Protecting the Desert Heir Read online

  She ignored more and more by the day, she knew. And it was only getting worse.

  They had taken to having their meals together here in the weeks since Rihad had forcibly removed Leyla from her arms and insisted Sterling take care of herself. Well. It was more that Rihad had decreed that they would take their meals here, whenever it was possible with his schedule, and Sterling hadn’t had it in her to object.

  You didn’t want to object, a voice deep inside of her whispered. Or you would have.

  “It seems I must keep an eye on you,” he’d said when he’d informed her of this new schedule. She’d been fresh from her first full night of sleep since Leyla’s birth and had felt drunk with it. Like a different person.

  And he had looked at her in a way that had made her breath catch, as if he’d truly wanted nothing more than to take care of her. As if he really was some kind of guardian angel—though she knew better. She did.

  Life had shifted all around her in these strange months since Leyla’s birth, then settled into a new form altogether. Sterling slept well at last. She spent her days with the baby and the fleet of cheerful, efficient nurses Rihad had acquired and who made Sterling feel like twice the mother she suspected she was. She took long walks around the palace and the surrounding grounds and gardens, sometimes pushing Leyla’s buggy and sometimes on her own, enjoying how much more like herself she felt by the day.

  How oddly content she felt, here in her forced marriage to a man she’d vowed years ago to hate forever, no matter if Omar had or not. She’d been happy to carry that torch. She’d meant it on their wedding day when she’d told Rihad she hated him.

  And then you kissed him.

  But she didn’t want to think about that.

  The presence of the nurses meant she had time to read again, to exchange emails with her friends in New York, to reacquaint herself with the life she’d put on hold when Omar had died. She started to imagine what might come next for her. She got back in touch with the foundation she’d worked with to aid foster children once they aged out of the system and found in the various responses to her marriage that things were very different now.

  Omar’s friends, perhaps predictably, felt betrayed.

  I understand why you’d feel that way, she emailed one after the next, trying hard to hold on to her patience—because where had they all been when she’d tried to run from Rihad? They’d texted, yes. Called. But not one of them had actually shown up that morning to help a heavily pregnant woman escape her fate.

  Her entire plan had been to disappear somewhere and hope for the best. That had worked out well enough when she’d been fifteen and on her own—or in any case, she’d survived—but would it have been fair to Leyla? Sterling might have been married against her will, but a little bit of distance and a whole lot more sleep had made her think that having Leyla’s future assured was what mattered. That it was the only thing that mattered—and no matter that it was Omar’s infamously judgmental brother who’d made that possible.

  But give me some credit, she’d chided Omar’s old friends—her old friends, too, not that anyone seemed to remember that while busy picking sides. Leyla is a princess and Bakri is a part of her birthright she can only access if legitimate. That’s all this marriage is: legitimacy for Leyla.

  The charities and foundations she’d worked with who’d known her as Omar’s lover, by contrast, were ecstatic at the notion of working with the Queen of Bakri—a title Sterling hadn’t fully realized was hers to claim now.

  Maybe a little bit too ecstatically, she’d thought only that morning, when yet another solicitation had hit her inbox.

  It was only then that she realized that Rihad was staring at her across the table, and that she had no idea how much time had passed since she’d last spoken.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You told me you wished to apologize and then lapsed into silence,” he replied, mildly enough—though once again, there was a gleam in the dark gold of his gaze that reminded her what a dangerous man he was. That suggested he was waiting for something as he watched her. “I thought perhaps you were rendered mute by the enormity of your sins.”

  “My sins have been widely overexaggerated, I think.” It had been two months since that kiss she found herself thinking about much more than she should. It was something about his mouth, crooked slightly in that sardonic way of his that thudded through her. “I wanted to apologize for falling apart the way I did in the first place. It’s taken me weeks to realize just how out of it I was.”

  Rihad shifted in his seat, his strong fingers toying with the steaming cup of rich coffee before him on the table. And though the baby slept happily in her little buggy beside Sterling’s chair, Sterling had the sudden, crazy desire to wake her up—so there would be something else to concentrate on, something other than the way this lethal man was looking at her. A distraction from all of this intensity that swirled between them like the desert heat itself.

  “And here I thought your apology would be for telling all your American friends that our marriage was a fake.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  A deeper, darker crook of that mouth. “I think you heard me.”

  “Yes, but...” Had he been reading her email? But even if he had been, and she wasn’t sure she’d put it past him, she’d never said that. Never quite that. “I never said that. Not to anyone.”

  “Were you misquoted, then?” He slid his tablet computer across the table to her. “Show me where, and I will notify my attorneys at once.”

  Sterling swiped her finger across the screen and stared down at the page that opened before her, from a famously snide tabloid paper.

  Queen of the Rebound screamed the headline. Then beneath it:

  Sexy Sterling uses famous wiles to bewitch Omar’s grieving brother, the King of Bakri, but tells pals back home: “This marriage is for Baby Leyla. It’s all for show.”

  The worst part, Sterling thought as she glared down at the offensive article and felt her stomach drop to her feet, was that she had no idea which of the people she’d thought were her friends had betrayed her.

  “You understand that this is problematic, do you not?” he asked, still in that mild tone—though she was starting to see that there were other truths in that hard gleam in his eyes, in the tense way he held that mouthwatering body of his as he sat there in one of those dark suits of his that some artist of a tailor had crafted to perfectly flatter every hard plane, every ripple of muscle. Every inch of sensual male threat that emanated from him, made worse because of the luxurious trappings.

  “It’s a tabloid,” she said dismissively, because she might note that threat in him but for some reason, it didn’t frighten her. Quite the opposite. “It’s their job to be problematic. It’s our job to ignore them.”

  “I would ordinarily agree with you,” Rihad said, so reasonably that she almost nodded along, almost lulled by his tone despite the way her pulse leaped in her veins. “But this is a delicate situation.”

  She deliberately misunderstood him, sliding the tablet back toward him and returning her attention to the selection of fruit and thick yogurt, flaky pastries and strong coffee, as if that was the most important thing she could possibly concentrate on just then: her breakfast. And so what if she wasn’t hungry?

  “This is tabloid nonsense, nothing more,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Nothing delicate about it, I’m afraid. They like to smash at things until they break, then claim they were broken all along. Surely you know this.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment and she tried to pretend that didn’t get to her—but eventually she couldn’t help herself and glanced up again, to find Rihad watching her too closely with a narrow sort of gaze, as if he was trying to puzzle her out.

  She swallowed hard, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she wante
d to keep her secrets hidden from him, or if she wanted to lay them all out before him in a gesture so suicidal it should have traumatized her even to imagine it. Yet somehow, it didn’t.

  “The whole world knows that Leyla is Omar’s daughter, not mine, no matter that my name is on her birth certificate,” he said, after a moment, when she was beginning to imagine she might simply crack open.

  “Did I know that you put your name on the birth certificate?” Sterling asked, shocked and taken aback, somehow, at that little revelation. “I don’t think I did.”

  She remembered his look of dark impatience, though she hadn’t seen it in a while. That made it all the more effective today.

  “Exactly what sort of legitimacy did you imagine I meant to convey on your child when I married you?”

  “I guess the sort where we’re not completely erasing Omar from his daughter’s life.” She reached over and fiddled with the hem of the blanket that drooped over the side of the buggy, though Leyla still slept soundly and no adjustments were needed.

  “It is a legal maneuver, nothing more,” Rihad said, his tone harsher than it had been in months, but that couldn’t be why her chest felt tight. It shouldn’t matter to her either way. “But you’re making my point for me. Omar has not been erased in any meaningful way. Everyone knows who fathered Leyla. Her place might be assured on paper and in the courts, but in the eyes of the Bakrian people and, more important, our enemies, her legitimacy must come from us.”

  “Us?”

  “Us. Me, their king, and you, my brand-new and deeply controversial queen.”

  She shied away from that term, scowling at him instead. “I don’t like that word.”

  “Which one?” His voice was so dry then. So dark and compelling. “Us? Controversial?”

  “Queen.” Her scowl deepened. “It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t fit the situation at all.”

  She meant it didn’t fit her, trash dressed up in an unearned crown—and she had the strangest notion he knew exactly what she meant. His dark gold gaze almost hurt against hers.

  “And yet it is your title, accorded to you with all due deference two months ago when you married the King of Bakri. That would be me, in case you’re not following this conversation, willfully or otherwise.”

  “But I don’t want to be your—”

  “Enough,” Rihad said then, cutting her off.

  He sat back in his chair, never shifting those mesmerizing eyes of his from hers, looking dark and terrible and entirely too fascinating, from that brusque nose of his to his strong jaw and all that rich brown skin in between. She wanted to lean closer to him, explore him—and hated herself.

  “I don’t care what you call yourself, Sterling. You are my queen either way. I suggest you accept it.” When she didn’t respond, that light in his gaze sharpened and made it a little too hard to breathe. “I think you understand perfectly well that we cannot allow any speculation that this marriage is fake to fester. It serves no one but our enemies.”

  She felt oddly fragile. “Why do you keep talking about enemies?”

  “The kingdom has been rocked by one scandal after the next and we are weak.” His gaze sharpened. “My father’s tumultuous love affairs. My wife’s death without giving me any heirs. Omar’s notorious mistress that he flaunted in the tabloids and his refusal to come back home and do his duty. My sister’s betrothal to Kavian of Daar Talaas, which she responded to by running away—”

  “I like her already.”

  “Amaya was a successful runaway, Sterling. She’s managed to avoid both my security and Kavian’s for months. Kavian will no doubt run out of patience with her, and when he does? Our countries will not unite and if they do not, Bakri will fall. There are too many other powers in the area that want our location and our shipping prowess, and we cannot possibly keep them all at bay alone.”

  “You’re talking about your enemies.” She lifted her chin as she held that harsh gaze of his. “The only enemy I’ve ever been aware of was you.”

  “I am talking about our enemies.” He nodded toward the tablet. “Or do you imagine that whatever ‘pal’ sold that story is your friend? Will they take you in when I am imprisoned and you—if you are lucky—are a royal Bakrian in exile?”

  Sterling opened her mouth to argue when something else occurred to her. That wild kiss swelled up in her again, a tactile memory. Searing through her as if it had only just happened. Flooding her with sensory images, with yearning, all over again.

  “Is this really because you’re worried about how our marriage is perceived?” she asked him. “Because of enemies? Or is it because you want to get into my pants?”

  He didn’t move a muscle. She knew that because she was watching him so closely that she could see it when he breathed. He didn’t even tense. And yet he seemed to explode outward, becoming twice his size and a thousand times more dangerous, like some kind of mystical being let loose from its cage at last.

  And every single cell in Sterling’s body shivered to red alert.

  She was flushed with the heat of it. Her skin seemed to ache for his touch. Her breasts felt too heavy and the taut peaks pulled tight. Inside of her, there was a low, hot humming that coiled between her legs and pulsed. Hard and wet. Ready.

  It was the most carnal experience of her entire life.

  It was the only carnal experience she’d ever had, save that last kiss.

  And they weren’t even touching.

  * * *

  That he did not turn over the table between them and taste her again right now was, Rihad thought, the only evidence remaining that he had once been a civilized man.

  He thought too much about his enemies as it was. He did not want to think about Sterling’s pants. He did not want to think about that body of hers that had redefined grace while heavily pregnant and now... She was difficult to look away from.

  He found he rarely did.

  Rihad did not want to think about the way he fought himself to keep from touching her, because he was determined to make this marriage work in some fashion or another, the way it had with his first wife. He and Tasnim had been friends, after a fashion. They’d eased into the physical aspects of their marriage and had worked on their friendship first. He’d decided at some point during the first days of gorgeous little Leyla’s life that he owed her mother no less, no matter how they’d come to find themselves married.

  But that did not explain why he took himself in hand each morning in his shower to slake his growing need. And it certainly did not explain the tempting array of images he tortured himself with as he did so.

  His voice was quiet when he finally answered her, and it cost him. “Can’t I be preoccupied with both the perception of our marriage and ‘getting in your pants,’ as you so charmingly put it?”

  “Unlikely. Men are more often focused on the one thing above all else.”

  “That shows how little you know me. I am not merely a man. I am a king.”

  “I know you enough, Your Majesty.”

  Her blue eyes rivaled the summer sun above them, and yet even when she looked straight at him he was certain he could see the walls she kept up, high and bolstered. He loathed them more and more each day. He wanted them knocked down. And he was entirely too aware that the urge was not exactly friendly.

  “And besides,” she continued, her voice light, “you don’t really want into these pants anyway.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh and waved her free hand in the general direction of her midsection. “Everything’s gone a little crazy after giving birth.”

  He snorted. “Self-deprecation does not suit you, Sterling.”

  She frowned at him, and he saw her ball her hands into fists, then drop them in her lap. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you were gifted with the sort of genetics that make mos
t women green with envy, as I suspect you are aware.” He shifted in his chair and let his gaze move all over her, which was not exactly an improvement for that wild hunger battering at him from within. Because she had been so beautiful when they’d met that she’d made Manhattan disappear so he could better admire her. And she grew more beautiful by the day. And the fact that she was no longer big with her pregnancy was the least part of that. “You gained a minimal amount of weight while carrying Leyla, lost most of it while giving birth to her and are probably healthier now than when you got pregnant in the first place. If the fashionably gaunt pictures I’ve seen of you back then are any guide.”

  He saw emotions he couldn’t name flit across her face, one after the next, and he hated that he couldn’t read them. Or her. That she defied him even now, without a single word, by simple virtue of remaining opaque.

  Rihad couldn’t have said when he’d begun to find that intolerable.

  “I’ll thank you to keep your comments on my body to yourself.”

  He smiled, and then wider when he saw the spray of goose bumps rise along her bare arms. “Unfortunately for you, Sterling, you are mine. And I take a keen interest in the welfare of the things that belong to me, whether that means trade prospects in my cities or my wife’s form.”

  She was flushed, he noted, and he was sure that if he mentioned it she would claim it was disgust. Distress. But he didn’t believe that.

  “How delightfully medieval.”

  And he enjoyed this, Rihad realized with a thud. He liked her sharp tone, her icy wit, even if it was at his expense. Because Sterling was the only person he’d ever met who dared speak to him this way.

  Perhaps there was something wrong with him after all, that he should enjoy it—her—so much.

  “Your body is fine, Sterling,” he told her, as much to see her draw herself up in outrage as anything else. He made a show of drinking from his coffee cup, then setting it down, for the sheer pleasure of watching temper crack through those blue eyes of hers like lightning. “You’re not a model any longer. You certainly don’t need to keep yourself so drawn and skeletal.” He smiled again, and he could feel the wolf in it. “If you want to dissuade me from making advances on you, you’ll have to come up with something better than that.”