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.
But he didn’t say that. He found he couldn’t.
Because he didn’t like what it said about him—and wasn’t that funny? He had spent his whole life gleefully embracing the worst of his impulses. Was it his ascension to the throne that made it all seem squalid now?
Or was it the way Shona looked at him, as if squalid was all she saw?
“You could have reached out when you discovered you were pregnant,” he said stiffly.
The way she looked at him then was not exactly friendly. But Malak preferred that to the quiet certainty with which she’d dismissed him as nothing but a man in a bar.
Maybe that was the real lesson here, he thought with entirely too much sharp self-awareness. He could stand anything save anonymity.
“How would I have done that?” Shona asked coolly. “You never told me your full name. You didn’t leave me your telephone number. I discovered who you were entirely by accident.”
“You mean tonight?”
“I mean I saw a picture of you in a magazine about six months later.” She shook her head. “And no, before you ask, it did not cross my mind to try to chase down the Playboy Prince drowning in models across the world who came from some country I’ve never heard of. Why would I?”
Malak straightened from the side of the Range Rover. There were too many things competing inside of him for dominance, and he didn’t know quite what to do with any of them.
He settled on fury. It felt cleanest.
“If you knew who I was, then you had no excuse.”
“It was a one-night stand,” Shona replied, still with that same damn cool. That—more than anything—told him how different she was from that smiling, bright girl he’d met on the bar stool next
