Page 51 of Sheikh's Secret Love-Child

“I love you, Shona,” her husband, her king, the love of her life, told her. “You gave me my son. And then you gave me the world. And in return, I will give you everything I have. And all that I am.”

“I appreciate that,” she murmured, and laughed when his eyebrows rose in that expression of arrogant astonishment that she loved perhaps more than she should have. “But I suspect my wedding gift is better.”

“Better than the love and devotion of the king of Khalia? The mind boggles.”

Shona reached out and took his hands in hers, then drew them to the slope of her belly, and held them there.

Awareness and a kind of awe dawned on Malak’s face, his hands tightened against her belly, and Shona smiled in the vain hope that it might keep the tears at bay.

It didn’t. And she couldn’t say she cared.

“The palace doctor tells me I’m nearly six weeks along,” she whispered.

“Shona...” he whispered, as if she was the miracle. Not the life they had sparked inside of her.

“I love you, too,” she told him, with all that she was. “And we will love these babies of ours. And you will not only be a marvelous king, Malak. You’ll be the best father. I know it.”

“If I’m any kind of father at all, it is because of you.”

And then he was lifting her up, holding her above him and then letting her slide down into his kiss. He wrapped his arms around her and he held her there, for what seemed like forever.

“You already gave me Miles,” he said, his voice thick with emotion, and for once her brave and proud Malak made no attempt to hide it. “And you give me you, every day and every night. I know I can’t possibly deserve any part of this. Any part of you.”

Shona reached out and ran her hand over his jaw, then slid it around the back of his neck.

“It’s not about deserving it. It’s about doing it.” She kissed him then. Sweetly, but with the promise of all that heat that only seemed to grow between them. “All we have to do is believe we can.”

“I believe it,” Malak said fiercely.

And he carried her to that four-poster bed, lay down with her in the middle of a forbidden desert oasis that was like something out of a dream and they started on their forever.

One perfect kiss at a time.

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