“You know a great many kings, do you?”
She slicked her hair back, as aware of the way his dark gold eyes tracked the movement as if he’d used his own hands. And his attention was like a live wire, ferocious and total.
“I’m aware of the entire history of the planet, if that’s what you mean.”
Rihad studied her in that focused, too-incisive way of his that made her want to do things to escape it. Before he could see every last corner of her dirty little soul.
“I have a modest hope that I am less bloodthirsty than many of the kings who predate me,” he was saying drily. “And I know I’m better to my wives than most of those, given I’ve yet to execute one.”
“Was that on the table here?”
“We’re talking about absolute power. It’s all on the table. Something to remember the next time you’re feeling feisty.” But his mouth was crooked into that small smile of his she was beginning to find addictive, despite that steady gaze of his that made her tremble deep within. “But I can’t imagine you really want to talk about the powers of the Bakrian monarchy, or the march of kings throughout time, do you?”
“I don’t want to talk to you at all. I wanted to swim.”
He indicated the pool behind her with a jerk of his fine chin. “Then by all means, Sterling. Swim.”
But she didn’t move.
They could have stayed frozen there for a decade. She’d never have known the difference. Only that she couldn’t look away from him.
This man who had far more power than the others she’d known, who’d taken theirs out on her because they’d considered her so beneath them. Rihad was autocratic. He certainly used his power. But never like that. Never so viciously.
Eventually, he reached down and traced a lazy, sensual pattern from one shoulder, across the very top of her chest, all the way to the other. Then back.
And she still didn’t understand why his was the only touch that made her feel like this, wrapped up in a blaze of need and outside her own skin. She didn’t understand why she wanted him, wanted more, wanted, when she’d never wanted any other man in her life.
When she’d never wanted any touch in her life.
She didn’t understand any of this, only that when he touched her she wanted to sob out, and not because it hurt her. And when he didn’t touch her, it was worse.
He’d made her into a woman she didn’t understand at all. Maybe it was that she felt like a woman after all. Not a punching bag. Not a clothes hanger. Not an ornament. Not a mother. A woman, for the first time.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
Just as she had at their wedding.
But this time, Rihad smiled, and it was as if that, too, burst into her and pried her wide-open however little she wanted to let him in.
“I am so sorry, little one,” he murmured, his dark gold eyes on hers, and that look of his slid straight through her, too soft and too slick. It made her shake and this time, not only inside. “It’s not so easy to make me the monster you wanted me to be, is it?”
“Maybe not,” she whispered up at him, filled with that same wild urge to do anything to keep him from seeing the truth about her. Before it was too late. “But this is very easy, actually.”
And Sterling reached up, grabbed hold of the arm he had propped on his knee as she braced her feet on the side of the pool, and she yanked him off balance.
Then she hauled the King of Bakri straight into the pool.
He sank like a stone, in a cascade of bubbles while a great wave slapped at her, and she was breathing so fast it hurt while the adrenaline—at her temerity, at the fact she’d actually done it—spiked inside of her. She’d made the split-second decision to get the hell out of that pool right now when he surfaced beside her, and Sterling realized that she was frozen in place. Paralyzed, more like.
Why on earth had she done that?
But Rihad laughed.
He tipped his beautiful face back and he laughed, hard and long, and she was tempted to think it was all a great big joke to him, to have her throw him fully dressed into a pool like that—but then he dropped his head back down, fixed that edgy gold gaze of his on her, and there wasn’t a shred of laughter on his lethally beautiful face then.
“That, Sterling,” he told her, his voice a sensual growl she felt in her sex as surely as if he was already touching her, “was a mistake.”
And then he reached over, hooked a hard hand around her neck and yanked her to him.
* * *
He took her mouth as if he owned it, and Rihad thrilled to it—because he did. She was his. The sweep of her tongue against his. The way she yielded to him so quickly, so completely, meeting him and spurring him on.
This was his woman. His wife. His.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, and he thought he might drown them both as he feasted on her, taking and taking, so hard and so good he thought he might die from it. He thought he might not care too much if he did.
There was no time left then. Not anymore. He had to be inside her, now, and nothing else mattered. Not her secrets. Not all the things she still hadn’t told him and had gone to such lengths to avoid telling him. Nothing but this mad fire, this perfect kiss. The heft of her gorgeous breasts in their little scraps of gold, the slick glory of her taste.
His Sterling. His queen.
Somehow, he moved them to the shallower end of the pool, where he could stand. When he did, he trapped her between the pool’s bank and his body. He felt the wind against the wet shirt on his back, but he didn’t care. He only cared about Sterling. About this. Her hands digging into the flesh at his shoulders. Her legs moving to wrap around his hips again.
And for the first time in his entire adult life, Rihad stopped thinking.
He fumbled between them, wrestling with his soaked trousers to pull himself free. Then, his mouth still fused to hers, he reached down between them, out of finesse and out of his mind as he pushed her little bikini bottom to one side and stroked beneath it, straight into her soft, scalding heat.
“Rihad...” she moaned, straight into his mouth, and it was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.
He didn’t think. He moved his hand, he held her close and then he simply thrust straight into her, hard and sure, making her truly his at last.
At last.
She made an odd sound, and he pulled back to look down at her lovely face, the haze clearing slightly.
Sterling’s eyes were too big and hinted at some kind of emotion he didn’t recognize. Rihad held himself still, and she breathed hard. Shakily. Once, then again.
“Are you all right, little one?” he asked quietly, still so deep inside of her he thought it might kill him. She was so hot, so wet. Snug around him, as if she’d been made to receive him exactly like this. “Did I hurt you? Are you not yet healed from giving birth?”
“No...” she said, as if she wasn’t sure. Her blue gaze was dark, slick, in the light from the gently dancing lanterns overhead. He frowned as she continued. “I’m fine. I’m healed, I... It’s just... It’s weird, that’s all.”
“Weird,” he repeated, as if the word didn’t make sense, and slid back a few inches, experimentally, just to see what would happen—
And then, impossibly, Sterling McRae blushed.
Bright red. As if, Rihad thought in total fascination, she was entirely innocent. As if this was her first time.
But that was crazy.
Still, once the thought was there, Rihad couldn’t seem to keep himself from indulging it. He’d wanted to lose himself in her, pound them both into delirious oblivion with all the pent-up need that had haunted his every thought of her for months now—but instead, he slowed down. He took his time.
He treated her like the virgin she couldn’t possibly be.
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He kissed her everywhere he could see that flushed red skin, until the rosy glow she wore was for another reason entirely. He set a slow, lazy pace, easy and wicked at once, making sure that each time he slid away she clung to him a little more, then pulled him back to her a little harder. He used his mouth and his hands, his teeth and his voice, until she was writhing against him, mindless and moaning, just the way he’d wanted her.
Then he reached down, pressed hard against the center of her need and sent her flying.
And it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. So damned beautiful it hurt—and he wasn’t done.
When she came back to herself, panting and dazed, he went a little bit faster, a little bit harder. He held her where he wanted her and took her until that made her cry out, then splinter all over again, and that time, he went with her.
But he was in no doubt, even then.
Sterling was a virgin.
Or had been one anyway, before she’d entered this pool.
And now she was his.
* * *
Rihad was unusually quiet when he climbed from the pool and then pulled her out behind him, but Sterling was still floating off in the clouds somewhere, too lost in the sensations still storming through her body to care.
He lifted her up and swung her into his arms, then carried her over the sands to his tent, not seeming to notice that he was still in his soaking wet clothes. He shouldered his way inside, where Sterling blinked in the softly lit interior until her eyes adjusted. When they did, she had to bite back a gasp.
Because it was like walking into a dream. Where her tent was like a desert rendition of a high-end hotel room, Rihad’s was something else entirely. It was a pageant of scarlet and gold, from the wide bed on its magnificent, kingly platform to the seating areas, some with pillows on the floor arrayed around what looked like a fireplace, some with wide, inviting couches, some set carefully around what looked like a personal library. There were jeweled chests and thick rugs, tapestries and ornate screens to mark off separate areas, and it felt like all the half-formed fantasies Sterling had ever had about distant harems and the harshly beguiling men who ruled over them.
And he was far better than any fantasy she’d ever had, she knew now. Even the ones she’d had about him, little, though, she’d wanted to admit that to herself.
Rihad still didn’t speak.
He stalked across the room and disappeared behind one of the screens, into what Sterling assumed was his own bathroom suite. She stood where she was, dripping onto the priceless carpet like a drowned thing, and when he returned, his face was set into an expression she couldn’t begin to work out. And his gaze was so fierce she couldn’t look at him directly—though that was not exactly a hardship, she thought, as her eyes dropped from his. He’d stripped off his wet clothes and was starkly, proudly naked, striding toward her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do so.
She supposed it was. Even she understood that nudity was commonly a part of the whole sex thing.
The whole sex thing that you’ve now done, she reminded herself, still more than a little dazed by it. The act itself and the fact that she’d slipped across a kind of internal boundary line while she’d been shattering apart in Rihad’s arms.
It was over. Virginity dispensed with quickly and efficiently, and the best part was, Rihad was none the wiser. No awkward conversations filled with explanations and confessions, no accusations of being a great big freak of nature—all the things she’d always feared would happen if she ever got around to this hadn’t happened with Rihad.
And she was still so turned on, still so hungry for him, that she shook.
He picked her up again, as if she was as light as a doll—or as if she was utterly his, a thought that was so electrifying it burst inside of her like pain—and she should have protested that, but she didn’t. This time, he set her down on the high, wide platform step next to the bed and set about peeling her bikini all the way from her body, his hands like hot brands where the wet material had chilled her skin.
He produced a towel from somewhere and dried her off, carefully and thoroughly, and before he was done she was restless and needy all over again, moving from foot to foot when he crouched down before her—
And he knew it, she realized, when he glanced up at her, his eyes glittering darkly and that lush mouth of his in a crooked curve.
Her breath left her in a rush.
Rihad wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her, then tipped her back so she sprawled out on the high bed before him. Then he folded up her knees and held her there with those too-strong hands of his, all of her aching lower body open to him. He looked at her for a smoldering moment, then leaned down and licked his way deep into her heat.
Sterling made a sound that could only be described as a scream.
And he took his damned time, all over again. He tasted every contour, every fold. He took her femininity as relentlessly and totally as he’d taken her mouth, and she was burning up for him so quickly, so deliriously, that she had the wild thought that she might not survive it.
He laughed against the core of her and it went through her like lightning, and then once more, he threw her off the side of the planet into that sweet, hot oblivion.
This time, when she came back to him he’d crawled up over her on the bed. He lined up that hard, proud length with her most sensitive flesh and, when she gasped out his name, pushed in deep.
It was different this time. Darker, hotter.
Harder.
She felt the wave snap back, then swell, and she tossed her head against the bed, as afraid of what was coming as she was desperate for it.
“Beg me,” he ordered her harshly against her ear as he held himself over her, and it was like its own caress, rough and wild.
And she didn’t think. She didn’t argue.
She obeyed. She begged.
And it made it that much better.
Hotter. Sweeter.
Rihad pistoned in and out of her, making her a creature she’d never imagined she could be. She tore at him. She scratched him. She pleaded with him and he laughed, and that made her plead all the more. She writhed and she held on, she met each hard thrust as if she’d been made for this. For him. As if she’d waited all this time, as if it hadn’t been an accident, because she’d been meant for him all along.
She wanted it to last forever. She thought she might die if it did.
And this time, when she fell apart, he shouted out her name like a hoarse prayer and came with her.
She didn’t know how long she slept, or if it was even sleep—maybe she’d simply passed out from the enormity of what had happened? What she’d finally done? But when she woke again, she was tucked up next to him and he was playing with her hair, sliding the slippery strands through those clever fingers of his, that enigmatic expression still on his darkly gorgeous face.
That face of his she felt was stamped inside her, somehow, like a brand.
Sterling felt made new. As if he’d taken her apart and put her back together, and she would never be quite the same. She felt deeply and irrevocably changed. Altered, as if she might not recognize herself in the mirror the next time she looked.
She felt as if he’d taught her how to fly.
And she couldn’t tell him that. He couldn’t know. It was a slippery slope—
“Sterling.”
She jolted back to him, to that curious light in his eyes and that little curve to his deliciously full mouth.
“Rihad,” she said, and she wondered if his name would always sound like that to her now. Like a poem.
“I want to ask you a question.”
“Anything.” She meant it. Especially if they could keep doing this. Just a few hundred more times, she thought, and that might take the
edge off.
He shifted closer to her, propped himself up on one elbow and smiled into her eyes.
“Tell me one thing,” he said, in that voice of his, so low and now intimately connected to something deep inside of her, as if he could simply flip a switch and she would long for him. She did. His dark gold eyes gleamed. “How is it possible that you were a virgin?”
Sterling went very, very still. He reached over and pulled a long strand of her hair between his fingers again, and this time, he tugged. Gently enough, but it seared through her anyway.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, though her voice sounded faint—or maybe she couldn’t hear it very well, over the clatter of her heart against her ribs. Because what else could she say? “Who’s ever heard of a virgin my age?”
His gaze held hers, steady and direct. “I didn’t ask you whether or not you were a virgin, Sterling. I know you were.” His lips curved into something tender if not quite a smile, and it pulled at her. “Hail Sterling, full of grace.”
“It’s true,” she whispered, because the thought hadn’t occurred to her, really. Not fully formed anyway. “I accidentally performed a virgin birth.”
“I asked you how.”
“The usual way.” She blinked when his eyebrow arched. “By which I mean IVF, of course. I did tell you that your brother was gay.”
“Yes, thank you.” His voice was as dry as the desert all around them. “I gathered that, as I saw no heavenly host hanging about the pool just now. How were you a virgin in the first place, Sterling? You’re not a nun, virgin birth aside.”
She had to clear her throat, because she couldn’t get up and run. He would catch her in an instant and she’d end up answering anyway, just with a greater display of his superior strength to be awed by when she did. She had absolutely no doubt.
“Well,” she said after what felt to her like a very long while, though he didn’t seem to move a muscle throughout it, “it wasn’t a plan. It just happened.”
Protecting the Desert Heir Page 12
