Page 12 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

“Malak...” She hadn’t known what she’d meant to say. Only that it had been clawing at her throat, demanding she open her mouth and give into it—

“We will take off momentarily,” Malak had told her, his voice as cold as his eyes had been hot. And accusing. “And when we land, we will be in the capital city of Khalia. I suppose it is as good a place as any to meet my son.”

And Shona had stayed there in that state room, feeling ripped apart in ways that didn’t make sense. Because it wasn’t that Malak was taking her away from the only life she’d ever known—though she imagined that would hit her, sooner or later. It wasn’t that he had appeared in the first place, making his demands and his outlandish claims. That wasn’t what had kept her awake, though her eyes had been gritty and glassy as she’d stared up at the smooth ceiling. It was that look on his face as he’d gazed down at Miles.

Shona had lived the whole of her life without ever loving another person.

That was how she’d grown up. That was what she’d learned one foster home at a time. She’d relied on herself, that was all, but she’d never believed that love was a real thing that could exist between real people. Until Miles.

He’d come into the world and cracked her wide open. His birth had changed everything. It was as if she’d lived all her life in a dark little house, curtains drawn tight over boarded-up windows, and Miles had punched through each and every one of them to let in the sun.

She knew the look that had been on Malak’s face. She’d recognized it. It was that same disbelieving, bone-deep love for his own child that had no equal. It was like a heart attack that didn’t kill, a cancer that settled there sweet and insistent in the bones. It was every breath. It was a kind of madness.

She’d seen it all over his face.

And Shona knew her way around bitterness. She welcomed it, come to that, because it made certain there were few unpleasant surprises out there in an uncaring world. But as bitter as she might have been, she wasn’t sure she had it in her to truly hate a man who loved her child like that.

That deeply. That truly. And that instantaneously.

And she didn’t know what that meant for her. Or how on earth she meant to survive whatever was coming next if she didn’t have the strength and purity of hating Malak to guide her.

But then they landed, and Miles was awake again, and all her dithering had led to nothing. Save a sleepless night, which left her feeling hollowed out and scraped raw as she led her son off the plane.

Because it was that or bar herself in the state room and hope for...what, exactly?

There was no good answer to that. So she took Miles’s hand in hers and answered his excited questions as best as she could, and walked off the plane into the new life she’d never wanted in the first place.

Shona had never been anywhere. She’d been born and abandoned in New Orleans and she’d assumed she would die there, too. She’d always been practical, because anything else led directly to pain and heartbreak, so she’d long ago stopped dreaming of things that she could never have—something she’d always thought was her best trait. She’d been proud of the fact that no one could hurt her. No one could even come close.

She’d been bulletproof.

And yet the moment they stepped outside the confines of the jet, a thousand dreams she’d forbidden herself to have seemed to flow back into her, like yet another dangerous flood. All those nights she’d spent curled up in a ball, blocking out the sounds of the latest horrible house some stranger had insisted she called her home. All those dreams she would have denied she’d ever entertained in the morning, of faraway places and exotic skies.

She’d never seen a sky like the one spread out before her at the top of the jet’s stairs, stretching on and on like hope. It was vast and impossibly blue, brighter and more intense than any she’d ever seen. And it took her long moments to understand that she wasn’t simply breathless, but that there was no moisture in the air. The landscape that stretched out in all directions, rippled and sinuous and the color of clay pots, was a desert—there were no swamps, no levees, no gnarled old cypress trees wreathed in Spanish moss, no murky bayou waters filled with alligators and secrets.

It was like being on another planet.

Shona wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry, or what emotion it was inside of her that seemed to be clawing its way out against her will—but Miles had no such affliction.

He tugged at her hand and she let him go.

And she couldn’t help feeling that it was filled with portent, that letting go. That it was an act of foreboding, of premonition—

“Be careful,” she called out, but it was a lost cause.

Because Miles was already moving. Running. He barreled down the steps of the jet and onto the tarmac. And it was like watching a kind of nightmare, Shona thought. It was slow motion and felt as if it had all been preordained. That every step her little boy took had been planned, exactly like this.

Because Malak waited there at the bottom, alone.

Shona noticed that there were no guards arrayed around him even as she watched Miles run headlong into this future she couldn’t prevent. And she knew, somehow, that Malak had emptied the tarmac. That his guards no doubt waited for him in the small airport hangar she could see to one side of the runway, but had cleared out, the better not to overwhelm a four-year-old.

And she had been alone too long, she thought as she made it down the stairs and stepped onto the tarmac herself. Or perhaps she couldn’t work out how to breathe in the desert air, or think critically in the glare of all the Khalian sun that danced over her skin. But try as she might, she just wasn’t sure she had it in her to hate this man who’d put her son’s feelings first, without even having to be asked.

Just as she didn’t have it in her to do anything but watch—more touched than she wanted to admit—as with no more than a single swift glance her way that shook her to the core, no matter its brevity, Malak crouched down to put himself on Miles’s level, and at long last met his own son.