Sheikh's Secret Love-Child. Caitlin Crews

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СКАЧАТЬ notice—anything to keep the baby far away from the man’s real family and the wife who usually knew nothing about her husband’s extracurricular activities. As well as curtail any future blackmail scenarios. But those were the happy stories. Far scarier were the women who’d lost their babies altogether because they didn’t have the money to fight in court.

      That wasn’t going to happen to her, Shona had vowed that day in the doctor’s office, the glossy magazine wrinkling in her panicked grip. She had nothing in the world but her baby and she’d be keeping him, come hell, high water or some random royal sheikh.

      Shona had never wanted to lay eyes on Prince Malak of Khalia again.

      That hadn’t changed.

      “Do not pretend you do not remember me,” Malak said, as Shona started to tell that very lie. That mouth of his curved, and she thought there was something sardonic in the way he looked at her across the sticky floor of the restaurant. “I can see that you do. And besides, lying is so unbecoming, is it not?”

      Her body melted at the sound of his voice. In ways that she planned to beat out of herself when she’d handled this, by hand, if necessary. But in the meantime, he certainly didn’t need to know that he still had that effect on her.

      “I can’t say I particularly care if you find anything I do becoming or not,” Shona replied, the same way she would to any crazy person who wandered in off the streets. Her reward was instant expressions of outrage from his guards, though Malak’s dark eyes only gleamed. “I see you’ve come with friends this time. A social call, I can only assume. Too bad I’m so busy or I’d love to catch up.”

      Malak smiled at that, though it was nothing like the smile she remembered from that night. This one was cool. Powerful, somehow. It made something deep inside her uncoil in a kind of white-hot panic. Worse, he didn’t dismiss his guards, which told Shona all she needed to know about whether or not this was just a weird kind of coincidence years too late. A thick sort of uneasiness wound its way around and around her, until it felt like a noose pulled tight.

      Because while it was always possible that he’d come back because he cycled through all his affairs every few years or so and conducted reunions as a matter of course, she knew that was highly unlikely. This was a famous prince, for God’s sake. He was knee-deep in willing women wherever he went. Why would he need to repeat himself?

      Which left exactly one reason he would be here in the restaurant where she worked, not at her home—likely, she thought in a sickening rush of understanding, because he’d already been to her little rental house on a not-great street a fifteen-minute walk from the French Quarter.

      She was wildly, insanely happy she’d dropped Miles at her friend Ursula’s house before work. Though perhaps friend was a strong word. Ursula had a six-year-old and also worked strange hours. They’d met years ago, waiting tables in the same place a few blocks over, and had been swapping child care ever since. They were bound together by necessity and the odd drink here and there, that was all.

      The truth was, Shona knew as little about friendship as she did about family.

      “Is there somewhere we can talk?” Malak asked.

      And she hadn’t known him more than that single, fateful night five years ago, it was true. But the man she’d thought he was during that long, impossibly carnal night that she refused to be ashamed of, no matter what had happened afterward, had never sounded like that.

      As if he was not so much asking a question, but delivering orders.

      And woe betide the person who did not obey them.

      But Shona had never been very good at following orders. That was what came of growing up hard, the way she had. Her own mother had abandoned her to the state when she was a baby and she’d had nothing but indifferent foster care and what she liked to call opportunities, ever since.

      Opportunities to learn how to be tough, no matter what came at her. Opportunities to figure out how to stand on her own two feet and take care of herself, because nobody else would. Or ever did.

      She’d been eighteen when she’d been set free by the state at last. She’d made her own way ever since, before and after she’d found herself pregnant and yet again on her own.

      And she wasn’t about to change that for some uppity prince in a suit that almost certainly cost more than a year’s rent.

      “No,” she told him. She could tell by the way he raised his brow that it wasn’t a word he often heard. Or had ever heard, possibly. “There is no place we can talk.”

      “No?” Malak echoed, as if she might have said it by accident and would reverse herself once she heard it repeated back to her.

      She didn’t. “We have nothing to talk about.”

      Shona folded her arms over her chest and she was fiercely glad that she looked like exactly what she was today. She wasn’t dressed up the way she had been when she’d met him that fateful night. She was a waitress, nothing more and nothing less, and she wasn’t the least bit ashamed of that. She wore the restaurant’s black T-shirt with the silly logo stamped on the front, a little black apron wrapped around her hips and the short red skirt the owner insisted upon, and Shona didn’t mind too much, because it helped with tips. She had scraped her hair back from her face and let it do its own thing at the back, like a high, black cloud of tight curls.

      Shona imagined she looked as far beneath the notice of a fancy prince from a far-off country as she was, and that was a good thing. Maybe it would remind Malak why he’d disappeared that morning five years before. Maybe, if she made sure to trumpet her obvious lack of breeding and class, he’d repeat his disappearing act.

      She could only hope.

      “I’m afraid that we have quite a few things to talk about,” Malak said in that same way of his, that suggested he was speaking laws aloud, not having a conversation. There was something about it that clawed at her, making her feel a kind of restlessness she refused to acknowledge. “And there can be no avoiding it, much as you might wish otherwise.”

      As he spoke, he thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers and shifted the way he stood. And then he smiled as if he had come here to do nothing but charm her.

      And this, then, was the man that Shona remembered so vividly from that night five years ago, there in that hotel bar she’d always wanted to go to, when she was growing up. It had almost gotten lost in the elegant suit and the security detail, but she remembered that smile. How infectious it was. How sensual. And how it had spurred her on to act so completely out of character.

      She had steadfastly refused to regret what had happened there, all this time. But now, with her heart a wild drumbeat in her chest and her breath tight and a little too close to being labored, she was afraid that everything had changed.

      Because the Malak she remembered—lazy and wicked, boneless and seductive—wasn’t a figment of her imagination, after all. He might look different now. He’d stood taller before and his mouth was far grimmer. He seemed less playful, less endlessly amused.

      But it was still him, and when he stood more casually it was impossible to keep herself from remembering...everything.

      And that was a big problem, because Shona had never reacted to any man the way she did to him. The truth was, she’d never touched any man but him.

      She СКАЧАТЬ