Page 43 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child
But unlike them, he didn’t have to act on the things he felt. He didn’t need to call the feelings inside of him love. He didn’t have to ruin himself and his kingdom over the ache in his chest.
He bloody well wouldn’t.
“Is something wrong?” Shona asked.
“Nothing is the matter,” he told her gruffly. He tilted his head in a silent command that she should follow him inside, leaving Miles in the care of his nannies, and was gratified when, for once, she followed without argument. “The wedding is being planned as we speak. It will be a vast celebration, appropriate for the king of these lands and the woman he claims as his.”
“That sounds medieval.”
“It sounds appropriate,” he responded, correcting her. “But Shona...” He stopped when they had moved deeper into the rooms, out of earshot of the balcony. He hardly spared a glance for the sitting room he found himself in, all embroidered pillows and low tables, and he despaired of himself when all he could seem to think about was getting her naked and putting all those pillows to use. “You must never speak of loving me again. I find it offensive in the extreme.”
She blinked. Then laughed, as if he’d started a comedy routine. “What? You find it offensive?”
“That is an order.” He stepped back when she would have reached out and touched him and told himself he didn’t care that she looked crestfallen. That it was better that way. “It was the fashion many years ago to lock up the queen in a far-off garrison, the better to ensure that she could never be used against the kingdom. Do not force me to take this step. Because I will if I have to.”
“You want to...lock me up?” she asked, and she sounded...off. Weak, almost, as if he’d punched her in the stomach. He hated himself as if he really had. “In a garrison? Is that another way of saying jail?” She shook her head. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Malak.”
“It is entirely up to you,” he told her, stiff and dark. “I am giving you the power to decide what happens next and you should take that as the act of benevolence it is. You will become my queen either way, but I will not have this talk of love. It has no place here.”
But all he could hear was her voice, sweet and soft in the night. The way she smiled when she tipped back her head and threw herself over into all that fire, all that heat, as if his hands, his mouth and his body were a kind of glory.
The way she said those terrible words he couldn’t allow.
“Why not?” she asked now, and her voice sounded stronger. When she met Malak’s gaze, he found he couldn’t read her expression at all. It made his skin seem to tighten over his bones. “Is this your way of telling me I’ve forgotten my place?”
“Your place is at my side,” he told her, forcing himself to sound cold. Forbidding. “I have told you this. But that doesn’t mean we need to pretend that what’s between us is some kind of romantic fairy tale. It’s not. It never was, was it?” And because she only stared at him as if he was speaking in tongues, he let the curve of his lips edge into cruelty. “I think you’ll find that fairy tales seldom begin drunkenly, in bars, between strangers.”
He watched her take a deep breath and took no pleasure at all in the fact he’d clearly hurt her. But he didn’t relent.
“Let me make sure I’m understanding you,” Shona said after a long moment and with too much vulnerability on her face. “I’m good enough to parade around in fancy clothes. I’m definitely good enough to roll around naked in your bed. But if I have any kind of feelings about those things and worse, say them out loud, I’m out of line. Is that it?”
Something in him cracked at that, as if the faint tremble in her lips was a fissure deep inside of him.
“Do not make me regret that I took the pleasant path with you,” he growled at her. “That I opted to use honey rather than vinegar when I could so easily have simply taken what I wanted. Because you wanted it, too.”
“I don’t know why you’re acting like a monster when you’re not one.”
But that was the problem. He felt like a monster and she was to blame for that. She tempted him to become the worst he was capable of. She was too much temptation. She would ruin him.
She already had.
“You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of,” he told her. “Do not make me show you.”
But Shona wasn’t like any other woman he’d ever known. She didn’t crumble. She didn’t weep in awe or gratitude.
She only eyed him, then tilted that chin up as if she was fully prepared to fight him.
He understood that his ruin was complete.
“Show me,” she dared him. “Tell me that you don’t want me. Tell me to my face when you and I both know better.”
And Malak didn’t even hesitate. Because he knew that if he did, he would never do this. And then what would become of him? Of his kingdom?
“I wanted Miles,” he told her, a deliberate and vicious blow, and the only wonder was that she didn’t fall to her knees. “I never wanted you, Shona. Why would I? You’re nothing to me but a means to an end.”
And then he turned on his heel and left her there, that stunned look in her brown eyes and her mouth open in shock, before he proved exactly how weak he was—how very much his father’s son he was, despite everything—and took it all back.