LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      WHEN THE OTHER shoe finally dropped, and hard, Shona Sinclair couldn’t say she was entirely surprised.

      Horrified, yes. Terrified—certainly.

      But not surprised.

      On some level, she had always known this day would come.

      Get ready, she told herself stoutly. Because it’s finally here.

      There were four men, cold-eyed and burly. She had never seen royal guards before, not in real life, but she hadn’t the slightest doubt that was exactly what they were. She knew it the moment she saw them. They came into the restaurant in a kind of rolling, lethal wave. They looked to the right and to the left, not looking for tables like everyone else who wandered in from the streets of the French Quarter, but more as if they were taking stock of every single person in the place.

      If asked, Shona was certain they’d have an accurate count of all the busboys as well as the few patrons scattered amongst the tables who picked at their down-market gumbo and rubbery beignets.

      Shona knew who they were. She knew. And more, she knew what their appearance meant. She could feel it like a shuddering thing that wrapped around her and shook her so hard she couldn’t breathe for a moment.

      But she still held out hope. She caught her breath and she hoped.

      It could be a celebrity, she told herself. That happened with some regularity here in New Orleans, even in a less than A-list place like this. But these men didn’t have that Hollywood look. They were too serious, for one thing.

      And they were looking directly at her, for another.

      It was early yet. The dinner service had yet to really kick into gear and the restaurant was still fairly empty. But this was the famous French Quarter in New Orleans. It could fill up at any time and frequently did, because “laissez les bon temps rouler” knew no set mealtimes.

      Shona prayed for a crowd. Fervently.

      But when the door opened, it wasn’t a gift from any god Shona knew. Another man walked in, flanked by two more guards, and that was it.

      It was all over.

      Her worst nightmare had come to pass.

      Because she knew the man who stood there, adjusting the cuffs of his mind-numbingly expensive-looking suit with impatient little jerks, gazing around as if he found his surroundings deeply offensive. He took in the decor, which was aimed directly at the tourist trade with vintage New Orleans street signs and Saints football memorabilia plastering the walls.

      Then he took his time redirecting that dark, arrogant gaze of his back to Shona.

      Where it held.

      And she knew too much about him. Things that crowded into her memory and flowed like a kind of painful lava all through her body no matter how she tried to tell herself he didn’t affect her.

      He did.

      He still did.

      She knew that his eyes were not black, as they seemed from a distance, but were instead a breathtaking dark green she had only ever seen on one other human being. And that his face was even more of a marvel up close, all high cheekbones and that hard, tempting mouth. And his hands, elegant and strong all at once, could work magic.

      Shona knew that his laugh could make a woman forget herself completely and his smile could make that same woman think that losing herself like that was worth it.

      She’d forgotten many things since that searing night five years ago—her sense of humor, maybe, and any sense of who that silly girl had been that night she’d changed her life forever thanks to her own foolishness and a gorgeous stranger in a bar—but she hadn’t forgotten him.

      Despite her best attempts.

      “Hello, Shona,” he said, and even his voice was the same. “How nice to see you again.”

      She had never forgotten the sound of him, either. That low, rich voice that washed over her like a caress, his cultured British accent layered with hints of his own country, the faraway kingdom of Khalia.

      Shona had never heard of Khalia before she’d met him. And now she knew far more than she wanted about a place she had no intention of ever seeing firsthand. Such as where the kingdom was situated, tucked there on the Arabian Peninsula above the sparkling Arabian Sea. Its royal family. Its standing in the international community, even. She’d made it her business to know as much as possible ever since that terrible day five years ago, when she’d opened up a magazine in her obstetrician’s office to discover that the baby she was carrying—the result of a one-night stand with a stranger whose name she didn’t know in full and whom she’d assumed she’d never see again—belonged to Prince Malak of Khalia.

      He had been right there on a glossy gossip magazine page, dripping in blonde supermodels in one of the many fancy European cities Shona had never visited and knew she never would. Places like Europe were little more than fantasies for a girl like Shona, who’d had no family, no prospects and a chip on her shoulder about both that she liked to think of as her own personal pet.

      Princes were even more unattainable than trips to Europe, she was sure. She’d had absolutely no doubt that if she actually managed to reach him to tell him what had happened and that, surprise, he had a baby on the way—assuming a prince could be reached in the first place, because she doubted anyone could simply call the man at will—he would bluster back into her life the way men like him always seemed to do with women like her. He would do nothing but cause trouble, because that was what rich men did. Because they could. She’d seen it happen more than once. Women down on Shona’s level were good for a night or two, maybe, but certainly not good enough to carry a rich man’s child.

      As far as Shona could tell, wealthy men seemed to travel with legal teams at the ready to draw up nondisclosure agreements and engineer payoffs at a moment’s 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,

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