Royal Families Vs. Historicals

That was what a marriage was, at its best. What it was supposed to be.

What he was determined this one would be, no matter what he had to do to get there.

Rihad did not choose to analyze all the reasons why his need for this burned in him. He only knew that it did.

She settled herself down across from him at the low table with that innate grace of hers that was beginning to feel something like addictive.

“Does your tent suit?” he asked her, as if they were meeting at some or other royal exercise, where the highest protocols were observed.

“It’s lovely,” she replied in the same tone.

Rihad bit back a smile and waved to the servants. They appeared at once, filling the low table between them with various dishes, from perfectly grilled skewers of lamb to a pile of handmade flatbread, a generous pot of homemade hummus, assorted other dipping sauces and side dishes. Rihad took the opportunity to study this woman, this wife of his. She was nothing like Tasnim. He couldn’t remember a single moment with his first wife that had ever felt like this—this seething thing, nearly at a boil, that thrummed along beneath his skin and made him feel predatory and possessive even when she wasn’t in front of him.

And much, much more so when she was.

She wore another one of her dresses and a flowing pashmina she wrapped tightly around her like a blanket. More to continue to conceal herself from him as much as possible, he thought with no little amusement, than to ward off the night air. Her lustrous strawberry blond hair was pulled back into what was, for her, a merely serviceable ponytail at her nape, but then, elegance was stamped into her bones. She couldn’t help but appear chic, even when she was attempting to look dowdy. She’d been haunting in those teenaged photographs that had taken the modeling world by surprise years back, all high cheekbones, world-weary blue eyes and that hooker’s mouth of hers. More than a decade later, she was objectively, inarguably stunning, no matter what lengths she went to hide it.

And Rihad was merely a man.

He lounged there against his pillows and watched her eat her dinner with evident relish, this woman who could knock men flat like dominoes. Take down whole kingdoms. Wreck worlds.

Or maybe that was just what she’d done to him, when he’d been expecting something so much different.

“You’re staring at me as if I’m an animal in a zoo,” she pointed out crisply when she’d demolished a few lamb chops and several heaping spoonfuls of the grain and greens salads. “It’s going to give me indigestion.”

“I’m waiting for you to finish eating,” he said lazily. “You’re building up your energy, are you not? For the sex. Consummation on command, I believe you called it. A warning, Sterling. I’m very demanding.”

“The sex,” she repeated slowly. There wasn’t a flicker of reaction on her perfect face, or even in those sky-blue eyes of hers when she fixed them on him, but he knew better. He could feel the air itself sizzle between them. “Am I to understand that you’ll be performing a solo act? Right here, out in the open? How fascinating. You’ll understand if I don’t watch, I hope. I wouldn’t want my stomach to turn at a delicate moment and throw you off your stroke.”

He only watched her as the servants cleared all the plates between them and then piled the table high again with an array of tempting desserts—but Sterling was looking at him with that fire in her gaze and he couldn’t have imagined any better treat than her.

“You’re sitting here in silence, Sterling,” he pointed out, playing up the languid desert king because he could see the way it got to her. He could see the way she shifted against her pillows, as if she couldn’t quite get comfortable. “I assumed that you’d decided we should jump right into the sex rather than have a frank discussion.” He smiled. “I’m perfectly all right with that, if it’s what you wish.”

* * *

She most certainly did not wish, Sterling told herself then. But she had the growing notion that she was lying to herself.

And worse, that he knew it.

“Do you ever have interactions with anyone in which you aren’t threatening them?” she asked, mildly enough. “Whether directly or indirectly?”

“Most of my interactions are political in nature,” he replied, a vision of male ease as he lounged there and watched her too closely, his dark eyes glittering in the light thrown by too many hanging lanterns to count. “So, no. I don’t have any conversations that do not involve jockeying for power, or position, or status, or economic gain.”

“You are aware that some people have conversations that involve none of those things?”

A faint crook to that perfect mouth. “I’ve heard rumors.”

“I will have to decline your lovely offer,” she said, and smiled at him in the polite-yet-distant way she’d perfected in New York. “I’ve never been to an oasis before and I think I’d like to take a swim in the middle of a desert. Your marvelous suggestion that we delve into my past and/or me, personally, while tempting, will have to wait.”

She thought he would throw something back at her, but he only continued to study her with that small smile in the corner of his mouth. Sterling took that as acquiescence—or whatever it was when powerful men gave in, without seeming to give at all.

Sterling rose and walked past him toward the deepest of the three pools that shimmered there only a few steps from where they’d had their dinner. All the pools were hung with their own lanterns, each casting a dancing, mellow light over the dark waters. It made the water seem something more than simply inviting. Mysterious. Seductive. She stepped onto the mat that had been laid out there beneath the lightly rustling palm trees and kicked off her slides, then dropped her pashmina.

“You realize you are not fooling me, I hope,” Rihad said almost conversationally, still lounging there beneath the canopy behind her. “I know exactly what you are doing.”

“Swimming?” she asked over her shoulder. “You are correct, Your Royal Majesty. Your powers of observation are truly magnificent.”

Then she pulled the floor-length, flowing dress she wore up and over her head, leaving herself in nothing at all but a very tiny, very provocative string bikini in a metallic, shiny gold.

She could feel his sudden stillness from behind her, predatory and vast, like an epic, nuclear implosion of the same hunger she knew beat in her, but she didn’t turn back toward him. She didn’t need to. This was the point. The tease. The distraction.

Getting him back a little bit. Making him pay.

And she’d spent enough time as a model to have rendered her nothing but practical, more or less, about her body. She might have given birth only a few months back. She might have a different shape now, and new marks like claws on a belly she doubted would ever be concave again. But she was well aware of the power of her curves. And she knew that standing there in a flirty gold bikini would make it as hard for Rihad to sleep at night as it had been for her since that morning in the palace gardens.

Sterling was very good at this after all. She’d made a living out of using her body like this, once upon a time.

But she didn’t want to think about the past. She wanted to keep it behind her, as long as she could. Tonight, she only wanted to make Rihad ache the way that she ached.

She didn’t look back at him, she looked at the inky black surface of the pool, lit with dancing gold from the lanterns, and it was like looking straight into Rihad’s mesmerizing gaze.

She dived right in.

CHAPTER TEN

THE WATER WAS COOL, CLEAR.

It was like a silken caress over her skin, long and luxurious at once, and if she could have, Sterling would have stayed beneath the surface of that pool forever. She let herself sink, then float beneath the surface, and pretended she could remain there. But eventually her lungs began to ache a little bit and she kicked back up into the night air.

To find Rihad much closer, squatting there at the edge of the water, his dark gaze fierce on hers. It made her heart leap inside her chest, so hard and so high she was surprised it didn’t make the water ripple in reaction.

“Do you think you are safe in the water?” he asked her, and there were stark lines stamped on his face as he gazed at her. As if need was carving into him, the way she could feel it in her, too.

Whittling away at her until she didn’t know what was left, or who she’d be when it was done.

“I think that safety is relative where you’re concerned,” she said now, perhaps a shade too flippantly. She was more enthusiastic about swimming than she was skilled at it, so she moved closer to the side of the pool, reaching out a hand to hold on to the edge. “Kings are not exactly known for putting the needs of their wives before their own.”

“You know a great many kings, do you?”

She slicked her hair back, as aware of the way his dark gold eyes tracked the movement as if he’d used his own hands. And his attention was like a live wire, ferocious and total.

“I’m aware of the entire history of the planet, if that’s what you mean.”

Rihad studied her in that focused, too-incisive way of his that made her want to do things to escape it. Before he could see every last corner of her dirty little soul.

“I have a modest hope that I am less bloodthirsty than many of the kings who predate me,” he was saying drily. “And I know I’m better to my wives than most of those, given I’ve yet to execute one.”

“Was that on the table here?”

“We’re talking about absolute power. It’s all on the table. Something to remember the next time you’re feeling feisty.” But his mouth was crooked into that small smile of his she was beginning to find addictive, despite that steady gaze of his that made her tremble deep within. “But I can’t imagine you really want to talk about the powers of the Bakrian monarchy, or the march of kings throughout time, do you?”

“I don’t want to talk to you at all. I wanted to swim.”

He indicated the pool behind her with a jerk of his fine chin. “Then by all means, Sterling. Swim.”

But she didn’t move.

They could have stayed frozen there for a decade. She’d never have known the difference. Only that she couldn’t look away from him.

This man who had far more power than the others she’d known, who’d taken theirs out on her because they’d considered her so beneath them. Rihad was autocratic. He certainly used his power. But never like that. Never so viciously.

Eventually, he reached down and traced a lazy, sensual pattern from one shoulder, across the very top of her chest, all the way to the other. Then back.

And she still didn’t understand why his was the only touch that made her feel like this, wrapped up in a blaze of need and outside her own skin. She didn’t understand why she wanted him, wanted more, wanted, when she’d never wanted any other man in her life.

When she’d never wanted any touch in her life.

She didn’t understand any of this, only that when he touched her she wanted to sob out, and not because it hurt her. And when he didn’t touch her, it was worse.

He’d made her into a woman she didn’t understand at all. Maybe it was that she felt like a woman after all. Not a punching bag. Not a clothes hanger. Not an ornament. Not a mother. A woman, for the first time.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

Just as she had at their wedding.

But this time, Rihad smiled, and it was as if that, too, burst into her and pried her wide-open however little she wanted to let him in.

“I am so sorry, little one,” he murmured, his dark gold eyes on hers, and that look of his slid straight through her, too soft and too slick. It made her shake and this time, not only inside. “It’s not so easy to make me the monster you wanted me to be, is it?”

“Maybe not,” she whispered up at him, filled with that same wild urge to do anything to keep him from seeing the truth about her. Before it was too late. “But this is very easy, actually.”

And Sterling reached up, grabbed hold of the arm he had propped on his knee as she braced her feet on the side of the pool, and she yanked him off balance.

Then she hauled the King of Bakri straight into the pool.

He sank like a stone, in a cascade of bubbles while a great wave slapped at her, and she was breathing so fast it hurt while the adrenaline—at her temerity, at the fact she’d actually done it—spiked inside of her. She’d made the split-second decision to get the hell out of that pool right now when he surfaced beside her, and Sterling realized that she was frozen in place. Paralyzed, more like.

Why on earth had she done that?

But Rihad laughed.

He tipped his beautiful face back and he laughed, hard and long, and she was tempted to think it was all a great big joke to him, to have her throw him fully dressed into a pool like that—but then he dropped his head back down, fixed that edgy gold gaze of his on her, and there wasn’t a shred of laughter on his lethally beautiful face then.

“That, Sterling,” he told her, his voice a sensual growl she felt in her sex as surely as if he was already touching her, “was a mistake.”

And then he reached over, hooked a hard hand around her neck and yanked her to him.

* * *

He took her mouth as if he owned it, and Rihad thrilled to it—because he did. She was his. The sweep of her tongue against his. The way she yielded to him so quickly, so completely, meeting him and spurring him on.

This was his woman. His wife. His.

She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on, and he thought he might drown them both as he feasted on her, taking and taking, so hard and so good he thought he might die from it. He thought he might not care too much if he did.

There was no time left then. Not anymore. He had to be inside her, now, and nothing else mattered. Not her secrets. Not all the things she still hadn’t told him and had gone to such lengths to avoid telling him. Nothing but this mad fire, this perfect kiss. The heft of her gorgeous breasts in their little scraps of gold, the slick glory of her taste.

His Sterling. His queen.

Somehow, he moved them to the shallower end of the pool, where he could stand. When he did, he trapped her between the pool’s bank and his body. He felt the wind against the wet shirt on his back, but he didn’t care. He only cared about Sterling. About this. Her hands digging into the flesh at his shoulders. Her legs moving to wrap around his hips again.

And for the first time in his entire adult life, Rihad stopped thinking.

He fumbled between them, wrestling with his soaked trousers to pull himself free. Then, his mouth still fused to hers, he reached down between them, out of finesse and out of his mind as he pushed her little bikini bottom to one side and stroked beneath it, straight into her soft, scalding heat.

“Rihad…” she moaned, straight into his mouth, and it was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.

He didn’t think. He moved his hand, he held her close and then he simply thrust straight into her, hard and sure, making her truly his at last.

At last.

She made an odd sound, and he pulled back to look down at her lovely face, the haze clearing slightly.

Sterling’s eyes were too big and hinted at some kind of emotion he didn’t recognize. Rihad held himself still, and she breathed hard. Shakily. Once, then again.

“Are you all right, little one?” he asked quietly, still so deep inside of her he thought it might kill him. She was so hot, so wet. Snug around him, as if she’d been made to receive him exactly like this. “Did I hurt you? Are you not yet healed from giving birth?”

“No…” she said, as if she wasn’t sure. Her blue gaze was dark, slick, in the light from the gently dancing lanterns overhead. He frowned as she continued. “I’m fine. I’m healed, I… It’s just… It’s weird, that’s all.”

“Weird,” he repeated, as if the word didn’t make sense, and slid back a few inches, experimentally, just to see what would happen—

And then, impossibly, Sterling McRae blushed.

Bright red. As if, Rihad thought in total fascination, she was entirely innocent. As if this was her first time.

But that was crazy.

Still, once the thought was there, Rihad couldn’t seem to keep himself from indulging it. He’d wanted to lose himself in her, pound them both into delirious oblivion with all the pent-up need that had haunted his every thought of her for months now—but instead, he slowed down. He took his time.

He treated her like the virgin she couldn’t possibly be.

He kissed her everywhere he could see that flushed red skin, until the rosy glow she wore was for another reason entirely. He set a slow, lazy pace, easy and wicked at once, making sure that each time he slid away she clung to him a little more, then pulled him back to her a little harder. He used his mouth and his hands, his teeth and his voice, until she was writhing against him, mindless and moaning, just the way he’d wanted her.

Then he reached down, pressed hard against the center of her need and sent her flying.

And it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. So damned beautiful it hurt—and he wasn’t done.

When she came back to herself, panting and dazed, he went a little bit faster, a little bit harder. He held her where he wanted her and took her until that made her cry out, then splinter all over again, and that time, he went with her.

But he was in no doubt, even then.

Sterling was a virgin.

Or had been one anyway, before she’d entered this pool.

And now she was his.

* * *

Rihad was unusually quiet when he climbed from the pool and then pulled her out behind him, but Sterling was still floating off in the clouds somewhere, too lost in the sensations still storming through her body to care.

He lifted her up and swung her into his arms, then carried her over the sands to his tent, not seeming to notice that he was still in his soaking wet clothes. He shouldered his way inside, where Sterling blinked in the softly lit interior until her eyes adjusted. When they did, she had to bite back a gasp.

Because it was like walking into a dream. Where her tent was like a desert rendition of a high-end hotel room, Rihad’s was something else entirely. It was a pageant of scarlet and gold, from the wide bed on its magnificent, kingly platform to the seating areas, some with pillows on the floor arrayed around what looked like a fireplace, some with wide, inviting couches, some set carefully around what looked like a personal library. There were jeweled chests and thick rugs, tapestries and ornate screens to mark off separate areas, and it felt like all the half-formed fantasies Sterling had ever had about distant harems and the harshly beguiling men who ruled over them.

And he was far better than any fantasy she’d ever had, she knew now. Even the ones she’d had about him, little, though, she’d wanted to admit that to herself.

Rihad still didn’t speak.

He stalked across the room and disappeared behind one of the screens, into what Sterling assumed was his own bathroom suite. She stood where she was, dripping onto the priceless carpet like a drowned thing, and when he returned, his face was set into an expression she couldn’t begin to work out. And his gaze was so fierce she couldn’t look at him directly—though that was not exactly a hardship, she thought, as her eyes dropped from his. He’d stripped off his wet clothes and was starkly, proudly naked, striding toward her as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do so.

She supposed it was. Even she understood that nudity was commonly a part of the whole sex thing.

The whole sex thing that you’ve now done, she reminded herself, still more than a little dazed by it. The act itself and the fact that she’d slipped across a kind of internal boundary line while she’d been shattering apart in Rihad’s arms.

It was over. Virginity dispensed with quickly and efficiently, and the best part was, Rihad was none the wiser. No awkward conversations filled with explanations and confessions, no accusations of being a great big freak of nature—all the things she’d always feared would happen if she ever got around to this hadn’t happened with Rihad.

And she was still so turned on, still so hungry for him, that she shook.

He picked her up again, as if she was as light as a doll—or as if she was utterly his, a thought that was so electrifying it burst inside of her like pain—and she should have protested that, but she didn’t. This time, he set her down on the high, wide platform step next to the bed and set about peeling her bikini all the way from her body, his hands like hot brands where the wet material had chilled her skin.

He produced a towel from somewhere and dried her off, carefully and thoroughly, and before he was done she was restless and needy all over again, moving from foot to foot when he crouched down before her—

And he knew it, she realized, when he glanced up at her, his eyes glittering darkly and that lush mouth of his in a crooked curve.

Her breath left her in a rush.

Rihad wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her, then tipped her back so she sprawled out on the high bed before him. Then he folded up her knees and held her there with those too-strong hands of his, all of her aching lower body open to him. He looked at her for a smoldering moment, then leaned down and licked his way deep into her heat.

Sterling made a sound that could only be described as a scream.

And he took his damned time, all over again. He tasted every contour, every fold. He took her femininity as relentlessly and totally as he’d taken her mouth, and she was burning up for him so quickly, so deliriously, that she had the wild thought that she might not survive it.

He laughed against the core of her and it went through her like lightning, and then once more, he threw her off the side of the planet into that sweet, hot oblivion.

This time, when she came back to him he’d crawled up over her on the bed. He lined up that hard, proud length with her most sensitive flesh and, when she gasped out his name, pushed in deep.

It was different this time. Darker, hotter.

Harder.

She felt the wave snap back, then swell, and she tossed her head against the bed, as afraid of what was coming as she was desperate for it.

“Beg me,” he ordered her harshly against her ear as he held himself over her, and it was like its own caress, rough and wild.

And she didn’t think. She didn’t argue.

She obeyed. She begged.

And it made it that much better.

Hotter. Sweeter.

Rihad pistoned in and out of her, making her a creature she’d never imagined she could be. She tore at him. She scratched him. She pleaded with him and he laughed, and that made her plead all the more. She writhed and she held on, she met each hard thrust as if she’d been made for this. For him. As if she’d waited all this time, as if it hadn’t been an accident, because she’d been meant for him all along.

She wanted it to last forever. She thought she might die if it did.

And this time, when she fell apart, he shouted out her name like a hoarse prayer and came with her.

She didn’t know how long she slept, or if it was even sleep—maybe she’d simply passed out from the enormity of what had happened? What she’d finally done? But when she woke again, she was tucked up next to him and he was playing with her hair, sliding the slippery strands through those clever fingers of his, that enigmatic expression still on his darkly gorgeous face.

That face of his she felt was stamped inside her, somehow, like a brand.

Sterling felt made new. As if he’d taken her apart and put her back together, and she would never be quite the same. She felt deeply and irrevocably changed. Altered, as if she might not recognize herself in the mirror the next time she looked.