Protecting the Desert Heir

by Caitlin Crews

  She had been wrapped in his arms, her back tucked against his front, his chin resting on her head.

  “He’d already forgiven you,” she’d said. She’d shifted when he tensed. “He loved you, Rihad. He always loved you.” She’d smiled up at him. “I was the one who hated you, for the both of us.”

  “Brothers might be stupid,” he told Leyla now, “but you must love them anyway.”

  “Love sounds stupid, too,” Leyla retorted, but she helped six-year-old Aarib continue to jump up and down on the wide lip of the pool near the waterfall anyway.

  Though not without a very deep, long-suffering sort of sigh that did not bode well for her upcoming adolescence. Rihad repressed a shudder at that unhappy thought, given how stunning a child she already was, God help him. He returned his attention to the matters of state that awaited him on his tablet, a far more appealing prospect than his little girl growing up.

  The papers hadn’t always left them alone, but it was nothing as it had been. Rihad had seen to the dismissal of the particular reporters who dared hound his wife so relentlessly—just as he’d seen to the immediate exile of some of his courtiers when he’d finally seen the way they’d treated her.

  The Queen of Bakri, by definition, was a woman without peer, spotless of reputation and widely beloved by all.

  Ten years on, Rihad had the distinct pleasure of knowing that wasn’t merely a decree he’d made, but the simple truth.

  He knew the moment Sterling walked outside to join them in the garden. He always knew. She changed the air, he’d often told her, simply by breathing it, sharing it.

  Those vicious, repulsive people she’d left behind in Iowa hadn’t ruined her. She wasn’t ruined. He thought that these days, she believed that without question at last.

  His beautiful Sterling. His perfect wife.

  He took a moment to marvel at her as she walked toward him across the stones while the world stilled all around him the way it always had. The way he thought it always would. She still dressed like the model she’d been, too elegant and so easily, offhandedly chic. That copper-blond hair of hers that still fascinated him beyond measure. Those long, long legs that had only this morning been draped over his shoulders as he’d driven them both to a hard, wild finish in the murky dark before dawn.

  Ten years later and he was still hard at the thought of her.

  “Are the monsters asleep?” he asked as she drew near.

  “More or less.” She smiled as she looked at Leyla and Aarib, as if she truly enjoyed the particular music of their young voices, scraping holes in the sky. He knew she did. Despite himself, so did he.

  “God bless the morning nap.”

  Rihad thought of their younger boys, four-year-old Jamil and two-year-old Raza. Little hellions in every possible way, far louder than the older two combined, and they both demanded their mother’s personal attention as only younger children could. “Indeed.”

  She moved as if to sit in her own seat but he pulled her down into his lap instead, nuzzling her neck until her breath caught. He pressed himself against the seam of her bottom, and she laughed.

  “You’re insatiable.” But she sounded proud.

  Content, he thought. They were content, and it was nothing like settling. It was like flying. Soaring through ten years and headed for ten more. Headed straight for forever.

  “Only for you, my little one,” he murmured against her ear. “Always for you.”

  They had not always had it easy, these past ten years. They had failed each other, hurt each other. The world was not always gentle and it was easy to lose each other in the whirl of children and responsibilities, even in a palace with fleets of nurses and around-the-clock staff.

  But they had always had love. And love brought them back to each other, over and over again.

  Rihad had learned to treat her less as a subject and more like a partner. Or he tried. She, in turn, had learned how to trust him.

  This was intimacy, in all its complicated glory, of the soul and of the flesh. Lovers become parents, a king and his queen, a man and his woman. This was the magnificently double-edged sword of truly being known by another, across whole years.

  In truth, he loved every bit of it.

  And he still liked to show her how much.

  “They’re kissing.” It was Aarib’s disgusted little-boy voice, more piercing than usual, or perhaps Rihad wanted to be interrupted less in that moment.

  “They do that a lot,” replied Leyla, in her world-weary older-sister voice. “A lot.”

  “Why did we have more children?” Sterling asked him, laughing. “Whose terrible idea was that?”

  But then she kissed him once more, and he saw moisture glistening in her lovely blue eyes. He ran his hand over her cheek.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much, Rihad.”

  “For what?” he asked quietly.

  “For everything,” Sterling said, fiercely. “For giving me our family. For being my family.”

  She rose to go to the children then, and he let her leave, fully aware that she had no reason to thank him. She was the heart of this wondrous little tangle of theirs, love and trust and wonder, tears and scrapes and sudden furies.

  Their heart. His heart.

  His, Rihad thought. Forever.

  And he was the king. His will was law.

  * * * * *

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  CHAPTER ONE

  SHE FELT LIKE GLASS, stretched so tightly that a gentle tap could shatter her forever.

  Clutching her wrap tight in her fingers, Clio Norwood looked around for her fiancé, Jackson.

  Ashley, his secretary, who had arrived unannounced and interrupted their meeting with a client Jackson was determined to add to his cap, was nowhere to be seen either. Something distasteful hovered in the back of Clio’s mind, as if waiting to strike.

  With the small get-together of the ultrarich in full swing atop the Empire State Building, Manhattan glittered around them.

  Usually, the vibrant, unrelenting pulse of the city that had become home to Clio over the past decade filled her with unending spirit for life. It had kept her going even when she had been struggling after graduation from Columbia University. And had helped her swallow her failures and her naive, broken expectations of making it by herself in the city that never slept.

  But tonight, even New York couldn’t puncture the bubble of dread that had begun to pervade her of late.

  Jackson had returned last night after three weeks from an overseas trip and had been in a stinker of a mood as he liked to call it, because he had missed out on some real estate deal.

  They had barely exchanged a word all day today as she had been at work. When she had returned to the posh flat they had been living in for the past year, he had commanded her to get ready for this party tonight.

  Commanded and not asked, much less requested. A pattern that was becoming more and more obvious to Clio. Still, she knew the stress of his business, understood the
driving need to make one’s mark in the world, so she had given in.

  Even if she was still bone tired from the out-of-season flu she had had a week ago.

  Tonight, Jackson needed her help to convince Mrs. Alcott, an old friend of her parents’, to hire him as her personal investment banker. With her estates in Britain and substantial family business, Jane Alcott would be a coup for Jackson’s already flourishing career.

  But they hadn’t even greeted Jane properly before Ashley had approached Jackson with a desperate glint in her eye.

  Loath to create a scene, Clio had clenched her teeth and smiled serenely even as she saw the curious looks and stifled whispers among Jackson’s clients’ wives and girlfriends. Even the utter kindness of Jane’s question if everything was all right between Jackson and her had been unbearable.

  What was going on with him? What was going on between them?

  Because Clio knew with a nauseating clarity that Ashley was just the tip of the iceberg for what was going on between her and Jackson.

  Suddenly, it felt blatantly scandalous of Ashley to drag him away with a barely disguised proprietary claim on him.

  Squaring her shoulders, Clio let her long stride eat up the space. She hated creating a scene, hated the pitying and speculative glances that had been coming her way far too frequently the past few months, but she had endured it all silently.

  Tonight, she had had enough. She stilled as a tall, commanding figure came into her focus.

  Clio blinked, the impact of those jade green eyes and generous but scornful mouth instantaneous.

  Stefan Bianco.

  Her first instinct was to head for the elevator before he could see her, leave the party. Even her parents, with their disapprovingly stifling silence, would have been welcome. She didn’t want the man she had known a long time ago, one of her oldest friends, to see her tonight.

  Stefan, Christian, Rocco and Zayed made up the Columbia Four—the four young men she had known when they had all been at university together, who had turned into supersuccessful, ultrawealthy, sought-after bachelors for whom the world was a playground and its most beautiful women were playthings.

  But before they had all become successful in their own right, she had known them, had seen them every day for four years, and had shared her deepest fears and hopes with them.

  And the fact that she wanted to run away from one of the few people who had genuinely known her, had understood her, left a bitter taste in her mouth.

  Was she that much of a failure, then? Was she running away from Stefan or was she running away from what she had become?

  * * *

  Stefan Bianco looked around at the glittering cityscape of Manhattan and gritted his jaw tight.

  The vibrant pulse of it, the memories from almost a decade ago everywhere he looked, his own sheer naïveté when he had studied at Columbia with his other three friends—the memories rose up around him like a specter that wouldn’t let him breathe easy even for a few minutes.

  And yet, as the head of a multimillion luxury real estate company, New York was unavoidable even though he tried to reduce the number of times he came here.

  But this time, he had a reason for being at this exact party, on top of the Empire State Building.

  It was high time he found a way to stop Jackson Smith.

  The memory of his executive assistant Marco’s whitened face as he lay against the hospital bed after his suicide attempt, Marco’s five-year-old daughter’s chubby face wreathed in confusion as she asked Stefan about what had happened to her papa...

  The powerlessness he had felt was like acid in his stomach.

  Jackson had swindled Marco out of his savings, pushed him to bankruptcy, until his assistant had lost everything, had seen no way out...

  The eviscerating self-doubt, the sense of being an utter failure, of letting down everyone that had counted on him—looking into Marco’s eyes had been like looking at his own reflection of a few years ago.

  Guilt corroded his insides. If only he had found a way to stop Jackson years ago when he had swindled Stefan himself...

  It had been the worst time of his life—Serena’s betrayal, his guilt driving him to not return to his parents in Sicily and the around-the-clock hours he had worked to secure a deal...

  He had lost the little he had made because of Jackson’s treachery. He would have been in Marco’s place if it hadn’t been for his friends Rocco, Christian and Zayed anchoring him, if he hadn’t already been woken up to the reality of life by Serena, the woman who had professed to love him.

  This time Jackson needed to be stopped, whatever it took.

  As though Stefan thinking Jackson’s name invoked the very devil himself, the American laughed in a group not two feet from where Stefan stood.

  A short blonde, dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt, dragged Jackson away, interrupting the conversation. His craggy face tight with tension, Jackson leaned toward another woman in the group, a tall redhead, and whispered something.

  An apology, Stefan assumed. That didn’t quite work, given the way the woman flinched and turned her head away. More curious than ever, Stefan looked on as the woman’s bare shoulders stiffened, bones jutting out of her shoulders.

  Everything about her posture screamed tension and something more. Jackson let himself be dragged away even as the tall woman stood ramrod straight, her head held high and so perfectly still that Stefan wondered if she would break if someone blew a wisp of breath her way.

  Her face wreathed in shadows, there was a quiet dignity to her. And then he noticed her hair. Even tucked away from that angular face and scrunched tight into an elaborate knot, that red hair was as unmistakable as the narrow, upturned nose and stubborn tilt of the chin.

  That face would be perfectly oval and her eyes green, like glittering emeralds. When she smiled, one corner of her mouth turned upward in a crooked slant.

  Clio Norwood, the one woman he had never tamed.

  Every cell inside him went on high alert, as if he had been infused with a charge of live current. What the hell was Clio doing with Jackson Smith?

  There had been intimacy in the way Jackson had bent closer to her and whispered something, in the way his open palm had caressed her bare arm.

  Yet Stefan could feel the tension in her as the silence of the group reverberated against her. Saw the speculative and intrusively hungry glances cast her way. Noted the way she retreated into herself as an older woman inquired something.

  And knowing Jackson and his perfidious ways, a thousand kinds of thoughts swarmed in on Stefan.

  Anything even remotely connected to Jackson, Stefan didn’t touch with a pole. Yet, he found himself moving toward her, his gaze savoring the sight of her. Inch by glorious inch, light bathed that long neck and her face.

  He stilled, supremely aware of the insistent beat of his own pulse, of the heightened charge of his own breath.

  Clio was just as utterly gorgeous as she had always been, if a little too thin.

  His mind cast back to over a decade ago, to his university days with Rocco, Christian and Zayed—who’d become more brothers than friends—to the unparalleled enthusiasm of learning the world and knowing that it could be at their feet, to the glory of discovering women and the pull they held for them, and to Clio Norwood—the woman who had known the Columbia Four as well as they had known each other.

  Every inch an aristocrat she no longer wanted to be and used to privileged playboys just like them, she had often laughed at their exploits, seeing their escapades with other women with a decidedly amused resignation and distance. She’d rejected his come-ons that first year, as easily as she had shrugged away the elaborate wealth and standing she had been born into.

  Of all the men on the planet, the last man he would have envisioned Clio to be with was Jackson Smith
.

  In no mood to get into a sparring match with Jackson again, especially when his patience was already dangerously low, Stefan waited. Minutes piled on top of each other. With a graceful tilt of her head, Clio excused herself from the group.

  Ignoring the uncharacteristically frantic thrumming of his heart, Stefan cornered her in the next moment. “Ciao, Clio.”

  He wrapped his fingers over her arm to turn her and felt the shiver that went through her. Saw the bracing breath she took before she turned around. A flash of fear, feral and bright, danced in her green eyes.

  Until she blinked, those long lashes hiding her expression.

  When she looked up again, a flicker of warmth dawned in those green depths. “Stefan...what a surprise...I had no idea you were in New York.”

  That accent of hers—it had always done strange things to his insides, swept over him with a mix of warmth and heated awareness. But her tone was reserved and artificial; it rattled him.

  Granted, they hadn’t seen each other in a while, but for four years, Clio had been a part of his life—an integral one and one he remembered without bitterness.

  Placing his arm around her toward the railing, he trapped her, shielding her from the rest of the crowd.

  “You would have known if you’d kept in touch, wouldn’t you, bella?”

  Tension thrummed in the tight set of her shoulders. “You barely ever set foot in New York whereas this is my home.”

  “True. But you didn’t think it important to even attend Rocco’s wedding. Does your new...life not allow room for old friends, Clio?”

  She didn’t flinch as she had done with Jackson, but there was an infinitesimal withdrawal. That shadow of fear again.

  Dio, what was her association with Jackson?

  “I’ve always been here, Stefan.” A remnant of the old Clio—full of adventure and plans for a new kind of life—flashed in her gaze. “I’m not the one determined to wipe anything related to our life in New York from memory.”