“You were merely my first.”
* * *
For a moment Rihad held himself so still he thought he might have turned to stone himself, into one of the pillars that held up this palace of his, smooth and hard and cold all the way through.
Which would have been safer for Sterling by far.
Because what shook in him, rolling and buckling, seismic and intense, was so vast he was surprised the whole cursed palace didn’t crumble down around them where they stood. There was a clutching sensation in his chest, a pounding in his head and a murderous streak lighting him up like a bloody lantern.
“I am your first, yes,” he said, in the voice of the civilized man that he’d always thought he was, before her—a king, for his sins, not this wild, fanged creature within that wanted only to howl. Then stake its claim. “And your last, Sterling. Let us make sure that part is clear.”
“That’s not up to you,” she said, tilting her chin up as if she was expecting a wrestling match to break out.
Rihad could think of few things he’d like more than to put his hands on her, but he wouldn’t do it just then. Not while he was still battling his temper, which was all the more unpredictable because he was so unused to it.
He’d never understood desire. Need. This kind of exquisite weakness. Now he was made of nothing else.
He tried to remain calm. Or at least sound calm. “I think you’ll find it is.”
“There’s no need to get so emotional,” she chided, and he was as astonished as that day back in New York when she’d started issuing orders. She stood, smoothing her hands down the front of the long dress she wore over her bare feet, a combination he found maddeningly erotic. Or was that another emotion? He seemed to be full of them where she was concerned. “I don’t know why you’re not seeing this clearly. The sooner we divorce, the easier it will be to rehabilitate your image.”
“My image is fine.”
Sterling inclined her head toward the table and his tablet and all those snide tabloid articles. “Evidently not.”
She even smiled serenely in his direction as she walked past him into the suite, the long skirt of her dress flowing out and around as she moved, so lithe and pretty on her feet it was as if everything she did was a dance. Even the way she walked away from him.
And this was absurd. He knew that. He knew she was trying to needle him, though he couldn’t have said why. He knew she wanted him as much as he did her—he hadn’t imagined their morning in his shower, the way she’d cried out his name and ground herself against his mouth, and he’d seen that same hectic fever in her gaze now, too. It was always there. Always.
He hadn’t imagined everything that had happened between them over the past month. This woman was his in every conceivable way. He had no intention of divorcing her, or even permitting her to sleep apart from him again. What did it matter if she admitted this or not?
Yet Rihad found it mattered quite a lot.
He stalked after her, catching her while she was still crossing his bedchamber and using her elbow and her momentum to spin her back around to face him.
“Don’t you dare—” she began, but he was already touching her, and that was its own alchemy.
That fire that only burned hotter by the day exploded between them, the way it always did, wild and bright. He saw her pulse accelerate in her neck. He saw that white-hot heat make her eyes go glassy.
“You little fool,” he bit out, but this wasn’t temper, he understood. Not any longer. There was that bittersweet pang of jealousy at the thought of her with other men, but everything else was pure, sensual menace that he had every intention of taking out on her delectable body. Until she took his point to heart. “Do you think this happens every day?”
“I assume it must,” she fired back at him, so busy fighting him she didn’t seem to notice the way he was backing her across the room, to the nearest wall. “Or every popular song I’ve ever heard is a lie.”
She let out a small, surprised noise when her back came up against the nearest brocaded wall, and then another when Rihad merely leaned closer and pressed his forehead to hers, holding her that simply.
“This is the sex you seem to think you can get anywhere,” he told her, and her mouth was a serious temptation, but he ignored it, concentrating on pulling that long skirt of hers up and sliding his hands beneath. “This is the chemistry you imagine is so run-of-the-mill.”
He felt that shudder go through her and then his hands were on her soft thighs, and it was his turn to let out a long breath when he found she was completely bare beneath her dress. There was nothing but the heat of her skin, the touch of her soft curls, and then that molten core of her, all his.
Only and ever his.
“Rihad…” she whispered.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” he told her.
He angled his head back so he could look at her, even as he plunged a finger deep into her heat. He watched a flush spread over her cheeks and knew that was the truth of things between them. The only truth that mattered, and it always would be. That dark, bewitching fire. That endless well of need.
“If you have something to say to me, Sterling, say it. Don’t poke at me. Don’t pretend.”
She stiffened at that. “Pretending is the problem. It’s what we’ve—I’ve—been doing this whole time!”
“I don’t think so.”
He pulled his finger from her depths, then held her gaze as he licked it clean, her taste as intoxicating as ever on his tongue. He felt his mouth curve as her lips parted at that, as if she was finding it difficult to breathe regularly. He reached down between them to handle his robes and his trousers, and then he stepped between her legs as he lifted her up, wrapping her around him and holding her there for a long, hot instant.
This time, he didn’t carry her to a nearby table. This time, as he lowered her against him he slid deep inside of her, so deep they both groaned at the sensation.
Her hands balled into fists at his shoulders and she bit her lip as if she meant to resist him. But then she rolled her hips against his as if she couldn’t help herself, and Rihad smiled.
He took control then. Her ankles were locked tight around his hips and he lifted her up, then brought her down, working her against him slowly. So slowly. Making her shudder and pant. Making it so good she’d forget all this divorce and separation nonsense.
Because she was soft and hot, a revelation around him with every stroke, and she was his.
All his. Always his.
It took him a long while to realize that he was chanting that out loud, like a prayer or a promise, and when he did, he laughed.
“Say it,” he demanded.
But this was Sterling, his Sterling. So even as she writhed against him, even as her hips met his in this wild dance of theirs, she defied him.
And
