“Eh,” said her grandfather, dipping some fries into the stew. “All is good, eh? Nothing bad here.”

  There were too many of them to fit in the tiny dining room, and so they ended up spread throughout the living room too, Laura and Ziad on the couch.

  “I cannot believe you are eating a hamburger out of a takeout carton,” she marveled. “And wearing jeans. I've really done a number on you, haven't I?”

  “I am full of surprises,” Ziad said with a wink.

  They were finishing up with the meal, and Laura was beginning to wonder if Andrea should lie down for a rest when Ziad stood up.

  “Hang on for just a moment,” he said, going to the kitchen.

  Blinking, Laura looked around at her family. Most of them looked as surprised as she was, but Emily had a gleeful expression on her face.

  Wait, what does Emily know?

  To her surprise, Ziad returned with a gorgeous pink cake, decorated with sugar roses. It was large and beautiful, and it could only have come from the refrigerator.

  “Oh, Emily, you knew,” she said, and Emily laughed.

  Ziad passed around cups, filling them with champagne for the adults and sparkling grape juice for the kids.

  “Today is a celebration,” he said, pouring Laura her serving. “I wanted to do my bit.”

  “I think you did plenty after almost having that cabinet fall on you yesterday,” she said.

  She had thought that Ziad would come and sit down with her again, but instead he stayed standing.

  “A toast,” he proposed, raising his cup. “To Andrea's health and beauty.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Andrea enthusiastically, lifting her drink, and they all drank.

  It was a beautiful moment, but something else in the air made the hair at the back of Laura's neck stand on end. She set her champagne aside, wondering if it had been so long since she drank that it was going to her head.

  “Oh, Laura, here, have mine,” Jamila said, shoving her sparkling grape juice at her, and Laura shook her head.

  “No, honey, I'm fine…”

  “One more toast,” Ziad said, turning to Laura, oddly solemn. “To the most beautiful woman in my life, the one with the greatest courage, the greatest wit, and of course the greatest heart. To Laura, who taught me that the bonds of family can stretch across the world without breaking.”

  “I'll drink to that,” she said with a smile, and she drank from her cup, only to realize it was Jamila's sparkling grape juice with a few cake crumbs floating in it.

  “Oh honey, you can't—"

  She froze, bringing the cup to the coffee table by her side. While she had been drinking, Ziad had gone down on one knee in front of her, a small velvet box in his hand.

  “Ziad?”

  “I'm sorry,” he murmured. “I have already used up all my prepared words. Will you marry me, Laura? For real this time?”

  It couldn't have been better if fireworks were going off. In her memory, they would be.

  “Ziad,” she said softly. “Ziad, I…I don't know what to say…”

  “You do,” said her grandfather, his wrinkled face wreathed with a wide grin. Beside her, her mother clapped her hand over his mouth. Laura thought that other people would have taken it badly if their beloved's proposal had been interrupted by her grandparent, but there was something terribly perfect about it, having her family here, seeing the joy on their faces.

  “Say you will,” Ziad suggested, not moving. “Say you will, and I will take care of all the rest.”

  “Say you love me.”

  The words popped out of her mouth unexpectedly, but once they did, she knew that she could not take them back. She needed the words, to know that they were true before she could do anything else, but Ziad only smiled.

  “Of course I love you,” he said, tenderness in every line of his frame. “Of course I do. I have loved you almost from the beginning. I did not always show it, and I did not know the words for what it truly was until shockingly late in the game, but I love you. Do you love me?”

  She stared at him in incredulity.

  “Don't you know?” she asked, her heart thudding hard. “You are asking me all of this, telling me all of this, without knowing?”

  “I suspect,” he said. “I hope. But no. I do not know.”

  It was too much for her, that he might have been living in the same kind of doubt that she was, and something inside her broke, letting in a flood of light and laughter as she threw herself into his arms.

  “Yes,” she murmured fiercely. “I love you. I love you with everything in me. I belong to you, and yes, I will marry you again and again if that's what you want. You are everything to me, and I want to be everything for you.”

  Ziad laughed, hugging her so tight that she laughed breathlessly, and then he pulled back, taking her hand.

  “This, my darling, belongs to you,” he said, slipping the ring onto her hand.

  Wedding bands were not a traditional part of Yeni culture. The sapphire ring he had proposed with the first time was a gorgeous piece, but it was far too large for her to wear normally. She knew it had been selected for its appeal to the cameras.

  At first glance, this ring looked humble in comparison. It was a delicate band of diamonds, the ring sized perfectly to her hand, but she suspected that from the sparkle, it might have been worth more than the previous ring two or three times over. It didn't matter. He could have made her a ring from a twist-tie and she still would have loved it so long as it came with his declaration of love.

  She admired the ring for another moment, and then she threw her arms around him.

  “And you, my darling, belong to me,” she said, and she held on to him tight as her family burst into cheers.

  Epilogue

  The sun setting over the water painted the darkening waves with gold and orange and salmon, and Laura took a deep and bracing breath of the cool sea air. It was a perfect late-summer evening, and she looked down in amusement at the blanket spread out on the sand, a neatly packed basket sitting next to her.

  Well, almost perfect. This really is a picnic meant for two people.

  The enormous family picnic had taken place that afternoon, and between them, her family, Ziad's family, and Sarah's family had turned the beach into a roar of fun and excitement. She and Ziad and the kids had already been on the private island for a week, her own family had shown up a few days ago, but everyone else had only arrived that afternoon.

  If she was being perfectly honest with herself in the fading light of day, she’d had no idea how it was going to go. At first glance, you wouldn't be able to find people more different from each other, but within moments, she had realized that all her fears were unfounded. Jake had taken to Fahim's quiet surety like a duck to water, her mother and Maryam seemed to be getting on like a house on fire, and her father, her grandfather, and Imran found an incredible amount of common ground in playing with Hasan and Jamila.

  We're really not separate families any more, she thought with a growing swell of contentment in her chest. We're just one family now. We'll face trouble together; we will share our joys. This is what life is all about.

  She still teared up when she thought about Jamila calling her over to help with her drawing a few weeks ago.

  “Mommy, I can't get the colors right. Will you come help me?”

  The word had struck Laura to the heart, and she had somehow managed not to sob or laugh with joy when she’d said, “Of course, sweetie, show me what you want to do.”

  She was Mommy now, and her heart had never felt so full.

  She checked her watch.

  Well, life might also be about being on time and not keeping your spouse waiting.

  Almost as if she had summoned him with her thoughts, Ziad appeared at the head of the small staircase leading up to the beach houses, and a few moments later, he was flopping down on the blanket by her side, giving her a sweet kiss before throwing his arm around her.

  “Sorry I'm late,” he said. “I just managed to get Hasan down for the night, and Imran came looking for me.”

  “Oh, did he?”

  “This time, he wanted me to confirm little Layla's genius because he thought that she was counting the stars on the mobile over her crib.”

  Laura laughed, shaking her head.

  “No. I keep telling him. She's focusing. She's getting better control over her body, but no. She is not counting. She is not a mathematical genius, nor is she destined to be a gymnast because she managed to grab her own feet a little early.”

  “I don't know how Sarah puts up with it,” Ziad said, but there was a fondness to his words that told Laura how little he minded.

  “Oh, I think they deserve each other. At least Imran has the excuse of being new to babies in general and not having a lot of experience. I think Sarah's barely behind him in her pride. The only thing stopping her from calling Layla a genius herself is that she knows I'll laugh at her.”

  “Yes, they do deserve each other,” Ziad said with a laugh, and Laura sat up straighter.

  “Want to drink to it?” she asked, and she pulled a small bottle from the basket.

  “With fruit juice?” he asked, amused.

  “I was in a hurry to get out the door, and I grabbed the first likely looking bottle. You can't blame me for accidentally picking up Jamila's grape juice.”

  “Ah, fair enough, I suppose. It is rather tasty.”

  She poured them glasses of grape juice, and solemnly, they toasted first to Imran and Sarah, and then to their families joining together.

  “I'll admit that I had some worries,” Ziad said after a moment. “Our families are so very different.”

  “We are very different,” she said easily. “Do you have some worries about us?”

  “Never,” he said immediately. “No. I have been sure about you since…”

  He paused, and Laura tilted her head slightly to look at him over the rim of her champagne glass.

  “It's okay. I know we've had a rocky road of it starting out—”

  She blinked when he put a finger over her lips, effectively silencing her.

  “I was never sure of myself,” he said solemnly. “I never knew myself well enough to love you fully at the beginning. Every time I was overly critical, every time I doubted our relationship, it was not you I was doubting. I see that now. It was only myself, and I hope that someday you will forgive me for it.”

  Laura abruptly found herself free of a weight that had been sitting on her shoulders for a long time. She nodded, squeezing Ziad's hand in hers.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.”

  It was all becoming a little serious for her, and she cast about for another topic. She wasn't quite ready to broach the big thing on her mind, but she quickly found something else.

  “So we came up from the beach today to a priority envelope for Emily. She was accepted to the University of Almiri, and she can start in the fall.”

  “Ah, was that what the shouting was all about?”

  “Ha, yes. Emily was thrilled, and of course everyone is thrilled for her. I guess all those videos I sent home about how much I love Yeni made an impression. I didn't even know that she had applied.”

  “I think she will love the country almost as much as you do,” Ziad said with a smile. “And it will be good for you to have family close by. I wish your parents would reconsider my offer to bring them over.”

  “They're stubborn. Work on them a little. Be patient, invite them over to stay for a week or so. Yeni's an easy place to love.”

  “You're so easy to love,” Ziad told her, and he tilted her chin up for a kiss.

  It started as a gentle and sweet thing, but it caught fire in the space of a few seconds. This had been an amazing vacation, but with all the people involved, it had been hard to get any kind of real privacy. Now, with the sun dipping below the horizon, the shadows lengthening, and the night birds calling over the shush of the waves, they fell into each other, their kisses hungry and sweet as sugar.

  Ziad pulled the hem of her camisole up and was running his hand along her bare flank when she managed to get the willpower to push him back for a moment.

  “What?” he asked with a frown.

  “There was…well, I had an ulterior motive for asking you out here.”

  Ziad grinned, at her, squeezing her hip gently.

  “I thought I had figured out what the ulterior motive was, but please, by all means, enlighten me.”

  At her look, he sobered, straightening up.

  “Laura, what is it?”

  She took a deep breath, tangling her hands in her lap.

  “I was just thinking. You know. With our families here, with Sarah and Imran's new baby. I was just thinking that maybe it would be nice to give Jamila and Hasan a new baby sister or brother of their own?”

  Her voice squeaked a little on the last word, and then she gasped as Ziad pulled her into his arms, standing up and bringing her straight off her feet.

  “You would do me the honor of bearing my child?” he asked, his grin enormous, and she threw her arms around him.

  “It's an honor that goes both ways,” she said breathlessly.

  Ziad put her down, and she could sense the tension shift in his body, something that sent a thrill up her spine.

  “Well, then,” he said silkily. “Perhaps we better look into getting started on your intriguing proposal.”

  “Oh.” Laura giggled. “That sounds like such a good idea.”

  She took a step back.

  He took a step forward.

  Laura turned and ran for the house and their bedroom, Ziad just one step behind her. He was gaining fast, but she didn't mind. This was a game where they would both end up the winners.

  End of The Sheikh’s Contract Wife

  Khalid Sheikh Series Book Two

  The Sheikh’s Tempting Nanny, 20 May 2021

  The Sheikh’s Contract Wife, 27 May 2021

  The Sheikh’s Pregnant Teacher, 3 June 2021

  PS: Do you love hot blooded Sheikhs? Then keep reading for exclusive extracts from The Sheikh’s Pregnant Teacher and The Sheikh’s Marriage Bargain.

  Thank you!

  Thank you so much for purchasing my book. It’s hard for me to put into words how much I appreciate my readers. If you enjoyed this book, please remember to leave a review. Reviews are crucial for an author’s success and I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to review the book. I love hearing from you!

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  About Leslie

  Leslie North is the USA Today Bestselling pen name for a critically-acclaimed author of women's contemporary romance and fiction. The anonymity gives her the perfect opportunity to paint with her full artistic palette, especially in the romance and erotic fantasy genres.

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  BLURB

  Their song of passion echoes through the desert…

  Sheikh Fahim Khalid, the gruff loner of the Khalid royal family, has been tasked with finding a music tutor for his brother’s adorable children. And he can't believe his good fortune when American Rose Adams applies for the job. Little does he know, Rose, is pregnant, and looking for a safe haven from her past.

  Their shared love of music ignites a spark between them, and rumors of romance soon run rampant through the palace. Until Rose’s ex turns up, bringing scandal to the royal family. And no matter how he feels about Rose, that is something Fahim cannot allow…

  Rose has never met anyone as protective—or as sexy—as the Sheikh. She hates that her past is causing problems for Fahim's family, but she hates the thought of leaving him even more.

  Will Fahim be there for her when she needs him the most? Or will his duty to family drive them apart once and for all?

  Grab your copy of

  The Sheikh’s Pregnant Teacher

  Available 27 May 2021

  www.LeslieNorthBooks.com

  EXCERPT

  Chapter One:

  The palace library was one of Fahim's favorite places in the world. He had spent countless hours here as a young boy studying for school, and then countless hours studying to pass the bar as a young man. It was his right and his privilege to make use of the library, a vaulted space filled to the brim with a thousand years of literature, but today, for perhaps the first time, he wanted nothing more than to escape, out a window, perhaps, if necessary.

  “You studied music for a while,” his brother, the king, had said. “It should be the matter of a moment for you to find Jamila a music tutor, shouldn't it?”