Royal Families Vs. Historicals

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.