Royal Families Vs. Historicals

“Exactly what sort of legitimacy did you imagine I meant to convey on your child when I married you?”

“I guess the sort where we’re not completely erasing Omar from his daughter’s life.” She reached over and fiddled with the hem of the blanket that drooped over the side of the buggy, though Leyla still slept soundly and no adjustments were needed.

“It is a legal maneuver, nothing more,” Rihad said, his tone harsher than it had been in months, but that couldn’t be why her chest felt tight. It shouldn’t matter to her either way. “But you’re making my point for me. Omar has not been erased in any meaningful way. Everyone knows who fathered Leyla. Her place might be assured on paper and in the courts, but in the eyes of the Bakrian people and, more important, our enemies, her legitimacy must come from us.”

“Us?”

“Us. Me, their king, and you, my brand-new and deeply controversial queen.”

She shied away from that term, scowling at him instead. “I don’t like that word.”

“Which one?” His voice was so dry then. So dark and compelling. “Us? Controversial?”

“Queen.” Her scowl deepened. “It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t fit the situation at all.”

She meant it didn’t fit her, trash dressed up in an unearned crown—and she had the strangest notion he knew exactly what she meant. His dark gold gaze almost hurt against hers.

“And yet it is your title, accorded to you with all due deference two months ago when you married the King of Bakri. That would be me, in case you’re not following this conversation, willfully or otherwise.”

“But I don’t want to be your—”

“Enough,” Rihad said then, cutting her off.

He sat back in his chair, never shifting those mesmerizing eyes of his from hers, looking dark and terrible and entirely too fascinating, from that brusque nose of his to his strong jaw and all that rich brown skin in between. She wanted to lean closer to him, explore him—and hated herself.

“I don’t care what you call yourself, Sterling. You are my queen either way. I suggest you accept it.” When she didn’t respond, that light in his gaze sharpened and made it a little too hard to breathe. “I think you understand perfectly well that we cannot allow any speculation that this marriage is fake to fester. It serves no one but our enemies.”

She felt oddly fragile. “Why do you keep talking about enemies?”

“The kingdom has been rocked by one scandal after the next and we are weak.” His gaze sharpened. “My father’s tumultuous love affairs. My wife’s death without giving me any heirs. Omar’s notorious mistress that he flaunted in the tabloids and his refusal to come back home and do his duty. My sister’s betrothal to Kavian of Daar Talaas, which she responded to by running away—”

“I like her already.”

“Amaya was a successful runaway, Sterling. She’s managed to avoid both my security and Kavian’s for months. Kavian will no doubt run out of patience with her, and when he does? Our countries will not unite and if they do not, Bakri will fall. There are too many other powers in the area that want our location and our shipping prowess, and we cannot possibly keep them all at bay alone.”

“You’re talking about your enemies.” She lifted her chin as she held that harsh gaze of his. “The only enemy I’ve ever been aware of was you.”

“I am talking about our enemies.” He nodded toward the tablet. “Or do you imagine that whatever ‘pal’ sold that story is your friend? Will they take you in when I am imprisoned and you—if you are lucky—are a royal Bakrian in exile?”

Sterling opened her mouth to argue when something else occurred to her. That wild kiss swelled up in her again, a tactile memory. Searing through her as if it had only just happened. Flooding her with sensory images, with yearning, all over again.

“Is this really because you’re worried about how our marriage is perceived?” she asked him. “Because of enemies? Or is it because you want to get into my pants?”

He didn’t move a muscle. She knew that because she was watching him so closely that she could see it when he breathed. He didn’t even tense. And yet he seemed to explode outward, becoming twice his size and a thousand times more dangerous, like some kind of mystical being let loose from its cage at last.

And every single cell in Sterling’s body shivered to red alert.

She was flushed with the heat of it. Her skin seemed to ache for his touch. Her breasts felt too heavy and the taut peaks pulled tight. Inside of her, there was a low, hot humming that coiled between her legs and pulsed. Hard and wet. Ready.

It was the most carnal experience of her entire life.

It was the only carnal experience she’d ever had, save that last kiss.

And they weren’t even touching.

* * *

That he did not turn over the table between them and taste her again right now was, Rihad thought, the only evidence remaining that he had once been a civilized man.

He thought too much about his enemies as it was. He did not want to think about Sterling’s pants. He did not want to think about that body of hers that had redefined grace while heavily pregnant and now… She was difficult to look away from.

He found he rarely did.

Rihad did not want to think about the way he fought himself to keep from touching her, because he was determined to make this marriage work in some fashion or another, the way it had with his first wife. He and Tasnim had been friends, after a fashion. They’d eased into the physical aspects of their marriage and had worked on their friendship first. He’d decided at some point during the first days of gorgeous little Leyla’s life that he owed her mother no less, no matter how they’d come to find themselves married.

But that did not explain why he took himself in hand each morning in his shower to slake his growing need. And it certainly did not explain the tempting array of images he tortured himself with as he did so.

His voice was quiet when he finally answered her, and it cost him. “Can’t I be preoccupied with both the perception of our marriage and ‘getting in your pants,’ as you so charmingly put it?”

“Unlikely. Men are more often focused on the one thing above all else.”

“That shows how little you know me. I am not merely a man. I am a king.”

“I know you enough, Your Majesty.”

Her blue eyes rivaled the summer sun above them, and yet even when she looked straight at him he was certain he could see the walls she kept up, high and bolstered. He loathed them more and more each day. He wanted them knocked down. And he was entirely too aware that the urge was not exactly friendly.

“And besides,” she continued, her voice light, “you don’t really want into these pants anyway.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh and waved her free hand in the general direction of her midsection. “Everything’s gone a little crazy after giving birth.”

He snorted. “Self-deprecation does not suit you, Sterling.”

She frowned at him, and he saw her ball her hands into fists, then drop them in her lap. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you were gifted with the sort of genetics that make most women green with envy, as I suspect you are aware.” He shifted in his chair and let his gaze move all over her, which was not exactly an improvement for that wild hunger battering at him from within. Because she had been so beautiful when they’d met that she’d made Manhattan disappear so he could better admire her. And she grew more beautiful by the day. And the fact that she was no longer big with her pregnancy was the least part of that. “You gained a minimal amount of weight while carrying Leyla, lost most of it while giving birth to her and are probably healthier now than when you got pregnant in the first place. If the fashionably gaunt pictures I’ve seen of you back then are any guide.”

He saw emotions he couldn’t name flit across her face, one after the next, and he hated that he couldn’t read them. Or her. That she defied him even now, without a single word, by simple virtue of remaining opaque.

Rihad couldn’t have said when he’d begun to find that intolerable.

“I’ll thank you to keep your comments on my body to yourself.”

He smiled, and then wider when he saw the spray of goose bumps rise along her bare arms. “Unfortunately for you, Sterling, you are mine. And I take a keen interest in the welfare of the things that belong to me, whether that means trade prospects in my cities or my wife’s form.”

She was flushed, he noted, and he was sure that if he mentioned it she would claim it was disgust. Distress. But he didn’t believe that.

“How delightfully medieval.”

And he enjoyed this, Rihad realized with a thud. He liked her sharp tone, her icy wit, even if it was at his expense. Because Sterling was the only person he’d ever met who dared speak to him this way.

Perhaps there was something wrong with him after all, that he should enjoy it—her—so much.

“Your body is fine, Sterling,” he told her, as much to see her draw herself up in outrage as anything else. He made a show of drinking from his coffee cup, then setting it down, for the sheer pleasure of watching temper crack through those blue eyes of hers like lightning. “You’re not a model any longer. You certainly don’t need to keep yourself so drawn and skeletal.” He smiled again, and he could feel the wolf in it. “If you want to dissuade me from making advances on you, you’ll have to come up with something better than that.”

Her lips quivered and her gaze flashed dark, with something he didn’t understand. He was fascinated all the same.

“How about this.” Her voice was fierce, almost aggressive, but that only deepened his fascination. “Don’t make advances on me at all. I don’t want you.”

He watched her for a moment. He waited, and sure enough, she flushed again, brighter and delightfully redder than before.

“Now, that’s just an outright lie,” he murmured.

And she looked away, because he was right. And she hated it. And he loved that he could read that as easily as the text on his tablet.

“Is this where you force me again?” she asked tightly, her eyes on the pool nearest the table while her body shouted out all the ways she was a liar, again and again, as if it was in collusion with Rihad. “Because that was so much fun when you called it a wedding.”

He laughed then and saw her jolt with surprise. She turned back to him, her gaze unreadable again, but he’d come to a decision. The friendship angle had been fine these past months. It had been appropriate. The woman had just had another man’s child—and lost that man to a tragic accident besides. But it was time to move on.

Rihad stood, aware of the way her eyes clung to him as he moved, very much as if she was finding his body as much a temptation as he found hers.

“We’ll have a honeymoon, I think,” he said, and watched her shift restlessly in her chair, the truth in the pink bloom on her cheeks. “You and me for two weeks in the desert, with a thousand opportunities for intimacy.”

“What?” She sounded panicked, and he was not a civilized creature, he realized. Not at all, because he liked that. “Intimacy? Why would you want that?”

“Perception.” He shrugged. “Of course, it will be widely assumed that you’re merely pandering to my base, animal instincts with that famously lush body of yours. Men are beasts, are they not? And I am no better than my brother when it comes to your seductive powers.”

“Yes, you are!” Sterling looked alarmed. “You live to resist me! Or you should.”

“I am unfamiliar with weakness,” he told her, and he didn’t care if that truth hit her as arrogance. It didn’t make it any less true. “But in this case, succumbing to the practiced charms of a known seductress is a weakness I am prepared to allow the world to dissect at their leisure.” He eyed her aghast expression. “Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful story for your tabloid-loving friends to sell far and wide?”

Her voice was scratchy when she answered, and her eyes were much too bright with a heat he wanted to bathe himself in. “It sounds heinous. And completely unbelievable anyway.”

“Why don’t you ask me the question?” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, because he doubted she’d appreciate it if he put them on her. Yet.

“Why are you so awful?” Sterling asked at once, her voice sharp but with that storm in her blue eyes. “But I already know the answer, of course. Because you can be.”

“That’s not the question you want to ask.”

Sterling stared back at him. He heard the summer breeze high above them, dancing through the plants and the trees, and the running water all around them, like songs. He saw her pulse hammer against the delicate skin of her neck and wanted nothing more than to press his mouth to it, as if he could taste her excitement. He saw her hands open and then bunch into fists again, as if she couldn’t control them.

She sat up straighter. Squared her shoulders. Tilted up her chin.

“So we’ll simply go out to the desert for a little while. Spend the time out there so people think…whatever they want to think. Call it a honeymoon so the whole world leaps to the same conclusion. That we’re together in more ways than one. A unit.”

“Yes.”

She swallowed, hard. “You won’t… I mean, we won’t…”

“I have no intention of forcing you to consummate this marriage,” he said bluntly, and he told himself it wasn’t fair to think she should already know that he was not that kind of man. It didn’t help when she sagged in her chair in exaggerated relief. “Have I given you cause to imagine otherwise?”

“You kidnapped me,” she pointed out, though what he noticed was how little heat there was in it. “You married me against my will. You’ll forgive me if I’m not entirely certain where you draw that line.”

He took his time moving around the table. Her eyes widened, but stayed fast to his, and she made a squeaking sort of noise that reminded him of Leyla when he pulled her chair out from the table and then around to face him, so he could brace himself on its arms and put his face directly into hers.

And God help him, but it was sweet.

“Bringing you to Bakri and marrying you before you bore a royal Bakrian child outside of wedlock was my duty,” he told her, dark and serious, though he was far more fascinated by the high color on her cheeks than was wise. “Containing the scandal that you represent is my responsibility. But what happens between us now?”

“Nothing is happening! There’s no us for anything to be between!”

He ignored her. “That has nothing to do with duty.” Rihad leaned in closer, so close he could have easily tasted that seductive mouth of hers, yet he held himself back. “That has everything to do with need.”

“I have no needs,” she said, but then she shivered, and Rihad smiled.

“I won’t force you, Sterling,” he told her with quiet intent. “I won’t need to.”

She stared back at him. No snappy comeback. No sharp wit. Wide blue eyes and that pulse of hers a wild staccato in her neck. And he wanted her more than he could recall wanting anything, for all that she was a wild card, a loose woman, a problem to be solved. He accepted all of that.

“But first,” he said, “it’s time to talk about Omar.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

STERLING GAPED AT HIM, her head spinning madly at the sudden shift in conversation and her stomach in a new, hard knot.

“You look at me as if you expect me to transform into a monster where I stand,” Rihad pointed out with a certain gruffness, almost as if that wounded him. She told herself she was imagining it. “All fangs and claws and evil intent.”

“I’m not sure you haven’t already done so.”

That mouth of his crooked into something not quite a smile. He reached over and tucked a stray tendril of her copper-blond hair behind one ear, and neither one of them moved for a long, shattering instant.

Then he straightened to his full height, but she could still see that steely glint in his dark gold eyes, the potency of his gaze undiminished.

“I am not going to go on a honeymoon, whether real or for show, with a woman whose head is filled with another man, Sterling. It’s time you told me about my brother and your relationship with him.”

He didn’t object when she pushed back the chair and surged to her feet, hurriedly stepping away from him. He only watched her as she went, and that shattering thing between them seemed to expand into a taut, terrible grip around her heart. But she made herself stand straighter.

“I don’t think you really want to have that conversation,” she told him as evenly as she could. “You’re unlikely to hear anything you like.”

Sterling wasn’t sure she wanted to have it, either. She felt too guilty, too ashamed. No matter what she might have told their friends or herself, this wasn’t what Omar would have wanted. He’d left Bakri for a reason. This—all of this, everything that had happened since the accident—was a stark betrayal of the best friend she’d ever had. The only family she’d ever known.

And that fire inside of her, that terrible flame when she looked at Rihad that she didn’t know what to do with, was worse.

“This is not the first time you have insinuated that I harmed my brother in some way,” Rihad said darkly. “Why? What is your evidence for this?”

She shook her head, as if she could shake him away that easily, and all his questions, too. “Don’t act the innocent, Rihad. It isn’t a good fit.”

“You mistake innocence for intent, I think. It’s time to stop talking in circles, Sterling. If you wish to accuse me of something, do it to my face.”

He smiled again then, lethally, and she felt it everywhere.

And she’d forgotten this, hadn’t she? She’d been lulled into a false sense of security because there’d been nothing in her head but Leyla and he’d been so encouraging, so supportive, since the day she’d been born. They’d eaten their meals together these past months and talked about a thousand things, like any other civilized strangers who happened to be married to each other. Books, art. The cities they’d seen, the places they’d visited, from Cannes to the Seychelles to Patagonia.

She’d learned that he had been a solemn child and an even more serious young man, studious and focused in all things. She’d discovered that he had played a great deal of soccer and the occasional game of rugby all the way through university, but only for sport, as he’d always known his future. His place.

“That must have been nice,” she’d said once. Perhaps too wistfully. “To have no doubt what direction you were headed in, no matter what.”

He’d eyed her across their dinner and the candles that had lined the table and she’d shivered, though she hadn’t been cold.

“Who can say if it was nice or not?” he’d replied after a moment, as if he’d never thought about it before that instant. “It was all I knew.”

She’d started to think of this man as something like pleasant. She’d started to imagine that this forced-marriage thing might not be quite so terrible after all. But she’d been kidding herself. This was Rihad al Bakri. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever encountered.

How had she allowed herself to forget that?

“Fine,” she said staunchly now, telling herself this had always been inevitable. That they had always been heading straight here. “Let’s talk about Omar.”

Sterling crossed her arms, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to dress each time she knew she would see him, including the airy sundress she wore now that felt a bit unequal to the conversation. She told herself fashion and beauty were armor, the way they had been when she’d been a model and the point was to look at the clothes, not the woman in them. And they were—but that wasn’t the only reason she did it these days.

The depressing truth was that back then she’d liked to hide in the glare of any spotlight that might have been focused on her. But here in this far-off palace that sometimes felt like a dream over these past months, she liked it when he saw her. When he got that gleam in his dark gold eyes that told her he appreciated what he saw. Even now.

She had so many reasons to hate herself that Sterling couldn’t understand why she hadn’t started overflowing where she stood. Like a backed-up sewer. That was precisely how she felt, clogged and wrong.

“Wonderful.” His gaze was so dark. So intense. “Let’s begin with why Omar persisted in his relationship with you across all these years. He defied his family and his country, abandoned his duties and broke our father’s heart into a thousand pieces. That was unaccountable enough. Yet he never married you, never claimed you in the eyes of the world. Never stood up for you in any way when he knew perfectly well his affair with you was scandalous. Not even when you fell pregnant.”

“You’re relentless.” But she said that as if it was only to be expected, without any particular heat. “Omar was the best man I ever knew. The kindest and the bravest. He stood up for me in ways you can’t imagine.”

“My imagination is remarkably vivid.” His voice was cool. “Why don’t you try me?”

“Maybe Omar and I didn’t want to get married, Rihad.” She sighed when he only gazed at her in arrogant disbelief. “Maybe not everyone is as traditional as you are. In some places, it’s the twenty-first century.”

“I have no doubt that you and Omar lived a delightfully modern and unconventional life in every possible way, cavorting about New York City in all that marvelous limelight for so many years.” He eyed her in a way she didn’t much like then. “But your pregnancy should have snapped him back to the reality that, like it or not, he was a Bakrian royal who owed legitimacy to his own child. Why didn’t it?”

“Perhaps he assumed you would swoop in like the Angel of Death and sort it all out to suit yourself,” she said coolly. Then threw a smile, sharp and icy, back at him. “And look at that. You did.”

“Do you think these little games you seem determined to keep playing will distract me from getting your answer, Sterling? They won’t, I promise you. Why didn’t he marry you?”

His whole bearing had gotten colder and more regal as he stood there, his gaze a demanding thing that beat at her, and she believed him. She believed that he would keep asking that same question, again and again, until she finally answered it. That he would stand here an eternity if that was what it took. That he was like the great desert that surrounded his country on three sides, monolithic and impassable, and deeply treacherous besides.

“He wanted to marry me,” Sterling said after a moment. Then she raised her gaze to meet his again and forced herself not to show him any of the emotion that swirled around inside of her. “I refused.”

Rihad laughed. Not at all nicely. It set her teeth on edge, as she imagined it had been meant to do, and she had to order herself to unclench her jaw before she broke something.

“Of course you did.” His tone then was so dark, so sardonic, it felt like another one of his disturbingly sensual touches inside of her. “He begged you, I imagine, and you nobly rebuffed him, in the vein of all gold diggers and materialistic mistresses across the ages.”

He didn’t quite roll his eyes. His derisive tone meant he didn’t have to. But Sterling felt sharpened all the same then. Honed into some kind of blade by that dismissive tone of his.

“I know it’s hard for you to believe, Rihad. I know it flies directly in the face of all the fantasies you have about social-climbing sluts like me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Omar would have married me in a heartbeat. I was the one with reservations.”

“The prospect of becoming a Bakrian princess was too onerous for you? It seemed too much of a thankless chore?” There was that lash in his voice then that should have made her crumble, but she only tilted up her chin and glared back at him. “You were already living off him. Why not make it legal and continue to do so forever?”