The Sheikh's Pregnant Wife - Leslie North Page 0,5
fact, I think I’ll take a walk to stretch my legs. Do the guards know the way?”
He saw this last statement for what he hoped it was—a signal that she was finally relaxing into the protocols and standards of the royal family. They couldn’t just stroll away from the palace, or any building, without protection. He knew she hadn’t loved this at the beginning.
“I’ll come with you.” At his words, Kara broke into a smile. “Let’s change into something more comfortable, and then we can go.”
A smile quirked the corner of her lips, but she turned away before it became overtly flirtatious. He stifled his own disappointment. What right did Yaseen have to want her to flirt with him? He shouldn’t. She shouldn’t. They shouldn’t get into that kind of routine, not with the end of their marriage written into a contract. The more he focused on work and the less he focused on how beautiful her eyes were, the better.
They went inside. Two members of the staff had run ahead with their suitcases and set them on the foot of the bed in the master suite. The room was done in shades of cream and white. Aunt Zein had been in charge of the original scheme, and Yaseen’s family had never changed it. It was just like Zein to design a house that served as a perfect backdrop for her signature pottery. One of her pieces kept watch from a built-in shelf in the corner.
“Oh, look at that,” Kara said, leaning in close.
“One of her creations.” Yaseen had to stop himself from pulling her back by the elbow. His aunt’s pottery pieces were priceless—both in terms of their dollar value and the sentimental status they held for the family.
Kara brushed by him on her way back to the bed, her hand making the barest contact with his. Goosebumps erupted on both his arms. Kara bent over her suitcase and pulled out a light blue sundress. She shook it out, then disappeared into the walk-in closet to change—no one would think they’d spent a hot night together, once upon a time. Yaseen tamped down his disappointment at her departure and focused on changing out his starched dress shirt for a casual pullover. He turned away from the open suitcase to find Kara watching him. Her dress had a square neckline he wanted to trace with his finger inside the fabric, and her bare toes wiggled charmingly.
“What?” he asked.
“I’ve never seen you dressed so...informally.”
“I’m not expecting any press out on the walking path.” He nodded toward the DSLR camera cradled in her hands. “What’s that for?”
“Pictures,” she said. “What else? It has a feature that can transfer them directly to my phone for my Instagram.” She slipped on a pair of espadrilles.
A laugh escaped him. “Are you taking photos for the sports center? Because we won’t be building that on the villa’s grounds.”
“It’s for my own personal collection.” Kara kept the camera close at hand as they went out the wide back doors of the villa, crossed the yard, and took a path underneath ever-thickening shade trees.
Zein had been very fond of the walking paths and had them continually manicured, but she hadn’t paved them. I want it to still feel like nature, she’d said to him once, when he was a teenager. You don’t get that feeling with a layer of concrete between your feet and the earth. Kara walked slightly ahead of him, adjusting the settings on her camera. She stopped and snapped a few shots of the trees against the sky.
“Our marriage is so far from normal,” she said, her tone almost absent. The breeze picked up her voice and brought it to him with a warm caress against his skin.
He put his hands in his pockets. “What even is normal?”
“Not this.” Kara laughed, wrinkling her nose.
“No, tell me,” insisted Yaseen. “What about it isn’t normal?”
She pursed her lips, and they kept walking along the path, the sundress lifting deliciously on the wind. “I don’t know,” she admitted after several beats. “I didn’t have a stereotypical middle-class upbringing with two parents and a white picket fence.”
“Neither did I,” he said wryly.
She laughed again, and the sound lifted his mood. “We don’t share a bed, for one thing. I don’t know many wives who sleep in a separate suite, like medieval royalty. And we’re mainly together for public appearances.”
“You don’t think that counts as normal?” They both laughed then, and the silence between them settled into something easy and