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
