But that was not who he was, damn it all. That was not what he did.
He had never been a man of what-ifs and maybes. He did not feel. He had seen, then taken. His conquests had been legendary.
Hell, she was one of them.
Malak caught up to her in the next atrium, with a set of three fountains in the center, greenery and bright magenta flowers flowing from the pillars, and walls bedecked with a thousand tiny mirrors set into the tiles.
And he had not touched her in so long. Too long. It seemed like forever. He reached out and took her wrist, pulling her around to face him again.
Gently. Inexorably. And what he noticed most was how easily she came, spinning back to him as if this was some kind of dance. As if they both knew the steps. As if they shared this same gripping thing that was making his chest feel tight and the rest of him...greedy.
“What do you think you have to lose?” he asked her, and his voice sounded almost gruff. But then, perhaps it matched that arrested expression on her lovely face.
Her gaze searched his. She swallowed, and his eyes moved to track the movement. He held her so he could feel the tumult of her pulse beneath the smooth, dark brown expanse of her satiny skin. He expected her to tug her wrist from his grip, but she didn’t.
Instead, she turned her head to the side and nodded toward the hundreds of mirrors on the nearest wall that together made a great, reflective pool.
“Look at that,” she whispered, something fierce and yet broken in her voice. “You look like a king. You belong here, surrounded by all of this. Fountains and jewels, thrones and servants. But I look exactly like what I am. A foster kid playing dress-up.”
If she’d reached into his chest and dug out his heart with those elegant fingers of hers, he couldn’t have been more surprised. More taken back.
“You look like a beautiful woman, Shona. Elegant and without equal.”
“Just stop.” She didn’t say it in her usual bitter and harsh way. It was more of a sigh. She shook her head at their reflection. “I never played princesses. Or any other games of make-believe. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t need that kind of escape from reality—or anyway, I never liked it. Why pretend things are better when they’ll be just as terrible on the other side of whatever game you’re playing?”
She was telling him something important. Even if Malak couldn’t understand it, not completely, he could feel it. It was like a shudder, working its way down his spine. It settled deep in his belly, like a kind of foreboding.
“I am not a make-believe king, little one,” he told her quietly, moving there beside her, dark and tall while she was so lithe and pretty. And she fit him. Her head reached his shoulder and he wanted to turn her toward him, make her tilt up that chin, and get a taste of that proud, lush mouth that haunted his dreams. “When you become my queen, and you will, it will not be a game we play. It will be real.”
He didn’t understand what it was she was looking at, there on the wall in so many gleaming tiles, what she saw in their reflection that made her brown eyes look so anguished.
He wasn’t surprised when she pulled away from him then. He let her go, watched as she stared at her reflection a moment more, then turned that same anguished look on him.
“I did this for Miles,” she told him, and there was something else in her voice he didn’t recognize. “Because I never want to be the thing that holds him back. Not in anything.” She waved a hand over her dress, her face twisting. “But I don’t want to do this again.”
“I don’t know what you think that gown is doing to you. You’re a beautiful woman. Why shouldn’t you dress like one?”
“I’m an abandoned orphan from New Orleans,” Shona said, grief showing on her face. Or perhaps it was closer to fury. “I come from nothing. I am nothing. I don’t belong in a dress like this.” She shook her head and laughed a little, though there was nothing like humor in the sound. “Yadira even tried to fit me with some kind of—”
“Jewels,” Malak finished for her. “I know. I chose them myself.”
“It’s ridiculous.” She threw the words at him like an accusation. As if it should have been a body blow that knocked him back a few feet, at the very least. “I don’t know what you want. I know what I look like. I know exactly who I am.”
“Then you had better tell me what you think that is. Because I’m afraid I am at a loss.”
“You don’t have to humiliate me,” Shona whispered, and that, then, was the body blow. Malak was surprised he stood his ground. “I’m here, aren’t I? You might think I scowl too much, but I haven’t tried to escape, have I? I haven’t tried to turn Miles against you. I haven’t kept him from you. I haven’t even argued with the way you’ve decided his time here should be spent. Even before you brought us here I agreed that you could see him. Isn’t that enough? Why do you have to humble me as well?”
Her voice cracked and something inside Malak did the same. He took a step toward her and she moved away, but not with her usual grace. It was as if she stumbled, though she didn’t trip. She simply moved, jerkily, over to the bench in front of the nearest fountain and sat there.
“There is nothing humble about you, little one,” Malak said quietly, and maybe he was the one without his customary grace. “You are proud and you are strong and I pity any man who imagines he could humiliate you.”
She made another sighing sound. “And yet you do it. You do it without even trying.”
He closed the distance between them. She already looked like a queen. If he had ever imagined a queen, the images would have paled next to Shona. Her dark hair was full and curly around her head. The gorgeous deep green gown swept over her figure, as demure as it was alluring. Her skin gleamed, that rich brown that haunted him when he was awake and asleep, and she shone brighter than the sparkling water of the fountains or the intricate mosaics on the floor beneath their feet.
She was as perfect now as she had been in a gold dress and smile five years ago.
Even more so, perhaps, because she’d given him Miles.
“Shona,” he started again, reaching over to take her chin in his hand. He tilted her pretty face to his.
“It’s cruel,” she whispered. Her eyes glittered with some kind of intense emotion he had no hope of naming, but he could feel it. Inside him. Around him. In his throat and his chest and his heavy sex. “You can dress me up. You can throw gowns on me and wrap ridiculous chains of impossible jewels around my neck. But it doesn’t change anything. Don’t you understand that? Nothing will ever change me.”
“What do you think I want to change?”
She jerked her chin from his grip. “Everything.”
It was the way she said that word. With too much heat and that brokenness besides.
“I don’t want to change you, Shona.”
“Of course you do.” Her voice was thick but Malak didn’t think the darkness in it was aimed at him. “I don’t blame you. But I would rather the whole world see me for who I really am right from the start than this—this sad game of charades that no one will ever believe, anyway.”
She made a hollow noise when he only stared at her.
“I don’t believe that you can’t see it. Weren’t you the one who was just telling me how sad and narrow my life is? The truth is, you’re right. I have nothing to give Miles now. I don’t know how to raise a prince. I thought I was doing okay as a single mother making ends meet. Better than my own mother did, anyway. You can call me a queen. You can dress me up like one if you must.” She pulled in a ragged breath, then let it out in a rush. “But you can’t change the simple fact that I was thrown away like trash because I am trash. You can’t dress that up no matter how hard you try.”
Malak felt something deep inside him go still. Like rage turned to stone.
But he gazed at Shona with all the ease that had marked him in his playboy days. As if there was nothing heavy between them and never would be.
“I am the king of Khalia,” he told h
er quietly. “Any woman I have ever slept with is, by definition, only of the highest caliber. Diamonds of the finest water, as they say. But the mother of my child? The mother of the next king of this glorious kingdom? It is impossible that this woman—this paragon who must be celebrated above all others as a matter of national pride and patriotic duty—can ever be or could ever have been anything remotely like trash.”
“I think you’re talking about Miles again.”
“Quite apart from that,” he said, with all the certainty of his station and the throne that had never felt more like his than it did today, “this is my country. You are whatever I say you are. And I must inform you that you are among the finest treasures of the kingdom, Shona. Because I say so.”
Her lips curved, but her eyes were sad. “That doesn’t make it true.”
“Maybe this will convince you, then.”
He did what he had been longing to do for what seemed like forever. He stepped closer to her, and swept her up from the bench, and into his arms at last.
And then finally—finally—Malak took her mouth with his.
CHAPTER NINE
IT WAS AS if Shona had been swept out to sea.
A wave of sensation crashed over her and dragged her off, tumbling her end over end and tossing her far away from anything like land. She knew she needed to swim in the few moments she had left before she began to drown.
But Shona didn’t know how to swim. She wasn’t sure she knew how to float. So instead, all she could do was cling to Malak as if he was a lifesaver when she knew very well he was the reason she was out there fighting to stay above water in the first place.
Not that any of that seemed to matter much when he kissed her.
He kissed her and he kissed her.
She didn’t know how to keep track of all the feelings and sensations that swirled around her and inside her, so she poured herself into the kiss instead. She didn’t know what she wanted—or she didn’t know how to express it—so she stopped worrying about it and lost herself in the slick magic of his tongue against hers.
He’d called her out and then he’d called her treasure, and how could she be expected to handle that kind of whiplash?
She wound her arms around his neck. She stopped pretending that she didn’t hunger for him with every part of the body that had already betrayed her so comprehensively out on that balcony.
His hands moved down the length of her back—though it hardly felt like her back at the moment, covered as it was in the finest fabric Shona had ever touched—and he made a low noise in the back of his throat when his palms moved over her bottom.
Then the world seemed to move in a dizzy little circle, and when it was done, he was sitting on that bench next to the fountain and she was on his lap, astride him, her back to his front.
He was that strong, she thought in a kind of dazed amazement. He could simply lift her and position her and do as he wished with her.
The notion made her shudder.
“I want you to watch,” he told her, his voice low and gritty with that same need she could feel storming through her. Changing her. Altering the bones inside her skin. Making her imagine things she’d given up on so long ago she’d forgotten it was possible to want them in the first place. “I want you to tell me what you see.”
They were reflected in so many different mirrors. Malak was beautiful, as big and broad as he was lean. He held her so easily, there on his lap with his strong arms wrapped around her waist, and try as she might, she didn’t see anything resembling a treasure. She saw the same thing she’d seen in the reflection back in her rooms.
Seeing herself dressed up in a princess costume only pointed out how far away she was—and would always be—from ever being such a thing.
But she didn’t feel the lurching, awful knot in the pit of her stomach anymore the way she had when she’d first caught sight of herself. And she knew it had everything to do with the way Malak’s hands moved over her. His palms found her breasts and he lingered there, playing with pressure until she moaned and moved against him, wordlessly begging for more. She watched him track his way over her abdomen, then reach down farther, raking up the skirt of the long, emerald-green dress to expose her thighs.
And he didn’t stop there. He pulled up the dress farther and farther, until she was sitting on his lap with only his trousers and her skimpy little panties separating them.
“I can feel your heat,” he said against her ear, his voice as rough as it was warm against her skin.
Shona didn’t want to look anymore. She wanted him, too, with a kind of desperate greed she was afraid to examine too closely. And those things fused together as she leaned back against the wall of his wide chest, angling herself so she could set her mouth to his again.
She lost herself in that kiss, again even as she felt his hands busy beneath them. He tugged at her panties until she felt the tugging give way and understood that he’d ripped them from her body.
It only made the way his tongue dueled with hers that much hotter. Better.
He broke the kiss, his hands at her hips. He lifted her up and laughed a little at the small noise of distress she made, then settled her down on his lap again—except this time, she could feel that extraordinary length of him between them.
Hard. Thick.
Hot.
Better by far than she remembered.
“Watch,” Malak ordered her, his voice deliciously stern.
And Shona did.
His fingers dug into her hips as he lowered her, so slowly it was like an exquisite torture, onto the part of him that was hardest. The part of him she wanted most, as she melted in helpless longing. Her dress slid over her thighs again and hid what he was doing from view in those mirrors, so all she could see was Malak behind her, concentrating fiercely, and her own face.
Her own surrender was like a glare illuminating her.
Her eyes were wide and glazed and her neck felt like it could hardly bear the weight of her own head. Her lips parted as if she wasn’t sure she could breathe and her hands had nothing to do but grip fistfuls of her dress.
It had been such a long time. It was almost as if this was new again: the way he stretched her, the way he filled her, the exquisite ache of his possession when he was finally fully settled inside her body.
Malak shifted then. He wrapped one arm around her and tilted her forward a little so that he moved even deeper within her.
And Shona felt it everywhere. Her toes. The tips of her ears.
“Go on then,” he ordered her, his dark green gaze as fierce as emeralds, burning her into a crisp through the reflection of the glass in front of them. “Show me who you are.”
And if there was the faintest shadow of some kind of argument inside her, she ignored it.
Shona began to move.
She tested the rotation of her hips. She rocked herself, forward and back, then in lazy circles.
She arched to dig her toes into the floor on either side of Malak’s legs, and used that as leverage to pull herself up, then slide back down the entire delectable length of him. Once, then again. And again, until they both groaned.
He reached out and found her hands, then laced his fingers with hers as he crossed their arms over her abdomen, together.
And still she rocked against him. She practiced her strokes, reacquainting herself with something she hadn’t realized she’d longed for, deep in the night, lost in dreams she’d pretended not to recall during the day.
Long and slow. Hard and fast.
His eyes blazed in the mirror. There was color high on those cheekbones of his, so sharp they made her feel like swooning even as he held her fast. He was as fierce as he was beautiful, like this place and the desert he ruled.
And she saw herself. The dizzy abandon on her face, that madness in her eyes, that she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before. She thought it might well be joy.
Shona hardly recognized herself.
And if it was a stranger, a lit
tle voice inside her whispered, you would say she was beautiful. Because that woman in Malak’s arms is beautiful.
“I want...” she whispered, the words torn from her as if she had no control over them.
“Tell me,” he growled, his mouth like a brand in the crook of her neck, and the strange thing was, she craved the burn of it. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want you,” she managed to say.
She felt his smile, wicked and dark, there against her heated skin—even as she saw it happen in the mirror. It was like having the same sensation twice. That much brighter. That much hotter. “You already have me. I’m deep inside you.”
“Please,” she moaned, as if it wasn’t really begging. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to make these noises, to want these things she wanted, but only from him. “Please, Malak...”
“Tell me what you want,” he said again, more fiercely this time. “Tell me what you need, Shona.”
“I want...everything,” she managed to say, dizzy from her own rocking. From the slick, endless slide up, then down, again and again, and him so intensely hard inside of her. “Please, Malak. Please.”
He freed one of his hands from her grip, then reached down between them, moving beneath the silk of her dress to find the place where they were joined. And his fingers were as wicked as they were clever.
Malak found the aching center of her need and pressed down.
“Your wish is my command.” His voice was like another touch. “My queen.”
And then he drove her straight over that edge.
Shona tumbled and soared, bliss chasing itself around and around, and Malak followed her over that same steep, glorious side of the world, calling out her name as he fell.
For a long time they stayed as they were, with Malak lodged deep inside her as if they’d been made to fit like that. Some part of her believed they had been. That every day they’d missed this connection, this perfect fit, had been a kind of crime.
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child Page 10
