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
