maybe that was just what she’d done to him, when he’d been expecting something so much different.
“You’re staring at me as if I’m an animal in a zoo,” she pointed out crisply when she’d demolished a few lamb chops and several heaping spoonfuls of the grain and greens salads. “It’s going to give me indigestion.”
“I’m waiting for you to finish eating,” he said lazily. “You’re building up your energy, are you not? For the sex. Consummation on command, I believe you called it. A warning, Sterling. I’m very demanding.”
“The sex,” she repeated slowly. There wasn’t a flicker of reaction on her perfect face, or even in those sky-blue eyes of hers when she fixed them on him, but he knew better. He could feel the air itself sizzle between them. “Am I to understand that you’ll be performing a solo act? Right here, out in the open? How fascinating. You’ll understand if I don’t watch, I hope. I wouldn’t want my stomach to turn at a delicate moment and throw you off your stroke.”
He only watched her as the servants cleared all the plates between them and then piled the table high again with an array of tempting desserts—but Sterling was looking at him with that fire in her gaze and he couldn’t have imagined any better treat than her.
“You’re sitting here in silence, Sterling,” he pointed out, playing up the languid desert king because he could see the way it got to her. He could see the way she shifted against her pillows, as if she couldn’t quite get comfortable. “I assumed that you’d decided we should jump right into the sex rather than have a frank discussion.” He smiled. “I’m perfectly all right with that, if it’s what you wish.”
* * *
She most certainly did not wish, Sterling told herself then. But she had the growing notion that she was lying to herself.
And worse, that he knew it.
“Do you ever have interactions with anyone in which you aren’t threatening them?” she asked, mildly enough. “Whether directly or indirectly?”
“Most of my interactions are political in nature,” he replied, a vision of male ease as he lounged there and watched her too closely, his dark eyes glittering in the light thrown by too many hanging lanterns to count. “So, no. I don’t have any conversations that do not involve jockeying for power, or position, or status, or economic gain.”
“You are aware that some people have conversations that involve none of those things?”
A faint crook to that perfect mouth. “I’ve heard rumors.”
“I will have to decline your lovely offer,” she said, and smiled at him in the polite-yet-distant way she’d perfected in New York. “I’ve never been to an oasis before and I think I’d like to take a swim in the middle of a desert. Your marvelous suggestion that we delve into my past and/or me, personally, while tempting, will have to wait.”
She thought he would throw something back at her, but he only continued to study her with that small smile in the corner of his mouth. Sterling took that as acquiescence—or whatever it was when powerful men gave in, without seeming to give at all.
Sterling rose and walked past him toward the deepest of the three pools that shimmered there only a few steps from where they’d had their dinner. All the pools were hung with their own lanterns, each casting a dancing, mellow light over the dark waters. It made the water seem something more than simply inviting. Mysterious. Seductive. She stepped onto the mat that had been laid out there beneath the lightly rustling palm trees and kicked off her slides, then dropped her pashmina.
“You realize you are not fooling me, I hope,” Rihad said almost conversationally, still lounging there beneath the canopy behind her. “I know exactly what you are doing.”
“Swimming?” she asked over her shoulder. “You are correct, Your Royal Majesty. Your powers of observation are truly magnificent.”
Then she pulled the floor-length, flowing dress she wore up and over her head, leaving herself in nothing at all but a very tiny, very provocative string bikini in a metallic, shiny gold.
She could feel his sudden stillness from behind her, predatory and vast, like an epic, nuclear implosion of the same hunger she knew beat in her, but she didn’t turn back toward him. She didn’t need to. This was the point. The tease. The distraction.
Getting him back a little bit. Making him pay.
And she’d spent enough time as a model to have rendered her nothing but practical, more or less, about her body. She might have given birth only a few months back. She might have a different shape now, and new marks like claws on a belly she doubted would ever be concave again. But she was well aware of the power of her curves. And she knew that standing there in a flirty gold bikini would make it as hard for Rihad to sleep at night as it had been for her since that morning in the palace gardens.
Sterling was very good at this after all. She’d made a living out of using her body like this, once upon a time.
But she didn’t want to think about the past. She wanted to keep it behind her, as long as she could. Tonight, she only wanted to make Rihad ache the way that she ached.
She didn’t look back at him, she looked at the inky black surface of the pool, lit with dancing gold from the lanterns, and it was like looking straight into Rihad’s mesmerizing gaze.
She dived right in.
THE WATER WAS COOL, CLEAR.
It was like a silken caress over her skin, long and luxurious at once, and if she could have, Sterling would have stayed beneath the surface of that pool forever. She let herself sink, then float beneath the surface, and pretended she could remain there. But eventually her lungs began to ache a little bit and she kicked back up into the night air.
To find Rihad much closer, squatting there at the edge of the water, his dark gaze fierce on hers. It made her heart leap inside her chest, so hard and so high she was surprised it didn’t make the water ripple in reaction.
“Do you think you are safe in the water?” he asked her, and there were stark lines stamped on his face as he gazed at her. As if need was carving into him, the way she could feel it in her, too.
Whittling away at her until she didn’t know what was left, or who she’d be when it was done.
“I think that safety is relative where you’re concerned,” she said now, perhaps a shade too flippantly. She was more enthusiastic about swimming than she was skilled at it, so she moved closer to the side of the pool, reaching out a hand to hold on to the edge. “Kings are not exactly known for putting the needs of their wives before their own.”
“You know a great many kings, do you?”
She slicked her hair back, as aware of the way his dark gold eyes tracked the movement as if he’d used his own hands. And his attention was like a live wire, ferocious and total.
“I’m aware of the entire history of the planet, if that’s what you mean.”
Rihad studied her
