Page 40 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THEFIRSTTIME Shona told him she loved him, Malak did her the great courtesy of ignoring the outburst.

He assumed it was the heat of the moment. The fact they were in bed had obviously confused her and made her lose all sense and reason. After all, he reminded himself, this was all very new to her. He chose to take it as a compliment, nothing more.

Because Malak told himself she could not possibly realize what it was she had said. Or if she did, she would likely be so embarrassed by blurting out something like that, something that was mad and impetuous and plainly absurd, that she would never let that sort of thing fall from her lips again.

But the strangest thing happened in the days that followed: Shona didn’t stop. She wasn’t embarrassed at all, or if she was, she certainly didn’t show it in any way Malak could understand.

On the contrary, it seemed that once Shona had accepted her role as his queen and the more she readied herself to take her place at his side, the more...reckless she grew.

There was no other word for it.

The word love fell from her lips with alarming regularity. And every time she said that damn word—or sobbed it, or moaned it, or whispered it as she slid off into sleep—it was as if she’d picked up a hammer and wielded it directly against his flesh.

Again and again and again, leaving nothing but wounds and bruises behind.

Still, Malak forced himself to remain quiet. To pretend none of that was happening. He kept hoping that if he continued to ignore it, if he acted as if she’d said nothing at all, Shona would stop letting that poisoned word escape her lips.

After all, there was a wedding to plan, one that befit Malak’s new station and allowed his people to properly celebrate all the changes in the kingdom. There were delicate negotiations to pick his way through, inside his family and out. He had to invite his half brother, Adir, who ruled a desert tribe—and more importantly, had helped himself to Zufar’s original betrothed after an unfortunate confrontation at the palace. He had to invite his brother, Zufar, of course, who had abdicated the Khalian throne to rule with his new bride in remote Rumadah. And he had to invite his sister, Galila, and her husband, King Karim of Zyria, who happened to be the son of the man who had been Malak’s mother’s lover all those years ago. The royal diplomacy would have been headache enough. The seething family drama beneath all that diplomacy, though significantly calmer of late, made it all that much more of a minefield.

Because they were all coming, not only to celebrate Malak’s wedding, but to show that the royal family of Khalia, though rocked by all that had happened since Queen Namani had died, stood proud and solid, together.

Malak told himself it was that alone that ate at him, dripping like acid into his heart. His gut. He told himself it was nothing but the same old family nonsense that had nearly destroyed them all already, a hundred times over. All those old secrets and new bonds that had caused so much upheaval, and had ended with Malak on the Khalian throne.

But it wasn’t his family who haunted him. It wasn’t their voices he heard in his head when he was trying to concentrate on his responsibilities.

It was Shona. It was always Shona. It was the way she said “I love you,” over and over, and never seemed the least bit concerned that he failed to respond. Or even to acknowledge that she’d spoken at all.

And yet she slept so easily, sprawled over him or cuddled beside him in his bed. She slept the deep and restorative sleep of the righteous while Malak was the one left wide-awake and staring into nothing, those damn words going round and round inside of him.

Leaving marks wherever they touched.

One day, not long after Shona had started this campaign of hers to ruin what they had between them and drive him fully mad, Malak found himself up in the old family wing of the palace. He had been on his way to a stuffy meeting with his financial advisors and had taken a wrong turn. Then kept right on going.

His mother was gone now. His brother and sister had married and moved away. Malak himself had moved from the family wing to take his place in the monarch’s traditional suite. Now the only inhabitant of these rooms Malak knew so well was his father.

His poor, lonely, broken father, whom Malak had always seen as a victim of love. Even when Tariq had still been king and Namani had still been alive and they’d both continued to put a happy face on their wretched marriage.

Today Malak found the old man in what had once been a playroom but was now the abdicated king’s personal library. And as he stood in the doorway, Malak remembered finding his father exactly like this, across all the years of his childhood. When he wasn’t off ruling the kingdom, Tariq had found an armchair in the family wing and had sat as he did now, a book open in his lap but his gaze fixed somewhere on the other side of the nearest window.

As a child, Malak had imagined his father had been consumed with weighty ruminations regarding the kingdom, the future, his role as king. He’d imagined his father had stared out and seen his own consequence, his own power—both of which Malak had found fascinating as none of that had ever been meant to be his.

He knew now that it was far more likely that the old man had been brooding over the unfaithful wife who had never loved him.

All that power and consequence was Malak’s after all, for his sins. And it didn’t escape him that all he seemed to think about was the woman he was about to marry who couldn’t stop telling him she loved him, when he knew exactly where that led.

Here, he thought darkly. It leads right here.

To a lonely old man in a chair, hidden away in a room filled with memories, ghosts and grief.

Malak stayed where he was in the doorway rather than walking in, as too many competing emotions were roaring through him at once. None he particularly liked. He loved his father. There could be no argument on that score, but it was also true that when he looked at the old man—particularly locked away up here, where nothing could distract him from his endless focus on Namani—he felt a kind of sorrow that knew no name.

A sort of grief, perhaps, for what might have been.

Had his father been a different man. Had his mother been a woman worthy of the kind of devotion the old king had lavished upon her no matter the cost to him, his kingdom or their children. Had either one of his parents thought less about themselves and the tangle of their personal lives and a little bit more about the children they should have been attempting to raise.

Malak had always talked himself out of that kind of harsh judgment in the past. Yes, his parents had ignored their children, but it was not as if they had been run-of-the-mill, suburban parents somewhere. They had been King Tariq and Queen Namani of Khalia. They could hardly have been expected to spend the kind of time with their offspring that others with fewer responsibilities did.