LITMIR.BIZ

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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 shoved aside that thought, because it was the least of her worries and really, something she ought to have done something about before now. Suddenly, all these years when she’d thought she was too tired, too stressed, too poor, too something to get out there and meet someone seemed like a character flaw, not simple self-protection. Because Shona hated the fact that Malak was the sum total of her experience of sex and men when he also had the power to ruin her life.

      Again.

      “Even if we had something to talk about, which we don’t, I’m at work,” she told him in the same tone she’d used before. As if the moment she could, she’d be dialing 911 to have him bodily removed and possibly subjected to a psychiatric evaluation. “This is neither the time nor the place for your goon squad or you. You should try calling, like a normal person.”

      “A call would not have sufficed in this situation.”

      “We have no situation,” Shona said, with a little more force.

      Because there was only one thing that he could possibly be talking about, and Shona was not going to let this happen. She would die first.

      She’d worried about this moment for years. And now that it was here, it was as if she had done all her panicking already. Maybe that was why, despite the pounding of her heart and that sick feeling in her belly, she found herself focusing hard on Malak instead of giving in to all the sick feelings churning around inside of her. She noticed the way his guards had blocked all the exits. She calculated what she had to do to make it through this so she could run, pick up Miles from Ursula’s and get the hell out of New Orleans.

      The great thing about coming from nothing and having only slightly more than nothing to her name now was that disappearing would be no problem. She was barely on the grid as it was. All she had to do was get away from Malak tonight and she could go somewhere—anywhere—far away from here. It would be like she and Miles had never existed.

      She was kicking herself for not doing exactly that five years ago.

      “You are correct, of course,” Malak said, a dangerous light in those eyes of his. Miles’s eyes. “He is not a situation at all, is he? He’s a little boy. I believe you call him Miles, do you not?”

      She wasn’t calm at all, Shona realized then. She was frozen solid, but not in fear. Or not only in fear. She was stitched through with fury, red and bright. “Miles is no concern of yours.”

      “Something you must believe very strongly indeed,” he murmured, and there was something even harder about him then. It pricked at Shona like an accusation. “If you prefer to raise him in squalor rather than as what and who he is. The only son of a prince of Khalia.”

      “I don’t know or care who his father is,” Shona gritted out at him. “What matters is that he’s mine.”

      “Let me tell you what happens when a prince becomes king,” Malak told her, his voice soft with a different kind of menace. “No need to offer your condolences, as I am certain you were about to. Neither my father nor my brother died. They abdicated, one after the next, like royal dominos.”

      And Shona couldn’t quite take that in. She didn’t want to make sense of what he was telling her. Because that would mean...

      But he was still talking. “Transfers of power are always fraught with peril, I am sure, but perhaps never more so than when the new king was never meant to come anywhere near the throne. First, the palace advisors rend their garments and pray for deliverance, of course. That takes some time. But when they are done, when reality has set

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