Page 48 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

“Because I had a baby.” Her voice was quiet. Matter-of-fact.

And pierced him straight through.

She held his gaze in that way of hers that made it impossible to know if he should gather her close or make absolutely certain that this time, when he pushed her away, she stayed away.

But he couldn’t seem to move.

And Shona continued. “I was twenty-two years old and more alone than I think you can imagine. And suddenly I was a mother. Whatever I felt, whatever I thought my life was going to look like, it changed in that moment. And part of that change was daunting, sure. But sometimes I think it saved me.”

He needed to say something—anything—to make her stop before those tectonic plates inside him crumbled into dust, but she didn’t seem to hear him.

“After all, when every single choice you make has to be the responsible one because lives are at stake, it almost feels like freedom, doesn’t it? Because there’s no room for error.” That smile of hers sliced him straight to the bone. It was sad and wise and entirely too beautiful. Shona. “There’s absolutely no way that you can do anything but the right thing, so that’s what you do.”

Malak was in agony. He didn’t know what he wanted—or he wanted too much and all at once. He wanted to put his hands on her, but then he always did. He wanted to stop her talking, by any means necessary, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing.

It was as if he was frozen solid yet lit on fire.

And worst of all, she seemed to know it.

“And I get that your parents were distant,” she was saying, as if she was trying her best to tear him apart, here in this gallery filled with all the men whose shoes he doubted he could ever fill, staring down at him in disapproval. “Maybe they were even actively cruel. And I’m sympathetic. I am. But of all the women in all the world you could have chosen to have your baby, Malak, you picked the one who had even less in the way of parents than you did. At least you met your mother.”

“My mother...” He hadn’t meant to say that. It burst from his lips of its own accord and he wanted to hate her for that—but there was something in Shona’s melting brown eyes. Something a whole lot like compassion, and it humbled him. “She hated me.”

And all his life, when he said such things—always as a joke, an aside, a bit of a laugh—the people he’d said them to had denied it. Over and over again. “Of course she doesn’t hate you,” they would say. “Her emotions might be very complicated,” they would assure him. “No mother hates her own child,” they would say—but Malak had always thought they were making themselves feel better, not him.

Because he knew the truth now. His mother had wanted Adir. Malak was the consolation prize—and she’d hated him for it.

Shona didn’t say any of those things. She didn’t offer him anything even resembling a platitude. She only gazed at him for a moment, a knowledge in that gaze of hers that he didn’t want to see.

“Maybe she did,” she said quietly, and still, he was surprised the walls didn’t shake with the force of it. “But that says a lot more about her than it ever could about you.”

And something about that nearly snapped him in two.

“Shona—”

“I know all about it,” she told him, and her eyes filled while she said it. It was almost more than he could bear. “Oh, God, do I know about it. And I’ve lived my whole life until now in response to every single thing they did to me when I was a kid. Or didn’t do. The neglect. The cruelty. I could react to it forever. So could you. But where does it end?”

“Shona.”

But still she didn’t stop. Instead, she moved closer, that finger softening until her whole hand was on his chest. And he couldn’t seem to set her away from him the way he knew he should.

The way he told himself he would any minute. Any minute now.

“I promised myself that I would never, ever allow Miles to feel even a moment of the kind of crap I lived through,” Shona told him, fierce and solemn at once, and all that emotion turning her brown eyes brilliant. “And I won’t. Don’t you get it? We get to decide what his life is like. We get to decide what kind of man he becomes. Do you really want him to be like us, Malak? Do you want to break him before he even starts?”

There were tears on her cheeks. And equally as astonishing, his hands were on her shoulders, holding her.

He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t holding her.

“Never,” he gritted out.

As if it was the most sacred vow he would ever utter.

“I have to believe that love is only as scary as we make it,” Shona whispered. “I have to believe that we are not doomed to play out these same tired cycles over and over and over again. He deserves better, Malak.” She reached up then, and fit her hand to his jaw, and in so doing knocked the world off its axis. “But so do we.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” Malak managed to get out past the constriction in his throat, his chest. He dipped his head so his face was next to hers. Close enough to kiss her—and yet he didn’t. He couldn’t, not just then. Not with the world in the balance between them. “I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to feel these things or—”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to know. I don’t think anybody does.”