Page 16 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

And then she would smile the way she’d learned to smile at the tourists in the French Quarter to get better tips, until she could see the tempers they were all too well-trained to lose in her presence.

The things she refused to try grew all the time. She refused to learn which fork to use at a table. She refused to learn how to wear the scarves and robes they laid out before her, because she refused to blend in with the people here. She refused to pay any attention to the tiny details that comprised the sort of diplomacy queens were expected to wield, because she refused to become that queen. She was uninterested in learning how to walk appropriately. How to stand fetchingly. How to address heads of state, or not, depending on local customs.

She might have had to take the classes. Or sit through them, anyway. But that didn’t mean she needed to distinguish herself as any kind of honor student. She’d taken a similar approach in all the high schools she’d found herself in as she’d bounced around from one home to the next in her last few years in the system.

Because one thing she knew well was that it was much, much worse to try hard for things that other people could take away on a whim. It was better not to try, not to want, not to break her own heart.

“You will embarrass the king,” her teachers warned her, in tones of ever-deepening concern.

“I’m all right with that,” she would reply serenely.

Miles, on the other hand, was thriving.

He loved the palace. He loved that he finally had a father. He loved his father heedlessly and wholeheartedly, in fact, and much as Shona might have hated her circumstances, she couldn’t hate that. Miles loved his many nannies and teachers, all of whom doted on him as if he was truly the most delightful child alive—which he was, of course. In Shona’s own, personal opinion. He loved all the new and exciting things he got to see and talk about every day. He loved that he had a grandfather, too, the sad old man who moved about the palace like a ghost in the wake of his wife’s death and who barely replied to polite greetings.

Miles was fine. Happy, even.

It was Shona who couldn’t fit in. Shona who was...wrong.

Like every foster home she’d ever found herself in, she reminded herself darkly. She’d survived them all. She would survive this, too.

“When will this defiance end?” Malak asked her one night.

He’d made their dinners even more painful. He’d decreed that they would all eat together as a family. Again, it was that word that had never meant anything to her and yet resonated inside of her in ways she couldn’t entirely understand. She worried that it was a word that meant so much she couldn’t look at it directly—and so Shona was forced to bite the bullet and pretend everything was fine as long as Miles was there. And it almost was. Miles would chatter away happily while Shona glared at Malak across gold plates and heaping platters of food.

And the moment Miles’s beloved nannies came to spirit him away, Shona would stand up and resume her stubborn refusal to take part in anything that didn’t directly benefit her child.

“When will you stop pretending I’ll ever be your queen?” Shona asked in return that night. “That’s when you can expect my defiance to stop. Not before.”

“I’m only interested in learning if there’s a timetable.” Malak sat back on his usual pile of pillows, looking entirely too at ease. “Because, Shona, I don’t mind telling you, this is all quite boring.”

“Heaven forbid. I wouldn’t want to bore you.” She rolled her eyes. “What could be worse than that?”

“I can think of a great many things that are worse than that,” he said, much too softly.

She wasn’t a fool. She could hear the warning in his voice.

But she ignored it.

“I can’t,” she said. Unwisely.

Because Malak smiled at her.

And then rose to his feet in a single, simple movement that did nothing but highlight his masculine grace in ways she could feel inside of her.

She could feel it. Inside her.

Her heart leaped toward her throat. Her stomach dropped toward her feet.

Run, something inside urged her—but her feet seemed nailed to the floor.

“What are you doing?” she asked, though she hardly sounded like herself. She was only grateful she’d managed not to stammer.

But that seemed like a small and insubstantial victory indeed when that smile of his deepened. And turned something like fierce.

“It occurs to me that I’ve been going about this all wrong,” Malak said with a quiet ferocity she could feel in her bones.

And everywhere else.

“I don’t know what that means, but—”

“What is that saying?” he asked, but she knew he wasn’t really asking. The look in his eyes was hot. And hard. And it made her want to do nothing at all but melt. “You get more flies with honey than with vinegar, is that not so?”

But he didn’t wait for her to come up with an answer.

He simply started toward her.