Page 10 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER THREE

THEYLANDEDIN 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.