Page 29 of Sheikh's Quarantine Triplet Baby Daughters

Diane

As much as she might have wanted to spend every waking moment with Samyar, Diane actually spent most of her days on her own. He was able to grab lunch and dinner with her most days, even when his meetings and press conferences were at their most volatile, but otherwise, she was left to her own devices for the daylight hours.

With a shrug, Diane went back to the museum wing. Amusingly, she had never given her key cards back, and she still had access to the material she had been working on. She continued the research she had started in the silence of her work room, and sometimes, it was interesting to pretend that nothing had changed; that she could, if she wanted, walk out and see the city or rent a car and drive to a nearby national park.

"Of course," she said to herself wryly one day, "everything has changed."

Even at the first trimester, she was growing noticeably rounder, her belly pushing out in front of her in a way that she could only think of as insistent. Dr. Ramamurthy had shrugged, telling her it was normal.

"Triplets are always smaller than singletons," she said. "There are three small fetuses growing inside you right now. They need the room."

I'm going to be enormous when they're born,Diane thought. That's going to take some getting used to.

She was getting tired faster. She was occasionally much more inclined to daydream than she had been before. Samyar insisted she keep a panic button on her at all times, especially if she was going down to the mostly deserted museum wing, and she could see why he was so worried.

However, for the most part, life was continuing as best it could in a time of global panic, and every day, she was grateful for what she had.

Of course Diane realized later, she should have remembered how isolation and a quiet workshop had gotten her into this in the first place.

She was just returning to the residential wing of the palace when a tall woman in an impeccable white suit approached her with speed.

"Ms. Warner," she said, her voice brisk. "My name is Camille Nahas. I'm the head of public relations for the palace."

Diane took her hand with a vague feeling of alarm. She had never met this woman before.

"I'm pleased to meet you," she said slowly, and Camille made a face. It turned her from an inapproachable perfect figure into someone much more human.

"I'm really sorry that you probably won't be," she said honestly. "Have you seen the papers?"

"The... papers?"

"All right, that's probably all to the good. We're going into a meeting to discuss the situation in ten minutes, and I wanted to make sure that you were in attendance. If you'll come with me?"

Diane followed her automatically, thinking that she was only wearing jeans and a long black tunic, nothing as sharp as Camille's suit.

"So quickly," she murmured, and Camille smiled grimly.

"Believe me, it would have been sooner if we could get the king out of his meeting sooner. As it was, he was able to leave early—"

"Wait, you got Samyar out of his meetings?" Diane asked, appalled. "He's working with public health—"

"And if he wants to keep working with public health, if he wants to keep making the impact that he has been, this needs to be addressed at once. Trust me, I like this as little as anyone else."

Diane's hands went over her belly in an unconscious protective moment, and she swallowed hard. She was silent the rest of the way to the spacious conference room where Samyar was already seated, glaring at the tablet in front of him and the people around him. The moment he saw her, however, he leaped to his feet.

"Diane! Dammit, Camille, I told you she didn't have to be here."

"And you pay me a great deal of money to tell you that she does. Fire me if you want, but that's the truth. I'd rather be fired than involved in whatever comes next if you keep her in the dark."

"What's going on?" demanded Diane, who couldn't wait any longer. "If you don't tell me what's going on, I swear, I will go out and find it myself!"

Samyar and Camille both winced at that.

"It's fine," Samyar insisted. "It's a small matter, we're getting it handled, and nothing is going to change."

Camille was more direct. She hooked Samyar's tablet away from him and slid it over to Diane.

"You might want to have a seat," she said, and Diane was glad she had when she read the headline.

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