“How does such a thing just happen?” His gaze moved over her, and some heretofore unknown romantic part of her thrilled to that expression on his harshly beautiful face then, as if it really was tenderness. And oh, how she wanted it to be. “You were a beautiful girl on her own when you went to New York. A cautionary tale, really.”
She opened her mouth to tell him another lie, but she couldn’t, somehow. It was as if everything really had changed, whether she liked it or not. It wasn’t only the sex. It was the baby. The way he’d saved her from herself when she’d been out of her mind on hormones and guilt. It was that he hadn’t hit her—had seemed astonished she’d thought he would. It was his gentleness now. It was the way he’d taken over her body so completely and yet still left her wanting more.
Who was she kidding? It was him.
And Sterling didn’t want to think about what that meant. She thought she knew—and that was truly insane. But she couldn’t lie to him, either. And there were different levels of the truth.
“My foster parents were the nicest people,” she told him, smiling slightly as if that might make these things easier to talk about. As if anything could. “That’s what everybody always said, in case we weren’t grateful enough. They were kind. Giving. They took in kids like me who’d been otherwise completely abandoned. They had their own kids. They were active and responsible members of the community. Everyone adored them.” She couldn’t look away from him, though she wanted to. “And why wouldn’t they? My foster parents never left any marks. Sometimes they just hit us and other times they liked to play elaborate games, using us as targets. They practiced their aim with cigarettes, cans. Sometimes forks and knives. But there were never any bruises anyone could see.” She saw that dark thing move in his gaze and smiled again, deeper and harsher. “They always told us we were welcome to tell on them, if we dared. That they’d enjoy ripping little nothings like us apart in public. Because no one would ever believe a word we said about the saints of the neighborhood, and they were right.”
“Where are these people now?” Rihad asked softly. Dangerously, as if, were he to speak in his usual voice, he would raze whole cities to the ground with the force of his fury.
And it made something long frozen deep within her unfurl in a little blast of warmth.
“They’re behind me, that’s where they are.” She smiled at him, a real smile that time, and when he slid his hand along her cheek, she leaned into it. “But after that I knew how evil people were, once they thought they had all the power. How vicious and cruel. So I made myself into an Ice Princess who didn’t like to be touched and was always much too sober to have any fun anyway, so everyone left me alone. And then Omar came along, and I didn’t have to worry about that stuff anymore, because everyone believed I was with him. And that’s how I accidentally ended up a virgin.”
Rihad didn’t speak for a long time, and she would have given anything to know what he was thinking. What was happening behind that austere, ruthless face of his and that disconcertingly sensual mouth. She wanted to lick him until neither one of them could think anymore. She wanted to bury her face in the crook of his neck, as if he could keep her safe from all the things that swirled around her that she couldn’t even identify. He would, she thought. He really would.
And God help her, the things she wanted then, that she was too afraid to name.
“But you let me take you.” His gaze was even more golden than usual then, and it set her alight. “Twice.”
“Yes.” Her throat was so dry that it hurt when she swallowed. “I did.”
“Why?” He traced a line from the tender place beneath her ear, down and around to stroke the line of her collarbone, as if he was trying to smooth the ridge of it back beneath her skin. “Why me?”
“We’re already married, Rihad,” she said, as primly as if she was lunching at some terribly dignified country club. “Your name is on my daughter’s birth certificate.”
And she saw that smile of his again, watched it light up his eyes. It filled her with the same light.
“Why, Sterling. That makes you sound traditional and old-fashioned, not modern and scandalous at all.”
“It seemed safe enough,” she told him, caught in that glittering gaze of his. Lost in the way he was touching her, so casually intimate, as if this was only the beginning. As if there was so much further yet to go—but she didn’t dare let herself think that. “And also, to be honest, I didn’t think you’d notice.”
He didn’t seem to move, but everything changed. Got way more intense, so fast it made her stomach drop. “I noticed.”
She froze. “Oh. Was I...? Was I not...?”
Rihad laughed then and rolled, coming up over her and holding her there beneath him, that stunning body of his stretched out above her, so gorgeously male it hurt.
“You were exquisite,” he told her quietly, sincerity in every syllable. “You are a marvel. But I am old-fashioned myself, Sterling, as you’ve pointed out to me many times. Deeply traditional in every possible way.”
She was shaking, and it wasn’t fear. It was him. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that you were far safer when I thought you were a whore,” he said bluntly, his dark gaze seeming to burn through her, kicking up new flames and changing everything. Changing her. “Now I know that you are only mine. Only and ever mine. And I, my little one, am a very, very selfish man.”
And then he set about proving it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE HEADLINE A MONTH LATER was like a slap—the hit, perhaps, that Sterling had been expecting all along. She sat frozen solid on the balcony outside Rihad’s suite, staring down at the tablet computer Rihad had left sitting there when he’d stepped inside to take a phone call. She felt sick.
Black Widow Sterling Lures King Rihad into Her Web! the worst of the European tabloids shrieked. And the article beneath it was even worse.
Sex-symbol Sterling flaunts postbaby bod and enslaves the desert king! Starry-eyed King Rihad can’t keep his eyes—or his hands!—off his late brother’s lover. “But Sterling left a trail of broken hearts behind her in New York,” say concerned friends. Will the formidable king be one more of heartbreaker Sterling’s conquests?
It was beautifully done, really. Killer Whore. Vain Whore. Married Whore. Omar’s Whore. New York Whore. So many clever ways of calling Sterling a whore without ever actually uttering the word.
The worst part was, she hadn’t seen this coming. She hadn’t expected it, and she should have. Of course she should have. But she’d actually believed that now that she and Rihad were not only married, but also actually as intimate as that honeymoon had been meant to suggest, the awful paparazzi would leave her alone.
She’d been incredibly naive.
There are no happy endings, she reminded herself then, frowning out at the sea that stretched toward the horizon before her as if basking, blue and gleaming, in the sun. Not for you. Not ever.
But she’d been lulled into believing otherwise.
Their lazy days at the oasis had bled together into one great burst of brilliant heat, a haze of bright sun above, desert breezes over the cool water in the shaded pools and the desperate, delirious hunger that only Rihad had ever called out in her—and that only he could satisfy.
Sterling had learned every inch of his proud, infinitely masculine body. She’d tasted him, teased him, taken him. She’d learned how to make him groan out his pleasure, how to scream out her own. He’d taken her beneath the endless stars, in the vast softness of his bed, in the luxurious tub that stood in her own luxuriously appointed tent. He’d been inventive and uninhibited—and demanding, as he’d promised. She’d learned to be the same in return.
Sterling had given herself over to the exquisite pleasures of the flesh that she’d denied herself so long—all her life, in fact. Touc
h. Lust. Desire and its sweet oblivion. She’d eaten too much, drunk too deeply. She’d lost herself in Rihad, again and again and again. She’d told him the truth about herself, or a critical portion of the truth anyway—and the world hadn’t ended.
She’d let herself imagine that Rihad was as powerful as he’d always appeared to her. That he could truly hold back whatever nightmares threatened. That he would.
That she and Leyla and this marvel of a man could create their own truths and live in them. That they could finally be the family she’d always wanted.
But she’d forgotten who she was.
She always did.
It had been some weeks since they’d left the oasis and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why the tabloids had latched on to her again. The article went on to make salacious suggestions about a list of regional leaders and some local celebrities, all of whom had been at last night’s elegant function in one of the new luxury hotel complexes being built along the shore of the Bay of Bakri.
That meant that someone at that party had taken exception to the Queen Whore being paraded about on their king’s arm and had taken to the tabloids to express their feelings.
“I’d prefer you not read that nonsense,” Rihad said from the doorway, his deep voice like a flame within her, that easily. That quickly. Sterling looked over at him, still frowning, despite the little flip her heart performed at the sight of him, dark and beautiful there in the arched entryway. His mouth crooked as if he could feel it, too. “It will rot your brain.”
“I told you not to take me to your events, Rihad.” When his fierce brows rose, she flushed, aware that her agitation had sharpened her tone. “I knew this would happen.”
“It is our job to ignore the tabloids,” he said, mildly enough. “Or so you told me yourself.”
But this was different. She was a different person than the woman who had said that to him. And this incarnation of herself didn’t want to let the tarnish of that one seep into what they’d built between them in the past month. She thought it might break her apart.
“It’s only going to get worse.” Sterling folded her hands in her lap and tried to remain calm, or at least to look it. “It always gets worse. They already call me the Queen Whore.”
“Not out loud or in print, they don’t.” There was no softness on his starkly beautiful face then. No hint of a curve to his lush mouth. Only that dangerous light in his dark gold eyes. “Not unless they wish to explain themselves to me personally. Let me assure you, no one does.”
“You can’t threaten everyone on the planet, Rihad. You can’t decree that people forget my past.”
“Your imagined past.”
“What does that matter? When it comes to perception, all that matters is what people believe.” She shook her head at him. “Isn’t that why we went on our honeymoon in the first place?”
“It was one among many reasons,” he said, and his dark gold eyes moved over her the way his hands did so freely, these days. And she was still so astonished that she liked it. That she more than liked it. “The least important, I think.”
He looked dark and forbidding in the gleaming robes he’d worn today for his meetings with some of the local tribes later on, but he didn’t intimidate her any longer. Not the way he once had. Now all that power, all that dark authority he wore so easily, made her shiver for entirely different reasons. His dark gold eyes fixed on hers and everything inside her stilled in glorious anticipation, the way it always did now. Goose bumps moved sinuously over her arms and shoulders, and she wished she could continue to lose herself in it. In him.
But she knew what he didn’t.
That her past was a living thing that stalked her. It always would. It always did, because it lived inside of her. No matter what she did, or how, the world thought the worst of her. That wouldn’t change. It had never changed. She’d told herself she was immune to it for all those years with Omar, because that kind of notoriety had been exactly what he’d wanted and they’d courted it together.
But Rihad was different. Rihad wasn’t hiding. The last thing Rihad needed was notoriety.
Rihad deserved a whole lot better than a secondhand queen he’d married only for the baby’s sake, no matter how they fit together in bed. Sex might have been new to Sterling, but it wasn’t to him. He could get it anywhere, she reminded herself brusquely and ignored the deep pang inside her at the thought. He was the King of Bakri. There would be women lining the streets of Bakri City should he indicate he was looking.
Sterling was the one who couldn’t imagine anyone but him touching her. She was the broken one, all the way through.
“You married yourself off to stop a scandal,” she reminded him lightly, though nothing inside of her felt anything like light. It was as if the moment she’d acknowledged the darkness, it had seeped into everything. Every part of her. “Not to perpetuate one every time you step outside the palace walls.”
He considered her for a moment, his dark gaze unreadable. He was still standing there in the arched doorway that led into his rooms, where she’d spent the bulk of her time since they’d returned from the desert. They hadn’t even discussed it—he’d simply moved her things into his suite. Sterling had been so spellbound by this man it hadn’t occurred to her to maintain any distance.
For his sake, not hers.
And it was then, frowning up at him, angry at herself and worried about his future, that Sterling understood that she’d fallen in love with Rihad al Bakri.
It stunned her. It was a hit as brutal as that tabloid headline, swift and to her gut, with the force of a hard kick. She didn’t know how she managed to keep from doubling over. How she managed to keep looking at him as if her entire life hadn’t run aground right then and there, decisively and disastrously.
Love wasn’t something Sterling could do. Ever.
How had she managed to fool herself all this time? A baby. A husband. No one will ever love you, little girl, they’d told her. This is what you deserve. Deep down, you know it.
She did know it. And she never should have let all of this get so complicated.
“What can possibly be going through your head?” Rihad asked quietly, jolting Sterling’s attention back to him. “To put such a look on your face?”
“I was only thinking about how soon we should divorce,” Sterling said, in a surprisingly even tone of voice. There were too many things rolling inside of her, making her feel unsteady on her own feet, as if she was a storm about to break. “That’s obviously the easiest and best way to solve this problem. You remain the dutiful, heroic king who married me only to secure Leyla’s position and when they discuss the scandal that is me, it won’t affect you at all.”
He’d gone so still. His dark gold eyes burned.
“Do I appear affected now?” It was a dangerous question, asked in that lethal tone of voice.
“It will make me seem particularly heartless and horrible if I were to leave before Leyla is a year old,” Sterling continued matter-of-factly, not answering him. “That might be best, then. I trust that once everything’s died down, once you marry someone far more appropriate, we can work out a quiet way for me to stay in her life.”
“Sterling.” He waited until she met his hard gaze, and she could admit that it was difficult. That it cost her. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Our divorce,” she said, struggling to keep her voice light. To gaze back at him as if there was something more inside her than a great weight and a terrible sob breaking her ribs apart. “Leyla is now legitimate. A princess of Bakri, as you planned. There’s no reason to drag this out if my presence here is causing you trouble. That’s silly.”
“Because it has worked out so terribly for you thus far?” he asked, a hard edge in his voice, like a lash, and she had to force herself not to react to it. Not to show him how i
t had landed and how it hurt. “My condolences, Sterling. When you came apart beneath my mouth in the shower this morning, twice, I had the strangest impression that you’d resigned yourself to the horrors of this marriage. Somehow.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and made herself glare at him as if she still hated him—as if she’d ever really hated him—her heart pounding at her as if she was running. She wished she was.
Then again, this was how it had started.
“That’s sex,” she said dismissively, and she felt something sharp-edged scrape inside her as she said it. As if she wanted to hurt him. As if she wanted to remind him that this had never been meant to happen between them. As if he was to blame for the fact she’d lost herself in sex and happy fantasies of happy lives she could never have. As if loving him was something he’d done to her. A punishment for daring to imagine she could love anyone without repercussions, when she’d been taught otherwise a very long time ago. “I’ve never had it before, as you know. It turns out, it’s a lot of fun.”
“Fun,” he repeated softly, in a way that should have terrified her.
She told herself it didn’t. Or that it didn’t matter either way.
“And I appreciate you introducing me to this whole new world,” she said, never shifting her gaze from his. “I do.”
“Introducing you?” he echoed, and that time, a chill sneaked down her back. Her heart already ached. Her stomach twisted. But if she loved him, if she loved her daughter—and God help her, but she did, so much more than she’d known she was capable of loving anything—she had to fix this.
And there was only one way to do that.
Maybe she’d always known it would come to this. Maybe that was why she’d never touched a man in her life. Because no matter who he was, it would always end up right here. Face-to-face with the worst of her truths and no way to escape it.
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