THEY LANDED IN Khalia the next morning.
Shona felt very much the way she had that morning long ago, when she’d woken up in the most sumptuous, luxurious hotel suite she’d ever seen in her life to find herself all alone. She’d felt…deliciously battered, and somehow made new.
And she’d had no idea how she, who had never had any intention of falling into bed with a stranger and ending up alone and pregnant—too many examples of girls who’d taken that path in foster care had soured her on those choices—had found herself there.
Which was to say, she could remember every gloriously carnal detail, but she didn’t understand how she’d surrendered all of herself so heedlessly to a man she’d never laid eyes on before that night.
At least this time she could track the sequence of events.
Malak had announced that he was finished with their conversation. And more, that his next stop would be her friend’s house—because, of course, he knew about Ursula—to pick up his son.
He kept saying that. His son. It made Shona’s sight turn red at the edges. It made her feel something like violent, temper rushing through her like a river.
That it was only the simple truth made it worse.
“You can either be a part of our first meeting or not,” he’d told her, all steel and disregard, and she’d wanted to scream at him. She’d wanted to beat on him with her fists. She’d wanted to make him deeply, desperately sorry he’d come back into her life.
But she’d wanted to protect Miles a whole lot more than she’d wanted any of that.
So she’d hated herself for it, but she’d gotten in the car.
There was no pretending it wasn’t another surrender. And as much as Shona wanted to deny it—as much as she told herself that this was about Miles and nothing else—that wasn’t what it had felt like, tucked away in the back of a much-too-comfortable Range Rover with Malak.
Malak, whom she’d wanted to tear apart with her fingers, but didn’t dare—and not because of the armed men who watched her with cold, narrow eyes. But because she honestly didn’t know, even as angry as she’d been then, what she would do if she allowed her fingers access to that hard, lean, athletic body. She couldn’t trust that a swing of her fist might not turn into a betraying caress.
It was one more reason to hate herself.
And then they’d arrived at Ursula’s little apartment on the outskirts of the Garden District, and she’d ordered herself to stop obsessing about Malak.
Because the other shoe had dropped. Squarely on her head, as she should have expected it would. And now she had to tell her little boy that his father was here.
The father she’d told him he didn’t have.
“Let me bring Miles down to you,” she’d said when the driver parked the SUV, something a little darker than mere panic beating at her.
And she’d felt more than seen the way Malak had looked at her from where he lounged there in the back seat beside her. His gaze felt dark and dangerous, like a hand at her throat.
“Do not make me chase you,” he’d said quietly. Too quietly. “I doubt you would enjoy what would happen if it was you alone trying to escape me. But Shona, hear this, if nothing else. If you make me hunt my son—if you force me into the role of predator before I have ever even laid eyes on him and make that our first experience of each other—I will never forgive you.”
“Maybe I don’t want your forgiveness,” she’d thrown back at him, because she couldn’t quit. She couldn’t hold her tongue. Maybe she was made wrong, the way many a foster parent had suggested over the years.
Made to be alone, they’d said. Made to make everyone around her happy to leave her be.
She’d taken pride in that all her life. She’d had no idea why it had felt so different then, as if she was a monster, somehow. When she hadn’t been the one making all the threats.
“I have no doubt about that.” Malak’s voice had still been much too quiet, and Shona hadn’t mistaken the malice in it. “But you must ask yourself if you wish your son to pay the inevitable price along with you.”
And that was the trouble, of course. There was a part of her that had wanted nothing more than to snatch up Miles and make a run for it. No matter how it ended, just to prove that Malak couldn’t show up like this and order her around, much less make these pronouncements just because he was a big deal where he came from.
But she had no idea how she would explain that to a four-year-old.
And so she’d climbed the stairs to Ursula’s apartment, feeling very much as if she was marching to her own execution. She’d let herself in the way she always did and had wanted…some kind of poignant moment, maybe. Something to prove that she wasn’t made to be alone—that she and Ursula were friends, after all. That her life was more than a sticky restaurant, pathetic tips and the kind of eternal solitude that made her bones ache sometimes.
But Ursula sat on her ratty old couch, a cigarette in her hand and her gaze on the television screen flickering on the wall across the room. She barely looked up. She gave a distracted wave when Shona offered her a slightly overdone goodbye, and that was it. Shona picked up a sleeping Miles and sighed a little as he settled his sweet face into the crook of her neck.
Ursula would miss the child care. But Shona knew better than to imagine the other woman would miss her.
Then she’d walked back downstairs. To her doom.
“He’s asleep,” she’d said in a hushed tone as she made it back down to the street to find Malak standing there beside his Range Rover again, as if he’d been readying himself to chase her through the streets of the Garden District, if necessary.
She’d expected an argument. A demand, perhaps, that Shona wake up Miles right there and then so that Malak could enact whatever tender, imaginary father/son reunion he was carrying around in his head.
But instead, he only gazed at her and the child she held so securely against her for what felt like an eternity, his expression fierce. Almost…arrested.
“He might wake up when we go back to my house and pack his things,” she’d told him, not at all certain why she’d felt the need to solve this issue for him. To make it okay that this was happening when she’d never wanted it to happen in the first place.
But he was Miles’s father. She had to remember that. She told herself that was the only reason she felt the need to give Malak what he wanted.
“We have no need to return to that house,” Malak said. And Shona had been certain she wasn’t imagining the way he emphasized that house, as if the very words were distasteful to him. “My men have already collected your personal effects.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my house,” Shona had retorted, with a little more heat than necessary. She’d cradled the back of Miles’s head with her hand, as if she’d needed to protect him from any aspersions Malak had wanted to cast on the home she’d worked so hard to give him. “I’ve always been proud and lucky to have it.”
“We will endeavor, you and I, to provide you with far better opportunities for pride, I think.” Malak’s voice had been blistering, for all it was soft against the thick night, and his gaze had been so dark it had almost hurt. “And a far, far better environment in which to raise my son.”
My son.
Shona had bitten her tongue. Because what else could she do? It was bewildering and more than a little awful in ways she didn’t even know how to take on board, but there was no denying the fact that it was really, truly happening. Malak had really returned and, just as she’d always feared, taken control.
Of her. Of Miles. Of everything.
She’d believed that he’d sent his henchmen to pack up her whole life as if it was that easily erased, at his whim. Just as she’d believed that he would absolutely take Miles from her if she fought him.
The man she remembered from the night of her twenty-first birthday had been charming. But even then, she’d been aware that there was a core of steel beneath all that laziness and sensuality. She’d seen hints of it, here and there. She’d remembered it, somehow, though he’d been nothing but obliging and kind.
But now there was no charm, no kindness. There was nothing but steel and command, and she wondered how she’d ever imagined there was anything else. How she’d possibly fallen for the notion that he’d been easy, lazy or mild in any way.
He had not demanded that she hand over Miles in the car, as she’d feared. Nor did he take the sleeping child from her when they arrived at an airfield on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and boarded the private jet that waited there, sporting the lavish insignia of the Royal House of Khalia.
She didn’t know what was wrong with her that she saw these things as evidence that Malak was…not a good man, necessarily, but better than she’d imagined. Better, certainly, than she’d worried he might be after all these years of lying awake at night, stressing over this exact reality coming to pass.
You’re pathetic, she’d told herself, but that hadn’t helped a thing.
Much less changed it.
Once on board the private jet, that had reminded Shona a little too much of that absurdly luxurious hotel suite where she’d created this mess five years ago, Malak had showed her to one of its state rooms with a courtesy she’d found only slightly exaggerated, and had watched her, his dark green eyes glittering with an emotion she’d been afraid to name as she’d laid Miles on the bed. He’d moved closer then, and Shona had held her breath, but all he’d done was stand to the side of the bed and gaze down at the sleeping child.
His son, whom he’d never met.
And Shona had never missed him. She might have wished that things had been different across these last years, but she had never missed Malak, specifically. She had never imagined him and Miles, father and son together, or wasted her time dreaming of happy families. That was one more casualty of her foster-care experiences. She didn’t believe in happy families. She never had. She wasn’t even sure she believed in fathers, come to that, because that line on her birth certificate had been left blank and she’d never met any men deserving of that title during her eighteen years as a ward of the state.
So she had no words for what had washed over her then, like some kind of flash flood. It had been devastating and life-altering, and it had happened too fast. It had been almost too intense to bear. It had been something primal.
There was something about the way Malak had looked down at Miles. Or maybe it had been the simple fact of the three of them in one room—her little boy and both of his parents, for the first time.
Shona had never had the same experience. She hadn’t known it was something she’d craved, hard and deep, as if her bones had been crying out for it all this time.
She felt something inside of her that she couldn’t even name…turn over. And hum a little, as if something she hadn’t known was lost and hadn’t thought to miss had been returned to her, at last.
And when she’d looked up again, when she’d dared, Malak had turned that unreadable dark green gaze of his on her.
Shona had no idea why the only thing she’d wanted to do then was apologize. She hadn’t even known for what.
She’d felt the air between them drawn tight. Thick with emotion, maybe. Or regrets. All that lost time, those lost years, stolen from the little boy who slept innocently between them.
Shona hadn’t understood the power of family, of blood, until that moment. Until she found herself yearning for things she’d never wanted, ever.
“Malak…” She hadn’t known what she’d meant to say. Only that it had been clawing at her throat, demanding she open her mouth and give into it—
“We will take off momentarily,” Malak had told her, his voice as cold as his eyes had been hot. And accusing. “And when we land, we will be in the capital city of Khalia. I suppose it is as good a place as any to meet my son.”
And Shona had stayed there in that state room, feeling ripped apart in ways that didn’t make sense. Because it wasn’t that Malak was taking her away from the only life she’d ever known—though she imagined that would hit her, sooner or later. It wasn’t that he had appeared in the first place, making his demands and his outlandish claims. That wasn’t what had kept her awake, though her eyes had been gritty and glassy as she’d stared up at the smooth ceiling. It was that look on his face as he’d gazed down at Miles.
Shona had lived the whole of her life without ever loving another person.
That was how she’d grown up. That was what she’d learned one foster home at a time. She’d relied on herself, that was all, but she’d never believed that love was a real thing that could exist between real people. Until Miles.
He’d come into the world and cracked her wide open. His birth had changed everything. It was as if she’d lived all her life in a dark little house, curtains drawn tight over boarded-up windows, and Miles had punched through each and every one of them to let in the sun.
She knew the look that had been on Malak’s face. She’d recognized it. It was that same disbelieving, bone-deep love for his own child that had no equal. It was like a heart attack that didn’t kill, a cancer that settled there sweet and insistent in the bones. It was every breath. It was a kind of madness.
She’d seen it all over his face.
And Shona knew her way around bitterness. She welcomed it, come to that, because it made certain there were few unpleasant surprises out there in an uncaring world. But as bitter as she might have been, she wasn’t sure she had it in her to truly hate a man who loved her child like that.
That deeply. That truly. And that instantaneously.
And she didn’t know what that meant for her. Or how on earth she meant to survive whatever was coming next if she didn’t have the strength and purity of hating Malak to guide her.
But then they landed, and Miles was awake again, and all her dithering had led to nothing. Save a sleepless night, which left her feeling hollowed out and scraped raw as she led her son off the plane.
Because it was that or bar herself in the state room and hope for…what, exactly?
There was no good answer to that. So she took Miles’s hand in hers and answered his excited questions as best as she could, and walked off the plane into the new life she’d never wanted in the first place.
Shona had never been anywhere. She’d been born and abandoned in New Orleans and she’d assumed she would die there, too. She’d always been practical, because anything else led directly to pain and heartbreak, so she’d long ago stopped dreaming of things that she could never have—something she’d always thought was her best trait. She’d been proud of the fact that no one could hurt her. No one could even come close.
She’d been bulletproof.
And yet the moment they stepped outside the confines of the jet, a thousand dreams she’d forbidden herself to have seemed to flow back into her, like yet another dangerous flood. All those nights she’d spent curled up in a ball, blocking out the sounds of the latest horrible house some stranger had insisted she called her home. All those dreams she would have denied she’d ever entertained in the morning, of faraway places and exotic skies.
She’d never seen a sky like the one spread out before her at the top of the jet’s stairs, stretching on and on like hope. It was vast and impossibly blue, brighter and more intense than any she’d ever seen. And it took her long moments to understand that she wasn’t simply breathless, but that there was no moisture in the air. The landscape that stretched out in all directions, rippled and sinuous and the color of clay pots, was a desert—there were no swamps, no levees, no gnarled old cypress trees wreathed in Spanish moss, no murky bayou waters filled with alligators and secrets.
It was like being on another planet.
Shona wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry, or what emotion it was inside of her that seemed to be clawing its way out against her will—but Miles had no such affliction.
He tugged at her hand and she let him go.
And she couldn’t help feeling that it was filled with portent, that letting go. That it was an act of foreboding, of premonition—
“Be careful,” she called out, but it was a lost cause.
Because Miles was already moving. Running. He barreled down the steps of the jet and onto the tarmac. And it was like watching a kind of nightmare, Shona thought. It was slow motion and felt as if it had all been preordained. That every step her little boy took had been planned, exactly like this.
Because Malak waited there at the bottom, alone.
Shona noticed that there were no guards arrayed around him even as she watched Miles run headlong into this future she couldn’t prevent. And she knew, somehow, that Malak had emptied the tarmac. That his guards no doubt waited for him in the small airport hangar she could see to one side of the runway, but had cleared out, the better not to overwhelm a four-year-old.
And she had been alone too long, she thought as she made it down the stairs and stepped onto the tarmac herself. Or perhaps she couldn’t work out how to breathe in the desert air, or think critically in the glare of all the Khalian sun that danced over her skin. But try as she might, she just wasn’t sure she had it in her to hate this man who’d put her son’s feelings first, without even having to be asked.
Just as she didn’t have it in her to do anything but watch—more touched than she wanted to admit—as with no more than a single swift glance her way that shook her to the core, no matter its brevity, Malak crouched down to put himself on Miles’s level, and at long last met his own son.