Page 42 of Sheikh's Unexpected Triplet Babies

"I don't know," he said quietly. "Let us simply move forward for now."

"Yes," she said softly, never taking her gaze off of him. "Yes, we shall."

After he left, her mind replayed their interaction over and over again. Instead of despairing, though, she came away with three realizations.

He had stopped once while speaking. He had almost said something else, and she would have given a great deal to know what he’d almost said instead.

The second realization was that he thought he had stripped away her power, but somehow he had overlooked something very important. He had said she was allowed to stay wherever she wanted, and she fully intended to take advantage of that.

The third realization was that he still wanted her. The look of astonishment on his face when he saw her in her dress had been followed by a moment of what looked like pure possessiveness. He wanted her, and he wanted to make sure that no one else got to see what he saw.

It wasn't much, but it was more than she’d thought she had before.

He had told her that she wasn't living in a fairytale, and she knew it was true.

But she also knew that no fairytale heroine ever gave up until she had saved the day and gotten what was rightfully hers.

***

JAHIN MADE IT back to the car, and then he simply sat behind the wheel for several long moments, taking deep, deep breaths. He felt as if he had left a piece of himself in the townhouse, and it took every bit of his considerable willpower not to run back there and get it.

It was that damnable red dress, he thought resentfully. She had appeared there, and he had forgotten almost everything that had happened. All that mattered was that she was there, she was beautiful, and she was his. Even now, thinking of her lush body, he shivered. Her pregnancy was growing slightly more obvious. There was a curve to her belly and a ripeness to her body that hadn't been there before, but it only made her all the more desirable.

He’d had to stop himself from going to her then, and he had to stop himself from going up the stairs to her now. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that it would have broken something in him to make love to a woman who had shut him out.

He clung to his pride, to the fact that she had left him, rejected him in one of the most brutal ways possible, but it was still barely enough.

Jahin made himself take several deep breaths before he thought it was safe to drive in traffic again. He couldn't spend all his time fretting about Bedelia and the children she carried. She was under the care of one of the best obstetric wards in the world. She would be safe. All he had to do was keep his distance, and hopefully by the time she gave birth, he would be levelheaded enough to make calm arrangements for what happened next, whatever that was going to be.

It had seemed so simple when he was planning last night, but now by the cold light of day, Jahin could tell that the plan was ridiculous. He knew Bedelia, and there would be no way that she would allow him to take her children away. It had been the gesture of a desperate man, and if he were painfully honest with himself, he had wanted to hurt her.

When he realized that, Jahin felt a deep pain and shame inside him.

There was nothing in him that could hurt Bedelia. It would only be hurting himself, and he knew it.

No, he simply had to wait for time to fix some of this. He would wait, and things would get better.

As he drove, however, Jahin felt the deep hole in his heart, and he wondered if that was the way he would feel forever.

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