Page 13 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER FOUR

TWOWEEKSLATER, Shona was ready to scream. Knock down the palace walls, if possible. Raze the royal city to the ground all around her.

And get the hell out of there before she imploded.

Or worse.

It wasn’t that anything had gone horribly wrong. She wasn’t treated badly, the way she’d half worried she would be—the way she had been more times than she could count when she’d been shifted to a new foster home. The truth of the matter was that the royal Palace of Khalia was by far the nicest place Shona had ever seen.

Or imagined, for that matter.

She thought about the traditional exteriors of palaces that a person expected from movies and advertising, and realized she’d never thought about what they might look like inside. And if she had, she never would have imagined all the gold.

She had been treated like a queen from the start, whether she wanted to become one or not. She and Miles had been bundled into their own car after those moments on the tarmac that Shona still couldn’t think about without her heart seeming to catch in her chest, and then swept off into the capital city that rose from the dunes as if it had been fashioned from the same sand.

“Is that really my dad?” Miles had asked in wonder, as if a father was a surprise adventure Shona had arranged for him—like a carnival ride.

“It really is,” Shona had replied in as even a tone as she could manage.

And she’d braced herself for questions. Recriminations. Or explanations she wasn’t prepared to give. But that wasn’t Miles. He accepted the addition of a father and a trip abroad to a magical new place the way he accepted any gift—as if it had all always been meant to be his.

Shona hadn’t known whether she should have been as grateful for that as she was. She was sure it said terrible things about her as a mother that she’d raised a child who could so easily...shift. From no father at all to an actual father who happened to be the king of a foreign land made of sand in the blink of an eye.

While Miles had chattered on in delight, the way he might about an action figure, Shona had stared out the window without knowing where to look. She’d braced herself to answer all the questions that Miles might fire at her, but he was busy telling her that his father was a king. So she stared at the buildings they passed as they entered the city through the high, imposing walls, but none of the structures she saw seemed to make any sense. All the shapes were wrong. Or different, anyway, from what she knew.

And she still hadn’t managed to take a deep breath.

The palace itself was worse. Or a wonder, anyway, and Shona hardly knew how to take it in. Her urge was to turn around and leave—to get the hell away before she could like it too much or want to stay, because she knew better than that—but escape wasn’t on offer.

She was a foster kid, she kept telling herself, holding tight to Miles’s hand as they walked inside the gleaming white palace that was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, graceful and immense at once. She’d been abandoned when she was six days old, literally left outside a bar like a bag of trash. She had no business in a royal palace.

She kept expecting someone to notice.

Everywhere she looked there was marble and gold, and then more marble and gold. Though there had been desert in all directions outside, the palace was filled with green things, bright flowers and water everywhere. It was bright and yet cool, despite the heat just beyond its walls. Glorious fountains flowed into pools and cascaded into gardens, heedless of the rolling dunes outside. The floors looked clean enough to eat off, unlike the battered streets of the French Quarter back home.

And worse, every person she passed bowed their head to her. Even wearing that same old uniform from her job back in the restaurant on the other side of the planet, they bowed.

She couldn’t help thinking that once they realized what a mistake Malak was making, they’d hate her for that most of all. They’d call her an imposter—and they’d be right.

But no one seemed to share her concerns.

“This is completely unnecessary,” she’d said to the woman who’d waited for her upon their arrival and introduced herself as Shona’s very own servant. And it was possible she’d sounded a little...shrill. “I don’t need servants of any kind and you certainly don’t need to bow like that when you talk to me.”

“You are queen—”

“I most certainly am not. I’m not queen. I’m not going to be queen.”

If the servant, whose name was Yadira, was taken back by Shona’s vehemence, she’d given no sign. She looked as if she could be Shona’s age, or a little older, and there was something about the robes she wore that made her every movement seem extrafeminine—or maybe it was just that Shona had slept in her black T-shirt and red skirt and was now shuffling around apalace dressed like a French Quarter waitress. It was getting to her.

Or, possibly, it was everything else that had happened since Malak had walked back into her life.

“You are the mother of the crown prince of Khalia,” Yadira had said quietly, her dark eyes touching Shona’s, then lowering. “How else should you be treated?”

Shona had been too overtired then—or that was what she told herself—to argue. And she certainly couldn’t explain the chaos inside of her.

She’d expected them to take Miles from her like every dramatic movie she’d ever watched. She’d steeled herself for a screaming battle, but it hadn’t happened. Yadira had delivered them to a suite of rooms that rambled over what seemed to be an entire wing of the palace, and was bigger than all the places Shona had ever lived...put together. Yadira had showed them around, pointing out a series of living areas, a private pool, balconies everywhere, dens and bedrooms and her own stocked kitchen should she feel compelled to make herself a snack...or, say, a twelve-course meal. She showed Shona what she called “your bedchamber,” which was actually another set of rooms inside the suite—a private sitting room, a bathroom that was larger than her house back in New Orleans and that sported a tub that could fit several people and enjoyed a view over a rambling, walled garden, as well as a door she didn’t even open that Yadira told her led to her dressing rooms. Plural.

But the only room Shona cared about was the one that led directly from her bedroom into what Yadira called the nursery. It was a bedroom for Miles as well as his own bathroom and playroom, and in yet another sitting room, a set of nannies who all exclaimed over him as if he was the center of the universe.