Shona didn’t want to move. She was limp against him, her head tilted back against his shoulder. And when she opened her eyes, she could see the two of them in the mirror still.
He was so big and he held her so easily. He made her feel fragile. Delicate. Precious...and she’d never felt like that in her life.
Shona waited to feel ashamed. To feel that kick of self-disgust. Or that same mocking voice that had chased her since the moment she’d stepped into this dress, telling her what a fool she was making of herself. Telling her how little she belonged here.
In this palace. With this man.
Telling her things she knew, down deep in her bones, were nothing more than the truth.
Because even before he’d become a king, she’d known that Malak wasn’t for her. That the one night she’d had with him was more than she deserved.
But right now, she couldn’t chase after those things the way she knew she probably should have, because all she could feel was Malak. He was still deep in her body, still broad and deep. He was made of steel and heat and he surrounded her. She could feel him when she breathed.
Everywhere.
As if he was a part of her.
“Look at you,” Malak said quietly, and her eyes flew to his. Her heart kicked at her as she waited for that other shoe to hit her again, for him to say some of the things she’d already thought herself, to cast her aside the way she thought he should—but there was nothing but approval on his face. Nothing but that same lust and fire in his dark green eyes. “Look at us. How can you possibly doubt that you belong right here?”
Shona didn’t know if he meant here in the palace, or here in his arms. And she didn’t know why she didn’t ask. Why she didn’t scrape and claw at him with her bitter sarcasm the way she normally would have.
It was almost as if something inside of her had hushed. As if the volume of all that noise she carried around inside of her had been turned down.
And it didn’t feel as if she’d lost something. It felt like a relief.
He didn’t wait for her to answer. His eyes still blazed as he reached between them to disengage himself. And Shona couldn’t help the small noise she made when he pulled out of her.
Malak stood, taking her with him as he rose. He set her on her feet before him, and then took a moment to tuck himself back into his trousers. Shona smoothed down her full skirt and thought it had been easier five years ago, in the dark of a hotel room. She’d drifted off to sleep and when she’d woken up again, he’d been gone.
No reflections in mirrors to contend with. No need to come up with any awkward conversation.
She searched for something, anything, to say. But Malak had other ideas. He swept her up into his arms again, then lifted her high against his chest, and that was better. Easier, anyway.
Shona had always imagined surrender differently. Drowning, maybe. But this was as easy as stepping into a warm bath.
And far, far better.
“Where are we going?” she asked as he began to move.
Malak didn’t look down at her. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he walked, carrying her down the corridors of his palace.
“I’m not done with you yet,” he said, and his voice was still all fire and greed. It twisted through her and lit her up all over again. “Not nearly.”
And Shona thought on some level that she should fight that. Fight him. She should fight because that was what she did.
It was the only thing she’d ever known how to do. Her only skill. The only thing in this world she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she did well.
But she didn’t have it in her. Not tonight. Not here in a palace so far away from anything and everything she’d ever known.
So instead she rested her head against Malak’s shoulder, let her eyes drift shut and let him carry her wherever he pleased.
* * *
When Shona woke in the morning she had no idea where she was.
It wasn’t a new sensation.
Waking up without knowing where she was, in fact, was one of Shona’s least favorite things in the world. She felt it in her stomach first, that sickening little lurch that she remembered all too well, because nothing felt familiar. She opened her eyes to find herself staring at something that didn’t make any sense.
She could see bold red fabric shot through with gold, but she knew her bedroom here was done up in creams and blues.
The night before came back to her slowly. The way these things always did. It reminded her too much of waking up in strange foster houses as a child, never knowing where she was. But she didn’t feel unsafe at all now.
And maybe that was what soothed her, as she took stock of her body, stretched out on a big, wide bed. She felt...protected, even as she tried to sort out what had happened. She felt a delicious tiredness all over, in her fingernails and her skin and the crook of her toes. Marvelously, beautifully used. As if every last inch of her had been—
Shona felt a hot flush move over her, as if from the inside out. Because she remembered, then, in a great, rolling wave of delirious heat. Every last inch, indeed.
Malak had been demanding—fierce and thorough.
She had lost track of how many times he had taken her, there in his dizzyingly vast suite of rooms, all of which were exactly as luxurious and over-the-top as she had expected, given what the rest of the palace looked like. Had there ever been room in her life for such foolishness?
Not that it was his bedroom that had captivated her, hour after hour.
She had learned how he tasted, everywhere. She had explored him as if he was hers. She’d had her mouth and her fingers on every inch of his beautiful body, reveled in that hot, smooth skin of his that looked like cinnamon and tasted all man. Hot and gloriously male.
He had taught her to take him deep in her mouth, either kneeling there at his feet or over him on the bed, propped up between his legs. He had made her scream, with his mouth between her legs again, and more outrageously, using nothing more than his fingers on one nipple and his teeth and a wicked bit of suction on the other.
The night had gone on and on, until it had all felt like liquid, pouring through her hands, impossible to hold, shimmering there whenever she turned her head too fast. And she hadn’t given herself permission to brood. To worry. To do anything but enjoy what was happening there between them.
Again and again and again.
He had called for food at some point, and they’d eaten it together, there in the seating area somewhere beyond the foot of his bed. It was erected around a vast fireplace that looked as if ten men could stand inside it, though Malak had only laughed when Shona had said so. She had wrapped herself in one of the shockingly soft sheets from his bed, and they’d feasted on food that had ceased to seem strange to her, after all these weeks in Khalia. Dates and nuts and strong cheeses. Delicate pastries that melted in her mouth. Meats and casserole-type things that looked like lasagna but tasted far more complicated and airy.
And when they had both eaten their fill, Malak had crawled over her on the sofa where she’d been sitting and had told her he couldn’t wait for dessert. Nor had he, as he’d pulled her hips up to his mouth again, until her cries had echoed off the walls.
She sat up carefully now, waiting to feel something pull, deep inside somewhere. She waited for the pain, because surely that was the price that had to be paid for a night like the one they’d shared. She could hardly remember what had happened five years ago, or not this part of it, anyway. She remembered waking up in that hotel room, how hushed and uncertain she’d felt as she’d crept around, looking in all the rooms. There had been so many rooms, when all she knew about hotels were down-market motels, where a person was lucky to have a bed and a towel that didn’t draw blood. But when she’d discovered he was not lurking in one of the other rooms of the suite, that he’d gone sometime before she’d woken up, she hadn’t wanted to stay herself.
Luxury had made her uncomfortable. It seemed like some kind of...moc
kery, really. She had gathered herself as best she could, scrunching up her hair so that the curls looked springy again, and smoothed her dress back into place. Her heart had been pounding wildly in her chest when she’d walked out into the front hall that was still a part of the hotel suite, then taken the elevator that was right there down to the ground floor. She’d expected to be stopped at any moment, for one of the people who clearly belonged in a hotel as fancy as that one to question her; to ask her what on earth she thought she was doing in a nice place like that, when she was sure she had her humble beginnings written all over her.
But no one had said a word. And if they’d looked at her with any sort of judgment in their eyes, she hadn’t looked closely enough at anyone she’d passed on her way out to have seen it. She’d escaped back into the bawdy French Quarter gratefully, feeling almost instantly at ease once she’d hit the streets. That was where she belonged. Not in some fancy hotel.
Here, now, she certainly didn’t feel as if she should have been waking up alone in the king’s bedchamber. It was worse than that hotel. It was...royal. Sunlight was streaming into the bedchamber from the grand archways that functioned as both windows and doors, leading out to another one of those polished marble balconies—this one wider and far grander.
Shona sat where she was, listening carefully. She held her breath, trying to hear any clues as to Malak’s whereabouts. She’d learned how to be good at that kind of thing in too many foster homes to count. It was always better to have an idea of where everybody was under whatever roof she happened to find herself.
But she couldn’t hear a thing. Fancy hotels and royal palaces were so quiet. She crept out of the bed, making sure her feet made no noise against the floor, covered as it was in fine rugs. She looked around for the gown that Malak had taken off her so slowly, so deliciously, the night before, but it was nowhere in sight. She frowned at that, because she was certain he had tossed it to the side right there on the floor. But it wasn’t where she thought it should have been, over in the vast expanse between the side of his bed and the bathroom suite that could have housed an entire parish or two.
“You look confused,” came Malak’s voice from the doorway, rolling over her the way she began to realize it always would. As if he was connected to something inside of her and could tug on it at his leisure. “Not exactly a rousing endorsement of last night’s festivities, I think.”
“I was looking for my clothes.”
“I cannot imagine why you think you need such things.” He sounded amused. And something darker. Hotter. “When I am only going to remove them.”
CHAPTER TEN
MALAK HELD OUT his hand and Shona didn’t have it in her to refuse it.
Even though there was that noise inside her head, warning her of all the terrible ways this could end. All the other shoes that could fall and crush her, even in a palace like this—because they always, always did. Even though there was that hitch in her chest that she was terribly afraid was the heart she’d thought so well armored and so protected after all these years that nothing could ever come close to threatening it.
But on the other side of all of that was Malak, and that hand outstretched before her.
Unwavering and certain, as if he had no doubt whatsoever that she would take it.
And she couldn’t seem to help herself. She reached out and slid her fingers into his.
He pulled her close and her body knew him now. She melted into him, and then, better by far, his mouth was on hers.
And it was still so good. His kiss was like light, heat and longing, despite the fact she would have told herself that she had nothing left in her. That she’d given all she had to give, long ago.
He led her out onto the marble balcony, bathed in the crisp, bright light of another desert morning. Then he led her off to the side, where a gleaming, rectangular pool sat on its own raised platform, part of the water beneath billowing canopies that provided some little bit of shade.
“I don’t swim,” she told him, but she didn’t pull her hand from his. She didn’t slow her stride. She didn’t immediately launch herself into action—she just said it.
Almost as if you’ll do anything the man asks you to do, a little voice inside her observed. But she pushed that aside, because there was a kind of fluttery sensation deep inside her and she didn’t know how to name it. She didn’t want to name it.
“You don’t have to swim,” Malak told her, his dark eyes glittering as if he knew. As if he knew everything that moved inside her, heat and disquiet and fluttering alike. “You need only float.”
“I don’t float.”
Malak eyed her, standing there in all that desert sunlight, bright and clean and so unlike the thick Louisiana air she knew. He studied her face as if she was wearing some kind of mask when the funny thing was, she had never felt more exposed or raw.
“You come from a city that is below sea level. Of course you can float.”
“I wouldn’t know. Who had time for swimming lessons?” Shona laughed a little at that. Because the very notion was absurd. One of her foster parents setting aside time—and even more unlikely, money—to take Shona to unnecessary lessons? Impossible. The subject had never come up.
“Then this will be another first, little one,” Malak told her. “We can only hope it will be even half as delightful—and instructive.”
Shona felt hot at that, and she couldn’t pretend it was the Khalian sun. Then she felt hotter still when Malak let go of her hand so he could strip himself of the loose, flowing white trousers which were all he had on—and which did nothing at all to direct attention away from the lean power of his sculpted body.
And the reality of what they were doing hit her, then. Standing outside, absolutely stark naked, together. In the brightness of the Khalian morning, where anyone could see them.
If anyone could see onto the king’s private balcony, that was, which Shona doubted. But still.
Shona knew she should have been horrified. Embarrassed, at the very least. Her experiences of being naked or close to it around other people were limited to that hotel room with Malak all those years ago, the night she’d given birth to Miles and now.
She should have wanted to run and hide.
Especially since the man wanted her to get into a pool, of all things.
But she didn’t run. She didn’t even try to conceal herself. She watched as Malak climbed over the lip of the pool and then sank into the sparkling turquoise water until he was submerged up to his waist. He lifted up his hands and she took them, then let him help her down into the water’s embrace.
He had taught her how to catch fire. How to lose herself in the slick, sweet beauty of one body deep inside another. He had taught her lust and longing, need and release.
All that and the fluttering that made her feel like a winged thing, bright and feathery, as if at any moment she might take flight.
But this bright morning, when she’d woken up alone only to find that she wasn’t, after all, Malak taught her something else. He led her down into the water with him and held her in his strong grip, and he taught her how to float.
How to let the water hold her aloft, so that she really did feel like she was flying.
And he taught her something else, there where there was nothing but blue water below and blue sky above, and him in the center of it all, stern and sweet and his dark green gaze on her as if there had never been anything in all the world but the two of them together, just like this.
He taught her that the other shoe she’d feared would fall was far more dangerous than any she could have imagined, before, when the only thing she had feared was the possibility of his reappearance.
It wasn’t what he would do to her, out on a marble balcony with the desert light like a caress upon her face. It wasn’t the water that coursed over her like the prayers she’d long since stopped saying. It wasn’t all the things they’d done in that wide bed of his or in that atrium made of mirrors. It was much, much worse th
an those things and it was already done.
It was her poor little heart, that beat as if he was the only reason for it to exist in the first place, in this pool and in this palace and in the chaotic streets of the French Quarter, too.
It was the pride in his voice when he talked to or about their son.
And it was the way he took her, masterful and sure, right there in that gleaming turquoise pool so that she sobbed out her need and his name against his wide shoulder, as if she’d remembered how to pray, after all.
Shona had never fallen in love with anyone—had never wanted that kind of torment in her life when she’d never seen anything but too many examples of it going wrong—but maybe that was the point.
This wasn’t falling, here with Malak. It was floating.
And she’d been doomed from the start.
* * *
After that night, Shona threw herself into all the things she’d ignored before, because if there was one thing she knew how to do, it was figure out how to make the best of things if there was no alternative.
Might as well fly if you’re already falling, she told herself, and she tried to do just that.
Shona shocked her tutors by paying attention in her lessons. She actually wore the clothes that Yadira set out for her and tried to at least pretend to be the sort of woman who was comfortable in such fine fabrics and shockingly elaborate costumes. She didn’t know the first thing about being a queen, but she knew how to pretend.
So that was what she did.
Because Shona also didn’t know what to do with a heart that felt four sizes too big, and more painfully raw with every beat. She didn’t know how to make sense of the things she felt, or the man who made her feel them. So she did what she could instead.
She told herself it was for Miles.
“You’re so pretty, Mama,” he told her one evening as they made their way to their usual dinner in the king’s private rooms.
“Thank you, baby,” she said, smiling down at him, aware that there were only so many evenings left that he would happily hold her hand as they walked. And only so many days left when she could snuggle his whole body with hers before he grew too big—and before he stopped allowing her to hold him that way at all.
Sheikh’s Secret Love-Child Page 11
