Page 27 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child
He didn’t laugh. Not exactly, though he made a sound that could have been something like it. Only devoid of any humor.
“What does that mean to you?” he asked. “You throw that word around, but tell me, what would you do with this freedom you are so obsessed with?”
Shona glared up at him. “Live my life without all this commentary on my wardrobe, for one thing.”
Malak didn’t take that bait. “Will you head back to that restaurant in New Orleans? Will you toil away at your two jobs and never quite make ends meet? Fight to pay the rent on a disgraceful house in that appalling neighborhood? You’ve been free to live out your dreams for the past four years. And what have you done with it?”
Shona pressed her curled fingers harder against her rib cage and told herself she wasn’t shaking, deep inside. “I’ve raised your crown prince. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“And what else?” An expression she couldn’t identify moved over his face when she didn’t answer him immediately, that on another man she might have called something like desperate. But this was Malak. “This is not a test. I want to know. You’ve spent nearly a month here, and in all that time, all you have told me is what you are not. You are not this person or that person. You will not do this, you will not do that. What do you want, Shona?”
It was another hit. A wallop, just like before, but she weathered it. Somehow she kept herself from crumbling. “I don’t need to prove myself to you.”
“You are so focused on what you think has been taken from you that you cannot seem to see what’s been given to you.” He shook his head. “You call this palace a prison, but what you fail to see is that it gives you access.”
“Access to what? You?” She scoffed. “I had more than enough access to you in a hotel bar in New Orleans.”
“To the world, Shona. To anything you like.” He rubbed a hand over his face, and that startled her. It seemed such a perfect expression of frustration and she was amazed that she had the power to get to him when he seemed like such an impassable wall to her. She wasn’t sure she liked it. “My child is by definition an extraordinarily wealthy individual. As am I. And there is no possibility that I will permit that child’s mother to live in squalor. Your old life was hard, I grant you. And I admire the fact that you made it work at all. But all that hardship is a thing of the past now. Your days of working around the clock, worrying over child care and trading shifts with friends are over. You are the only one who does not seem to realize that.”
Her heart was pounding. She realized she was holding her breath and forced herself to let it out.
Malak pressed his advantage. “Don’t you understand? You are mine now. There are no longer any boundaries on what you can or cannot do.”
“Except you. Except your boundaries.”
This time, that curve to his hard, beautiful mouth seemed sad. “And this is what you think of me, in the end. That I am indistinguishable from poverty, from prison.”
She didn’t think that. Of course she didn’t think that.
But she hated—or maybe the real truth was that she feared—that part of her that longed to reach out to him. To apologize for saying such a thing. To make him feel better, somehow, when she was still fighting off that shaking deep inside.
She bit her own tongue so hard she tasted copper.
And when she didn’t speak, Malak continued in that same low, dark way that was only making her internal trembling worse.
“If you want to live out your days in this narrow, dark cage you seem to think is your only option, you are welcome to do so,” he said. His tone lanced through her like some kind of terrible lightning. It made her want to defend herself. Cry. Rip herself open and bring a different version of herself out into the light, free of all the ugly weight of her childhood—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how. “But I would hope that you have better dreams for your child. He deserves better than that same small cage, do you not agree?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. He looked past her yet again, and nodded his head, and then Yadira was there again.
“Come, mistress,” she said, her own voice subdued, as if everybody despaired of Shona. Including Shona herself, it seemed. “At the very least we can try on the clothes, yes?”
And Shona let the other woman take her by the elbow and steer her toward the doorway that led farther into the suite, and on toward her bedroom. She let Yadira guide her, but she couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from Malak’s until the very last moment. She couldn’t seem to find her voice, either.
As if he had one hand around her throat.
And worse by far, the other clenched tight around her heart.