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.”
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