Malak merely held up a hand, and his men subsided. Because no one was getting the fight they wanted today.
“I would advise you to remember that, like it or not, I am a king,” he told her softly. “It is possible I might find this irrepressible spirit of yours intriguing, in time, but my men most assuredly will not.”
She let out a short laugh that was almost as offensive as the off-color suggestion she’d just made. “The only thing I care about less than you is the opinion of your babysitters.”
Malak did not respond to that bit of impudence the way he wanted to do.
Because this was not Khalia. This was America, where, diplomatic immunity or not, people would likely take a dim view of him tossing a screaming woman over his shoulder and then throwing her into his waiting car.
Besides, that was no kind of strategy. Allowing her to think she could speak to him in this way was setting a dangerous precedent, but he could handle disrespect. He could think of several enjoyable ways to do just that even as he stood here in this distressingly dank hole that called itself a restaurant, the last place on earth he would ordinarily find himself feeling so...needy.
But he didn’t want to kidnap Shona and his own son. He would certainly do it if it came to that, but he knew that would do nothing but make him her enemy. Neither one of them wanted this unavoidable connection and the marriage that had to follow, that was plain enough, but it would be far better for him if she surrendered to the inevitable rather than fought him every step of the way.
At the very least it would be better for his relationship with the small child he had yet to meet whom he’d helped create—a notion he still couldn’t entirely get his head around.
After all, he knew more than he needed to know about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a terrible marriage. He had no intention of passing on that feeling to his own child—even one he’d only learned existed a week ago.
“I will wait for you outside,” he said, with great magnanimity, as if he was bestowing upon her a tremendous favor. It made her eyes narrow. And then he could see the thoughts that spun through her head, so he addressed them. “My men are already at every exit, Shona, so escape is out of the question. What you need to ask yourself is if you want me to pay your boss to fire you, too. Simply because I can. With ease. And because it would suit me to speed up this process.”
“Of course you’d threaten me with losing my livelihood,” she replied, shaking her head at him as if he disgusted her. He found he did not enjoy the sensation. “After all, what’s a job to you? You don’t have to put food on any tables. You probably think it all just appears there, like magic.”
Malak did not dignify that with a response. He turned on his heel and went outside instead, where night was beginning to creep into the French Quarter, and as it did, as the soupy heat of the day began to ebb.
Outside in the thick, sweet twilight he could wrestle with his temper before he caused an international incident. Something that would not bother him in the slightest, he felt certain, because it would get him what he wanted that much quicker—but would cause the people of Khalia more alarm. And his people had been through enough already in these last few turbulent months.
He expected her to follow after him directly, but she didn’t. She made him wait. She not only did not walk away from her job as he expected she might, but she also worked her entire shift. And on her breaks she tested every single exit he’d told her he was having watched, which his men dutifully reported to him each time.
Malak almost admired her thoroughness and commitment.
Almost.
When she finally walked out of the restaurant and saw him waiting for her as he’d told her he would, she tilted up that belligerent little chin of hers and fixed him with the same scowl she’d used inside.
It took a great deal more self-control than it should have not to object to that...in a manner that involved his hands on her and the horizontal back seat of his vehicle. Malak complimented himself on his own restraint, because he very much doubted Shona would.
“I don’t know what you think is going to happen,” she began, her tone hot.
“I have already told you what’s going to happen.” Malak leaned against the pristine side of the Range Rover his security detail had driven here from the private airfield where his jet waited. The New Orleans night was sultry, just as he recalled it. There had been people around in the daylight, but they seemed wilder and brighter in the dark. Their laughter spiced the air as they wandered down the street and followed the seductive sound of the music that snaked around every corner.
In the middle of it, he and Shona stood there, studying each other with mutual dislike.
You do not dislike her, a voice inside challenged him at once. You dislike the fact she dislikes you, and so openly.
He opted to ignore that. He was unused to being disliked. Ignored or desired, that was what Malak was familiar with. But never this...hatred.
“I am not going to be your queen,” she told him, very distinctly. “I’m willing to let you see Miles, because, like it or not, you’re his father. And he deserves to know you, I suppose.”
He stopped admiring his restraint and forced himself to use it. “You suppose.”
“All you are to me is a man in a bar,” Shona said quietly, her dark gaze on his. And there was no reason that should have slammed into Malak like a blow when it was no more than the truth. “I don’t want anything from you. I never did. I never expected to see you again.”
“Clearly.” Every line of her body was defiant, but as Malak studied her, it wasn’t her defiance that got to him. It was that other thing. That spark that had bloomed between them in that bar long ago. The same fire still licked through him, and he didn’t like that at all. Wanting this woman would only complicate matters further. “But now I have returned. What I can’t understand is why you care so little for your own child you would consign him to a life of hardship rather than involve me.”
She let out a crack of laughter that felt a little too much like a slap. “Hardship? Did you just open your mouth and say something to me about hardship? What would you know about it?”
“You must know that I can provide for him in ways that you can only dream about. What mother wouldn’t want that?”
“My son wants for nothing.” Shona’s voice was quiet again, but certain. Absolutely certain. “He’s a happy kid. A good kid. And he’s mine.”
“What good is it to be yours if it means child care?” He nodded at the shoddy restaurant behind her. “A mother who must scramble for tips in a place like this?”
“Because an honest day’s work is beneath you, obviously.”
“Is this about honesty, Shona? Or your own bloody-mindedness?”
She rolled her eyes. Actually rolled her eyes, which Malak was not sure anyone had ever done to him in all his life.
“He’s four years old because guess what? Sometimes when people have sex, babies come of it. I’m surprised a worldly man like you didn’t know that.”
“I used a condom.” He had always used condoms. Always.
“They are not one-hundred-percent guaranteed. Apparently. And I dealt with the consequences of that all this time, all on my own. Except now you roll back into town talking about thrones and kings like I’m supposed to drop everything and what? Be grateful that you discovered we exist? I don’t think so.”
What bothered Malak the most about her words wasn’t her tone of voice, which bordered on scathing. It was the fact that nothing she said was untrue.
He hadn’t looked back when he’d left. He’d remembered her and her charming innocence, but had it not been for his father and brother’s abdications from the Khalian throne, something no one could possibly have predicted and Malak himself still did not quite believe, he would never have returned here.
But he didn’t say that. He found he couldn’t.
Because he didn’t like what it said about him—and wasn’t that funny? He had sp
ent his whole life gleefully embracing the worst of his impulses. Was it his ascension to the throne that made it all seem squalid now?
Or was it the way Shona looked at him, as if squalid was all she saw?
“You could have reached out when you discovered you were pregnant,” he said stiffly.
The way she looked at him then was not exactly friendly. But Malak preferred that to the quiet certainty with which she’d dismissed him as nothing but a man in a bar.
Maybe that was the real lesson here, he thought with entirely too much sharp self-awareness. He could stand anything save anonymity.
“How would I have done that?” Shona asked coolly. “You never told me your full name. You didn’t leave me your telephone number. I discovered who you were entirely by accident.”
“You mean tonight?”
“I mean I saw a picture of you in a magazine about six months later.” She shook her head. “And no, before you ask, it did not cross my mind to try to chase down the Playboy Prince drowning in models across the world who came from some country I’ve never heard of. Why would I?”
Malak straightened from the side of the Range Rover. There were too many things competing inside of him for dominance, and he didn’t know quite what to do with any of them.
He settled on fury. It felt cleanest.
“If you knew who I was, then you had no excuse.”
“It was a one-night stand,” Shona replied, still with that same damn cool. That—more than anything—told him how different she was from that smiling, bright girl he’d met on the bar stool next to his. And he refused to ask himself if he was to blame for that change, because he was fairly certain he wouldn’t like the answer. “And as far as I could tell, you had those every night of the week. Why would you remember me?”
Why, indeed? And why was that a question Malak suddenly didn’t want to answer?
“I remember you now,” he told her with soft menace. “And even if I did not, the palace investigators found you all on their own. They informed me, in case I’d forgotten, that I was in New Orleans exactly nine months before you gave birth to a little boy who looks a good deal like me. And I might be tempted to believe in coincidences, especially because I’ve never gone without protection in my life, but they do not. It was simpler than I suspect you wish to know to get a sample of the child’s DNA to prove what is already obvious at a glance.”
Her brown gaze met his in a steady sort of challenge that no one else would dare. He told himself it was one more problem with this woman—her obvious inability to recognize her place—but that was not how it felt. “I thought you were supposed to be the king. Don’t you tell your people what to do?”
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 any
thing!”
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.
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child Page 3
