  THE FIRST HINT Jahin had gotten that something was wrong was a startled shout. He had been standing next to the track, watching for the horses he had picked out earlier for their paces, temperament and natures, when the roan with white socks that he’d had his eye on reared away from the herd, trying to get away from the
center of the commotion.

  Out of the chaos of shouts and screaming horses, he saw two giants emerge in battle, the black and the gold, and for a moment, he was simply struck by their power and beauty. Then one rider lost his seat, falling back to the track. The track was soft enough, but the horse hooves certainly weren't, and Jahin joined another pair of men who dragged the hapless rider off to one side.

  Letting others make sure that the rider was all right, Jahin returned to the horses. God, they were both gorgeous, and though the gold had caught his eye earlier, he remembered passing up the black. He had thought the black lacked passion and a certain ferocity he looked for in his own horses, but now apparently he was being proved wrong.

  Without pause, he inserted himself into the fray and thanked all the stars in heaven when he managed to grab the black's bridle on the first lunge. The horse turned with surprising ease, and then he was able to calm it further by covering its eyes.

  When the horse stilled, he could feel the nervous tremors running through its enormous body, the way sweat dripped from its hide.

  "Ah, you were merely anxious," he murmured. "Well, easy enough to fix."

  The black's owner hurried over, and Jahin gave up the reins without a protest. After all, he decided, it was only going to be temporary. He had made his decision, and sooner rather than later, he was going to have the black for his stable.

  Jahin was just getting ready to move off of the track when he heard the faint sound of applause. He looked up only to hear the applause growing louder and louder until it seemed as if the entire crowd was shouting for him.

  It was...a surprisingly good feeling. Most of his life, people were applauding his arrival at an event or an elegant party or the opera. This applause was for his prowess with horses, and it was somehow more honest.

  As he bowed, Jahin was startled to catch sight of a foreign woman in the crowd. Women were not all that common at the Masir horse fair, and foreign women were doubly unusual. She wore a flowered headscarf that properly belonged on an ancient woman selling potions by the side of the road, but even from where he stood, he could see that she was young. Her scarf slid back to reveal russet hair in brown and red and gold, and her eyes were almost startlingly green.

  For some reason, the sight of her made Jahin smile, warming him in a way that he did not understand.

  He shook his head and strode off to the sidelines. The sales at Masir went fast, and the last thing he could be concerned with was some little fool of a foreigner making eyes at him from the sidelines, even if those eyes were a very beautiful green.

  ***

  AFTER THE RACES, an ancient bell rang in the center of the Masir town square. That meant the sales could begin, and frenzied bargaining broke out all around her.

  The horse fair was of course the main event, but there was also a small marketplace that had sprung up not far away where locals could sell everything from a bit of food and drink to gorgeous hand-embroidered clothes and handcrafted instruments and housewares.

  Maybe it's time to invest in a new headscarf, Bedelia thought wryly, but perhaps that should wait until she knew how to wear this one.

  Still, she envied the young women of Muneazil who wore their headscarves with a certain élan and style she knew only came from years of practice. Muneazil did not have have compulsory rules about headscarves, but most women here seemed to wear them anyway, the edge sitting far back on their heads and falling down their backs, their bangs and the front part of their hairstyle exposed.

  There was a lot to envy, Bedelia couldn't help thinking. The women of Muneazil tended towards the tall and willowy type, with flashing dark eyes and skin like warm amber. Next to them, Bedelia felt like the classical ugly duckling.

  She wasn't unattractive by any stretch of the imagination. She was short, no more than five foot one inch, and curvy, with hips and a bust that had gotten her so much attention that she was happy to cover up in the Muneazil tradition of voluminous belted tunics for women. She wasn't quite sure that she had put together a respectable outfit, but the black trousers and gray tunic were wonderfully comfortable and made her feel impressively invisible. The other women wore the bright colors of butterflies and flowers, and yet invisibility still seemed easy for them.

  Just as she was tempted to run to the vendor area to pick up a kebab or a skewer of fruit, her phone chirped, telling her she had a message. Bedelia glanced at it.

  Don't mess this up. I can still fire you, and then you can find your own way home.

  She rolled her eyes and set to typing something impressively consolatory. She reminded herself that every job had some rough spot, and while it was a little unfortunate that her rough spot was actively her employer, it wasn't so terrible. After all, here she was at a horse show that had existed before the United States had even become a country. She had traveled to a corner of the world that few would ever come to.

  She could see why Miller would want to set a novel in Muneazil. It was one of the most powerful members of the UAE, but it was isolated, almost painfully so. Unlike other emirates, which had embraced the modern world’s glass and silicone, fast cars and loud lifestyles, Muneazil had looked at all of that and ventured perhaps a cautious “maybe.” The emirate's capital, which named the emirate as a whole, was modernizing, with some comparing it to Dubai or perhaps Tokyo or Beijing. But once outside of the city, there was something eternal and timeless about the rest of the emirate.

  If she were honest with herself, Bedelia was not looking forward to what Miller would write about a place that she was beginning to love. He wrote action-adventure novels featuring a spy/mercenary/bounty hunter macho man, complete with swooning, scantily-clad women on the lurid covers, and his novels were apparently successful enough that he could send her to do on-the-ground research.

  "Can't stand to go to those countries myself," he had said with a surprisingly delicate shudder for such a big man. "Not really my cup of tea."

  Well, Miller's loss was her definite gain, and right now, there was nothing she wanted to do more than to work. Bedelia decided the kebab could wait, and instead, she wandered into the lines where the horses were staked.

  Each seller was only allowed to enter one horse in the opening run, and that meant there might have been as many as eight hundred horses staked in the lines now, by Bedelia's rough guess. And there were easily twice as many men venturing up and down, inspecting the horses available to them.

  She paused to hear two men haggle over a mare and her foal, and she watched entranced in the crowd as one man directed his horse to rear up and lash out with powerful hooves in what would have been a deadly strike if there was anyone in front of him.

  The sheer variety of people and horses was amazing, but it wasn't long before Bedelia realized one very important thing about the lines. She was the only woman there, and worse, some of the men were taking notice. She had seen plenty of women at the vendor stalls, selling and buying and chattering with each other, but since she had come to the main business area, she had not seen any other females there at all.

  Uneasily, she ducked her head and started to make her way back to the vendor stands. She didn't think she had given any offense, but she did remember from the guide book how very separate the lives of men and women in Muneazil could be. In the city, it was very much what she was used to back home in the States, with men and women mingling as they pleased. Out here in remote Masir, however, it seemed that things were different.

  She nearly ran straight into an older man with a flowing white beard, and he scowled at her, spitting something out in Arabic that she didn't understand. Her Arabic was passable, but he was either speaking too quickly or perhaps in a dialect she wasn't familiar with. In either case, the distinctly unfriendly look on his face unnerved her, and she walked a little faster.

  Of course, after ducking under a rope and then another, she quickly realized that she had gotten turned around. What she’d thought was a shortcut was nothing of the sort. Well, no matter; she
could find her way back easily enough now.

  She was just beginning to relax, thinking that nothing would happen to her, when suddenly a hard hand fell down on her shoulder, bringing her around. Bedelia yelped in a way that made an old cob next to her snort in displeasure, and then she was looking up into a pair of grinning faces.

  The men were both taller than her, which wasn't hard, and while one was bearded and the other nearly bald, they both had rather menacing grins that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise up.

  "Look what a pretty filly we've found here," said the bald one. "Do you think we can afford her?"

  "Oh, we might not even need to do that," replied his friend. "After all, a filly that runs wild doesn't have an owner that will be too worried, even if we just borrow her for a while."

  "I don't have an owner at all," Bedelia said in indignant Arabic, right before she realized that perhaps admitting this was not such a clever plan.

  At her statement, the men's eyes glowed with a kind of acquisitive fervor, and her heart leaped into her throat.

  She felt as if she were standing in frozen water, but slowly, ever so slowly, she forced her hand down to the pocket in her trousers, the one where she kept a slender little metal canister no larger than three fingers held together.

  "Oh well, of course you must let us try you," said the bald man. "If you have a pleasant enough pace, and a hot enough temperament, we can give you a good home, can't we?"

  The bearded man gave a chuckle that made Bedelia a little sick, and then, faster than she thought they could move, they both grabbed for her.

  She took two rapid steps back, her hand coming up smoothly as she had been taught. There was a fraction of a second where she ascertained that the orange nozzle was pointed away from her, not towards her, and then she sprayed a fine mist of pepper spray straight into her attackers' eyes.

  They shouted with fear and pain, clawing at their faces, and the bearded one stumbled forward, lurching for her. He didn't find her, but he did run right into the hindquarters of the gray cob she had ducked around. The cob had had quite enough of this nonsense, and with a stamp of a rear hoof, ground the bearded man's foot into the ground.