“What is this? Where are we?”

“This is an airport,” Rihad told her, in the same lecturing way she’d used when she’d ordered him not to use his mobile as he drove out of Manhattan. “And that is a plane. My plane.”

Sterling went so white he thought she might topple over where she sat. Her hands moved at once to the round swell of her belly, as if she was trying to protect the child within from him, and he hated it that there was some part of him that admired her for so futile a gesture.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

He suspected she knew. But he took immense satisfaction in angling closer, so he could see every faint tremor on those sinful lips. Every shiver that moved across her skin. Every dawning moment of horrified recognition in her deep blue gaze.

“I am Rihad al Bakri,” he told her, and felt a harsh surge of victory as her gaze went dark. “If that is truly my brother’s child you carry, it is my heir. And I’m afraid that means you’ll be coming with me.”

Scandalous Sheikh Brides

And the powerful men who claim them!

In their rival desert kingdoms the word of Rihad al Bakri and Kavian ibn Zayed al Talaas is law.

Nothing and no one stands in the way of these formidable and passionate sheikhs.

Until two exceptional women dare to defy them and turn their carefully controlled worlds upside down.

These men will do whatever it takes to protect their legacies—including claiming these women as their brides before a scandal ensues!

Read Rihad’s story in

Protecting the Desert Heir June 2015

And look out for Kavian and Princess Amaya’s story, coming soon!

Protecting the Desert Heir

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

USA TODAY bestseller and RITA® Award-nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Programme, where she can finally utilise the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Scandalous Sheikh Brides

Title Page

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THE LAST TIME she’d run for her life, Sterling McRae had been a half-wild teenager with more guts than sense. Today it was more a waddle for her life than anything approaching a run—thanks to the baby she carried and had to protect no matter what, now that Omar was dead—but the principle remained the same.

Get out. Get away. Go somewhere you can never be found.

At least this time, twelve years older and lifetimes wiser than that fifteen-year-old who’d run away from her foster home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she didn’t have to depend on the local Greyhound bus station to make her getaway. This time, she had limitless credit cards and a very nice SUV at her disposal, complete with a driver who would take her wherever she asked to go.

All of which she’d have to ditch once she got out of Manhattan, of course, but at least she’d start her second reinvention of herself with a little more style.

Thank you, Omar, Sterling thought then. The heels she refused to stop wearing even this late into her pregnancy clicked against the floor of the apartment building where she and Omar had shared his penthouse ever since they’d met while he’d been a graduate student. A wave of grief threatened to take her feet right out from under her, but Sterling fought it back with grim determination and clenched her teeth tightly as she kept on walking.

There was no time left for grief or anything else. She’d seen the morning news. Rihad al Bakri, Omar’s fearsome older brother and now the ruler of the tiny little port country on the Persian Gulf that Omar had escaped at eighteen, had arrived in New York City.

Sterling had no doubt whatsoever that he would be coming for her.

There was every chance she was already being watched, she cautioned herself as she hurried from the elevator bank—that the sheikh had sent some kind of advance team to come for her even though the news had broadcast his arrival barely a half hour ago. That unpleasant if realistic thought forced her to slow down, despite the hammering of her heart, so she appeared nothing but calm. It forced her to smile as she moved through the lobby, the way she might have on any other day. There would be no honoring Omar if she let herself—and more important, her baby—fall into the clutches of the very people he’d worked so hard to escape. And she knew a little bit about the way predators reacted when they saw prey act like prey.

The more fearful you acted, the harder they attacked. Sterling knew that firsthand.

So instead, she walked. She sauntered.

Sterling walked like the model she’d been before she’d taken her position at Omar’s side all those years ago. Like the notorious, effortlessly sensual mistress of the international playboy Omar had been in the eyes of the world. She strolled out into the New York City morning and didn’t look around to savor the great sprawl of the city she’d always loved so much and so fiercely. There was no time for goodbyes. Not if she wanted to keep her baby—Omar’s baby—safe.

And she might have lost Omar, but God help her, she would not lose this baby, too.

Sterling was glad the summer morning was bright and warm, giving her an excuse to hide her thick grief and her buzzing anxiety and the too-hot tears she refused to let fall behind a pair of oversize sunglasses. It took her longer than it should have to realize that while that was indeed Omar’s gleaming black SUV pulled up to the curb on the busy Upper East Side street, that was not Omar’s regular driver standing beside it.

This man lounged against the side of the vehicle looking for all the world as if it was some kind of throne and he its rightful king. His attention was on the cell phone in his hand, and something about the way he scrolled down his screen struck Sterling as insolent. Or maybe it was the way he shifted and then looked up, his powerfully disapproving dark gaze slamming into hers with the force of a blow.

Sterling had to stop walking or fall over—and this time, grief had nothing to do with it.

Because that look felt like a touch, intimate and lush. And despite all the work Sterling had put into her image as a woman who wallowed neck-deep in the pleasures of the flesh, the truth was she did not like to be touched. Ever.

Not even like this, when she knew it wasn’t real.

It felt real.

This driver was too much. Too tall, too solid. Too damned real himself. He was dressed in a dark suit, which only served to make his lean, intensely dangerous body seem lethal. He had thick black hair, cut short as if to hide its natural curl, rich brown skin and the most sensual mouth Sterling had ever seen on a man in her life, for all that it was set in a grim line. He was astonishingly, noticeably, almost shockingly beautiful, something that should have been at odds with that knife-edged form of his. Instead, it was as if he was a steel-tempered blade with a stunningly bejeweled hilt.

He was either the last person she should want driving her to freedom, or the first, and Sterling didn’t have time to decide which. She didn’t have any time at all. She could feel her phone buzzing insistently from the pocket where she’d stashed it, and she knew what that meant.

Rihad al Bakri. The king himself, since his and Omar’s father had died a few years back. He was finally here, in Manhattan, as she’d feared. Both Omar’s friends and hers were texting her warnings, calling to make sure she was aware of the impending threat. Because no matter what else happened, no matter what might become of Sterling now without the man who had been everything to her, Omar’s older brother could not know about this baby.

It was why she’d taken such pains to hide the fact that she was pregnant all these months. Until today, when it didn’t matter any longer, because she was running away from this life. She’d do what she’d done the last time. A far-off city. Hair dye and/or a dramatically different cut. A new name and a new wardrobe to go along with it. It wasn’t hard to pick a new life, she knew—it was only hard to stick to it once you’d chosen it, because ghosts were powerful and seductive, especially when you were lonely.

But she’d done it before, when she’d had much less. She had even more reason to do it now.

All of this meant that Sterling certainly didn’t have time to ogle the damned driver, or wonder what it said about her that the first man she’d noticed in years seemed to have taken an instant dislike to her, if the strange driver’s expression was any guide. It said nothing particularly good about her, she thought. Then again, maybe it was just her grief talking.

“Where is Muhammed?” she asked crisply, forcing herself to start forward again across the sidewalk.

The new driver only stared at her and as she drew closer she found herself feeling something like sideswiped by the bold, regal line of his nose and the fact that those dark eyes of his were far more arresting up close, where they gleamed a dark gold in the bright morning light. She was breathless and fluttery and she couldn’t make any sense of it, nor understand why he should look something like affronted. Her phone kept vibrating, her breath was ragged and she was this close to bursting into tears right there on the street, so she ignored the odd beauty of this strangely quiet and watchful man and wrenched open the door to the SUV herself.

“I don’t actually care where he is,” she threw at him, answering her own question as her panic started to bang inside her like a drum. “Let’s go. I’m sorry, but I’m in a terrible hurry.”

He leaned there against the driver’s window, his expression startled and thoughtful all at once, and he only studied her in a leisurely sort of way as Sterling slung her oversize shoulder bag inside. And she had never been much of a diva, no matter how much money Omar had given her to throw around. But today was a terrible day after a week of far worse, ever since she’d gotten that call in the middle of the night from the French police to tell her that Omar was dead after a terrible car crash outside Paris. And she had none of the social graces she’d worked so hard to learn left inside of her after that. Not even a polite word.

Not for a man like this one, who stared at her as if he would decide when and where they went, not her. Something snapped inside of her and she let it—hell, she welcomed it. A surly driver was a far better target than herself or Omar’s terrifying brother, who, Sterling was well aware, could show up at any moment and destroy everything.

As far as she’d ever been able to tell from reading between the lines of Omar’s staunchly loyal stories, that was pretty much all the sheikh did.

“How did you get this job?” she demanded, focusing her temper and her fear on the stranger before her. “Because I don’t think you’re any good at it. You do realize you’re supposed to open the door for your passengers, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” he said then, and Sterling was so startled by that rich, low, deeply sardonic voice that she curled a hand around her big, low belly protectively even as her throat went alarmingly and suddenly dry. “My mistake. It is, of course, my single goal in life to serve American women such as yourself. My goal and my dream in one.”

Sterling blinked. Had he said that in another way, she might have ignored it. But the way he looked at her. As if he was powerful and hungry and ferocious and was only barely concealing those things beneath his civilized veneer. It arrowed into her, dark and stirring.

It reminded her, for the first time in a very long while, or maybe ever, that she was a woman. Not merely mother to her best friend’s child, but entirely female from the top of her head, where that look of his made her feel prickly, all the way down to her toes, which were curling up in her shoes where she stood on the curb.

And entirely too many places in between.

The baby chose that moment to kick her, hard, and Sterling told herself that was why she couldn’t breathe. That was why her entire body felt taut and achy and very much like someone else’s.

“Then yours must be a life of intense disappointment,” she told him when she could breathe again, or anyway, fake it. “As you fall so far short.”

“My apologies,” the driver replied at once, his voice smooth, but with that hard undercurrent in it that made Sterling’s head feel light. “I forget myself, clearly.”

He straightened then and that didn’t make it any better. He was tall and broad at once, a sweep of black that took over the entire world, and she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d snatched her up, belly and all, in one powerful fist—

But he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He reached over and wrapped his hand over the top of the door instead, then inclined his head toward the SUV’s interior as if it was his car and he was the one doing her a great favor.

Impossible images chased through her head then, each more inappropriate and embarrassing and naked than the last. What was wrong with her? Sterling didn’t have thoughts like that, so yearning and wild. So...unclothed. She didn’t like to be touched at all, much less...that.

“Well,” she said stiffly after a tense, electric moment she could feel everywhere, even if she couldn’t understand it. She felt weak and singed straight through and she couldn’t seem to look away from him when she knew that he was causing this. That it was him. “Try not to do it again.”

His dark gold eyes got more intense, somehow, and that stunning mouth of his shifted into something that could only be described as mocking. She ordered herself not to shiver in response, but she felt it wash over her anyway, as if she had.

“But we really do have to get moving.” She made her voice softer then. Placating, the way she’d learned to do with all kinds of men—all kinds of people, come to think of it—over the years. She’d made it her art, and no matter that her life with Omar had tempted her to believe she wouldn’t have to live like that any longer. That she could turn it on or off for fun, as she wished. There’s no such thing as a happy ending, she reminded herself harshly. Not for you. “I have a long way to go and I’m already behind schedule.”

“By all means, then,” he said invitingly, the way a wolf might have done, with the suggestion of claws and the hint of fangs yet nothing but that sardonic smile on his shockingly sensual, infinitely dangerous mouth. “Get in. I would hate to inconvenience you in any way.”

Then he reached out and took her hand, ostensibly to help her into the SUV.

And it was like fireworks.

It was pure insanity.

Sensation galloped through her, shooting up from that shocking point of contact like wildfire, enveloping her. Changing her. Making the city disappear. Making her whole history fall out of her own head as if it had never happened. Making her body feel tight and restless and dangerously loose at once. Making her wonder, yearn, long—

She wanted to jerk her hand away from his, the way she always did when someone touched her without her permission, but she didn’t. Because for the first time in as long as she could remember, Sterling wanted to keep touching him more than she wanted to stop.

That astounding truth pounded through her like adrenaline, a sleek and dizzying drum.

“I cannot serve you if you do not enter the vehicle,” the driver said after a moment, his gaze narrowing in on hers in a way that made her breath go shallow. And his voice seemed to stoke the fires that raged in her, as if the way his hand wrapped around hers was a sexual act. A whole lot of sexual acts. “And that would be a tragedy, would it not?”

Sterling couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe—and she was terribly afraid that the edgy feeling swamping her just then wasn’t panic at all. She knew panic. This was deeper. Richer.

Life-altering, she thought in a kind of awe.

But the only thing she could let herself think about right now was her baby, so she shoved all the confusing sensations away as best she could—and tried to get into the car and get away from him before her legs simply gave out beneath her.

Or before she did something she’d truly regret, like moving closer to this strange man instead of away.

* * *

There were a number of things Rihad al Bakri—reigning sheikh, Grand Ruler and King of the Bakrian Empire—did not understand.

First, how his late brother had neglected to mention that he had impregnated his mistress and quite some time ago, if her current condition was any guide. Or how this one delicate American woman had managed to elude his entire security force and was now sashaying out into the city as if she was still on the sort of catwalks she’d frequented when she’d been, by all accounts, a feral teen. Finally, he was arrogant enough to wonder how on earth she could possibly have mistaken him—him—for a livery driver, of all things.

And that was not even getting into his unending grief that his brother was gone. That after wasting so many years of his life gallivanting about with this unsuitable woman, Omar could have disappeared so senselessly in the space of a single evening.

Rihad could not come to terms with it. He doubted he ever would.

Yet all of that faded when Rihad took her hand, meaning only to help her into the SUV as any decent servant might. He had enough of them. He should know.

The loud, brash, concrete city all around them seemed to skip its groove like an old-fashioned record, and go still.

So still it was like a quiet agony, reverberating inside of him.

Her hand was delicate and strong at once, and Rihad didn’t like that. Nor did he like the way her mouth firmed as she looked at him, as if she was pressing her lips together to disguise the way they trembled, because he had the wild, nearly ungovernable desire to taste that theory.

Surely not.

Her strawberry blond hair should have appeared messy, twisted back in a riot of smooth gold and copper strands, but instead made her look fresh. She wore a stretchy sort of tunic dress over skinny jeans and absurdly high heels, quite as if she wasn’t so heavily pregnant that it looked as if she’d shoved a giant ball underneath her clothes. Worst of all, she was remarkably graceful, moving easily from the sidewalk into the vehicle, making him wonder exactly how she might move when not pregnant.

Or better yet, beneath him.

Rihad did not want to wonder about this woman in any capacity at all and much less that one. He’d wanted nothing more than to eradicate the stain of her from the memory of his brother’s life, erase her taint from the Bakrian royal family once and for all. That was why he’d come here himself, straight from Omar’s funeral, when he could easily have sent agents to eject her from this property.

Enough scandal. Enough selfish, heedless behavior. Rihad had spent his life cleaning up his father’s messes, Omar’s messes, even his half sister Amaya’s messes. Sterling McRae was the emblem of his family’s licentiousness and Rihad wanted her—and all the remnants of his brother’s lifetime of poor decisions—gone.

So naturally she was pregnant.

Hugely, incontestably, irrevocably pregnant.

Of course.

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU ARE WITH CHILD,” Rihad said grimly as his brother’s mistress settled herself in the SUV, pulling her hand from his as she sat—and perhaps, he thought, with a certain alacrity that suggested that simple touch had affected her, too.

He opted not to consider that too closely.

“You are very observant.” Was that...sarcasm? Directed at him? Rihad blinked. But she continued, her voice now coolly imperious. “And now if you’ll close the door and drive?”

She was giving him orders. She expected him—him—to obey these orders. To obey her.

That was such an astonishing development that Rihad merely stepped back and shut the door while he processed the situation. And thought about how to proceed.

All Rihad could hope for was that the child this woman carried was not Omar’s—but he was not optimistic. His brother’s obsession with his regrettable mistress had spanned the better part of a decade. Omar had famously scooped her up when she’d been a mere seventeen. He’d installed her in his apartment within the week, not caring in the least that she was little more than an ignorant guttersnipe with a made-up name who wasn’t even of legal age at the time.

The paparazzi had all but turned gleeful cartwheels in the streets.

“Omar will tire of her,” their late father had said after scanning one such breathless and insulting article, back in the Bakrian palace.

The old sheikh had been a connoisseur of flagrantly inappropriate women. He’d stopped marrying them after the mercenary Ukrainian dancer—the mother of the deeply disobedient Amaya, who was chief among Rihad’s many problems these days while she evaded her responsibilities and the fiancé she’d decided she didn’t want on the eve of her engagement party—had taken off and proceeded to live off the telling of her “my life in the evil sheikh’s harem” story for decades. The old man had gone off matrimony after that, but not women. If anyone knew how men treated their mistresses, it would be his father.

“Perhaps a refresher course in your expectations of Omar might not go amiss,” Rihad had suggested drily. “His time in New York City appears to have affected his memory, particularly where his duties to this country are concerned.”

His father had only sighed, as Rihad had known he would. Because while Rihad was his father’s heir, he had never been his father’s favorite. And no wonder. Omar and the old sheikh were peas in a deeply selfish pod, stirring up scandals left and right as they did exactly as they pleased no matter the consequences, while Rihad was left to quietly clean it all up in their wake.

Because somebody had to be responsible, or the country would fall to its enemies. That somebody had been Rihad for as long as he could remember.

“No man is without his weaknesses, Rihad,” his father had said, frowning at him. “It is only regrettable that Omar is making his so public.”

Rihad had no idea if he had weaknesses or not, as he’d never been given any leave to indulge them. He’d never kept mistresses, inappropriate or otherwise. He’d known full well that as his father’s successor he’d been promised in a political marriage since birth. And he’d dutifully married the woman picked out for him when he’d finished his studies in England, in fulfillment of that promise.

Tasnim might not have been a flashy model type, with masses of shining copper-blond hair and a sinful mouth like the woman Omar had holed up with all these years. But she’d been as committed to their marriage as Rihad had been. They’d worked their way to something like affection in the three short years before she’d been diagnosed with cancer at a routine doctor’s appointment. When she’d died five years ago this past summer, Rihad had lost a friend.

Maybe that was what moved in him then, on the side of a New York City street as his brother’s worst and most public embarrassment sat waiting for him to drive her away from the comeuppance Rihad had planned to deliver upon her, in spades. Fury that Tasnim, who had kept all her promises, was gone. The same old mix of fury and bafflement that Omar had broken all the rules, as usual, and gotten this plaything of his big with child anyway—and then abandoned a Bakrian royal child to fate, its mother unmarried and unprotected.

That or the fact her hand in his, her skin sliding against his in even so simple and impersonal a touch, had made him burn. He could feel it now. Still.

Unacceptable.

If he’d been anyone else, he thought, he might have been shaken by that astonishing burst of heat. Altered, somehow, by that fire that roared through him, making him feel bright and needy, and suggesting all manner of possibilities he didn’t wish to face.

But Rihad was not anyone else. He did not acknowledge weakness. He rose above it.

He pulled out his mobile, made a call and snapped out his instructions as he climbed into the driver’s seat, his decision made in an instant. Because it was the most expedient way to handle the crisis, he assured himself, not because he could still feel her touch as if she’d branded him. He could see Sterling in the back via his mirror—such a fanciful, ridiculous name—and the frown she aimed at him. It had nothing to do with the things that coursed through him at the sight of her, none of which he’d expected. He was a man of duty, never of need.

“You can’t talk on your phone while you drive,” she told him. Scolded him, more like. “You know that, don’t you?”

As if he was extraordinarily dim. It occurred to Rihad then that no one he was not related to by blood, in all his years on this earth, had dared address him with anything but the utmost respect—if not fawning deference.

Ever.

For a moment he was stunned.

He should have been outraged. He couldn’t understand why instead there was a part of him that wanted only to laugh.

“Can I not?” he asked mildly, after a moment, his tone an uneasy balance between the two. “I appreciate the warning.”

“Aside from the fact it’s against the law, it’s not safe,” she replied in that same irritated way he’d never in his life had directed at him before, her voice tight. Annoyed, even. He saw her shift against the leather seat and put her hands over her swollen belly, in a way that suggested she was not quite the soulless, avaricious harlot he’d painted her in his head. He ignored that suggestion.

“I don’t think I’d care if you ran this car into the side of a building if it was only me, but it’s not.”

“Indeed it is not.” Rihad slid his phone into the interior pocket of his jacket and then started the vehicle. “Yet your husband would miss you, surely?”

He was needling her, of course, and he couldn’t have said why. What could he possibly gain from it? A glance in the rearview mirror showed him her profile, however, not that cool frown he found he very nearly enjoyed. She’d turned her head as if to stare back at the building as he pulled the car into traffic. As if leaving it—this place she’d lived with his brother, or off his brother if he was more precise—was difficult for her.

Rihad supposed it must have been. It would be much harder to find a patron now, no doubt. She was older, for one thing. Well-known—infamous, even—for her role as another man’s prize possession, across whole years. Soon to be a mother to another man’s child, which the sort of men who regularly trafficked in mistresses would be unlikely to find appealing.

Because you find her so unappealing even now, when she is huge with your brother’s child, a derisive voice inside chided him. Liar.

Rihad ignored that, too. He could not find himself attracted to his brother’s infamous leftovers. He would not allow it.

“The father of my child is dead,” Sterling said, her voice so frozen that if he hadn’t stolen that glance at her, he’d have believed she really was utterly devoid of emotion.

“And you loved him so much you wish to follow him into that great night?” He couldn’t quite keep the sardonic inflection from his own voice, and her head swung back toward him, her lovely brow creasing again. “That seems a rather desperate form of tribute, don’t you think? The province of the cowed and the cowardly, in my opinion. Living is harder. That’s the point of it.”

“Am I having an auditory hallucination?”

That was obviously a rhetorical question. Still, Rihad shrugged as he turned onto the narrow highway that clung to the east side of the city and led out of town, and replied, “I cannot answer that for you.”

“Or are you quizzing me—in a snide manner—about the death of someone I loved? You’re a driver.”

And her tone was withering, but there was something about it that spoke of repressed emotions, hidden fears. Or perhaps he was the one hearing things then.

“I don’t care what you think about my life or my choices or my feelings, in case that’s not clear. I want you to drive the damned car upstate, no more and no less. Is that all right with you? Or do you have more unsolicited opinions to share?”

Rihad smiled as he merged onto a different highway and headed toward the top of the island and the stately bridge that would lead to the airfield where his jet should be waiting, refueled and ready, upon his arrival. Or heads would roll.

“Where are you going?” he asked her with deceptive casualness. “Upstate New York is lovely in the summer, but it is not possible to outrun anything in your condition. Surely you must realize this.”

“My condition.” She repeated the words as if, until she sounded them out, she couldn’t believe she’d heard them correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

“You look as if you’re used to being kept well,” Rihad continued. Mildly. “That will be hard to replicate.”

She swiped those huge, concealing sunglasses off her face, and Rihad wished she hadn’t. She was nothing less than perfection, even in a quick glance in the rearview mirror of a moving vehicle, and he felt as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Her eyes were far bluer than the sky outside and she was more delicate, somehow, than she appeared in photographs. More vulnerable, he might have thought, had she not looked so outraged.

“Does it make you feel good to insult people you don’t know?” she demanded, also in a tone he’d never heard directed at him before. This woman seemed to be full of such tones. “Is that the kind of man you are?”

“What kind of man I am or am not is hardly something you will be capable of ascertaining from the backseat of this vehicle.”

“Yet you feel perfectly comfortable shredding my character from the front, of course. What a shock.”

Rihad didn’t like the tightness in his chest then. “Were you not kept well? Please accept my condolences. Perhaps you should have found a better patron before you permitted such a shoddy one to impregnate you.”

He didn’t know what he expected. Floods of tears? But Sterling sat straighter in her seat, managing to look both regal and dignified, which only made that constriction around his chest pull tighter.

“Let me guess,” she said after a hard pause, her tone so scathing she was clearly nowhere near tears of any kind. “This is some kind of game to you. You intrude upon people’s lives, insult them, and then what? Is causing pain its own reward—or are you hoping they’ll do something crazy to get away from you, like demand you leave them by the side of the road? Exactly what do you get out of being this nasty?”

Rihad’s teeth were on edge, his body tense. He left the bridge behind him and headed west, wanting absolutely nothing at that moment but to get to his plane and get the hell out of here, back to his own land. His throne. The familiarity of his country, his rule. Before the tension in him exploded into something he couldn’t control.

That such a thing had never happened before—that he had never been quite this tense in the whole of his life before he’d laid eyes on this woman—did not bear thinking about.

“I have no intention of leaving you by the side of the road,” he assured her, and there was possibly too much dark intent in the comment, because she scowled at him in response. “Not yet anyway.”

“You’re a true gentleman. Clearly.”

And Rihad laughed then, because it was funny. All of this was funny, surely, however little familiarity he had with such things. He was a king pretending to be a driver. She was the mistress who had ruined his dead brother’s life. And he felt more alive trading insults with her than he had in years.

In fact, he couldn’t recall when he’d ever felt quite like this, for any reason.

He’d obviously gone mad with guilt and grief.

“I want us both to be very clear about who you are,” Sterling said then, leaning forward in her seat, and her scent teased at him, honey and sugar with the faintest hint of a tropical bloom beneath. It made his hands clench into fists against the steering wheel. It made him hard and needy.

It made him feel like a stranger to himself. Like the hungry, selfish man he’d never been.

Rihad couldn’t bring himself to analyze it. He concentrated on the road instead.

“I am perfectly clear about who I am,” he told her.

Or perhaps he was telling himself—because he had been. When he’d exited his private jet mere hours before. When he’d arrived at Omar’s apartment building, dismissed the driver who waited there and sent his team inside to secure this woman so he could have the pleasure of evicting her himself. He’d known exactly who he was.

And nothing has changed since then, he told himself harshly.

Or would.

“You are a man who thinks it’s appropriate to mock and insult a woman, first of all,” Sterling said in that precise way of hers that he really shouldn’t find so fascinating. It was only that no one had ever dared use a tone like that in his presence before, he assured himself. He was intrigued intellectually, nothing more. “Congratulations. Your mother must be proud.”

He laughed again, with significantly less mirth than before. “My mother died when I was twelve years old.”

“A great blessing, I think we can agree, so that she might be spared the knowledge of who you’ve become in her absence,” Sterling said, so matter-of-factly it took Rihad a moment to realize how deeply she’d insulted him. And then she kept going, unaware that no one spoke to him like that without consequences. No one would dare. “You are also a man who finds it amusing to speculate about the lives of strangers. Openly and repulsively.”

“Are you not a kept woman?” he asked, making no attempt to soften his tone. “My mistake. What is it you do, then, to support yourself?”

“You are ill-mannered and rude, and that was evident at a glance, long before you opened your mouth.” She laughed then, an abrasive sound that made his hackles rise. “I’ve met more honorable pigs.”

“Be very careful,” Rihad warned her. Because he had limits—even if, he was well aware, anyone who’d ever met him might have thought he’d crossed them a long while back. “A man does not react well to the questioning of his honor.”

“Then a man should act as if he has some,” she snapped.

“Yes, of course,” Rihad snorted. “And how would I prove that I am an honorable man to one such as you, do you imagine? Will you be the judge? A woman who—”

“Is pregnant?” Her voice was icy then, so cold he almost overlooked the fact that she’d interrupted him. Something no one had done since his father had died, and no woman had ever done, as far as he could recall. “So scandalous, I know. It’s almost as if every single person walking this earth came about their presence here some other way.”

“I must have mistaken you for someone else,” Rihad murmured as he made the final turn that would lead them to the airfield, which was just as well, because he thought his temper might flip the damned SUV over if he didn’t put some distance between the two of them, and soon. “I thought you were the mistress of Omar al Bakri.”

“If I were you—” and her voice was very soft, very furious then “—I’d be very, very careful what you say next.”

“Why?” Rihad realized he was taking out his aggression on the gas pedal and slowed as he arrived at the gate to find his men already there, which was lucky for everyone involved. They waved him through and he was glad, he told himself, that this little farce was almost finished. He wasn’t one for subterfuge, no matter how necessary. It felt too much like lies. “He is dead, as you say. You remain. Is that child his?”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” She sounded bored then, though he could still hear the fury beneath it, giving it a certain huskiness that he felt in all the wrong places. “I must be a whore. That’s the point of these questions, isn’t it? Are you trying to determine whether or not I’m a terrible, no-good, very bad harlot or have you already rendered your judgment?”

“Are you?”

She laughed. “What if I am? What is it to you?”

But Rihad glanced at her in the mirror and saw the truth of things in the way her hands clasped on the shelf of her belly, her knuckles white, as if she was not as blasé as she was pretending.

It would be easier if she was. Easier, but it wouldn’t do much for that thing that still held him in its grip, that he refused to examine any closer.

“I’m only using the proper terminology to describe your role,” he said mildly as he pulled up beside his plane out on the tarmac. “I apologize if you find that insulting.”

“You decided I was a whore the moment you saw me,” she said dismissively. Or he assumed that was what that particular tone meant, having never heard it before. “But virgins and whores are indistinguishable, I hate to tell you.”

“It’s a bit late to claim virginity, I think.”

“Whores don’t have identifying marks to set them apart.” If she’d heard him, she was ignoring him—another new sensation for Rihad. He was beginning to feel each of them like blows. “Purity isn’t a scent or a tattoo. Neither is promiscuity, which is lucky, or most men like you who love to cast stones would reek of it.”

“I am aware of only one case of a virgin birth,” he pointed out as he put the SUV into Park. “Everyone else, I am fairly certain, has gone about it the old-fashioned way. Unless you are on your way to notify the world’s religious leaders of the second coming of Mary? That would explain your hurry.”

“How many people have you slept with?” she asked, sounding unperturbed.

He laughed as much to cover his astonishment at her temerity as anything else. “Are you petitioning to be the next?”

“If you’ve slept with anyone at all and you’re unmarried, you’re a hypocrite.”

“I am widowed.”

A typical female might have apologized for his loss, but this was Sterling McRae, and she was not, he was already far too aware in a variety of increasingly uncomfortable ways, the least bit typical.

“And you’ve never touched a single woman in your whole life save your late wife?”

He should not have brought Tasnim into this. He was furious with himself. And Sterling, of course, correctly interpreted his silence.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured. “It appears you are, in fact, a hypocrite. Perhaps you should judge others a bit less. Or perhaps you’re no more than one of those charming throwbacks who think chastity only matters when it’s a woman’s.”

“The world has turned on its ear, clearly,” Rihad said in a kind of wonder, as much to the tarmac as to her, and he told himself that what surged in him then was relief that this was over. This strange interlude as a man people addressed with such stunning disrespect. “I am being lectured to by a blonde American parasite who has lived off of weak and foolish men her entire adult life. Thank God we have arrived.”

He turned in his seat, so he saw the way she jolted then, as if she hadn’t noticed the SUV had come to a stop. She looked around in confusion, then those blue eyes of hers slammed back to his.

“What is this? Where are we?”

“This is an airport,” Rihad told her, in that same patronizing, lecturing way she’d ordered him not to use his mobile as they’d driven out of Manhattan. “And that is a plane. My plane.”

She went so white he thought she might topple over where she sat. Her hands moved over the round swell of her belly, as if she was trying to protect the child within from him, and he hated that there was some part of him that admired her for so futile a gesture.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

He suspected she knew. But he took immense satisfaction in angling closer, so he could see every faint tremor on those sinful lips. Every shiver that moved across her skin. Every dawning moment of horrified recognition in her deep blue gaze.

“I am Rihad al Bakri,” he told her, and felt a harsh surge of victory as her gaze went dark. “If that is truly my brother’s child you carry, it is my heir. And I’m afraid that means it—and you—are now my problem to solve.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE SUV SEEMED to close in around her, her heart was a rapid throb in her throat and it was only another well-timed kick from the baby that broke through the panic. Sterling rubbed a hand over her belly and tried to calm herself.

He won’t hurt you. He can’t. If this is the heir to his kingdom, you’ve never been safer in all your life.

The man she should have realized wasn’t the slightest bit subservient to anyone threw open the driver’s door and climbed out of the SUV, then slammed it shut behind him. She could hear the sound of that voice of his outside on the tarmac, the spate of Arabic words like some kind of rough incantation, some terrible spell that he was casting over the whole of the private airfield. His men. Her.

And she couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there, frozen in place, obeying him by default. She stared at the back of the seat he’d vacated and tried to convince herself that despite the panic stampeding through her veins, she really was safe.

She had to be safe, because this baby had to be safe.

But the truth was, there was more than a small part of her that was still holding out hope that this was all a terrible nightmare from which she’d bolt awake at any minute. That Omar would be there, alive and well, with that wry smile of his at the ready and exactly the right words to tease away any lingering darkness. He’d tell her none of this could possibly have happened. That it never would.

And this would be a convoluted, nonsensical story she’d tell him over a long, lazy breakfast out on their wraparound terrace with views of New York City stretching in all directions as if it really was the center of the world, until they both laughed so hard they made themselves nearly sick.

God, what she would do to wake up and find out this was all a bad dream, that Omar had never gotten in that car in France, that it had never spun out of control on its way back into Paris—

But the door beside her opened abruptly then and Rihad stood there before her.

Because, of course, it was him. Rihad. The sheikh. The king. The more-feared-than-respected ruler of his fiercely contested little country on the Persian Gulf. The older brother who had consistently made Omar feel as if he was a failure, despite how much Omar had looked up to him. As if he was less than Rihad somehow. As if the deepest truths of who he’d been had to be hidden away, lied about, concealed where no one could see them—especially not the brother who should have loved him unconditionally.

Omar had loved him, despite everything. Sterling had not been similarly handicapped.

“There has been no mention of this pregnancy in any of the papers,” Rihad said in his dark, authoritative way. “No hint.”

“Guess why?” she suggested, hoping all the pain she’d like to inflict on him was evident in her voice. “Guess who we didn’t want to know?”

“You were both fools.”

Sterling glared at Rihad as the light wrapped around him and made him look something like celestial. How had she managed to convince herself this man was merely a driver? He fairly oozed power from every pore. He was the physical embodiment of ruthlessness no matter how the summer sunlight loved him and licked over the planes and valleys of his fascinating face. He exuded ruthless masculinity and total authority in equal measure, and she’d thrown herself directly into his hands.

He stared down at her, that mouth of his in a sardonic curl, his dark gold gaze bright and hot and infinitely disturbing, until Sterling thought she might not be able to breathe normally again. Ever.

“I believe this is the part where a good driver helps a fine, upstanding lady such as yourself from the vehicle,” he said in that smooth way of his, like silk and yet with all that steely harshness beneath it. “Without any commentary involving terms she might or might not like.”

“I think you mean insults, not terms.”

“I think it’s time to get out of the car.”

Then he held out his hand and there was no pretending it was anything but a royal command.

“I’m not getting on that plane,” Sterling told him.

Very carefully and precisely, as if perfect diction might save her here. Save her from him. As if anything could.

“It was not a request.”

She could see then how much he’d been acting the part of the supposed servant before, because he wasn’t bothering with that any longer. He was a stern column of inimitable power, his will like a living thing coiled tight around both of them and the whole damned airfield besides, and she couldn’t understand why he’d played that game with her in the first place. This was not a man who pretended anything, ever, she understood at a glance. Because he didn’t need to pretend. This was a man who took what he wanted as he wanted it, the end.

But she was not going to let him take her. Not without a fight.

“Perhaps you’re misunderstanding me, Rihad,” she said, deliberately using his first name to underscore how little she respected him.

She felt the ripple of that impertinence move through him and then beyond him, through the line of his men, where they stood in a loose ring around him and the SUV, protection and defense. The disapproval washed back over her from all sides, but the gleam in Rihad’s dark gold gaze merely edged over into something more shrewd as he considered her.

As if she was an animal in a trap, she thought, and he was deciding how best to put her out of her misery. That was not a restful notion.

Sterling pushed on. “I would rather die than go anywhere with you.”

He leaned toward her in the open wedge between the door and the body of the SUV and every single nerve inside of her went wild. Sharp and hot and alert—something so much like pain it very nearly toppled her before she realized it wasn’t really pain at all. Merely an exquisite reaction—pure sensation, storming all over her—that she didn’t recognize and didn’t know what to do with.

It was almost impossible to keep herself from reacting, from throwing herself backward across the wide backseat and scrambling for safety—not that there was any available to her, she understood in a shattering instant. Not really. This man might not hurt her, physically, not as long as she was pregnant with the heir to his kingdom—but then, there were worse things.

She’d seen so many of them firsthand.

“Please believe me,” Rihad said softly then, so softly, though, that it only made her understand on a deep, visceral level how truly lethal he was. “I would arrange that if I could.”

“How charming,” she breathed, trying desperately not to sound as panicked as she felt. “I love threats.”

He smiled. “I would have done so years ago if I’d believed for one second that it would ever come to this. But let me assure you, any interest I appear to have in you is about the child you carry, not you. Never you.”

“This is Omar’s child,” she snapped back at him, struggling to keep her jangling, shimmering reaction to him to herself. “And since he is gone, that makes the baby my responsibility, not yours.”

“That is where you are wrong,” Rihad told her, his tone as merciless as that harsh look on his forbidding face. “If that child is indeed my brother’s—”

“Of course it is!” Sterling threw at him.

And only realized once she had said it that it was hardly strategic to tell him so. If he thought the child was someone else’s, if she could have convinced him of that, he might have let her go. Something in that dangerous dark gold gleam in his gaze told her he’d reached the same conclusion.

“Then, as I have explained, it is potentially next in line to rule my country.” He shrugged. “Your wishes would be of less than no importance to me at any time, but in a situation such as this? Which affects the whole of my country and its future?”

He didn’t have to finish the thought. That hard, sardonic twist to his lush mouth did it for him.

She tried again. She had no choice. “I refuse to go anywhere with you.”

“Get out of the car, Sterling,” he ordered her, steel and warning, and there was nothing but sheer power in his gaze. It rolled through her like fire. Or perhaps that was her name in his mouth while he looked at her like that. “Or I will take you out of it myself. And I rather doubt you will enjoy that.”

“Wow.” Sterling let out a small, brittle laugh. “This has been quite a morning for exploring the dimensions of your character, hasn’t it?”

“Hear this now,” he replied, his voice a hoarse kind of softness that made her shiver, his gaze dark and so powerful as it held fast to hers. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for my country. Nothing at all.”

“How heroic.” But she was far more shaken by that than she should have been, when it wasn’t even any kind of direct threat. “I think we both know the truth is less noble. You’re nothing but a reactionary Neanderthal who is never challenged, never questioned, never forced to face the consequences of his actions.”

“You appear to have your al Bakri brothers confused,” Rihad replied with a certain soft menace that made her think she’d landed a blow. “I am not the renowned playboy who lived a life of leisure and debauchery. That was Omar. I am the one who cleaned up his messes. Again and again and again.”

She wanted to scream. Throw things. But she only curled her hands into fists and glared. “I take it you mean me. I am the mess.”

“You are not a mess, Sterling.” He sounded kind, but she could see that look in his gaze, and she knew better. “You are a toxic spill. You corrupt and you destroy, and you have been doing it for over a decade. What you did to my brother was bad enough. It appalls me to think you will have your claws sunk deep in the next generation of al Bakris.” His perfect lips firmed. “But I am a man of duty, not desire. Which means as much as I would prefer to pretend you and whatever child you carry do not exist, I cannot.”

She couldn’t breathe for a moment. It was almost too much. It threw her back in time to that terrible house in Iowa and the foster parents who had believed that she was nothing but their personal punching bag. Worthless and dirtied, somehow, by her own tragic history. And their contempt. For a moment she almost tipped back over into all that darkness—but then she caught his gaze again, so bright and hard at once, and it bolstered her. It lifted her.

Because she’d survived far worse than this man and like hell would she slide back into that headspace after a few mean words.

“Oh, no,” she murmured icily. “You might get this toxic spill all over your sheikhdom. What then?”

“You’ll find I am not so easily led astray,” he said, his voice as low as hers had been, but layered with a kind of dark heat she could feel within her. Making her too warm in all kinds of places she didn’t understand. “And I’ve had a lifetime of preparation. You’re merely one more disaster it falls to me to handle.”

“And then, oddly, you wonder why I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” She squared her shoulders. “I’m not afraid of you, Rihad.”

And the strange thing was, she wasn’t. He made her anxious, yes—panicky about the future. But that wasn’t the same thing as afraid. She didn’t know what to make of that. It didn’t make any sense.

“Go ahead,” Rihad suggested, those disturbingly bright eyes of his tearing into her, seeing far too much. “Fight me if you like. Scream loud enough to draw down the sun. Kick and scratch and hurl invective as it pleases you.” He shrugged almost lazily, and Sterling’s throat felt tight, while far to the south, parts of her she’d always largely ignored bloomed with a mad heat. “But this will still end the same way, no matter what you do. What is Omar’s belongs to Bakri. And what is Bakri’s is mine. And I will do what I must to protect what is mine, Sterling, even if it means I must kidnap you to accomplish it.”

He straightened then, though his gaze never shifted from hers, and Sterling couldn’t tell if that lump in her throat was panic or tears or something a good deal more like fate.

Don’t be absurd, she snapped at herself, but that sensation of foreboding snaked down her back all the same.

“But by all means,” he said, daring her in that soft way that danced along her limbs and made her skin prickle with warning, and something much warmer, “try me.”

Sterling opted to decline that offer with as much icy silence as she could muster. She also ignored his offered hand, but she pushed herself out of the SUV and onto the tarmac anyway, because she’d always been a realist at heart. Oh, her years with Omar had tempted her to surrender to optimism, but deep down she’d always known better. She’d always known what lurked down there beneath the happiest-seeming moments. She’d always assumed, on some level, that it would all end badly.

So she stood on her own two feet in front of this terrible man and she made the command decision to keep playing her role. Sterling McRae, rich man’s whore. Toxic spill, no less. Coveted by many, captured by none save Omar. She’d gotten very good at it. She reached up and unclipped her strawberry blond hair, shaking her head to send it tumbling down around her shoulders. She shifted position so that her breasts were thrust out and saw the very male response in his eyes.

All men were the same after all, even when a woman was as far along as she was. Even kings.

“How long will you be kidnapping me for?” she asked, so very politely.

“Ah, Sterling,” he replied in the same tone, though his look was far darker, and she had to fight back a betraying sort of flush when he shifted, the lean power of his body too obvious, too close. “Haven’t you guessed yet how this must end?”

She eyed him with sheer dislike. “You dropping dead where you stand, if there is a God.”

He shook his head at her. “You can always take to prayer, if you feel it will help. It won’t change what must happen, but perhaps you’ll approach it all with some measure of serenity.”

“Is that what you call this? ‘Serenity’?”

His fine, dark brows lifted. “I call it duty. I doubt you’d recognize it if you tripped over it.”

“Says the man who already married a stranger on command once and thought that made him virtuous,” she snapped, the past he’d thrown in Omar’s face so often coming back to her then in a burst. “I’m more afraid of tripping over your ego than your duty.”

“You don’t know anything about my first marriage,” Rihad told her with a lethal, vicious edge in his voice. “Not one single thing.”

“I know that expecting Omar to make the same sacrifice was hideous,” she said crisply, as if she wasn’t the least bit shaken. Though still...not afraid of him, somehow. “And you can tell yourself any stories you want about me and my past and whatever else, but I had nothing to do with it. I was the only thing in his life he liked.”

“Sterling.”

His face was closed down then, granite and bone. Utterly forbidding.

“If this is where you bore me with self-serving lies about your idyllic arranged first marriage, I think I’ll pass.” She eyed him. “I’m not as big a fan of stories as you seem to be.”

“It is my second marriage that should concern you, not my first.”

She stared back at him. Then she understood, in a terrible rush that felt like a tide coming in, crashing over her and rolling her into the undertow, then sweeping her far out to sea. All in that instant.

“Do I know the lucky bride?” Sterling asked, her voice as sharp as the razor-edged smile she aimed at him. “I’d like to convey my condolences.”

“An heir to my kingdom cannot be born out of wedlock,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if that note in his voice was fury or satisfaction. Perhaps it was both. It thudded in her all the same. “You must realize this.”

She jerked up her chin, belligerently. “I’m not marrying you. I’m not getting on that plane, I’m not letting you near my baby, and I’m definitely not marrying you. Your heirs are your own damned problem.”

And the sheikh only smiled.

“I didn’t ask you to marry me,” he said softly. “I told you what was going to happen. Resign yourself to it or do not, it won’t make any difference. It will happen all the same.”

“You can’t tell me to do anything,” Sterling fired back at him, and she couldn’t control the way she trembled then, as if he’d already clapped her in chains and carted her away to his far-off dungeon. “And you certainly can’t make me marry you!”

“Pay attention, Sterling.” Rihad’s gaze was hotter than the summer sun, and far more destructive. And his will was an iron thing, as if he didn’t require chains. She could feel it wrapped around her already, pressing against her skin like metal. “I am the King of Bakri. I don’t require your consent. I can do whatever the hell I want, whenever I want. And I will.”

CHAPTER FOUR

STERLING MARRIED SHEIKH RIHAD AL BAKRI, King of Bakri, at his royal palace on a lovely terrace overlooking the gleaming Bakrian Sea a mere two weeks later, surrounded by his assorted loyal subjects and entirely against her will.

Not that anyone appeared to care if the bride was willing. Least of all the groom.

“I don’t want to marry this man,” she told the assembled throng when Rihad walked her through the crowd as the ceremony began. “He is forcing me to marry him!”

She didn’t expect that anyone would spring into action on her behalf, exactly, but she’d expected...something. Some kind of reaction. Some acknowledgment, however small, of what was happening to her. Instead, the collection of Bakrian aristocrats only gazed back at her. Indifferently.

“They don’t speak English,” Rihad murmured lazily from beside her, resplendent in his traditional robes in a way Sterling couldn’t let herself look at too closely. It made her feel faint. Weak. Or maybe that was the way he held her arm as they walked, too strong and somehow too appealing there beside her, despite everything. She didn’t want to marry him. But she didn’t seem to mind him touching her, and that contradiction was making her feel even crazier. “And even if they did, who do you think they would support? Their beloved king or the woman who led my brother down the path of wickedness?”

“Don’t they have a problem with the fact you’re marrying a woman who’s carrying another man’s child?”

But no one seemed particularly moved by that, either, when she knew they could hear her. See her. Least of all Rihad.

“They think I am a great hero, to protect the family honor in this way.” He sounded so at his ease. It made the knot in her belly pulse in response. She told herself that was dismay. “To do my duty, a concept I know escapes you, despite the fact it requires I lower myself to marry a known harlot of no pedigree, less education and inadequate means.”

He’d reduced her entire life into three cruel phrases. And not as if he was trying to slap at her as he did it, but as if he was merely stating the unsavory, unfortunate facts. Sterling’s throat was impossibly dry. She was sure she was shaking. But he still held her arm in his easy grip, giving her the impression she could wrench herself away from him if she wanted. She knew better, somehow, than to test that.

“There’s nothing preventing me from throwing myself over the side of that railing over there to escape you and save you from this great act of charity you’re performing,” she told him then, sounding far away even to her own ears. “What makes you think I won’t?”

They stopped walking and stood before the small, wizened man she understood would marry them here, with the sea spread out before them like the promise of eternity—but it felt as much like a prison as the plane that had brought her here days ago had, or the rooms they’d stashed her in since, no matter how well-appointed. Inside of her, something ached. And she felt more than saw that infuriating, indolent shrug of his from where he stood next to her.

“Jump,” Rihad invited her, low and dark. It shouldn’t have moved in her the way it did, like fire and need, when he was only goading her. “It’s a fifty-foot drop to the rocks below and, in truth, the answer to a thousand prayers for deliverance from you and all you represent.” A small smile played over his mouth when she glared back at him. “Did you imagine I would beg you to reconsider? I am only so good, Sterling.”

He was so certain she wouldn’t do it. She could see it as if it was written across his darkly handsome face in block letters—and he was right. She’d survived too much, come too far, to take herself out now, even if there hadn’t been a baby to consider.

It wasn’t the first time she’d had to grit her teeth to make it through an unpleasant situation, she reminded herself staunchly. With a quick glance at the man taking up too much space beside her, implacable and fierce, Sterling rather doubted it would be the last.

Rihad hadn’t hit her. He didn’t seem violent at all, in fact, merely unimpressed with her. That was a long way from the worst place she’d ever been. She didn’t want this—but it wouldn’t kill her, either. So she trained her eyes on the officiant before them and surrendered.

And when there were no further disruptions from her, the wedding went ahead. Sterling felt it all from a great distance, as if she was watching a movie of that enormously pregnant woman in the billowing dress stand next to that darkly beautiful man with the smug expression on his face that indicated he’d had no doubt at all that she would do exactly as he pleased. Exactly what he wanted, as, apparently, everyone did eventually. It didn’t seem to matter that she didn’t participate in her own wedding ceremony, didn’t speak a single word either way. No one asked her to do anything but stand there. The man marrying them merely waved his hands in her direction, Rihad answered him in impenetrable Arabic and that was that.

The crowd cheered when it was done, as if this was a happy occasion. Or, she supposed, as if it was a real wedding.

“I hate you,” she told him, and bared her teeth at him. She didn’t pretend it was any kind of smile. They stood there in all that distractingly cheerful sunshine, as if there really was some call for celebration in the midst of this disaster. When instead she was married to a man she loathed, trapped here in his world, his palace, his very hands. She told herself that was fury she felt, that low, shivering thing inside her, or the fact she couldn’t seem to take in a full breath. Because she refused to let it be anything else. “I will always hate you.”

“Always is a very long time, Sterling.” Rihad sounded darkly amused. “I find most people lack the attention span for sustained emotion of any kind. Hate, love.” He shrugged. “Passion is always brightest when temporary.”

“You are an expert, of course.”

“My expertise fades next to yours, of course, and all your fabled conquests,” he replied, his tone ripe with bland insult.

“You have yet to marry a woman who actually wants to marry you,” Sterling couldn’t keep herself from railing at him, almost as if his insults got to her. Which she refused to allow. “I doubt you have the slightest idea what passion is.”

Rihad’s smile edged into something lethal, and while he didn’t hurt her in any way when he took her arm, she couldn’t pull out of his firm grasp, either. His smile deepened when she tried.

“You forget that I did not exactly choose you, either,” he said, darkly and too hot and directly into her ear, making her shudder in reaction—and she was all too aware he could feel her do it. That made it worse, like some kind of betrayal. “I executed my duty to this country the first time I was married. Can you truly imagine I wanted to do it again?”

“Then you should have left me in New York.”

“No.” His voice was firm. Matter-of-fact. She saw the harsh intent in his golden gaze, stamped deep into the lines of his dark, gorgeous face. “That child cannot be born out of wedlock and also be recognized as a part of the royal bloodline. It isn’t done.”

“Omar said it would be fine,” Sterling threw back at him as Rihad’s aides corralled the well-heeled courtiers and herded them from their seats, directing them farther down the terrace. “He said it was the only child he planned to present to you and if you wanted it, or him, you could change the law. After all, you’re the king.”

“Of course,” Rihad growled.

A muscle worked in his lean jaw and she felt his fingers press the slightest bit harder into the flesh of her upper arm where he still held her fast, though, still, it didn’t hurt. Quite the opposite—she was astonished at the fact her usual revulsion at the faintest physical contact hadn’t kicked in yet. It was her hatred of him, she told herself resolutely. It was shorting out her usual reactions.

“How typical of my brother,” Rihad was saying. “Rather than adhere to a tradition dating back centuries, why not demand that the tradition itself be altered to suit him instead? I don’t know why I’m at all surprised.”

Sterling opened her mouth to argue, to defend Omar, but the dark look Rihad threw at her stopped her. She shut her mouth with an audible snap. And then he began to move, sweeping her along with him whether she wanted to go or not.

He led her back through the glorious royal palace to the suite of rooms she’d been installed in when she’d arrived, and Sterling was glad he did it in that fulminating, edgy silence of his. She felt utterly off balance. Shaken down deep. She couldn’t tell if it was because the wedding had actually happened precisely as he’d warned her it would. Or because he kept touching her in a thousand little impersonal ways that were nonetheless like licks of fire all over her body and none of it because of fear.

Or because when he leaned down and spoke so close to her ear she’d felt it everywhere. Everywhere. Like the most intimate of caresses.

She still felt it. And she hadn’t the slightest notion what to do about it.

It wasn’t until they reached her door that Sterling realized she had no idea what was going to happen next. That she’d resolutely refused to believe this was happening at all, this mockery of a wedding, and had thus not thought about...the rest of it.

Did he expect...? Would he...? Her mind shied away from it, even as her body burst into a humiliating flash of delirious heat that she was terrified he could see, it felt so bright and scarlet and obvious. She clutched at her belly, as much to remind herself that she was hugely pregnant as to assuage her sudden spike in anxiety.

But Rihad merely deposited her inside the lovely, spacious suite that was the prettiest prison cell she’d ever seen, then turned as if to leave her there without another word—standing in the middle of the suite’s grand foyer in an indisputably gorgeous dress her attendants had insisted she wear today, that had made Sterling feel pretty despite herself. Despite him.

“That’s it?” she blurted out.

She wished she hadn’t said anything when he turned back to her. Slowly. He was particularly beautiful then, in his ceremonial robes with that remote, inscrutable expression on his lean face. Beautiful and terrible, and she had no idea what to make of either.

But she didn’t think it was fear that made her pulse pick up.

“What were you expecting?” he asked, mildly enough, though there was a dark gleam in those gold eyes of his that made her breath catch. “A formal wedding reception, perhaps, so you could insult my guests and my people with your surly Western attitude? Berate our culture and our traditions as you are so fond of doing? Shame this family—and me—even more than you already have?”

“You’re not going to make me feel guilty about a situation all your own doing,” she told him, ignoring the hint of shame that flared inside of her anyway, as if he had a point.

He does not have a point. He hurt Omar, kidnapped you—but she could still feel it inside of her. As if her own body took his side over her own.

“Or perhaps you thought we should address the subject of marital rights. Did you imagine I would insist?” Rihad moved closer and Sterling held her breath, but he only stopped there a breath away from her, his gaze burnished gold on hers, and still too much like a caress. “I hate to disappoint you. But I have far better things to do than force myself on my brother’s—”

Sterling couldn’t hear him call her a whore on the day she’d married him. He’d come close enough out on the terrace. She couldn’t hear him say it explicitly, and she didn’t want to consider why that was. What that could mean.

“Don’t let me keep you, then,” she said quickly before he could say it. “I’ll be right here. Hating you. Married to you. Trapped with you. Doesn’t that sound pleasant?”

“That sounds like normal life led by married couples the world over,” he retorted, and then he laughed. It seemed to roll through her and a smart woman, Sterling knew, would have backed away from him then. Found safer ground no matter if it looked like retreat. But she, of course, stood tall. “And yet there is nothing normal

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