Protecting the Desert Heir

by Caitlin Crews

  Her lips quivered and her gaze flashed dark, with something he didn’t understand. He was fascinated all the same.

  “How about this.” Her voice was fierce, almost aggressive, but that only deepened his fascination. “Don’t make advances on me at all. I don’t want you.”

  He watched her for a moment. He waited, and sure enough, she flushed again, brighter and delightfully redder than before.

  “Now, that’s just an outright lie,” he murmured.

  And she looked away, because he was right. And she hated it. And he loved that he could read that as easily as the text on his tablet.

  “Is this where you force me again?” she asked tightly, her eyes on the pool nearest the table while her body shouted out all the ways she was a liar, again and again, as if it was in collusion with Rihad. “Because that was so much fun when you called it a wedding.”

  He laughed then and saw her jolt with surprise. She turned back to him, her gaze unreadable again, but he’d come to a decision. The friendship angle had been fine these past months. It had been appropriate. The woman had just had another man’s child—and lost that man to a tragic accident besides. But it was time to move on.

  Rihad stood, aware of the way her eyes clung to him as he moved, very much as if she was finding his body as much a temptation as he found hers.

  “We’ll have a honeymoon, I think,” he said, and watched her shift restlessly in her chair, the truth in the pink bloom on her cheeks. “You and me for two weeks in the desert, with a thousand opportunities for intimacy.”

  “What?” She sounded panicked, and he was not a civilized creature, he realized. Not at all, because he liked that. “Intimacy? Why would you want that?”

  “Perception.” He shrugged. “Of course, it will be widely assumed that you’re merely pandering to my base, animal instincts with that famously lush body of yours. Men are beasts, are they not? And I am no better than my brother when it comes to your seductive powers.”

  “Yes, you are!” Sterling looked alarmed. “You live to resist me! Or you should.”

  “I am unfamiliar with weakness,” he told her, and he didn’t care if that truth hit her as arrogance. It didn’t make it any less true. “But in this case, succumbing to the practiced charms of a known seductress is a weakness I am prepared to allow the world to dissect at their leisure.” He eyed her aghast expression. “Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful story for your tabloid-loving friends to sell far and wide?”

  Her voice was scratchy when she answered, and her eyes were much too bright with a heat he wanted to bathe himself in. “It sounds heinous. And completely unbelievable anyway.”

  “Why don’t you ask me the question?” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, because he doubted she’d appreciate it if he put them on her. Yet.

  “Why are you so awful?” Sterling asked at once, her voice sharp but with that storm in her blue eyes. “But I already know the answer, of course. Because you can be.”

  “That’s not the question you want to ask.”

  Sterling stared back at him. He heard the summer breeze high above them, dancing through the plants and the trees, and the running water all around them, like songs. He saw her pulse hammer against the delicate skin of her neck and wanted nothing more than to press his mouth to it, as if he could taste her excitement. He saw her hands open and then bunch into fists again, as if she couldn’t control them.

  She sat up straighter. Squared her shoulders. Tilted up her chin.

  “So we’ll simply go out to the desert for a little while. Spend the time out there so people think...whatever they want to think. Call it a honeymoon so the whole world leaps to the same conclusion. That we’re together in more ways than one. A unit.”

  “Yes.”

  She swallowed, hard. “You won’t... I mean, we won’t...”

  “I have no intention of forcing you to consummate this marriage,” he said bluntly, and he told himself it wasn’t fair to think she should already know that he was not that kind of man. It didn’t help when she sagged in her chair in exaggerated relief. “Have I given you cause to imagine otherwise?”

  “You kidnapped me,” she pointed out, though what he noticed was how little heat there was in it. “You married me against my will. You’ll forgive me if I’m not entirely certain where you draw that line.”

  He took his time moving around the table. Her eyes widened, but stayed fast to his, and she made a squeaking sort of noise that reminded him of Leyla when he pulled her chair out from the table and then around to face him, so he could brace himself on its arms and put his face directly into hers.

  And God help him, but it was sweet.

  “Bringing you to Bakri and marrying you before you bore a royal Bakrian child outside of wedlock was my duty,” he told her, dark and serious, though he was far more fascinated by the high color on her cheeks than was wise. “Containing the scandal that you represent is my responsibility. But what happens between us now?”

  “Nothing is happening! There’s no us for anything to be between!”

  He ignored her. “That has nothing to do with duty.” Rihad leaned in closer, so close he could have easily tasted that seductive mouth of hers, yet he held himself back. “That has everything to do with need.”

  “I have no needs,” she said, but then she shivered, and Rihad smiled.

  “I won’t force you, Sterling,” he told her with quiet intent. “I won’t need to.”

  She stared back at him. No snappy comeback. No sharp wit. Wide blue eyes and that pulse of hers a wild staccato in her neck. And he wanted her more than he could recall wanting anything, for all that she was a wild card, a loose woman, a problem to be solved. He accepted all of that.

  “But first,” he said, “it’s time to talk about Omar.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  STERLING GAPED AT HIM, her head spinning madly at the sudden shift in conversation and her stomach in a new, hard knot.

  “You look at me as if you expect me to transform into a monster where I stand,” Rihad pointed out with a certain gruffness, almost as if that wounded him. She told herself she was imagining it. “All fangs and claws and evil intent.”

  “I’m not sure you haven’t already done so.”

  That mouth of his crooked into something not quite a smile. He reached over and tucked a stray tendril of her copper-blond hair behind one ear, and neither one of them moved for a long, shattering instant.

  Then he straightened to his full height, but she could still see that steely glint in his dark gold eyes, the potency of his gaze undiminished.

  “I am not going to go on a honeymoon, whether real or for show, with a woman whose head is filled with another man, Sterling. It’s time you told me about my brother and your relationship with him.”

  He didn’t object when she pushed back the chair and surged to her feet, hurriedly stepping away from him. He only watched her as she went, and that shattering thing between them seemed to expand into a taut, terrible grip around her heart. But she made herself stand straighter.

  “I don’t think you really want to have that conversation,” she told him as evenly as she could. “You’re unlikely to hear anything you like.”

  Sterling wasn’t sure she wanted to have it, either. She felt too guilty, too ashamed. No matter what she might have told their friends or herself, this wasn’t what Omar would have wanted. He’d left Bakri for a reason. This—all of this, everything that had happened since the accident—was a stark betrayal of the best friend she’d ever had. The only family she’d ever known.

  And that fire inside of her, that terrible flame when she looked at Rihad that she didn’t know what to do with, was worse.

  “This is not the first time you have insinuated that I harmed my brother in some way,” Rihad said darkly. “Why? Wha
t is your evidence for this?”

  She shook her head, as if she could shake him away that easily, and all his questions, too. “Don’t act the innocent, Rihad. It isn’t a good fit.”

  “You mistake innocence for intent, I think. It’s time to stop talking in circles, Sterling. If you wish to accuse me of something, do it to my face.”

  He smiled again then, lethally, and she felt it everywhere.

  And she’d forgotten this, hadn’t she? She’d been lulled into a false sense of security because there’d been nothing in her head but Leyla and he’d been so encouraging, so supportive, since the day she’d been born. They’d eaten their meals together these past months and talked about a thousand things, like any other civilized strangers who happened to be married to each other. Books, art. The cities they’d seen, the places they’d visited, from Cannes to the Seychelles to Patagonia.

  She’d learned that he had been a solemn child and an even more serious young man, studious and focused in all things. She’d discovered that he had played a great deal of soccer and the occasional game of rugby all the way through university, but only for sport, as he’d always known his future. His place.

  “That must have been nice,” she’d said once. Perhaps too wistfully. “To have no doubt what direction you were headed in, no matter what.”

  He’d eyed her across their dinner and the candles that had lined the table and she’d shivered, though she hadn’t been cold.

  “Who can say if it was nice or not?” he’d replied after a moment, as if he’d never thought about it before that instant. “It was all I knew.”

  She’d started to think of this man as something like pleasant. She’d started to imagine that this forced-marriage thing might not be quite so terrible after all. But she’d been kidding herself. This was Rihad al Bakri. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever encountered.

  How had she allowed herself to forget that?

  “Fine,” she said staunchly now, telling herself this had always been inevitable. That they had always been heading straight here. “Let’s talk about Omar.”

  Sterling crossed her arms, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to dress each time she knew she would see him, including the airy sundress she wore now that felt a bit unequal to the conversation. She told herself fashion and beauty were armor, the way they had been when she’d been a model and the point was to look at the clothes, not the woman in them. And they were—but that wasn’t the only reason she did it these days.

  The depressing truth was that back then she’d liked to hide in the glare of any spotlight that might have been focused on her. But here in this far-off palace that sometimes felt like a dream over these past months, she liked it when he saw her. When he got that gleam in his dark gold eyes that told her he appreciated what he saw. Even now.

  She had so many reasons to hate herself that Sterling couldn’t understand why she hadn’t started overflowing where she stood. Like a backed-up sewer. That was precisely how she felt, clogged and wrong.

  “Wonderful.” His gaze was so dark. So intense. “Let’s begin with why Omar persisted in his relationship with you across all these years. He defied his family and his country, abandoned his duties and broke our father’s heart into a thousand pieces. That was unaccountable enough. Yet he never married you, never claimed you in the eyes of the world. Never stood up for you in any way when he knew perfectly well his affair with you was scandalous. Not even when you fell pregnant.”

  “You’re relentless.” But she said that as if it was only to be expected, without any particular heat. “Omar was the best man I ever knew. The kindest and the bravest. He stood up for me in ways you can’t imagine.”

  “My imagination is remarkably vivid.” His voice was cool. “Why don’t you try me?”

  “Maybe Omar and I didn’t want to get married, Rihad.” She sighed when he only gazed at her in arrogant disbelief. “Maybe not everyone is as traditional as you are. In some places, it’s the twenty-first century.”

  “I have no doubt that you and Omar lived a delightfully modern and unconventional life in every possible way, cavorting about New York City in all that marvelous limelight for so many years.” He eyed her in a way she didn’t much like then. “But your pregnancy should have snapped him back to the reality that, like it or not, he was a Bakrian royal who owed legitimacy to his own child. Why didn’t it?”

  “Perhaps he assumed you would swoop in like the Angel of Death and sort it all out to suit yourself,” she said coolly. Then threw a smile, sharp and icy, back at him. “And look at that. You did.”

  “Do you think these little games you seem determined to keep playing will distract me from getting your answer, Sterling? They won’t, I promise you. Why didn’t he marry you?”

  His whole bearing had gotten colder and more regal as he stood there, his gaze a demanding thing that beat at her, and she believed him. She believed that he would keep asking that same question, again and again, until she finally answered it. That he would stand here an eternity if that was what it took. That he was like the great desert that surrounded his country on three sides, monolithic and impassable, and deeply treacherous besides.

  “He wanted to marry me,” Sterling said after a moment. Then she raised her gaze to meet his again and forced herself not to show him any of the emotion that swirled around inside of her. “I refused.”

  Rihad laughed. Not at all nicely. It set her teeth on edge, as she imagined it had been meant to do, and she had to order herself to unclench her jaw before she broke something.

  “Of course you did.” His tone then was so dark, so sardonic, it felt like another one of his disturbingly sensual touches inside of her. “He begged you, I imagine, and you nobly rebuffed him, in the vein of all gold diggers and materialistic mistresses across the ages.”

  He didn’t quite roll his eyes. His derisive tone meant he didn’t have to. But Sterling felt sharpened all the same then. Honed into some kind of blade by that dismissive tone of his.

  “I know it’s hard for you to believe, Rihad. I know it flies directly in the face of all the fantasies you have about social-climbing sluts like me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Omar would have married me in a heartbeat. I was the one with reservations.”

  “The prospect of becoming a Bakrian princess was too onerous for you? It seemed too much of a thankless chore?” There was that lash in his voice then that should have made her crumble, but she only tilted up her chin and glared back at him. “You were already living off him. Why not make it legal and continue to do so forever?”

  “You’re such a small man, for a king,” she said softly, and had the satisfaction of watching his eyes blaze at the insult. This was the man she’d met in New York. This was the man who had sparred with her in that SUV. It was absurd that some part of her thrilled to see him again, as if she’d missed him. “Or maybe all kings are the same. What do I know? Obsessed with all these tiny details, territories and tabloids, that make them what they are. Life is a great deal richer and more complicated than that.”

  He studied her for a moment, and Sterling stared right back at him. There was something about the way he was looking at her, about the particular quality of that dark temper she could see inhabiting his gorgeous face just then. If he’d been any other man—if she’d been any other woman—she’d have thought it was some kind of jealousy.

  But that made absolutely no sense.

  “Give me one good reason you wouldn’t marry my brother,” Rihad growled after a moment or two inched by and still they stood there, faced off like enemy combatants. “You are a woman with no family. No support.”

  Did he know that was a sore spot for her? Or had he scored a lucky hit? Sterling sucked in a breath and hoped against hope he hadn’t noticed.

  But his dark eyes gleamed. He noticed everything.

  “A marr
iage to Omar would have changed all that. Even were you to eventually divorce, and even if you’d signed away everything ahead of time as our attorneys would have made certain you did, you would always have remained a part of the kingdom. Your child would always be a member of the royal family. Why would a woman like you turn down that kind of security?”

  A woman like you. That phrase rolled around and around inside of her, picking up all the mud and grime of all the other people in her life who had said something like that to her. No one could want a child like you, her foster parents had told her. Girls like you are only good for one thing, her first, sleazy modeling contact had told her. I should have known a bird like you would land on her feet, a British photographer friend of Omar’s had sneered in an email only yesterday.

  Omar had been the only person she’d ever met who had never, ever, put her in that kind of box. Sterling told herself she had to focus. This was about him, not her. This was about his life—the one he’d wanted to live, not the one his overbearing brother thought he should have lived.

  Maybe there wasn’t much a woman like her could do to a king, but she could certainly defend her best friend.

  “You don’t know anything about your brother, do you? You never did.”

  “I’m growing impatient,” Rihad growled. “If you want to continue to talk in circles, that’s your prerogative. But I will make no promises about my reaction to that. What I can promise you is that you are unlikely to like it very much.”

  Sterling took a deep breath.

  And then she told him Omar’s secret. At last.

  “Omar was gay.”

  * * *

  If Sterling had reached beneath that maddeningly flowy dress she wore and pulled out a gun, then shot it directly into his heart, Rihad could not have been more shocked.