Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

Malak didn’t want this. He had never really thought much of marriage at all, not for himself. Not after a front-row seat to his parents’ miserable one. And he had certainly never planned to find himself shackled to a woman he’d known for a single night long ago. He had not been raised to worry about continuing the bloodline. But from the moment Zufar had abdicated, Malak had found advisors in his ear, throwing out the names of eligible women of royal blood—Princess Amara of Bharathia, the Lady Suzette, and so on until it was all a blur of names and titles—and demanding he start thinking about his heirs.

Until it appeared he already had one.

And that reminded him who he was. He was no longer the Playboy Prince, the smirking star of a thousand tabloid articles. He was the king, with commitments to his people and their future whether he liked it or not, and it didn’t matter what had happened in the past few years. The only thing that mattered was what happened now.

“I understand your reluctance,” he told her, though he could tell that his tone was more cold than concerned by the way she stiffened. “But I am only here as a courtesy. I thought it would be better if I came to collect you myself instead of sending my men.”

“You can’t collect me. I’m not something you can pick up—”

She stopped, and the air changed between them. Something dark and dangerous seemed to loom there, just out of reach.

Malak did not state the obvious. That she was indeed something he could pick up, and he had.

But he might as well have yelled it.

“I should warn you that I have a limited amount of patience as it is,” he said softly, though not particularly carefully. “While I am aware of my own culpability in this, the fact remains that there is no possibility that my son and heir will be raised apart from me. The kings of Khalia are raised in the palace, under the care of the traditional tutors, the better to prepare for their eventual role. That is how it has been for centuries. That is how it will remain.”

She stood tall and still, her gaze on his and her hands in fists at her side. “My son is not a king.”

“No, he is a prince.” Malak gazed down at her, every inch of him the royal he had always been, though he had largely ignored it. But here, now, it was as if his ancestors roared in his blood. “The crown prince of Khalia, in point of fact. All that remains is to give him legitimacy. What that means, I am afraid, is that you will have to marry me. Whether you like it or not.”

Her breath left her in a kind of laugh. “I’m not going to marry you. I’m not going to hand my child over to you for random tutors to raise. You’re delusional.”

“That would make things easier for you, I’m sure. But I assure you, I am nothing of the kind.”

“Does everyone in Khalia marry a complete stranger? Is that also how it’s been for centuries?”

“As a matter of fact, many of the marriages in my family were arranged.” Malak didn’t think this was the time or place to comment on how those arrangements had worked out over time. His parents’ stormy marriage being the premiere case in point. “We are royal, after all. My brother was raised as the crown prince and was betrothed to an appropriate princess since her birth.”

Malak decided not to share how that had worked out, either. For either Zufar or Amira, the woman he’d been promised to but had not married, in the end. To say nothing of the half brother he’d never known he’d had, Adir, who had appeared from nowhere at their mother’s funeral and had spirited Amira away with him on the day of her wedding to Zufar.

None of those inconvenient truths would help him make his point here, to Shona. “Marrying strangers isn’t the barrier for me you might imagine.”

“Well, it’s a barrier for me,” she threw at him. “Because I’m not completely insane.”

“You have a choice before you, Shona. You can fight me all you like, but you will lose. And either way, I will be returning to Khalia with my son.” Malak let that sink in. He watched the way her chest rose and fell, too fast, and knew his edicts weren’t exactly landing well. “You can stay behind, if you wish. But I cannot tolerate any trouble or scandal. The kingdom cannot survive any more turmoil. So you need to ask yourself—are you willing to give up your child? To sign away all your rights and never speak of this again?”

“I would rather die,” she gritted out at him.

Malak felt that his smile was much too thin, but he aimed it at her, anyway. “Then again, let me offer my congratulations. For your only other choice is to return to Khalia with us and take your place as my queen.”

“I would rather—”

“Careful,” Malak warned her, his voice hardly more than a growl. “What I’m offering you is a great honor, whether you see it that way or not. Be very, very sure that you want to offend me. Be at peace with the inevitable consequences.”

Shona did not look anything like peaceful. “I’m not marrying you, Malak.”

“You will,” Malak said pitilessly. “Or you will remain behind, legally separated from your child and muzzled by a thousand contracts that ensure your silence, forevermore. Those are your choices.”

“You can’t force me to do any of these things,” Shona threw at him, as if amazed he thought otherwise. As if she expected the dirty streets of New Orleans to rise up on her behalf. “You can’t make me do anything!”

But Malak only smiled, and this time, it was real.

Because his patience was finally at an end.

CHAPTER THREE

THEY LANDED IN Khalia the next morning.

Shona felt very much the way she had that morning long ago, when she’d woken up in the most sumptuous, luxurious hotel suite she’d ever seen in her life to find herself all alone. She’d felt...deliciously battered, and somehow made new.

And she’d had no idea how she, who had never had any intention of falling into bed with a stranger and ending up alone and pregnant—too many examples of girls who’d taken that path in foster care had soured her on those choices—had found herself there.

Which was to say, she could remember every gloriously carnal detail, but she didn’t understand how she’d surrendered all of herself so heedlessly to a man she’d never laid eyes on before that night.

At least this time she could track the sequence of events.

Malak had announced that he was finished with their conversation. And more, that his next stop would be her friend’s house—because, of course, he knew about Ursula—to pick up his son.

He kept saying that. His son. It made Shona’s sight turn red at the edges. It made her feel something like violent, temper rushing through her like a river.

That it was only the simple truth made it worse.

“You can either be a part of our first meeting or not,” he’d told her, all steel and disregard, and she’d wanted to scream at him. She’d wanted to beat on him with her fists. She’d wanted to make him deeply, desperately sorry he’d come back into her life.

But she’d wanted to protect Miles a whole lot more than she’d wanted any of that.

So she’d hated herself for it, but she’d gotten in the car.

There was no pretending it wasn’t another surrender. And as much as Shona wanted to deny it—as much as she told herself that this was about Miles and nothing else—that wasn’t what it had felt like, tucked away in the back of a much-too-comfortable Range Rover with Malak.

Malak, whom she’d wanted to tear apart with her fingers, but didn’t dare—and not because of the armed men who watched her with cold, narrow eyes. But because she honestly didn’t know, even as angry as she’d been then, what she would do if she allowed her fingers access to that hard, lean, athletic body. She couldn’t trust that a swing of her fist might not turn into a betraying caress.

It was one more reason to hate herself.

And then they’d arrived at Ursula’s little apartment on the outskirts of the Garden District, and she’d ordered herself to stop obsessing about Malak.

Because the other shoe had dropped. Squarely on her head, as she should have expected it would. And now she had to tell her little boy that his father was here.

The father she’d told him he didn’t have.

“Let me bring Miles down to you,” she’d said when the driver parked the SUV, something a little darker than mere panic beating at her.

And she’d felt more than seen the way Malak had looked at her from where he lounged there in the back seat beside her. His gaze felt dark and dangerous, like a hand at her throat.

“Do not make me chase you,” he’d said quietly. Too quietly. “I doubt you would enjoy what would happen if it was you alone trying to escape me. But Shona, hear this, if nothing else. If you make me hunt my son—if you force me into the role of predator before I have ever even laid eyes on him and make that our first experience of each other—I will never forgive you.”

“Maybe I don’t want your forgiveness,” she’d thrown back at him, because she couldn’t quit. She couldn’t hold her tongue. Maybe she was made wrong, the way many a foster parent had suggested over the years.

Made to be alone, they’d said. Made to make everyone around her happy to leave her be.

She’d taken pride in that all her life. She’d had no idea why it had felt so different then, as if she was a monster, somehow. When she hadn’t been the one making all the threats.

“I have no doubt about that.” Malak’s voice had still been much too quiet, and Shona hadn’t mistaken the malice in it. “But you must ask yourself if you wish your son to pay the inevitable price along with you.”

And that was the trouble, of course. There was a part of her that had wanted nothing more than to snatch up Miles and make a run for it. No matter how it ended, just to prove that Malak couldn’t show up like this and order her around, much less make these pronouncements just because he was a big deal where he came from.

But she had no idea how she would explain that to a four-year-old.

And so she’d climbed the stairs to Ursula’s apartment, feeling very much as if she was marching to her own execution. She’d let herself in the way she always did and had wanted...some kind of poignant moment, maybe. Something to prove that she wasn’t made to be alone—that she and Ursula were friends, after all. That her life was more than a sticky restaurant, pathetic tips and the kind of eternal solitude that made her bones ache sometimes.

But Ursula sat on her ratty old couch, a cigarette in her hand and her gaze on the television screen flickering on the wall across the room. She barely looked up. She gave a distracted wave when Shona offered her a slightly overdone goodbye, and that was it. Shona picked up a sleeping Miles and sighed a little as he settled his sweet face into the crook of her neck.

Ursula would miss the child care. But Shona knew better than to imagine the other woman would miss her.

Then she’d walked back downstairs. To her doom.

“He’s asleep,” she’d said in a hushed tone as she made it back down to the street to find Malak standing there beside his Range Rover again, as if he’d been readying himself to chase her through the streets of the Garden District, if necessary.

She’d expected an argument. A demand, perhaps, that Shona wake up Miles right there and then so that Malak could enact whatever tender, imaginary father/son reunion he was carrying around in his head.

But instead, he only gazed at her and the child she held so securely against her for what felt like an eternity, his expression fierce. Almost...arrested.

“He might wake up when we go back to my house and pack his things,” she’d told him, not at all certain why she’d felt the need to solve this issue for him. To make it okay that this was happening when she’d never wanted it to happen in the first place.

But he was Miles’s father. She had to remember that. She told herself that was the only reason she felt the need to give Malak what he wanted.

“We have no need to return to that house,” Malak said. And Shona had been certain she wasn’t imagining the way he emphasized that house, as if the very words were distasteful to him. “My men have already collected your personal effects.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my house,” Shona had retorted, with a little more heat than necessary. She’d cradled the back of Miles’s head with her hand, as if she’d needed to protect him from any aspersions Malak had wanted to cast on the home she’d worked so hard to give him. “I’ve always been proud and lucky to have it.”

“We will endeavor, you and I, to provide you with far better opportunities for pride, I think.” Malak’s voice had been blistering, for all it was soft against the thick night, and his gaze had been so dark it had almost hurt. “And a far, far better environment in which to raise my son.”

My son.

Shona had bitten her tongue. Because what else could she do? It was bewildering and more than a little awful in ways she didn’t even know how to take on board, but there was no denying the fact that it was really, truly happening. Malak had really returned and, just as she’d always feared, taken control.

Of her. Of Miles. Of everything.

She’d believed that he’d sent his henchmen to pack up her whole life as if it was that easily erased, at his whim. Just as she’d believed that he would absolutely take Miles from her if she fought him.

The man she remembered from the night of her twenty-first birthday had been charming. But even then, she’d been aware that there was a core of steel beneath all that laziness and sensuality. She’d seen hints of it, here and there. She’d remembered it, somehow, though he’d been nothing but obliging and kind.

But now there was no charm, no kindness. There was nothing but steel and command, and she wondered how she’d ever imagined there was anything else. How she’d possibly fallen for the notion that he’d been easy, lazy or mild in any way.

He had not demanded that she hand over Miles in the car, as she’d feared. Nor did he take the sleeping child from her when they arrived at an airfield on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and boarded the private jet that waited there, sporting the lavish insignia of the Royal House of Khalia.

She didn’t know what was wrong with her that she saw these things as evidence that Malak was...not a good man, necessarily, but better than she’d imagined. Better, certainly, than she’d worried he might be after all these years of lying awake at night, stressing over this exact reality coming to pass.

You’re pathetic, she’d told herself, but that hadn’t helped a thing.

Much less changed it.

Once on board the private jet, that had reminded Shona a little too much of that absurdly luxurious hotel suite where she’d created this mess five years ago, Malak had showed her to one of its state rooms with a courtesy she’d found only slightly exaggerated, and had watched her, his dark green eyes glittering with an emotion she’d been afraid to name as she’d laid Miles on the bed. He’d moved closer then, and Shona had held her breath, but all he’d done was stand to the side of the bed and gaze down at the sleeping child.

His son, whom he’d never met.

And Shona had never missed him. She might have wished that things had been different across these last years, but she had never missed Malak, specifically. She had never imagined him and Miles, father and son together, or wasted her time dreaming of happy families. That was one more casualty of her foster-care experiences. She didn’t believe in happy families. She never had. She wasn’t even sure she believed in fathers, come to that, because that line on her birth certificate had been left blank and she’d never met any men deserving of that title during her eighteen years as a ward of the state.

So she had no words for what had washed over her then, like some kind of flash flood. It had been devastating and life-altering, and it had happened too fast. It had been almost too intense to bear. It had been something primal.

There was something about the way Malak had looked down at Miles. Or maybe it had been the simple fact of the three of them in one room—her little boy and both of his parents, for the first time.

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