Page 47 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THATNOONE else had ever dared call the great Sheikh Malak, the king of Khalia, an ass—to his face, at any rate—was immediately obvious.
The look he gave Shona was nothing short of amazed. Arrogant and astonished at once, and as he scowled at her he seemed like a thundercloud, filling the whole of the gallery without having to move a muscle.
But Shona had grown up in hurricanes. She only smiled at him. Serenely.
“Have you lost your mind entirely?” The question was quiet. Soft, even. But she didn’t mistake it for any kind of weakness. Not when she could see that wild gleam in his dark green gaze. “Is this your version of a suicide mission, Shona?”
“I don’t believe you,” she told him, instead of answering his questions. “I don’t believe a single thing you said to me earlier. I don’t think you believe it, either.”
“This is the trouble with innocence,” Malak said, and there was a certain drawling disparagement in his tone that slid down her back like shame. But she straightened, because she understood on some level that shame was exactly what he wanted her to feel.
Which meant she refused. “I’m hardly an innocent.”
“Not now, I grant you. But for all intents and purposes, you might as well have been a virgin. And I don’t how to tell you this nicely, Shona, but what you are feeling is remarkably common.”
“If that’s your attempt to be nice, it failed.”
He looked as if he pitied her, but she refused to give in to that scared part of her that urged her to slink away and lick her wounds somewhere else. Somewhere safe.
“This is what virgins do,” Malak told her in that same tone. “They confuse sensation for emotion.”
“I think what you mean to say is that this is what kings do,” she replied, not backing down an inch, because this was the most important fight of her life. “Kings of this kingdom, anyway. In the face of any emotion they panic, don’t they? Love is too big. Too unwieldy. It seems your father and your brother felt they had to choose between love and the throne.”
“You know nothing about my father or my brother. And I would advise you to pick your words very carefully.”
“You insisted that I take lessons, and I have. I imagine I know more about the recent history of this country than you do, because you lived it. You were in the thick of it. I’ve been studying the bigger picture.” She reached out a hand and poked her finger into his chest, and realized after she’d done it that it had been entirely for the jagged sort of joy that exploded inside of her when she saw his expression. That intense astonishment, as if he couldn’t believe a peasant had dared lay a hand on the king. But Shona dared. She dared everything. Because this was all or nothing and she’d spent her whole life with nothing already. She wanted all, for a change. She wanted Malak. “You have something neither your father nor your brother had.”
“I know I do. I have their example and absolutely no desire to repeat their mistakes.”
“No, Malak,” Shona said softly, and she felt a kind of power wash through her. Power and certainty, washing her from her head down to her feet, as if she had always been a queen. As if she had always been meant to stand in a palace and claim her king. She held his gaze, her own serious and sure. “You have me.”
* * *
Malak had never wanted anything more than he wanted Shona. Particularly right now.
But he could not allow himself such weakness.
“I have promised that I will marry you, if that is what you mean—” he began, his tongue thick in his mouth. His throat too tight.
But this was not the woman he had left behind earlier, staring back at him in shock and hurt. This was the woman who had stared him down in a shoddy restaurant in the French Quarter as if he’d breached the walls of her private castle. This was the woman who had wanted nothing at all to do with him, even when he’d made it clear how much better he could make her life.
This was his Shona. His queen.
But he couldn’t let that confuse the issue.
“I think you know that’s not what I mean at all,” she was saying in that same way of hers, as if her voice deserved to ring out over the whole of the desert the way it rang in him. “Do you think I don’t understand what it’s like to be afraid to love, Malak?”
It was as if she was strangling him when all she had done was poke a finger into the center of his chest. Her hands were nowhere near his throat, and even if they had been wrapped around it, he doubted very much she could have done him any harm.
And still he felt as if she was choking him.
“I do not fear love,” he bit out, though the words felt bitter in his mouth. “I do not fear anything. Ask around. I am well known to be shockingly reckless in the face of any and all danger.”
“You’re talking about a different Malak,” Shona said, with that certainty and dismissiveness that felt like tectonic plates shifting deep inside him. “But he died the day your brother abdicated the throne, didn’t he? The moment you had responsibilities, he changed, because he had no choice. He rose to the occasion. I know about that, too.”
“Of course you do.” His voice was acid. “Because you ascended which throne, again?”