Page 2 of Sheikh's Unexpected Triplet Babies

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.

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