Page 28 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER EIGHT

THECORONATIONCEREMONY went off smoothly. Far better than anyone, including Malak, could have hoped after the surprise of his ascension and the even bigger shock of Miles’s existence. He was fairly certain his top ministers had expected something along the lines of an American reality show.

But Malak had opted instead for a private, deliberately quiet affair, because he thought it was important that Khalia’s second major transfer of power in the past few months seemed so smooth it hardly merited any publicity—aside, of course, from what the papers might say about it.

Besides, he had other plans for grand, sweeping public ceremonies.

A coronation was a ritual steeped in age-old tradition of a far more prosaic sort—the consolidation of authority into a single man. Less myth, more might. Malak had planned his down to the barest, most minute detail, because he wanted the somber images he planned to release to live in his people’s heads and hearts as if they had always been there.

Malak himself, looking quietly authoritative, accepted his place on the ancient throne in traditional Khalian dress. The ritual naming of his heir, that he knew would inspire his people to raptures. For who could resist tiny, fierce-faced Miles, staring up at his father with an identical look of concentration in those same dark green eyes?

And everything went as it should. Precisely as Malak had planned.

Except for Shona.

She had disappeared into her room with her servant earlier, looking shaken. Malak had found he didn’t like it. He preferred Shona bright and ferocious, not quietly obedient—though he hardly knew where to put such a thought after all the effort he’d expended attempting to break her even a little. And then she had emerged again some time later dressed appropriately for her station.

At last.

And he’d forgotten what he liked or didn’t like about her emotional state, because he was, after all, just a man.

And she was so gorgeous it made his lungs hurt.

Malak had gone to significant trouble to find the perfect dress that encompassed both the sort of Western chic that would broadcast Shona’s beauty to the whole world and the suggestion of the kind of modesty his people would expect from a woman who had already borne him a son and would soon take her place at his side.

And she had exceeded his wildest expectations.

Shona was always beautiful. But it had never occurred to him how much she tried to hide that. With her aloofness. With her toughness. With her refusal to back down, ever, even so much as an inch. It wasn’t simply the way she dressed, it was how she carried herself.

As if she dared any man, even him, to find her beautiful when she could be a thorn in the side instead.

But it was as if the dress brought out a different side of her. A Shona he’d never met before, this one as soft as she was determined. No longer disguising her stunning beauty, but owning it at long last.

“Are you satisfied?” she’d asked him when she stood there, her hair a gorgeous dark halo around her and her brown eyes fixed on his while the dark green dress managed to both hide and celebrate her figure in a rush and tumble toward the floor.

And at any other time, that would have been a challenge. But not today.

Today, Malak had thought, she actually wanted to know his answer. Did he dare imagine she wanted his approval?

“I am completely satisfied,” he’d told her, though his voice was more gravelly than it should have been and his head was in the gutter.

It was harder than it should have been to simply extend his arm to her. Not to put his hands on her. Not to take her back into that bedroom and explore this new, even more stunning version of Shona with every part of his own exultant, needy body.

Not to call her what she was. His queen.

Instead, after a slight hesitation, she’d taken his arm. And she’d let him lead her through the palace.

“All you have to do is stand with Miles, smile a bit and look reasonably pleased to be involved in something of such import. Can you do that?” he had asked her as he’d walked them both toward the throne room his great grandfather had built for the express purpose of awing peasants and visitors alike.

His earlier ancestors had never seen a need for such a thing. They’d ruled by might and guile through the strength of their armies and the sheer audacity of their military strategies out here in these treacherous deserts. Thrones and crowns had been secondary, little more than affectations and fripperies to hardened warrior kings who took what they wanted and held it by the force of their will alone.

And somewhere between the power of his ancestors and the spectacle of modernity, Malak needed to find his own way to rule.

It made him...uneasy, almost, to consider how little he could imagine holding this throne without Shona. When had that happened? They had been forced back together because of a long-ago mistake and he should have hated that. He had hated the very idea of it, once upon a time. He was sure he had.

He didn’t understand why he didn’t hate it anymore. Why hate wasn’t at all the word he’d use to describe the situation he found himself in with this woman.

Not that he would allow it to be anything else.