Protecting the Desert Heir

by Caitlin Crews

  And for a long, tense moment, it felt as if she’d done exactly that.

  The report from her statement echoed so loudly it drowned out the world. It made the breezes still, the far-off noise of the palace and the city beyond fade. Even the water in the fountains seemed to run dry for what seemed like a very long time.

  Then she laughed, but it was a bitter, accusing sort of sound. It made him feel worse. Like a monster.

  “Is that not what you were looking for, Rihad? I’m so sorry. Not everyone lives according to your narrow standards of behavior.”

  “Explain this to me.” He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like some gruff, autocratic mockery of the person he’d thought he was instead. He knew it. He could hear it. But he didn’t care. Not at that moment.

  She glared at him. “Sometimes, Rihad, when little princes grow up and want to play with others, they don’t want to play with the little princesses as much as the—”

  “Explain your relationship with him,” he snapped.

  “This is ridiculous.” She rocked back on her heels and scowled at him. “You didn’t grow up beneath a rock. I don’t have to explain the world to you. You might choose to act as if it hasn’t moved on from the Stone Age here, but you know perfectly well that’s a choice you’re making, not the truth.”

  “I don’t require that you explain the world to me. Only my brother.”

  He shook his head, frowning, as every conversation he’d ever had with Omar raced through his head, one after the next. Every time Rihad had brought up Sterling, Omar had shrugged it off.

  “She is necessary, brother,” he’d said. He’d never explained that assertion any further—and Rihad had thought him besotted. Bewitched. Led about by his most sensitive parts by a scandalous woman. It was a tale as old as time. As old as their own father, certainly.

  It had never crossed his mind that this notorious woman, this walking sexual fantasy who had been the torment of thousands the world over in those coyly sensual perfume advertisements that had made her name, could possibly have been Omar’s beard.

  Yet he believed her, and that meant she’d been exactly that, and he’d fallen for it. To the detriment of his own relationship with his brother.

  “I think that if you could see the look on your face right now, you would understand why he felt this was necessary,” Sterling said coolly. “Omar didn’t dare tell you. He hid in plain sight and used one of the oldest tricks in the book.” She raised one hand and made the kind of imperious gesture in his direction that made him all but see red. “That exact expression.”

  “I have no idea what you think you see on my face,” he gritted out. “But let me tell you what’s behind it. Shock.”

  She scowled. “There is absolutely nothing wrong—”

  “That he didn’t tell me,” Rihad threw at her. “That he felt he needed to sever his relationship with his own family. That he felt he needed to keep this secret all these years.”

  “How could he possibly tell you?” she demanded, and he could see how much she’d cared for Omar in that fiercely defensive light in her blue eyes then, and everything inside him tilted. Slid. Because Rihad had only ever wanted to be that kind of support for his brother, and he’d failed him. “The only thing you ever talked to him about was what a disappointment he was. How he had let you down by not racing off to get married and have babies the way you thought he should. Having Leyla was his attempt to pacify you and I wouldn’t marry him because I thought he deserved more from his life. I thought he could do better than living a lie.”

  “But this is what I do not understand.” Rihad raked his hands through his hair and had the odd notion that he was a stranger to himself. If his brother had been an entirely different man than the one he pretended he was, what else could be a lie dressed up like the truth? He felt cut off at his knees. Adrift in the middle of his own palace, where he had always known exactly what and who he was. “Why go to such lengths to live this lie?”

  “I haven’t gotten the impression that Bakri is renowned for its open-mindedness,” Sterling said in that sharp way of hers that he enjoyed a bit less than usual then. “Much less its king. And I’ve only been here a few months.”

  “I can understand why he would not wish to tell our father,” Rihad said, as if he was talking to himself. In part, he was. “The old man was harsh, despite his own weaknesses. He was of another time.”

  “Whereas you are the embodiment of the modern age?” Sterling sniffed. “What with the kidnapping and the ranting about legitimacy and your obsession with al Bakri blood. Very progressive.”

  “He should have come to me.”

  “It’s not up to you to decide how he should have lived his life,” she threw at him, that scowl that twisted her face making her more pretty instead of less, somehow. “What he wanted was to live as he pleased. What he wanted was not to be nailed down into the things you thought he should do. He didn’t need your permission to be who he was.”

  “Perhaps not,” Rihad said, and he heard a note he didn’t quite recognize in his own voice. Profound sadness, perhaps, that he doubted would ever leave him now. It cracked in him like temper. “But perhaps he could have used my support.”

  Her lips parted then, her expression confused, as if he’d spoken that last part in Arabic.

  “Your support?” she echoed. “What do you mean?”

  Rihad was furious. And something that felt a great deal like lost, besides. He had always known precisely what he had to do and how to do it. He had always known his path and how to walk it. He didn’t know this. He didn’t know how to navigate it—because it was too late.

  Omar was dead, and Rihad had loved him—yet never truly known him.

  The grief he’d understood would always be with him seemed to triple inside of him with every passing moment. Became darker. Thicker. And woven in with it was guilt. That he hadn’t seen. That he hadn’t looked. That he’d accepted his own brother at face value, even when doing so had meant thinking the worst of him.

  He hated this. He hated himself. He hated all those wasted years.

  “None of this explains you,” Rihad bit out at Sterling, because she was there. Because she’d participated in this deception. Because she’d known his brother in a way he never would, and he was small enough to resent that, just then. “If he wanted a beard, why did he not marry years ago and cement it? And if he was going to be in a fake relationship with a woman, why did he not choose a woman who would raise no objections? Why you?”

  “That seems to be the sticking point,” she pointed out, her lovely eyes flashing with something heavier than temper. Darker. He felt another stab of guilt, and hated that, too. “Not so much why he did it, but that he did it with a woman like me.”

  “Because it’s impractical.” He wanted to punch something. He wanted to rage. He settled for seething at her instead. “You are a lightning rod of controversy. Why not choose a woman who would have flown beneath the radar?”

  “Why don’t we conduct a séance?” Sterling suggested in that same sarcastic tone, her pretty eyes narrow and dark on his. “You can lecture him just like this. I’m sure it will have the same effect now as it clearly did when he was still alive.”

  He didn’t know when he’d drifted closer to her, as if she was some kind of magnet. Only that they were much too close then, and he wanted to touch her too much, and that was only one of the reasons he was furious.

  It was the easiest reason.

  “Don’t.” Sterling’s eyes were glittering yet her mouth was vulnerable and Rihad wanted her. God, how he wanted her.

  “Don’t what?” he asked. “You were never my brother’s lover.”

  “That doesn’t mean I have any desire to be yours.”

  Yet he could see the faint tremor beneath her skin. He could see the flush across her cheeks.
He knew her desire as well as he knew his own.

  “Liar.” But he said it as if it was very nearly a compliment.

  She didn’t contradict him, and the world was still so far away. There was only her. Here. And there had already been too many lies. There had been too much hidden and for too long, and Omar was lost.

  His brother had never trusted him. Neither did Sterling. And he couldn’t have said why he felt both so keenly. So harshly. As if they were the same thing. As if he could no longer trust himself.

  “Help me solve the puzzle you present,” he urged her in a rough whisper. “Why did he have a child with you? What did he hope to gain?”

  She looked confused and slightly bereft. “He imagined that if he had a child, that would show you that he wasn’t as irresponsible as you thought he was, even without you knowing the truth.”

  “That is a fine sentiment, Sterling, but all the reasons I married you held true for him, too.”

  “I doubt very much it was his intention to die,” she threw back at him. “If he hadn’t, maybe we would have married. Had he told me the reasons why that would help Leyla, I would have relented. But we’ll never know what might have happened, will we?”

  “I know that if he’d come to me, if he’d told me, I would not have turned my back on him. That’s what I know.” Rihad let out a long breath. “I will never understand why he did not.”

  Sterling made a frustrated noise. “That might have a bit more weight if you hadn’t spent all these years acting as if he was a communicable disease.”

  He made a sound of protest, but she wasn’t listening to him. Instead, she thrust one of her fists at him as if she wanted to hit him, but held herself back at the last moment.

  “All you did was talk about how you had to clean up after him, as if he was garbage.” And her voice was so bitter then. Her blue eyes the darkest he’d ever seen them. “Maybe if he’d thought he could trust you, if you cared about anything besides the damned country, he might have risked coming out to you.”

  “I loved him.”

  Again that fist, not quite making contact with his chest.

  “Actions speak louder than words, Rihad. Don’t blame Omar for your failure to treat him like a person. That’s on you. That’s entirely on you.”

  And whatever was left inside of him shattered at that. Leaving him nothing but a howling emptiness, and the uncomfortable ring of a truth within it that he’d have given anything not to face.

  “Damn you,” he whispered, his tone harsh and broken, and he didn’t try to hide it.

  Then he reached for her, because he knew, somehow, that Sterling was the only person alive who could soothe that shattered thing in him—

  But she flinched away from him and threw up her arms, as if she’d expected him to haul off and hit her.

  As if, he understood as everything inside of him screeched to a halt and then turned cold, someone had done so before.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  STERLING FLINCHED, WHEN SHE knew better than that. But she couldn’t seem to help herself.

  She’d finally pushed him too far. She’d felt safe with him all this time, safer than she’d ever felt with another man, but that was before. She’d gone over the edge at last and she’d seen that broken look on his face.

  She knew what it meant. She remembered too well.

  She expected the hit. It had been a long, long time, but she thought she could take it. There was no warding off a blow from a man as strong as he was or as close, but if she could take the inevitable fall well, it wouldn’t immobilize her. The trick was not to tense up too much in anticipation, and then to curl into a tight ball against the kick—

  “Sterling,” Rihad said then, in that low, dark way of his that rippled through her, making her want to cry. Making her want him, too, which she thought was evidence that she was deeply sick in the head. Twisted all the way through, the way they’d always told her she was. “What do you think is happening here?”

  “Please,” she whispered, trying to stand tall, to square her shoulders despite the fact she couldn’t stop shaking. “Just don’t wake the baby. I don’t want her to see.”

  And she closed her eyes, tried not to brace herself too much and waited for him to hit her.

  The way her foster parents always had.

  She heard nothing. For one lifetime, then another.

  Then, finally, Rihad’s voice, but he wasn’t speaking to her. He spoke in Arabic, and she didn’t have to understand the words he used to know he was issuing orders again in that matter-of-fact, deeply autocratic way of his that was as much a part of him as breathing.

  Then again, the quiet.

  The breeze above and the water all around, and she kept her eyes shut tight because the quiet was the trick. It was always a trick. The false sense of security had always, always tripped her up. The moment she’d thought it wasn’t going to happen and looked to see was the moment they’d laid her flat.

  She heard footsteps, then the sound of Leyla’s buggy being wheeled away, and her stomach turned over, then plummeted. He was sending the baby off with the nurses, as she’d asked. That meant—

  She flinched away from his hand on her arm, making it that much worse. Her eyes flew open and met his, burning dark, dark gold and far too close, and she nearly bit off her tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered hurriedly, in a panic she couldn’t control, even when he let go of her and stepped back. “I didn’t mean to flinch.”

  He studied her for a long, long time.

  “Sterling,” he said, very quietly, but somehow with more power behind it than she’d ever heard him use before. “Who hit you?”

  And everything inside of Sterling ground to a lurching, nauseating halt. She couldn’t risk this. She should never have flinched. Open up that old can of worms and he would see. He would know.

  She didn’t think it through, she simply catapulted herself across the wedge of space between them, trusting he would catch her. She didn’t ask herself how she knew he would.

  But he did.

  His arms came around her as her chest collided with his, and all of that panic and all of those old ghosts shimmered into something else entirely.

  His seductive heat poured through her. Into her. Chasing away all those old cobwebs she couldn’t afford to let him see. He couldn’t know.

  She didn’t want to think too much about why that was the worst thing she could imagine. The very worst. She only knew, without a shred of doubt, that it was.

  “Exactly what do you think you are doing?” he asked, but his voice was as gentle as his hands against her.

  And yet she could feel how hot he was, hot and hard and deliciously male against her, everywhere. He wanted her. It was a revelation. He was so hot that she might have thought he was feverish, had she not been looking straight up into those dark gold eyes of his, where she could see he wasn’t the least bit unwell.

  Dark and beautiful and much too close to all the parts of her she didn’t want him to see, perhaps. But not sick.

  Sterling was more than a little bit worried that she was the sick one here, but she shoved that thought aside. There was no time left to worry about any of that. About the strange revelations this morning had wrought, much less what they meant or the repercussions they might have. She couldn’t let her mind spin out that way. She couldn’t see the future, so there was no use panicking about it.

  She could only do her best to confuse the present in the easiest and most direct way available to her before Rihad talked them both to the point of no return. Before he saw who she really was and was as disgusted as everyone else had always been.

  So that was what she did.

  Sterling pressed against him in what she hoped was an excellent show of wanton abandonment, winding her arms around the st
rong column of his neck, her mouth actually watering as she let her gaze move from that smooth, brown sweep of skin to his marvelous mouth that was now right there—

  “Sterling,” Rihad said repressively, but his hands were flush against her hips and he wasn’t pushing her away. And she could feel him against her belly, so hard where she was so soft and yielding. The wild sensation made her shudder all the way through and then arch against him.

  As if this wasn’t the man she’d tried to run from, so long ago in New York, so sure he would ruin her.

  As if this wasn’t the man she’d thought was about to haul off and hit her moments before.

  Or maybe because it was him. Because she’d snapped into a very old, horribly familiar place and he hadn’t hit her after all. He’d looked appalled at the very idea.

  And he wanted her. Even with that glimpse of the truth about her, he wanted her.

  He wasn’t like any other man she’d ever known. And that shattering thing swirled inside her, making her feel something rather more like truly wanton after all. That maddening heat, storming through her limbs and gathering low in her belly, making her feel hot and ripe and hungry—

  She arched into him, harder this time, then went up on her toes and kissed him.

  And everything exploded.

  His mouth was divine torture, his kiss insane. Rihad took control almost the second it began, one of his hands moving to wrap itself in her hair, the better to hold her head where he wanted it, the other a hard, wild encouragement at her hip.

  He angled his head for a better fit, and then he simply...took.

  And she loved it.

  Rihad kissed like a starving man, as if Sterling wasn’t the only one scraped raw and left aching by this hungry thing between them. He kissed as if there was nothing at all for her to do but go along for the ride, wherever he took them. He kissed her until she was shivering against him in uncontrollable reaction, need and longing and the rich headiness of desire making her dizzy. And still so needy it hurt.