His brain was spinning—lost somewhere between flashbacks of Azlyn’s lips on his skin and the actual real-time video of her looking pale and exhausted on a street corner at midnight.Days of bliss.A sexual marathon, really.If it had been the Olympics of intimacy, they’d have taken gold.Every time she looked at him with those blue eyes, he’d been a goner.
Now…he couldn’t stop staring at her.
She looked tired.Understandable, given the hour.Azlyn was a morning person.She used to wake him with an irritatingly chipper grin and kiss him like she’d just had a double espresso and a reason to live.It was adorable.And evil.
That’s when something weird caught his eye.
“What’s this?”he asked, narrowing his gaze and flipping the screen toward his cousin.
“What’s what?”Ramzi grunted, rising from his chair like a suspicious bear.His other cousins crowded behind him, forming a wall of muscle and confusion.
“What are you idiots looking at?”Saif and Rylan muttered.“I didn’t think the story was that interesting.I only noticed it because she’d interviewed you last year during that publicity tour.”
Saif and Rylan squinted at the screen, two towering linebackers visibly struggling to decode what might have been a foreign language—or worse, women’s fashion.
“It looks like a scarf,” Saif offered.
“A long one,” Rylan added.“But weird.Like, why is it wrapped around her like that?”
Ramzi frowned and tilted his head, the action similar to the slow, deliberate motion of a cat confronted with a suspicious object that dared to exist without explanation.“Maybe it’s a new style?Like a toga, but sadder?”
“It’s lumpy,” Rylan announced, arms crossed like a man betrayed by textiles.“Fashion these days makes no damn sense.”
Zayn frowned.“Azlyn didn’t wear scarves.”He paused at the surprised expressions on his cousins’ features.“Well…we didn’t wear much, actually.”That earned him a few side-eyes, which he ignored.“Clothes weren’t really…practical.”He felt their continued stares, but kept his eyes on the screen.“She ripped one of my shirts.”
Saif leaned in again, one thick finger pointing to the suspicious scarf-lump.“I think that’s a baby holder.”
Silence.
“A what?”Ramzi blinked.
“You know, one of those wrap things women use.They tie a baby to their body with it.See that bump?That’s not part of the scarf.That’s a baby head.”Saif stepped back and picked up the newspaper again, completely unfazed by the emotional bomb he’d just detonated.
Zayn stared at him.Then at the tablet.Then back at Saif.
Ramzi and Rylan had already moved on, apparently.One was checking his phone, the other frowning at the sports section like it had personally offended him.
Zayn, on the other hand, felt like the ground had just tilted sideways.
A baby.
Ababy.
He kept staring, unable to look away.Because that wasn’t just a scarf.And it sure as hell wasn’t just a lump.
Saif—bless his obnoxious, irritating heart—understood that something monumental had just happened.His eyes narrowed on Zayn’s stunned expression, and he straightened, suddenly all alert muscle and military precision.
“What’s wrong?”
“I just…!”Zayn tore his eyes away from the screen, then immediately looked down again.A baby?Azlyn had a baby?
Maybe it wasn’t hers.Maybe she was holding it for someone else?
But even as the video replayed, he watched the way Azlyn instinctively cradled the bundle against her chest.
Maybe it wasn’t even a baby.He tried to grasp at that thought—hope, really—but it slipped through his fingers.The bundle didn’t move, true, but one end of the scarf was snug across her shoulder, the other wrapped securely around her waist.And her hands—damn her hands—were gently cupped around whatever was inside.One supported the head.The other, unmistakably, rested against what could only be a baby bottom.
Azlyn had a baby?
