it everywhere.
And she’d forgotten this, hadn’t she? She’d been lulled into a false sense of security because there’d been nothing in her head but Leyla and he’d been so encouraging, so supportive, since the day she’d been born. They’d eaten their meals together these past months and talked about a thousand things, like any other civilized strangers who happened to be married to each other. Books, art. The cities they’d seen, the places they’d visited, from Cannes to the Seychelles to Patagonia.
She’d learned that he had been a solemn child and an even more serious young man, studious and focused in all things. She’d discovered that he had played a great deal of soccer and the occasional game of rugby all the way through university, but only for sport, as he’d always known his future. His place.
“That must have been nice,” she’d said once. Perhaps too wistfully. “To have no doubt what direction you were headed in, no matter what.”
He’d eyed her across their dinner and the candles that had lined the table and she’d shivered, though she hadn’t been cold.
“Who can say if it was nice or not?” he’d replied after a moment, as if he’d never thought about it before that instant. “It was all I knew.”
She’d started to think of this man as something like pleasant. She’d started to imagine that this forced-marriage thing might not be quite so terrible after all. But she’d been kidding herself. This was Rihad al Bakri. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever encountered.
How had she allowed herself to forget that?
“Fine,” she said staunchly now, telling herself this had always been inevitable. That they had always been heading straight here. “Let’s talk about Omar.”
Sterling crossed her arms, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to dress each time she knew she would see him, including the airy sundress she wore now that felt a bit unequal to the conversation. She told herself fashion and beauty were armor, the way they had been when she’d been a model and the point was to look at the clothes, not the woman in them. And they were—but that wasn’t the only reason she did it these days.
The depressing truth was that back then she’d liked to hide in the glare of any spotlight that might have been focused on her. But here in this far-off palace that sometimes felt like a dream over these past months, she liked it when he saw her. When he got that gleam in his dark gold eyes that told her he appreciated what he saw. Even now.
She had so many reasons to hate herself that Sterling couldn’t understand why she hadn’t started overflowing where she stood. Like a backed-up sewer. That was precisely how she felt, clogged and wrong.
“Wonderful.” His gaze was so dark. So intense. “Let’s begin with why Omar persisted in his relationship with you across all these years. He defied his family and his country, abandoned his duties and broke our father’s heart into a thousand pieces. That was unaccountable enough. Yet he never married you, never claimed you in the eyes of the world. Never stood up for you in any way when he knew perfectly well his affair with you was scandalous. Not even when you fell pregnant.”
“You’re relentless.” But she said that as if it was only to be expected, without any particular heat. “Omar was the best man I ever knew. The kindest and the bravest. He stood up for me in ways you can’t imagine.”
“My imagination is remarkably vivid.” His voice was cool. “Why don’t you try me?”
“Maybe Omar and I didn’t want to get married, Rihad.” She sighed when he only gazed at her in arrogant disbelief. “Maybe not everyone is as traditional as you are. In some places, it’s the twenty-first century.”
“I have no doubt that you and Omar lived a delightfully modern and unconventional life in every possible way, cavorting about New York City in all that marvelous limelight for so many years.” He eyed her in a way she didn’t much like then. “But your pregnancy should have snapped him back to the reality that, like it or not, he was a Bakrian royal who owed legitimacy to his own child. Why didn’t it?”
“Perhaps he assumed you would swoop in like the Angel of Death and sort it all out to suit yourself,” she said coolly. Then threw a smile, sharp and icy, back at him. “And look at that. You did.”
“Do you think these little games you seem determined to keep playing will distract me from getting your answer, Sterling? They won’t, I promise you. Why didn’t he marry you?”
His whole bearing had gotten colder and more regal as he stood there, his gaze a demanding thing that beat at her, and she believed him. She believed that he would keep asking that same question, again and again, until she finally answered it. That he would stand here an eternity if that was what it took. That he was like the great desert that surrounded his country on three sides, monolithic and impassable, and deeply treacherous besides.
“He wanted to marry me,” Sterling said after a moment. Then she raised her gaze to meet his again and forced herself not to show him any of the emotion that swirled around inside of her. “I refused.”
Rihad laughed. Not at all nicely. It set her teeth on edge, as she imagined it had been meant to do, and she had to order herself to unclench her jaw before she broke something.
“Of course you did.” His tone then was so dark, so sardonic, it felt like another one of his disturbingly sensual touches inside of her. “He begged you, I imagine, and you nobly rebuffed him, in the vein of all gold diggers and materialistic mistresses across the ages.”
He didn’t quite roll his eyes. His derisive tone meant he didn’t have to. But Sterling felt sharpened all the same then. Honed into some kind of blade by that dismissive tone of his.
“I know it’s hard for you to believe, Rihad. I know it flies directly in the face of all the fantasies you have about social-climbing sluts like me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Omar would have married me in a heartbeat. I was the one with reservations.”
“The prospect of becoming a Bakrian princess was too onerous for you? It seemed too much of a thankless chore?” There was that lash in his voice then that should have made her crumble, but she only tilted up her chin and glared back at him. “You were already living off him. Why not make it legal and continue to do so forever?”
“You’re such a small man, for a king,” she said softly, and had the satisfaction of watching his eyes blaze at the insult. This was the man she’d met in New York. This was the man who had sparred with her in that SUV. It was absurd that some part of her thrilled to see him again, as if she’d missed him. “Or maybe all kings are the same. What do I know? Obsessed with all these tiny details, territories and tabloids, that make them what they are. Life is a great deal richer and more complicated than that.”
He studied her for a moment, and Sterling stared right back at him. There was something about the way he was looking at her, about the particular quality of that dark temper she could see inhabiting his gorgeous face just then. If he’d been any other man—if she’d been any other woman—she’d have thought it was some kind of jealousy.
But that made absolutely no sense.
“Give me one good reason you wouldn’t marry my brother,” Rihad growled after a moment or two inched by and still they stood there, faced off like enemy combatants. “You are a woman with no family. No support.”
Did
