“Damn you,” he muttered, as if he was the cursed one. As if he was as lost as she was, as utterly out of control. “Everything about you is wrong.”
Then he bent his head and fit his mouth to hers, claiming her as easily as if he’d done so a thousand times before. As if she’d been his forever.
And everything stopped. Then melted.
Sterling braced herself for the kick of panic, of horror, but it never came. There was only the heat of it, the banked fury, the rolling wildfire that swept through her and altered everything it touched.
It was long and hot, slow and thorough.
Astonishingly carnal. Deliriously perfect.
It was nothing like the kisses she’d imagined, locked safely away in her little world, where she was never at risk of having one. Rihad’s kiss was possessive and devastating at once, storming through her, making her forget everything but him. Everything but this.
She forgot that she was anything but a woman—his woman, however he would have her, whatever it took, to burn in this fire until she was nothing but ash and longing, fire and need.
And his. God help her, she wanted to be his—
Rihad pulled away then and she could feel his breath against hers, harsh and stirring. Uneven, just as hers was.
He dropped his hand from the side of her face and stepped back, and it was as if he’d thrown them both out of vivid color and bright hot light into a cool, gray chill in that same instant. They only stared at each other for what felt like an eternity.
Sterling was aware of everything and nothing at once. The fine tapestries on her walls, in pinks and reds and ancient golds. The gilt and marble statuettes that bristled on every surface and the sparkling crystal that adorned the high chandeliers, every inch of which she’d studied in the long days she’d been here. The endless blue sea outside, putting the world right there in front of her yet always out of reach, so high up on the cliff side was the Bakrian royal palace. The baby inside of her, low and painful today, as if even her unborn child was expressing its disgust at what she’d let happen to her.
And Rihad. The king. Her husband. The man who had just kissed her. He looked every inch the wealthy sheikh today, in his traditional garments that only emphasized his strength, his power. The sheer intensity he carried with him like a sword, and now she knew he could wield it, too.
His expression was like stone as he gazed back at her, though his dark gold eyes burned the way she still did with the aftereffects of that kiss stampeding all over her, and Sterling couldn’t bring herself to look away.
“Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.” Her voice hardly sounded like hers, and she understood that it was far too revealing. That it told him far too much, and in far more depth. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. “Not today.”
Rihad’s nostrils flared as if he was pulling in a deep, deep breath, or fighting for control. As if he was as thrown by this as she was. As if the addictive taste of that wildfire that still crackled through her was too sharp, too dangerous, in him, too.
“I’m touched,” he said, and she understood that was all wishful thinking on her part, thinking this was difficult for him. Nothing was, after all. Not for the king. “I had no idea our wedding meant so much to you, considering how bitterly you complained throughout it.”
His voice was rough and sardonic, but Sterling was sick, she understood then, because she still felt the kiss like a caress. Her oversensitive breasts ached as if it had been that faintly calloused palm of his all over her bare skin. A little flicker of sensation skated from the tight peaks of each of them down through the center of her body to pool deep in her core. Then pulsed.
She’d always had a vivid imagination. But now what stormed in her was need.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she said, with what she thought was admirable calm, given the fact she now knew what that hard mouth of his felt like against hers, so hot and so male she might never recover from it.
“The trouble is, I know entirely too much about you,” he said after a moment, his tone harsh and cool, while his golden gaze seemed to tear into her. “And despite the temptation, I can’t overlook the fact that you were my brother’s low-class tramp of a mistress for over a decade.”
“And I am now also your wife,” she pointed out, amazed that her voice sounded so much calmer than she felt, if not quite as regally cool as his. She tipped up her chin. “Congratulations on your choices.”
“Let me be clear about how this marriage will work,” he said, and something curled up inside of her at the way he said it. “You will stay here in the palace until you deliver the baby. Will you wish to nurse it?”
“I...” She felt as if he’d tossed her over the side of that terrace after all. One moment he was kissing her, all carnal longing and impossible heat, and the next he was interrogating her about her plans for the baby’s feedings?
“I don’t care if you do or do not,” he said when she only blinked at him. “But if you do, you will stay here until the child is weaned. You will receive all the care and help you could require, of course. For all intents and purposes, that is now my child.”
“Never,” she said at once. Softly enough, but with feeling. “This is Omar’s baby. My baby. Nothing you do can change that.”
“Yes.” And his voice was ferocious. “Omar’s baby. Omar’s mistress. Omar’s many problems. This is nothing new for me, Sterling. I have been cleaning up after my brother all my life—why should it change now that he is dead?”
It was all too easy to remember how much she hated him then, and she clenched her hands so tightly into fists that her nails dug into her palms.
“What happens after the child is weaned?” she asked in a clipped voice as a tsunami of self-loathing crept ever closer, reminding her that she’d not only let this callous man touch her, but she’d also liked it. More than liked it.
She’d wanted more. Maybe she really was the whore Rihad thought she was. Maybe the fact she’d never touched anyone had concealed the essential truth about her.
“That is entirely up to you,” he said curtly. “Behave, and I may let you stay here, as long as you do not make a nuisance of yourself. Misbehave, and I will have you locked up in a remote part of the kingdom, a prisoner in fact and deed. I don’t care which it is.”
“I don’t want this,” she blurted out, because she was suddenly light-headed, and the thought that this was really her life now, that this had really happened, made the world spin.
He lifted a shoulder, then dropped it in that way of his—the royal sheikh untouched by and uninterested in such lowly concerns.
“Life is filled with sacrifices, Sterling.” His voice scraped over her, so harsh she expected it had left marks. “There were always going to be consequences for your relationship with my brother, whether he told you so or not. This is but one of them.”
She shook her head, as much to clear it as to negate him. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me go.”
He considered her for a moment, and there was no reason at all Sterling should flush while he did.
“You cannot imagine I would release a member of my blood into your tender care, can you?” He sounded amazed. And that was so insulting it would have hurt, had not everything else hurt that much more already. “The child stays here. And if you have a shred of maternal feeling in you, which I doubt, so will you. A child needs its mother, I am reliably informed. Even if that mother is you.”
“Wonderful,” she managed to say then, her voice bitter and thick. “That sounds like quite a life sentence. How lucky I am to have been snatched off the street and forced into such an advantageous marriage with the most benevolent and thoughtful dictator around.”
“If you weren’t so appallingly self-centered, you’d see that you truly are lucky,” he retorted, a flash of something dark in
those eyes of his. “Far luckier than you deserve. But then, thinking of others is hardly your strong suit, is it? Or you’d have left my brother alone years ago.”
“And a happy wedding day to you, too, Rihad,” she threw back at him, and it was easier to simply hate him. Cleaner. Less complicated. It felt like a relief, and she didn’t question why she felt so free to do it. “You’re a terrible man and will no doubt be a worse husband, in much the same way I’m sure you’re an awful king. Oh, joy.”
Temper cracked over his face then, dark and alarming, and she braced herself for whatever awful thing he might say next—whore whore whore, wash and repeat, whore whore whore, she thought with a mental roll of her eyes that suggested an insouciance she didn’t quite feel—but instead, he went still. Then frowned.
Not at her, exactly. More at the floor beneath her.
Sterling looked down to find a puddle around her, soaking the hem of her wedding dress and then spreading out across the inlaid mosaic tiles at her feet, and froze in horror. Had she actually humiliated herself to such a degree that she’d—
But then she understood.
The puddle announced what she should have guessed from her mounting discomfort throughout this conversation, but had been too furious and too emotional to face—that her water had broken.
Her baby was coming a few weeks early, whether she was ready or not.
CHAPTER FIVE
SOME THIRTY-SIX HOURS after he’d kissed the new wife he hadn’t wanted in an act of dark foolishness that had haunted him ever since, Rihad stood in the shadows of Sterling’s state-of-the-art hospital suite in the center of Bakri City and watched her sleep at last.
He didn’t know why he was there, lurking about like a spurned lover instead of the king, when they had both been forced into this marriage, him by circumstance and her by his own hand. Instead, he couldn’t seem to look away from Sterling, the woman he’d called a toxic spill.
He should not regret that. It was the truth, he knew, at least in terms of his brother’s life this past decade. But it was hard to remember that at the moment.
There were the faintest smudges beneath her impossibly long lashes, the only indication he could see on her lovely face of how she’d spent the past day and a half. And she was so beautiful, so very nearly angelic in repose, that it made him realize he’d never seen her like this before—so vulnerable, so soft. Not fighting him, poking at him, insulting him or challenging him. Not plastered across tabloid magazines with her breasts falling out of her neckline and Omar’s arm wrapped tightly around her.
Not toxic by any measure.
His chest felt too tight for his own ribs.
And there beside her, lying in a bassinet wrapped up in a swaddling blanket so that only the wisps of jet-black curls on her head poked out above her wrinkled little brown face, was a miracle.
It had been among the hardest things Rihad had ever done, to step aside and let a woman he barely trusted walk across a room to do this work that only she could do. After that scene in the palace, she’d been rushed to the hospital, where the finest doctors in the kingdom had assured them that while the baby was coming a bit early, that didn’t mean anything was wrong with either it or Rihad’s new bride. And sure enough, when Sterling’s exquisitely formed little daughter entered the world at last, she was perfect in every respect. Tiny, perhaps, but utterly, undeniably perfect.
Rihad had been there moments later, to see a woman he’d dismissed as nothing more than callous and calculating beaming down at the scrap of a girl she held in her arms, the look on her face so intimate, so filled with love, it had almost been too much to bear.
He’d had the strangest sensation then—the oddest regret. As if she really was meant to be his. As if this was meant to be his family in more than simply name. As if this was all wrong, somehow—that he should have been there with her, holding her hand, reminding her she wasn’t alone, sharing his strength so hers would seem that much more boundless. Not an intruder into these first moments between mother and child, but a part of it. That was all insane, of course. He’d tried to shake it off as he’d approached her, stiff and formal.
She’d glanced up at him, and that look on her face had altered. That wasn’t a surprise, but still, Rihad had felt it like a blow. Her mouth had flattened when she’d seen him. She’d hidden that naked joy in her gaze.
He’d hated it.
“Her name is Leyla,” Sterling had told him after a moment, as if she’d needed a breath or two to pull herself together before she could speak.
There had been nurses bustling in and out of the birthing suite behind him, doctors being paged incessantly from the intercom out in the corridor, but Sterling had been still. Rihad had had the notion that she’d been waiting for some kind of strike. From him.
As well she should, he’d thought.
It had made that sensation of inexplicable loss yawn open even wider within him. The baby had made tiny noises, more a creaking sound than actual crying, and Sterling had finally relented, her mouth curving into a sweet little smile as she looked down to soothe the little girl that almost undid him. When she’d looked up again, it had almost killed him. He’d never seen that expression on her face before, not even in those happy tabloid pictures of her and Omar. Open. Loving. Soft.
Something like pure.
Even then, at such a tender moment that had nothing at all to do with him, Rihad had wondered what it would be like if that look had been meant for him—and then he’d wondered if he’d utterly lost his mind.
Not if so much as when, he’d told himself then.
“It was Omar’s favorite name for a girl,” she’d continued after a moment, a faint line appearing between her brows. “That’s not... I mean, is there some royal naming tradition I should know about?”
“No.” He’d sounded so stiff. So altered. “Leyla is a lovely name.”
“She’s wonderful,” Sterling had whispered then, bending her face back down to the infant, fierce and maternal—and he’d had to leave. Because he hadn’t known what to do with that roaring, howling thing inside of him, so threaded through with emotions he didn’t know how to process.
Emotions he hardly recognized. What had emotions ever had to do with his life before now? His was a cool world, rational and logical and coldly reasoned. It was his weapon, his strength. The bedrock of his ability to rule his country. He didn’t know what the hell to do with all these feelings. He didn’t know what it made him, that he felt anything at all for this woman or her child. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with any of it.
He’d waited until night fell before he returned, and he slipped in only after his security detail assured him she slept at last. He told himself a thousand different reasons why that was the proper, even respectful, thing to do for a woman he hardly knew who’d just given birth—but the truth was, he was completely off balance and he knew it. He wasn’t sure he knew himself, was the thing—as if he’d been a stranger to himself since Sterling had walked up to him outside that building half a world away. And that alone was enough to give him pause.
Enough to keep him standing there in the shadows.
The child moved in her swaddling then, making that tiny noise again. Part alien, he thought, and part feline, and still it tugged at him. Rihad moved over to the bassinet before he knew he meant to leave his post across the room, seating himself in the chair beside it.
“Hush, little one,” he murmured, stroking his fingers down the whisper-soft plushness of one newborn cheek, marveling at it as he did. “Let your mother sleep.”
Then he covered the baby’s soft little body with his hand, letting the warmth of his palm seep into the rounded swell of her tiny belly, and sure enough, she quieted. Just as he’d done for his half sister Amaya when she’d been an infant. Just as he remembered watching his mother do to baby Omar
when Rihad had been a small boy.
Rihad stayed where he was, gazing down at her sweet face, all those dark curls and the eyes that he’d seen earlier were a liquid black that reminded him of his brother, and tried to make sense of the wild tumult within him.
Like an earthquake, when he knew he wasn’t moving and neither was the ground beneath him. It tore him apart even so, even while he felt little Leyla’s sweet new breaths beneath his hand.
Or perhaps it was because of her.
And he’d been furious for such a long time now. He’d been in a dark, black, consuming rage since he’d gotten that call from the Parisian police. Since he’d had to bury his younger brother so many years before his time. He’d understood it was grief, mixed up somewhere in that terrible rage inside of him, but understanding such a thing hadn’t done much to soothe him or stop the fury. His anger—that Omar had been lost so tragically, at this woman who had twisted him into unrecognizable pieces, at the marriage he’d felt he had no choice but to insist upon no matter how little he might have wished it—had been a living flame, hotter by the day, and he’d stopped wondering when or if it might go out.
It had been so easy to focus it all on Sterling. His brother’s whore, Rihad’s new wife—
But here, now, it was gone. Extinguished completely.
That was what he felt, Rihad realized then. That internal earthquake ripped away his fury and left him with no one to blame. There was only the darkness of fate, the sheer, spinning horror that was his brother’s pointless, untimely death.
And this tiny, perfect child was all that remained of Omar on this earth. This little scrap of life, so new she still bore the wrinkles from the womb, was all that was left of the brother Rihad had only ever wished to protect, from his own debauchery as from anything else.
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