The Sheikh's Pregnant Wife - Leslie North Page 0,37

her. Step one, fluff the pillows. Step two, put the plate down and climb in. Step three...

Before she picked up her fork again, Kara called down to the fort desk. “Hi. This is Kara Shaw in the penthouse suite. Kara...Hasan.” She hadn’t officially changed her name, but this needed to be as easy as possible. “I’d like to extend my reservation. Three days, please.” They agreed instantly, and she dropped the phone back into its cradle.

Kara picked up the plate. First, she’d finish this meal and watch some crappy TV. And then she’d figure out her next steps. She’d gather her courage. Things couldn’t swing between tenderness and loneliness like this—it was breaking her heart.

She should have known better than to fall in love with Yaseen.

18

He’d made the wrong choice.

The plane lifted off from the runway, and Yaseen’s heart hurt like it had forgotten how to do its job. It screamed. It howled. He’d made a horrible mistake, leaving Kara in that restaurant alone. Leaving her at all.

He loved her.

This wasn’t just a bad mistake—it was the worst mistake of his life. He pressed a hand to his chest to try to contain the spreading ache. It didn’t work.

What had gotten into him? He could have delegated the meetings in France. He could have gone back to Raihan with Kara on schedule and visited the site in France after he’d settled her in. He’d wanted to be important—indispensable—but he had it backward. Kara—and soon their baby—were the indispensable ones, and he’d just dispensed of her. Like a fool.

The plane broke through the clouds, the moonlight streaming down on the tops. He wanted to bang on the windows of the plane and shout at the pilot to turn around.

He grabbed for the phone on the desk of the private jet and dialed her number. It went straight to voicemail. Yaseen fired off a text to his security at the hotel. The lead man responded instantly. She’s in the penthouse suite for the night, he said. No sign she’s leaving. He felt a momentary relief. She was safe. But he missed her voice like a man in the desert misses cool water.

He landed in France and checked into the hotel but couldn’t imagine falling asleep. It was dark, but not particularly late, and the streets of Paris were lit up with a thousand streetlights. Yaseen changed into a less formal shirt and started walking. He walked, and walked, and walked. The blocks rolled by. He made turns at random, not wanting to know where he was. He had no idea how far he’d gone when he came across the football field.

It was lit up by a powerful set of floodlights, and beneath those lights were two teams of girls. On one side of the field, a group of women—their mothers, probably—sat huddled on blankets with coffee cups in their hands.

The ball rolled over and knocked against his foot.

He looked up at the field, and one of the girls waved him in, a big grin on her face. He dribbled out onto the field, choosing one of the sides at random, and they continued the game. Yaseen jogged up and down the field three times, passing the ball until one of the girls scored.

“You’re not bad,” one of them said, her blonde hair almost glowing in the floodlights.

“I could be a lot worse.” He smiled, gave them a wave, and left the field.

The field’s grass was perfectly manicured without a divot out of place. The even lawn extended, he saw now, over to a small cricket field, also under lights as bright as day. Two teams of boys played there. As he watched, part of the cricket audience came over to watch the girls play. They cheered each other on, the groups of people shifting between the two sporting events and a third area—a playground.

This was like Mennah and the team he wanted to sponsor. The difference was that these children had wonderful fields to play on. Everyone enjoyed themselves. The shouts rose into the night around him, joy echoing back. But Yaseen frowned. Why should the children in Mennah have less than these children in France? Why shouldn’t his own people have these advantages? It hit him all at once—that’s what Kara meant about using a different metric to evaluate the kinds of projects she worked on. Guilt turned his stomach. Here he was, participating in a joy that he denied to his own people.

He reached for his phone in his pocket,