Page 31 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child
“There is nothing humble about you, little one,” Malak said quietly, and maybe he was the one without his customary grace. “You are proud and you are strong and I pity any man who imagines he could humiliate you.”
She made another sighing sound. “And yet you do it. You do it without even trying.”
He closed the distance between them. She already looked like a queen. If he had ever imagined a queen, the images would have paled next to Shona. Her dark hair was full and curly around her head. The gorgeous deep green gown swept over her figure, as demure as it was alluring. Her skin gleamed, that rich brown that haunted him when he was awake and asleep, and she shone brighter than the sparkling water of the fountains or the intricate mosaics on the floor beneath their feet.
She was as perfect now as she had been in a gold dress and smile five years ago.
Even more so, perhaps, because she’d given him Miles.
“Shona,” he started again, reaching over to take her chin in his hand. He tilted her pretty face to his.
“It’s cruel,” she whispered. Her eyes glittered with some kind of intense emotion he had no hope of naming, but he could feel it. Inside him. Around him. In his throat and his chest and his heavy sex. “You can dress me up. You can throw gowns on me and wrap ridiculous chains of impossible jewels around my neck. But it doesn’t change anything. Don’t you understand that? Nothing will ever change me.”
“What do you think I want to change?”
She jerked her chin from his grip. “Everything.”
It was the way she said that word. With too much heat and that brokenness besides.
“I don’t want to change you, Shona.”
“Of course you do.” Her voice was thick but Malak didn’t think the darkness in it was aimed at him. “I don’t blame you. But I would rather the whole world see me for who I really am right from the start than this—this sad game of charades that no one will ever believe, anyway.”
She made a hollow noise when he only stared at her.
“I don’t believe that you can’t see it. Weren’t you the one who was just telling me how sad and narrow my life is? The truth is, you’re right. I have nothing to give Miles now. I don’t know how to raise a prince. I thought I was doing okay as a single mother making ends meet. Better than my own mother did, anyway. You can call me a queen. You can dress me up like one if you must.” She pulled in a ragged breath, then let it out in a rush. “But you can’t change the simple fact that I was thrown away like trash because I am trash. You can’t dress that up no matter how hard you try.”
Malak felt something deep inside him go still. Like rage turned to stone.
But he gazed at Shona with all the ease that had marked him in his playboy days. As if there was nothing heavy between them and never would be.
“I am the king of Khalia,” he told her quietly. “Any woman I have ever slept with is, by definition, only of the highest caliber. Diamonds of the finest water, as they say. But the mother of my child? The mother of the next king of this glorious kingdom? It is impossible that this woman—this paragon who must be celebrated above all others as a matter of national pride and patriotic duty—can ever be or could ever have been anything remotely like trash.”
“I think you’re talking about Miles again.”
“Quite apart from that,” he said, with all the certainty of his station and the throne that had never felt more like his than it did today, “this is my country. You are whatever I say you are. And I must inform you that you are among the finest treasures of the kingdom, Shona. Because I say so.”
Her lips curved, but her eyes were sad. “That doesn’t make it true.”
“Maybe this will convince you, then.”
He did what he had been longing to do for what seemed like forever. He stepped closer to her, and swept her up from the bench, and into his arms at last.
And then finally—finally—Malak took her mouth with his.