She hadn’t been able to breathe. But that hadn’t stopped her mouth from moving.
“Are you going to command me to have sex with you, too?” she’d asked in that same absurdly overpolite tone, as if she was inquiring after high tea. “Consummation on demand?”
And she’d had no words to describe what his smile had done to her then, or how that lazy, predatory gleam in his dark gold eyes had made her feel. God, the way it had made her feel. How it had sneaked through her, tangling all around and making her hollow and needy, scared and yearning at once.
Did she want him to command her? Reach up, he’d ordered her that morning. Hold on. Was that why she’d asked?
“If you insist,” he’d said after a moment, in a dark-edged way that had made everything inside of her feel the way he’d sounded. Like honey, sweet and slow. She remembered shattering all around him, again and again. She shivered just remembering it. “Is that how you like it, Sterling? Do you prefer to give orders on the street and take them in bed?”
It was as if he’d read her mind, and she’d told herself stoutly that she hated that. And that he hadn’t, of course.
She’d sniffed as if she found this discussion crass beyond measure. “Not from you.”
Rihad had only smiled again, harder and edgier than before, and it had banged through Sterling like a symphony of gongs. “We’ll see. We leave in two days’ time. I suggest you resign yourself to the torture.”
And now she was far, far away from anything even resembling civilization. The helicopter ride had taken at least two hours and they’d left the city limits within the first twenty minutes. There was nothing for miles in any direction. There was nothing here except forced intimacy and, she thought while her stomach cartwheeled around inside of her, nothing at all to keep her from exploring the one man alive whose touch she didn’t seem to mind.
“I’ve dismissed all but the most essential staff.” His voice made her jump and she opened her eyes to find him propped up against the nearest palm tree, his dark gold gaze simmering as it touched hers. “There is no one else here but the two of us and, farther out, my security guards to keep watch over the perimeter.”
“You mean, to keep me from running away from you.”
He smiled again, and that other night at the palace hadn’t been a fluke. It was devastating. It was almost as powerful as his kiss. It made her feel that same mix of weakness and wonder, and she didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.
“I mean, my most faithful and devoted guards are there to protect you whether you like it or not.” He’d let out a quiet sort of laugh. “But yes. Part of that protection would include returning you to my tender embrace should you wander too far from the oasis. The desert sands can be so treacherous.”
“How thoughtful.” But her mouth was pulling at the corners, as if her smile wanted to break free despite her own wishes. “Will you have men to guard the pools as well, in case I am tempted to drown myself rather than suffer your company?”
His laugh was deeper then. Richer. It was like drowning, indeed, in a masculine version of the best chocolate she could imagine, decadent and addictive.
She was in so much trouble.
“It depends which pool you mean to drown yourself in,” he said, as if he was giving the issue due consideration. “This nearest one will take some work. It’s barely knee-deep. You’re more likely to drown in your wineglass.”
“That can be arranged.”
He moved closer. He should have looked like any other man, the epitome of casual in nothing but a white oxford shirt and sand-colored trousers, but this was Rihad. He was the king. It didn’t seem to matter what he wore; nothing could conceal that low-edged hum of power he carried with him wherever he went.
“Shall we discuss our agenda, now that we’re here?” he asked when he was much too close. When she couldn’t seem to do anything but lose herself somewhere between that look on his face and the pounding of her heart.
“Our honeymoon has an agenda?” She fought to keep her voice light and airy—and to keep from leaping away from him because she knew, somehow, that he would know full well she wanted to do the opposite. “Royal sheikhs in their luxurious oasis retreats really aren’t like us.”
“Consider this nothing more than a statement of intent, Sterling.”
She wanted to throw something back at him, to make this interchange all about amusing banter and not about the rest of the things that circled all around them, pressing in on them, as flattening and searingly hot as the desert sun high over their heads.
“And what exactly do you intend?” she asked, but her throat was so dry, and he was so close. He stood there, much too near to her, so that she imagined she could feel the heat of him. So that her palms itched to touch him again—and that unnerved her more than anything else.
“I think you know what I want you to tell me,” he said quietly.
She didn’t want to meet his gaze then, but she did. And it shuddered all the way through her in a way that made her feel raw and vulnerable. But not afraid. Something else that she wasn’t certain she understood.
“No,” she said.
And she didn’t know what that meant, even as she said it. No, she didn’t know what he meant? No, she wasn’t going to tell him? No, in general?
But he smiled as if she’d whispered him a line or two of poetry and reached over to skate the backs of his fingers down the side of her face. Undoing her, she thought. He was tearing her down, pulling her apart, right where they stood.
“And I think you know the rest of what I want,” he said in a low voice.
“I know this will be hard for you to understand,” she said, trying to sound strong. Tough. Worldly and amused, in that way she’d perfected years ago. “But not everyone gets what they want all the time. Some people never get what they want at all. It’s a fact of life when you’re not literally the king of all you survey.”
Rihad smiled, and the heat where his fingers caressed her cheek blossomed deep within her.
“But I am.”
And still he smiled when all she could do was stare up at him, mute and undone and all those other things that tangled up inside of her and made her this shockingly susceptible to him.
Then he dropped his hand and stepped back, and Sterling felt that like a loss. She pulled in a breath, amazed she was still standing on her own two feet. Truly astonished she hadn’t simply keeled over from all that intensity.
“I have some things I must attend to,” he told her. “The sad truth is that the leader of a country is never truly on holiday, despite what he might wish. But you will join me for dinner. In the meantime, Ushala will lead you to your tent and see that you are settled in.”
“What if I don’t want to join you for dinner?” she asked.
She thought they both knew that she wasn’t really talking about dinner.
And in any case, Rihad only smiled.
* * *
Sterling disappeared into one of the sleeping tents that functioned as a luxurious guest room out here in his family’s private oasis. Rihad took a few calls as the afternoon wore on, impatient with this life of his that could not allow him anything resembling a real holiday. Not even a honeymoon.
He opted not to think too much about the fact that when he’d gone on a honeymoon previously, he’d welcomed the opportunity to work from the oasis, and neither he nor Tasnim had expected to see much of each other outside of their carefully polite meals.
But then, Sterling was different. Perhaps he’d known that from the first moment he’d seen her, so long ago now on that Manhattan sidewalk.
She did not emerge again until the sun dipped low and began to paint the dunes in the shifting colors of sunset. Reds and oranges, pinks and golds, and Sterling walking toward him in the middle of it all like another work
of art.
Rihad sat in one of the majlis, a seating area marked off with a soft rug beneath him, bright pillows all around in the Bedouin style and a low table stretched out beneath a graceful canopy. It opened on the sides to let the evening in as he sipped a cool drink and watched the sunset outdo itself before him, as if for his pleasure alone.
After a glance to make sure she was coming to him—of her own free will, which pleased him, though he imagined he’d have sought her out if she hadn’t and he wasn’t certain what that told him about himself—Rihad didn’t look up as Sterling approached him, didn’t take his eyes off the horizon.
Almost as if he worried that if he did, his best intentions would simply crumble into sand and blow away.
He smiled at the glorious spectacle laid out before him instead, the colors changing and blooming as he watched. He never tired of the desert. How could he—how could anyone? The landscape was constantly shifting, yet always the same. The great bowl of the sky stretched high above with these magical, daily displays of fierce natural splendor. It reminded him who he was. It reminded him that Bakri was as much a part of him as he was of it. Just as the sky and the land were fused into this stunning unity twice a day as the sun rose and fell, so, too, was his family a part of this country. Twined together, made one.
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 n
othing 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.”
Protecting the Desert Heir Page 11