Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

New Orleans, it turned out, was a very different city in the light. And while sober.

And perhaps Shona was, too.

He studied her a moment while he fought to keep his temper in check. “You will find I rarely traffic in metaphors.”

“I don’t care.” She shook her head at him, very much as if he was insane. “What you do or don’t do is of no interest to me. You need to leave, now, or I’m calling the police. And believe me when I tell you that I’m not into metaphors, either.”

She pulled her mobile from the pocket of her apron and Malak believed her. If there was a woman alive on this earth who would dare summon the local police to attempt to handle him, it would be this one.

Shona was fierce, it turned out, and his was the blood of desert kings. Fierceness was appreciated—or it would be, eventually, if he could focus it in the right direction. She was threatening him, as if she had no fear at all of the armed men who would die to protect him, and he could appreciate that, too. Theoretically.

But the truth was, he wasn’t at all certain that an American waitress of questionable finances and a “career” in restaurants like this depressing, grotty pit should find the idea of marrying the king of Khalia quite so appalling.

What he found he was certain of was that he didn’t like it.

“I invite you to call all the police you imagine will help you,” he told her, and he could hear that volcanic rage in his voice, humming just there beneath the surface. The faint widening of her perfect brown eyes told him she could, too. “I’m sure they will enjoy a lesson in diplomatic immunity as much as they’ll enjoy discussions with you about wasting their time. But the end result will not change. Perhaps it is time you considered accepting the inevitable.”

She made an alternate, anatomically impossible suggestion that made Malak’s entire security team bristle to outraged attention.

“The disrespect, sire!” the man on his right growled.

Malak merely held up a hand, and his men subsided. Because no one was getting the fight they wanted today.

“I would advise you to remember that, like it or not, I am a king,” he told her softly. “It is possible I might find this irrepressible spirit of yours intriguing, in time, but my men most assuredly will not.”

She let out a short laugh that was almost as offensive as the off-color suggestion she’d just made. “The only thing I care about less than you is the opinion of your babysitters.”

Malak did not respond to that bit of impudence the way he wanted to do.

Because this was not Khalia. This was America, where, diplomatic immunity or not, people would likely take a dim view of him tossing a screaming woman over his shoulder and then throwing her into his waiting car.

Besides, that was no kind of strategy. Allowing her to think she could speak to him in this way was setting a dangerous precedent, but he could handle disrespect. He could think of several enjoyable ways to do just that even as he stood here in this distressingly dank hole that called itself a restaurant, the last place on earth he would ordinarily find himself feeling so...needy.

But he didn’t want to kidnap Shona and his own son. He would certainly do it if it came to that, but he knew that would do nothing but make him her enemy. Neither one of them wanted this unavoidable connection and the marriage that had to follow, that was plain enough, but it would be far better for him if she surrendered to the inevitable rather than fought him every step of the way.

At the very least it would be better for his relationship with the small child he had yet to meet whom he’d helped create—a notion he still couldn’t entirely get his head around.

After all, he knew more than he needed to know about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a terrible marriage. He had no intention of passing on that feeling to his own child—even one he’d only learned existed a week ago.

“I will wait for you outside,” he said, with great magnanimity, as if he was bestowing upon her a tremendous favor. It made her eyes narrow. And then he could see the thoughts that spun through her head, so he addressed them. “My men are already at every exit, Shona, so escape is out of the question. What you need to ask yourself is if you want me to pay your boss to fire you, too. Simply because I can. With ease. And because it would suit me to speed up this process.”

“Of course you’d threaten me with losing my livelihood,” she replied, shaking her head at him as if he disgusted her. He found he did not enjoy the sensation. “After all, what’s a job to you? You don’t have to put food on any tables. You probably think it all just appears there, like magic.”

Malak did not dignify that with a response. He turned on his heel and went outside instead, where night was beginning to creep into the French Quarter, and as it did, as the soupy heat of the day began to ebb.

Outside in the thick, sweet twilight he could wrestle with his temper before he caused an international incident. Something that would not bother him in the slightest, he felt certain, because it would get him what he wanted that much quicker—but would cause the people of Khalia more alarm. And his people had been through enough already in these last few turbulent months.

He expected her to follow after him directly, but she didn’t. She made him wait. She not only did not walk away from her job as he expected she might, but she also worked her entire shift. And on her breaks she tested every single exit he’d told her he was having watched, which his men dutifully reported to him each time.

Malak almost admired her thoroughness and commitment.

Almost.

When she finally walked out of the restaurant and saw him waiting for her as he’d told her he would, she tilted up that belligerent little chin of hers and fixed him with the same scowl she’d used inside.

It took a great deal more self-control than it should have not to object to that...in a manner that involved his hands on her and the horizontal back seat of his vehicle. Malak complimented himself on his own restraint, because he very much doubted Shona would.

“I don’t know what you think is going to happen,” she began, her tone hot.

“I have already told you what’s going to happen.” Malak leaned against the pristine side of the Range Rover his security detail had driven here from the private airfield where his jet waited. The New Orleans night was sultry, just as he recalled it. There had been people around in the daylight, but they seemed wilder and brighter in the dark. Their laughter spiced the air as they wandered down the street and followed the seductive sound of the music that snaked around every corner.

In the middle of it, he and Shona stood there, studying each other with mutual dislike.

You do not dislike her,a voice inside challenged him at once. You dislike the fact she dislikes you, and so openly.

He opted to ignore that. He was unused to being disliked. Ignored or desired, that was what Malak was familiar with. But never this...hatred.

“I am not going to be your queen,” she told him, very distinctly. “I’m willing to let you see Miles, because, like it or not, you’re his father. And he deserves to know you, I suppose.”

He stopped admiring his restraint and forced himself to use it. “You suppose.”

“All you are to me is a man in a bar,” Shona said quietly, her dark gaze on his. And there was no reason that should have slammed into Malak like a blow when it was no more than the truth. “I don’t want anything from you. I never did. I never expected to see you again.”

“Clearly.” Every line of her body was defiant, but as Malak studied her, it wasn’t her defiance that got to him. It was that other thing. That spark that had bloomed between them in that bar long ago. The same fire still licked through him, and he didn’t like that at all. Wanting this woman would only complicate matters further. “But now I have returned. What I can’t understand is why you care so little for your own child you would consign him to a life of hardship rather than involve me.”

She let out a crack of laughter that felt a little too much like a slap. “Hardship? Did you just open your mouth and say something to me about hardship? What would you know about it?”

“You must know that I can provide for him in ways that you can only dream about. What mother wouldn’t want that?”

“My son wants for nothing.” Shona’s voice was quiet again, but certain. Absolutely certain. “He’s a happy kid. A good kid. And he’s mine.”

“What good is it to be yours if it means child care?” He nodded at the shoddy restaurant behind her. “A mother who must scramble for tips in a place like this?”

“Because an honest day’s work is beneath you, obviously.”

“Is this about honesty, Shona? Or your own bloody-mindedness?”

She rolled her eyes. Actually rolled her eyes, which Malak was not sure anyone had ever done to him in all his life.

“He’s four years old because guess what? Sometimes when people have sex, babies come of it. I’m surprised a worldly man like you didn’t know that.”

“I used a condom.” He had always used condoms. Always.

“They are not one-hundred-percent guaranteed. Apparently. And I dealt with the consequences of that all this time, all on my own. Except now you roll back into town talking about thrones and kings like I’m supposed to drop everything and what? Be grateful that you discovered we exist? I don’t think so.”

What bothered Malak the most about her words wasn’t her tone of voice, which bordered on scathing. It was the fact that nothing she said was untrue.

He hadn’t looked back when he’d left. He’d remembered her and her charming innocence, but had it not been for his father and brother’s abdications from the Khalian throne, something no one could possibly have predicted and Malak himself still did not quite believe, he would never have returned here.