She knew better than to give in to the feelings that slapped at her and beat her over the head then. Just as she should have known better than to give in to that other feeling that she’d foolishly given voice to over and over again.
The truth was, she’d known better as she was doing it. She’d known. But she’d gone ahead and done it, anyway.
She had no one to blame but herself for that sick feeling deep in her belly now.
“Enjoy,” she muttered at herself as she left that awful sitting room and its terrible mirror and went to find her little boy.
Shona spent the rest of the afternoon with Miles, forcing herself to act calm and normal and fine, but all the while her head spun around and around. And Malak’s words echoed inside of her as if he’d tattooed them on her rib cage.
Maybe if he had, it would have hurt her less.
Would Malak really send her off to some stronghold out there in the desert somewhere? Had she truly done this to herself? All by herself? Had she made all of this up—all the things she’d been so certain were building there between them?
But Shona couldn’t answer any of her own questions. And the more they spun around inside of her, the more ill they made her feel.
When Yadira came to tell her, with her usual polite smile that Shona sometimes wanted to peel off her face by any means necessary, that the king would be dining elsewhere that evening, Shona wasn’t surprised.
It felt like a kick to the ribs when she was already down, but she wasn’t surprised.
She and Miles ate together instead, sitting on pillows low to the ground because Miles still thought that was almost too much fun to bear. When Miles asked where his papa was, she told him that his father was a very busy man who might often have to spend time away from them to do the things he needed to do as a mighty king. And she wondered if this would be her life now. If she would make up story after story to explain Malak’s absence, or if she would be the one who was exiled. And if she was locked away somewhere, what stories would Malak tell Miles to explain her absence away?
A lump stuck in her throat.
She shooed away the nannies and put Miles to bed herself as if they were in their own, rattly house in New Orleans instead of a vast suite tailor-made for the crown prince. She tucked him into his big, wide bed that he liked to pretend was a spaceship and she read him story after story, and then she stayed with him as his breath became deep and even.
She had pulled the sumptuous curtains closed so Miles’s room was dark, with only the faint gleam of the night-lights the nannies had placed at intervals casting happy little glowing circles in the corners of the big room.
Shona finally understood that her son was a prince. She understood, whether she liked it or not, that this was the reality they lived in now and there was no getting away from it. But there was more than a little part of her that rebelled at the notion that her sweet little Miles, so happy and so bright, might one day turn into another version of his father. Or his grandfather.
Malak, who touched her like she was made of fire then told her coldly he had never wanted her at all. Or the old king, whom Shona had only seen in passing, shuffling through the palace halls with a thousand-yard stare and nothing but whispers in his wake. She didn’t want to see Miles become either one of them.
She didn’t want her son growing up like all the broken men whose homes she’d lived in as a child. She’d seen ruin in all its forms. Substance abuse. Pure cruelty, simply because they could. Because no one cared. She’d seen poverty and selfishness and, worst of all, good intentions gone horribly wrong.
She didn’t want any of that for Miles. She wanted him whole. Happy.
As bright as he was now. As he was meant to be forever.
Why don’t you want that for yourself? asked a tiny little voice deep inside of her.
At first she tried to ignore it. She concentrated on the sweetness of the moment. Just her and Miles, curled up on a bed together, the way it always had been before. Her and Miles against the world.
But that little voice was insistent.
And the more it poked at her, whispering questions she didn’t know how to answer, the more Shona found herself turning all of this over and over inside of her. As if her whole life was some kind of shivering thing that had taken her over tonight, and she couldn’t control it at all.
Why did she accept it when someone made her feel like trash, even if that someone was the only man she’d ever loved? Why did she agree with his assessment when some part of her knew—she knew—that he’d been deliberately trying to hurt her? She would take great pleasure in ripping apart anyone who dared do that kind of thing to her child—so why couldn’t she stand up for herself?
“You’re not a whiner,” she whispered at herself, there in the dark, while Miles slept beside her. “You’re a fighter.”
If she could fight and survive in New Orleans all these years—from foster care to the life she’d carved out for herself with absolutely no help from anyone—she should certainly be able to do the same here, where she was more pampered than she’d ever imagined any person could be.
But she couldn’t help thinking that she’d spent her whole life fighting for the wrong things.
That notion tasted sour in her own mouth, but that didn’t make it any less true.
She’d fought for some kind of safety, always. She’d fought to keep herself protected—by any means necessary. She’d fought to keep her child safe, too. To keep them both under a roof. To keep predators away from the both of them, one way or another. She’d fought and she’d fought, even if that fight had often meant cutting off her nose to spite her face.
And the notion that Miles might ever have to do any of that—for any reason—made her feel even more broken than she had in that sitting room earlier.
She pulled in a breath and tried to steady herself, but that feeling didn’t go away. If anything, as she was lying there with her hand on Miles’s back, feeling that little-boy heat of his fill her palm, it got worse.
Shona didn’t want that kind of life—her life—for Miles. She would die before she would let him live the way she had. Always desperate. Always suspicious. Always waiting to get knocked down again. She would die.
So why was it she so easily accepted it for herself? As if it was no more than her due?
Shona didn’t realize she meant to move. It seemed like some kind of dream. She had a simple enough thought about what she ought to accept for herself—and then the world changed. Or she did, anyway.
She was on her feet before she knew it. Then she was in the halls, wandering through the palace as if it really was her home. As if she had every right to go where she pleased. She swept past the guards at the entrance to Malak’s rooms, and realized as she inclined her head in their direction that she was perhaps more of a queen than she’d ever given herself credit for.
Because they certainly treated her as if she had every right to march straight past them.
Malak wasn’t in his private dining room, and that meant Shona had to explore the rest of the sprawling monarch’s suite that she’d really only seen in passing—too busy had she been with her gaze on Malak. It was even more luxurious here, one room leading into the next in a cascade of evident wealth. She moved through all of them, paying little attention to the gilt and the gold, the huge paintings and the towering statues, the marble floors covered in rugs so soft and so delicate they felt like clouds.
And then, finally, she found him.
He was standing in what looked like a little art gallery, the walls covered with portraits of stern men.
It took her a moment to realize that he looked like all of the men in those portraits.
Shona didn’t linger in the doorway. She didn’t wait for him to notice her or invite her in. Or worse, bar her from entry. She marched straight in, then headed across the gleaming black marble floor toward him.
Head high and chin tilted, as if she had every right.
“I cannot think
of a single reason that you should be here.” Malak did not turn and look at her. He kept his gaze trained on the portrait before him, of a man it took Shona longer than it should have to realize was his father.
He didn’t have to look at her to hurt her, she discovered. He spoke in that same hard, dismissive voice that had made her bleed earlier, and that accomplished the same thing.
But the world had changed. She had changed. Whichever it was, she didn’t believe him anymore. She didn’t believe the things that had happened between them were some kind of game he had played. Honey instead of vinegar. Something deliberate and fake to sweeten the acquisition of his only heir.
The only way she could believe that was if she also believed that she was the piece of Louisiana trash she’d spent her life thinking she was. And maybe some part of her would always think that might be true. But the rest of her adamantly did not.
And if she was going to teach her son how to stand up not only for himself, but also for the people who would one day be his to lead, she needed to stand up for herself first.
Right here, right now.
No matter what it cost her. Because whatever the price was, it was better than cowering in an empty room somewhere and believing all the lies people had told her.
Shona was done with that. She was ready for what came next.
And that started with this man who had turned her life upside down—twice.
“I can think of any number of reasons for me to be here,” she replied, her voice cool and even and a weapon all its own. She was proud of herself for that. “But first and foremost, Malak, I love you. Despite the fact you’re being an ass.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THAT NO ONE else had ever dared call the great Sheikh Malak, the king of Khalia, an ass—to his face, at any rate—was immediately obvious.
The look he gave Shona was nothing short of amazed. Arrogant and astonished at once, and as he scowled at her he seemed like a thundercloud, filling the whole of the gallery without having to move a muscle.
But Shona had grown up in hurricanes. She only smiled at him. Serenely.
“Have you lost your mind entirely?” The question was quiet. Soft, even. But she didn’t mistake it for any kind of weakness. Not when she could see that wild gleam in his dark green gaze. “Is this your version of a suicide mission, Shona?”
“I don’t believe you,” she told him, instead of answering his questions. “I don’t believe a single thing you said to me earlier. I don’t think you believe it, either.”
“This is the trouble with innocence,” Malak said, and there was a certain drawling disparagement in his tone that slid down her back like shame. But she straightened, because she understood on some level that shame was exactly what he wanted her to feel.
Which meant she refused. “I’m hardly an innocent.”
“Not now, I grant you. But for all intents and purposes, you might as well have been a virgin. And I don’t how to tell you this nicely, Shona, but what you are feeling is remarkably common.”
“If that’s your attempt to be nice, it failed.”
He looked as if he pitied her, but she refused to give in to that scared part of her that urged her to slink away and lick her wounds somewhere else. Somewhere safe.
“This is what virgins do,” Malak told her in that same tone. “They confuse sensation for emotion.”
“I think what you mean to say is that this is what kings do,” she replied, not backing down an inch, because this was the most important fight of her life. “Kings of this kingdom, anyway. In the face of any emotion they panic, don’t they? Love is too big. Too unwieldy. It seems your father and your brother felt they had to choose between love and the throne.”
“You know nothing about my father or my brother. And I would advise you to pick your words very carefully.”
“You insisted that I take lessons, and I have. I imagine I know more about the recent history of this country than you do, because you lived it. You were in the thick of it. I’ve been studying the bigger picture.” She reached out a hand and poked her finger into his chest, and realized after she’d done it that it had been entirely for the jagged sort of joy that exploded inside of her when she saw his expression. That intense astonishment, as if he couldn’t believe a peasant had dared lay a hand on the king. But Shona dared. She dared everything. Because this was all or nothing and she’d spent her whole life with nothing already. She wanted all, for a change. She wanted Malak. “You have something neither your father nor your brother had.”
“I know I do. I have their example and absolutely no desire to repeat their mistakes.”
“No, Malak,” Shona said softly, and she felt a kind of power wash through her. Power and certainty, washing her from her head down to her feet, as if she had always been a queen. As if she had always been meant to stand in a palace and claim her king. She held his gaze, her own serious and sure. “You have me.”
* * *
Malak had never wanted anything more than he wanted Shona. Particularly right now.
But he could not allow himself such weakness.
“I have promised that I will marry you, if that is what you mean—” he began, his tongue thick in his mouth. His throat too tight.
But this was not the woman he had left behind earlier, staring back at him in shock and hurt. This was the woman who had stared him down in a shoddy restaurant in the French Quarter as if he’d breached the walls of her private castle. This was the woman who had wanted nothing at all to do with him, even when he’d made it clear how much better he could make her life.
This was his Shona. His queen.
But he couldn’t let that confuse the issue.
“I think you know that’s not what I mean at all,” she was saying in that same way of hers, as if her voice deserved to ring out over the whole of the desert the way it rang in him. “Do you think I don’t understand what it’s like to be afraid to love, Malak?”
It was as if she was strangling him when all she had done was poke a finger into the center of his chest. Her hands were nowhere near his throat, and even if they had been wrapped around it, he doubted very much she could have done him any harm.
And still he felt as if she was choking him.
“I do not fear love,” he bit out, though the words felt bitter in his mouth. “I do not fear anything. Ask around. I am well known to be shockingly reckless in the face of any and all danger.”
“You’re talking about a different Malak,” Shona said, with that certainty and dismissiveness that felt like tectonic plates shifting deep inside him. “But he died the day your brother abdicated the throne, didn’t he? The moment you had responsibilities, he changed, because he had no choice. He rose to the occasion. I know about that, too.”
“Of course you do.” His voice was acid. “Because you ascended which throne, again?”
“Because I had a baby.” Her voice was quiet. Matter-of-fact.
And pierced him straight through.
She held his gaze in that way of hers that made it impossible to know if he should gather her close or make absolutely certain that this time, when he pushed her away, she stayed away.
But he couldn’t seem to move.
And Shona continued. “I was twenty-two years old and more alone than I think you can imagine. And suddenly I was a mother. Whatever I felt, whatever I thought my life was going to look like, it changed in that moment. And part of that change was daunting, sure. But sometimes I think it saved me.”
He needed to say something—anything—to make her stop before those tectonic plates inside him crumbled into dust, but she didn’t seem to hear him.
“After all, when every single choice you make has to be the responsible one because lives are at stake, it almost feels like freedom, doesn’t it? Because there’s no room for error.” That smile of hers sliced him straight to the bone. It was sad and wise and entirely too beautiful. Shona. “There’s absolutely no way that you can do anything but the right thing
, so that’s what you do.”
Malak was in agony. He didn’t know what he wanted—or he wanted too much and all at once. He wanted to put his hands on her, but then he always did. He wanted to stop her talking, by any means necessary, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing.
It was as if he was frozen solid yet lit on fire.
And worst of all, she seemed to know it.
“And I get that your parents were distant,” she was saying, as if she was trying her best to tear him apart, here in this gallery filled with all the men whose shoes he doubted he could ever fill, staring down at him in disapproval. “Maybe they were even actively cruel. And I’m sympathetic. I am. But of all the women in all the world you could have chosen to have your baby, Malak, you picked the one who had even less in the way of parents than you did. At least you met your mother.”
“My mother...” He hadn’t meant to say that. It burst from his lips of its own accord and he wanted to hate her for that—but there was something in Shona’s melting brown eyes. Something a whole lot like compassion, and it humbled him. “She hated me.”
And all his life, when he said such things—always as a joke, an aside, a bit of a laugh—the people he’d said them to had denied it. Over and over again. “Of course she doesn’t hate you,” they would say. “Her emotions might be very complicated,” they would assure him. “No mother hates her own child,” they would say—but Malak had always thought they were making themselves feel better, not him.
Because he knew the truth now. His mother had wanted Adir. Malak was the consolation prize—and she’d hated him for it.
Shona didn’t say any of those things. She didn’t offer him anything even resembling a platitude. She only gazed at him for a moment, a knowledge in that gaze of hers that he didn’t want to see.
“Maybe she did,” she said quietly, and still, he was surprised the walls didn’t shake with the force of it. “But that says a lot more about her than it ever could about you.”
And something about that nearly snapped him in two.
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child Page 14