Page 11 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

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.

Shona had never had the same experience. She hadn’t known it was something she’d craved, hard and deep, as if her bones had been crying out for it all this time.

She felt something inside of her that she couldn’t even name...turn over. And hum a little, as if something she hadn’t known was lost and hadn’t thought to miss had been returned to her, at last.

And when she’d looked up again, when she’d dared, Malak had turned that unreadable dark green gaze of his on her.

Shona had no idea why the only thing she’d wanted to do then was apologize. She hadn’t even known for what.

She’d felt the air between them drawn tight. Thick with emotion, maybe. Or regrets. All that lost time, those lost years, stolen from the little boy who slept innocently between them.

Shona hadn’t understood the power of family, of blood, until that moment. Until she found herself yearning for things she’d never wanted, ever.