LITMIR.BIZ

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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 to his. And he refused to ask himself if he was to blame for that change, because he was fairly certain he wouldn’t like the answer. “And as far as I could tell, you had those every night of the week. Why would you remember me?”

      Why, indeed? And why was that a question Malak suddenly didn’t want to answer?

      “I remember you now,” he told her with soft menace. “And even if I did not, the palace investigators found you all on their own. They informed me, in case I’d forgotten, that I was in New Orleans exactly nine months before you gave birth to a little boy who looks a good deal like me. And I might be tempted to believe in coincidences, especially because I’ve never gone without protection in my life, but they do not. It was simpler than I suspect you wish to know to get a sample of the child’s DNA to prove what is already obvious at a glance.”

      Her brown gaze met his in a steady sort of challenge that no one else would dare. He told himself it was one more problem with this woman—her obvious inability to recognize her place—but that was not how it felt. “I thought you were supposed to be the king. Don’t you tell your people what to do?”

      Malak didn’t want this. He had never really thought much of marriage at all, not for himself. Not after a front-row seat to his parents’ miserable one. And he had certainly never planned to find himself shackled to a woman he’d known for a single night long ago. He had not been raised to worry about continuing the bloodline. But from the moment Zufar had abdicated, Malak had found advisors in his ear, throwing out the names of eligible women of royal blood—Princess Amara of Bharathia, the Lady Suzette, and so on until it was all a blur of names and titles—and demanding he start thinking about his heirs.

      Until it appeared he already had one.

      And that reminded him who he was. He was no longer the Playboy Prince, the smirking star of a thousand tabloid articles. He was the king, with commitments to his people and their future whether he liked it or not, and it didn’t matter what had happened in the past few years. The only thing that mattered was what happened now.

      “I understand your reluctance,” he told her, though he could tell that his tone was more cold than concerned by the way she stiffened. “But I am only here as a courtesy. I thought it would be better if I came to collect you myself instead of sending my men.”

      “You can’t collect me. I’m not something you can pick up—”

      She stopped, and the air changed between them. Something dark and dangerous seemed to loom there, just out of reach.

      Malak did not state the obvious. That she was indeed something he could pick up, and he had.

      But he might as well have yelled it.

      “I should warn you that I have a limited amount of patience as it is,” he said softly, though not particularly carefully. “While I am aware of my own culpability in this, the fact remains that there is no possibility that my son and heir will be raised apart from me. The kings of Khalia are raised in the palace, under the care of the traditional tutors, the better to prepare for their eventual role. That is how it has been for centuries. That is how it will remain.”

      She stood tall and still, her gaze on his and her hands in fists at her side. “My son is not a king.”

      “No, he is a prince.” Malak gazed down at her, every inch of him the royal he had always been, though he had largely ignored it. But here, now, it was as if his ancestors roared in his blood. “The crown prince of Khalia, in point of fact. All that remains is to give him legitimacy. What that means, I am afraid, is that you will have to marry me. Whether you like it or not.”

      Her breath left her in a kind of laugh. “I’m not going to marry you. I’m not going to hand my child over to you for random tutors to raise. You’re delusional.”

      “That would make things easier for you, I’m sure. But I assure you, I am nothing of the kind.”

      “Does everyone in Khalia marry a complete stranger? Is that also how it’s been for centuries?”

      “As a matter of fact, many of the marriages in my family were arranged.” Malak didn’t think this was the time or place to comment on how those arrangements had worked out over time. His parents’ stormy marriage being the premiere case in point. “We are royal, after all. My brother was raised as the crown prince and was betrothed to an appropriate princess since her birth.”

      Malak decided not to share how that had worked out, either. For either Zufar or Amira, the woman he’d been promised to but had not married, in the end. To say nothing of the half brother he’d never known he’d had, Adir, who had appeared from nowhere at their mother’s funeral and had spirited Amira away with him on the day of her wedding to Zufar.

      None of those inconvenient truths would help him make his point here, to Shona. “Marrying strangers isn’t the barrier for me you might imagine.”

      “Well, it’s a barrier for me,” she threw at him. “Because I’m not completely insane.”

      “You have a choice before you, Shona. You can fight me all you like, but you will lose. And either way, I will be returning to Khalia with my son.” Malak let that sink in. He watched the way her chest rose and fell, too fast, and knew his edicts weren’t exactly landing well. “You can stay behind, if you wish. But I cannot tolerate any trouble

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