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.”
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,
