It made her feel sick. It made her feel unsteady on her own feet.
It made her want to take a swing at the man who stood before her, so easily shredding her to pieces. He’d done it that night on his balcony. He did it, again and again, as she sat at his table. And now this.
She wanted to open her mouth and admit it. She wanted to act like the grown woman she’d fought so hard to become, for a change, not that eternally passed-over foster kid who hadn’t mattered to anyone. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t give away the only weapon she’d ever had, no matter that every time she used it she was really only hurting herself.
But she didn’t know how to stop.
“Every single thing that’s happened since you set foot in that restaurant in New Orleans has been about you,” she said instead, and she kept her gaze steady on him as if that could make her steady, too. As if it could change that rocking, rolling sensation beneath her feet. “Your life. Your kingdom. Your throne. Your son. You, you, you. And I get it. You’re the king, as you’ll be the first to remind me.” She found one fist over her heart and pressed it in, deep. “But I have my own life. And guess what? I have my own dreams. My own hopes. My own—”
“Wonderful,” he interrupted, in that same harsh tone. He moved closer to her, towering over her in a manner she should have found intimidating. But she didn’t. She felt...melty and too soft and lit on fire, but not intimidated. “Tell me your dreams, Shona. I will make them come true. This is what I do.”
“I want to be free,” she shot back at him.
He didn’t laugh. Not exactly, though he made a sound that could have been something like it. Only devoid of any humor.
“What does that mean to you?” he asked. “You throw that word around, but tell me, what would you do with this freedom you are so obsessed with?”
Shona glared up at him. “Live my life without all this commentary on my wardrobe, for one thing.”
Malak didn’t take that bait. “Will you head back to that restaurant in New Orleans? Will you toil away at your two jobs and never quite make ends meet? Fight to pay the rent on a disgraceful house in that appalling neighborhood? You’ve been free to live out your dreams for the past four years. And what have you done with it?”
Shona pressed her curled fingers harder against her rib cage and told herself she wasn’t shaking, deep inside. “I’ve raised your crown prince. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“And what else?” An expression she couldn’t identify moved over his face when she didn’t answer him immediately, that on another man she might have called something like desperate. But this was Malak. “This is not a test. I want to know. You’ve spent nearly a month here, and in all that time, all you have told me is what you are not. You are not this person or that person. You will not do this, you will not do that. What do you want, Shona?”
It was another hit. A wallop, just like before, but she weathered it. Somehow she kept herself from crumbling. “I don’t need to prove myself to you.”
“You are so focused on what you think has been taken from you that you cannot seem to see what’s been given to you.” He shook his head. “You call this palace a prison, but what you fail to see is that it gives you access.”
“Access to what? You?” She scoffed. “I had more than enough access to you in a hotel bar in New Orleans.”
“To the world, Shona. To anything you like.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and that startled her. It seemed such a perfect expression of frustration and she was amazed that she had the power to get to him when he seemed like such an impassable wall to her. She wasn’t sure she liked it. “My child is by definition an extraordinarily wealthy individual. As am I. And there is no possibility that I will permit that child’s mother to live in squalor. Your old life was hard, I grant you. And I admire the fact that you made it work at all. But all that hardship is a thing of the past now. Your days of working around the clock, worrying over child care and trading shifts with friends are over. You are the only one who does not seem to realize that.”
Her heart was pounding. She realized she was holding her breath and forced herself to let it out.
Malak pressed his advantage. “Don’t you understand? You are mine now. There are no longer any boundaries on what you can or cannot do.”
“Except you. Except your boundaries.”
This time, that curve to his hard, beautiful mouth seemed sad. “And this is what you think of me, in the end. That I am indistinguishable from poverty, from prison.”
She didn’t think that. Of course she didn’t think that.
But she hated—or maybe the real truth was that she feared—that part of her that longed to reach out to him. To apologize for saying such a thing. To make him feel better, somehow, when she was still fighting off that shaking deep inside.
She bit her own tongue so hard she tasted copper.
And when she didn’t speak, Malak continued in that same low, dark way that was only making her internal trembling worse.
“If you want to live out your days in this narrow, dark cage you seem to think is your only option, you are welcome to do so,” he said. His tone lanced through her like some kind of terrible lightning. It made her want to defend herself. Cry. Rip herself open and bring a different version of herself out into the light, free of all the ugly weight of her childhood—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how. “But I would hope that you have better dreams for your child. He deserves better than that same small cage, do you not agree?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He looked past her yet again, and nodded his head, and then Yadira was there again.
“Come, mistress,” she said, her own voice subdued, as if everybody despaired of Shona. Including Shona herself, it seemed. “At the very least we can try on the clothes, yes?”
And Shona let the other woman take her by the elbow and steer her toward the doorway that led farther into the suite, and on toward her bedroom. She let Yadira guide her, but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from Malak’s until the very last moment. She couldn’t seem to find her voice, either.
As if he had one hand around her throat.
And worse by far, the other clenched tight around her heart.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CORONATION CEREMONY went off smoothly. Far better than anyone, including Malak, could have hoped after the surprise of his ascension and the even bigger shock of Miles’s existence. He was fairly certain his top ministers had expected something along the lines of an American reality show.
But Malak had opted instead for a private, deliberately quiet affair, because he thought it was important that Khalia’s second major transfer of power in the past few months seemed so smooth it hardly merited any publicity—aside, of course, from what the papers might say about it.
Besides, he had other plans for grand, sweeping public ceremonies.
A coronation was a ritual steeped in age-old tradition of a far more prosaic sort—the consolidation of authority into a single man. Less myth, more might. Malak had planned his down to the barest, most minute detail, because he wanted the somber images he planned to release to live in his people’s heads and hearts as if they had always been there.
Malak himself, looking quietly authoritative, accepted his place on the ancient throne in traditional Khalian dress. The ritual naming of his heir, that he knew would inspire his people to raptures. For who could resist tiny, fierce-faced Miles, staring up at his father with an identical look of concentration in those same dark green eyes?
And everything went as it should. Precisely as Malak had planned.
Except for Shona.
She had disappeared into her room with her servant earlier, looking shaken. Malak had found he didn’t like it. He preferred Shona bright and ferocious, not quietly obedient—though he hardly knew where to put such a thought after all the effort he’d expended attempting to break her even a little. And then she had emerged again some time later dressed appropriatel
y for her station.
At last.
And he’d forgotten what he liked or didn’t like about her emotional state, because he was, after all, just a man.
And she was so gorgeous it made his lungs hurt.
Malak had gone to significant trouble to find the perfect dress that encompassed both the sort of Western chic that would broadcast Shona’s beauty to the whole world and the suggestion of the kind of modesty his people would expect from a woman who had already borne him a son and would soon take her place at his side.
And she had exceeded his wildest expectations.
Shona was always beautiful. But it had never occurred to him how much she tried to hide that. With her aloofness. With her toughness. With her refusal to back down, ever, even so much as an inch. It wasn’t simply the way she dressed, it was how she carried herself.
As if she dared any man, even him, to find her beautiful when she could be a thorn in the side instead.
But it was as if the dress brought out a different side of her. A Shona he’d never met before, this one as soft as she was determined. No longer disguising her stunning beauty, but owning it at long last.
“Are you satisfied?” she’d asked him when she stood there, her hair a gorgeous dark halo around her and her brown eyes fixed on his while the dark green dress managed to both hide and celebrate her figure in a rush and tumble toward the floor.
And at any other time, that would have been a challenge. But not today.
Today, Malak had thought, she actually wanted to know his answer. Did he dare imagine she wanted his approval?
“I am completely satisfied,” he’d told her, though his voice was more gravelly than it should have been and his head was in the gutter.
It was harder than it should have been to simply extend his arm to her. Not to put his hands on her. Not to take her back into that bedroom and explore this new, even more stunning version of Shona with every part of his own exultant, needy body.
Not to call her what she was. His queen.
Instead, after a slight hesitation, she’d taken his arm. And she’d let him lead her through the palace.
“All you have to do is stand with Miles, smile a bit and look reasonably pleased to be involved in something of such import. Can you do that?” he had asked her as he’d walked them both toward the throne room his great grandfather had built for the express purpose of awing peasants and visitors alike.
His earlier ancestors had never seen a need for such a thing. They’d ruled by might and guile through the strength of their armies and the sheer audacity of their military strategies out here in these treacherous deserts. Thrones and crowns had been secondary, little more than affectations and fripperies to hardened warrior kings who took what they wanted and held it by the force of their will alone.
And somewhere between the power of his ancestors and the spectacle of modernity, Malak needed to find his own way to rule.
It made him...uneasy, almost, to consider how little he could imagine holding this throne without Shona. When had that happened? They had been forced back together because of a long-ago mistake and he should have hated that. He had hated the very idea of it, once upon a time. He was sure he had.
He didn’t understand why he didn’t hate it anymore. Why hate wasn’t at all the word he’d use to describe the situation he found himself in with this woman.
Not that he would allow it to be anything else.
“I will do my best,” she had replied. She’d shot him a look, holding herself very straight and tall as if some of those comportment classes had sunk in, after all. “For Miles’s sake.”
And Malak could hardly complain that she was hiding behind Miles when he had used his son to the same purpose himself. But it chafed at him.
And as he’d gone about his sacred duty, promising himself to his kingdom and his people, mouthing ancient words he had never thought would be his to say aloud, he found himself thinking less about the awesome responsibilities before him and more about this woman who still didn’t seem to realize she was destined to be his queen.
When there could be no other outcome.
And if he was honest, only a very small part of that had to do with the son they shared.
Afterward, in the small, formal reception that was filled with palace advisors and a host of his ministers, only a portion of his attention was on the usual political machinations, jostling for position and naked ambition amongst his courtiers. What he was focused on was Shona.
Shona, who kept a mysterious half smile on her face as she stood slightly off to one side, Miles there in front of her with his eyes wide. Shona, who gazed down at her son with that fierce pride written all over her—and the strangest thing was how Malak shared it. He could feel it in him, too. Miles had been outfitted to look like the miniature version of his father he was, and something about that made Malak’s chest ache.
But then, all of this did. The three of them standing together like this did something to him. He’d gotten good at ignoring it during the dinners they shared, but today it seemed less like a vague ache and more like a pulled tendon, sharp and inescapable, no matter how he stood or tried to catch his breath.
He could see how they’d look in all the pictures they’d taken today. Malak and Shona with Miles between them. Miles a few shades darker than Malak’s own brown skin and a few shades lighter than his mother. Like the happy family Malak had never known himself. The kind of happy family he’d never believed in.
A perfect set, something in him whispered.
When the nannies came to lead Miles away, Shona made as if to go with him, but Malak stopped her.
“I thought I would—”
“Remain behind with your lord and king?” Malak smiled at her frozen expression. “What an excellent idea.”
And he knew he’d gotten through to her somehow, because she made no move to create the sort of scene he knew full well she could have done, if she wished. And would have done a week ago. Possibly even yesterday. Instead, she stood with quiet dignity at his elbow, and stayed with him as he finished all his official conversations.
Malak doubted she knew that she had as good as announced her intention to wed him to every minister and courtier in the palace. And every subject of his who would see their pictures in the papers. But he knew.
And it felt a great deal like triumph—which he, in turn, enjoyed a whole lot more than all those other things he’d have preferred not to feel.
“Your ministers can’t possibly think that was appropriate,” she said when they were alone again, the last two in the formal hall outside the throne room. Malak loosened the tie of the very exquisitely cut Western suit he’d worn for the reception.
“If you mean the fact that I am dressed more like a Western king than the sheikh I am in my bones and my blood, believe me, there were many complaints.” He eyed her as if she’d made them. “But none I listened to, as you can see.”
Shona blinked. “What’s wrong with how you’re dressed?”
And then she looked flustered, as if the question revealed more than she’d meant it to.
Malak didn’t try very hard to hide his smile. “Nothing at all if the throne I wished to ascend was in Europe. Didn’t you hear the questions the reporter asked about that very thing?”
Shona was standing in the middle of the room, a vision in that formal dress that looked even better on her than Malak had imagined it would. She stood straight and almost too still, as if she was afraid to move. As if the wrong breath might lead to something far worse than the sudden intimacy of being the only two remaining in a formally crowded room.
“It’s very difficult to listen to so many people talk at once,” she said after a moment. “The reporter, the interpreter and then you as you answered.”
“Which is why you should take Arabic lessons,” he replied mildly, and smiled when her gaze cut to his with more of the heat he was used to. “It cuts down on the chatter. Alas, the tutor I hired for you tells me that you
have yet to sit through a single one of her carefully crafted—”
“You made your point earlier.” Her dark eyes glittered as she looked at him. “You don’t have to beat me over the head with it. And no, I didn’t hear the interpreter say anything about your clothes.”
“I wore traditional dress in the throne room and Western dress to the reception, upending centuries of tradition and, according to some, betraying my crass soul for all to see. Because I wish to straddle both worlds. I intend to be a progressive king.”
“Progressive?” she echoed. In clear disbelief. “You?”
“Indeed. There are parts of this kingdom that have remained unchanged since the twelfth century. Villages that have yet to enter the bold new world of the thirteenth century, much less the twenty-first.”
“But...progressive?” She let out a sound that was close enough to a laugh to make his eyes narrow. “That is not a word I would use to describe you.”
“My politics are considered remarkably progressive, in fact,” he assured her. “Here in Khalia, that is, where I am known as a great libertine, who wasted the better part of the last decade immersing myself in the scandalous pleasures of loose and casual Western cities and their many licentious women.”
“Right. And because of that you have such a liberal view of, say, marriage.”
“See?” His voice was soft. He doubted very much his expression matched. “You can do battle with me just as easily dressed like this as you can in those strange ensembles you cobbled together from the depths of your closet.”
He thought she looked shaken again, but if she did, she hid it in the next moment, forcing him to contemplate, yet again, the elegant line of her neck.
“It’s easy for you to say such things,” Shona said softly. “You have nothing to lose.”
She turned then and Malak almost let her go. But there was something about the way she moved toward the door, her head angled toward the floor and her hands in fists at her side. It caught at him. It made him question—
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