Sheikh's Secret Love-Child. CAITLIN CREWS

      She’d believed that he’d sent his henchmen to pack up her whole life as if it was that easily erased, at his whim. Just as she’d believed that he would absolutely take Miles from her if she fought him.

      The man she remembered from the night of her twenty-first birthday had been charming. But even then, she’d been aware that there was a core of steel beneath all that laziness and sensuality. She’d seen hints of it, here and there. She’d remembered it, somehow, though he’d been nothing but obliging and kind.

      But now there was no charm, no kindness. There was nothing but steel and command, and she wondered how she’d ever imagined there was anything else. How she’d possibly fallen for the notion that he’d been easy, lazy or mild in any way.

      He had not demanded that she hand over Miles in the car, as she’d feared. Nor did he take the sleeping child from her when they arrived at an airfield on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and boarded the private jet that waited there, sporting the lavish insignia of the Royal House of Khalia.

      She didn’t know what was wrong with her that she saw these things as evidence that Malak was...not a good man, necessarily, but better than she’d imagined. Better, certainly, than she’d worried he might be after all these years of lying awake at night, stressing over this exact reality coming to pass.

      You’re pathetic, she’d told herself, but that hadn’t helped a thing.

      Much less changed it.

      Once on board the private jet, that had reminded Shona a little too much of that absurdly luxurious hotel suite where she’d created this mess five years ago, Malak had showed her to one of its state rooms with a courtesy she’d found only slightly exaggerated, and had watched her, his dark green eyes glittering with an emotion she’d been afraid to name as she’d laid Miles on the bed. He’d moved closer then, and Shona had held her breath, but all he’d done was stand to the side of the bed and gaze down at the sleeping child.

      His son, whom he’d never met.

      And Shona had never missed him. She might have wished that things had been different across these last years, but she had never missed Malak, specifically. She had never imagined him and Miles, father and son together, or wasted her time dreaming of happy families. That was one more casualty of her foster-care experiences. She didn’t believe in happy families. She never had. She wasn’t even sure she believed in fathers, come to that, because that line on her birth certificate had been left blank and she’d never met any men deserving of that title during her eighteen years as a ward of the state.

      So she had no words for what had washed over her then, like some kind of flash flood. It had been devastating and life-altering, and it had happened too fast. It had been almost too intense to bear. It had been something primal.

      There was something about the way Malak had looked down at Miles. Or maybe it had been the simple fact of the three of them in one room—her little boy and both of his parents, for the first time.