Protecting the Desert Heir

Because you find her so unappealing even now, when she is huge with your brother’s child, a derisive voice inside chided him. Liar.

Rihad ignored that, too. He could not find himself attracted to his brother’s infamous leftovers. He would not allow it.

“The father of my child is dead,” Sterling said, her voice so frozen that if he hadn’t stolen that glance at her, he’d have believed she really was utterly devoid of emotion.

“And you loved him so much you wish to follow him into that great night?” He couldn’t quite keep the sardonic inflection from his own voice, and her head swung back toward him, her lovely brow creasing again. “That seems a rather desperate form of tribute, don’t you think? The province of the cowed and the cowardly, in my opinion. Living is harder. That’s the point of it.”

“Am I having an auditory hallucination?”

That was obviously a rhetorical question. Still, Rihad shrugged as he turned onto the narrow highway that clung to the east side of the city and led out of town, and replied, “I cannot answer that for you.”

“Or are you quizzing me—in a snide manner—about the death of someone I loved? You’re a driver.”

And her tone was withering, but there was something about it that spoke of repressed emotions, hidden fears. Or perhaps he was the one hearing things then.

“I don’t care what you think about my life or my choices or my feelings, in case that’s not clear. I want you to drive the damned car upstate, no more and no less. Is that all right with you? Or do you have more unsolicited opinions to share?”

Rihad smiled as he merged onto a different highway and headed toward the top of the island and the stately bridge that would lead to the airfield where his jet should be waiting, refueled and ready, upon his arrival. Or heads would roll.

“Where are you going?” he asked her with deceptive casualness. “Upstate New York is lovely in the summer, but it is not possible to outrun anything in your condition. Surely you must realize this.”

“My condition.” She repeated the words as if, until she sounded them out, she couldn’t believe she’d heard them correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

“You look as if you’re used to being kept well,” Rihad continued. Mildly. “That will be hard to replicate.”

She swiped those huge, concealing sunglasses off her face, and Rihad wished she hadn’t. She was nothing less than perfection, even in a quick glance in the rearview mirror of a moving vehicle, and he felt as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Her eyes were far bluer than the sky outside and she was more delicate, somehow, than she appeared in photographs. More vulnerable, he might have thought, had she not looked so outraged.

“Does it make you feel good to insult people you don’t know?” she demanded, also in a tone he’d never heard directed at him before. This woman seemed to be full of such tones. “Is that the kind of man you are?”

“What kind of man I am or am not is hardly something you will be capable of ascertaining from the backseat of this vehicle.”

“Yet you feel perfectly comfortable shredding my character from the front, of course. What a shock.”

Rihad didn’t like the tightness in his chest then. “Were you not kept well? Please accept my condolences. Perhaps you should have found a better patron before you permitted such a shoddy one to impregnate you.”

He didn’t know what he expected. Floods of tears? But Sterling sat straighter in her seat, managing to look both regal and dignified, which only made that constriction around his chest pull tighter.

“Let me guess,” she said after a hard pause, her tone so scathing she was clearly nowhere near tears of any kind. “This is some kind of game to you. You intrude upon people’s lives, insult them, and then what? Is causing pain its own reward—or are you hoping they’ll do something crazy to get away from you, like demand you leave them by the side of the road? Exactly what do you get out of being this nasty?”

Rihad’s teeth were on edge, his body tense. He left the bridge behind him and headed west, wanting absolutely nothing at that moment but to get to his plane and get the hell out of here, back to his own land. His throne. The familiarity of his country, his rule. Before the tension in him exploded into something he couldn’t control.

That such a thing had never happened before—that he had never been quite this tense in the whole of his life before he’d laid eyes on this woman—did not bear thinking about.

“I have no intention of leaving you by the side of the road,” he assured her, and there was possibly too much dark intent in the comment, because she scowled at him in response. “Not yet anyway.”

“You’re a true gentleman. Clearly.”

And Rihad laughed then, because it was funny. All of this was funny, surely, however little familiarity he had with such things. He was a king pretending to be a driver. She was the mistress who had ruined his dead brother’s life. And he felt more alive trading insults with her than he had in years.

In fact, he couldn’t recall when he’d ever felt quite like this, for any reason.

He’d obviously gone mad with guilt and grief.

“I want us both to be very clear about who you are,” Sterling said then, leaning forward in her seat, and her scent teased at him, honey and sugar with the faintest hint of a tropical bloom beneath. It made his hands clench into fists against the steering wheel. It made him hard and needy.

It made him feel like a stranger to himself. Like the hungry, selfish man he’d never been.

Rihad couldn’t bring himself to analyze it. He concentrated on the road instead.

“I am perfectly clear about who I am,” he told her.

Or perhaps he was telling himself—because he had been. When he’d exited his private jet mere hours before. When he’d arrived at Omar’s apartment building, dismissed the driver who waited there and sent his team inside to secure this woman so he could have the pleasure of evicting her himself. He’d known exactly who he was.

And nothing has changed since then, he told himself harshly.

Or would.

“You are a man who thinks it’s appropriate to mock and insult a woman, first of all,” Sterling said in that precise way of hers that he really shouldn’t find so fascinating. It was only that no one had ever dared use a tone like that in his presence before, he assured himself. He was intrigued intellectually, nothing more. “Congratulations. Your mother must be proud.”

He laughed again, with significantly less mirth than before. “My mother died when I was twelve years old.”

“A great blessing, I think we can agree, so that she might be spared the knowledge of who you’ve become in her absence,” Sterling said, so matter-of-factly it took Rihad a moment to realize how deeply she’d insulted him. And then she kept going, unaware that no one spoke to him like that without consequences. No one would dare. “You are also a man who finds it amusing to speculate about the lives of strangers. Openly and repulsively.”

“Are you not a kept woman?” he asked, making no attempt to soften his tone. “My mistake. What is it you do, then, to support yourself?”

“You are ill-mannered and rude, and that was evident at a glance, long before you opened your mouth.” She laughed then, an abrasive sound that made his hackles rise. “I’ve met more honorable pigs.”

“Be very careful,” Rihad warned her. Because he had limits—even if, he was well aware, anyone who’d ever met him might have thought he’d crossed them a long while back. “A man does not react well to the questioning of his honor.”

“Then a man should act as if he has some,” she snapped.

“Yes, of course,” Rihad snorted. “And how would I prove that I am an honorable man to one such as you, do you imagine? Will you be the judge? A woman who—”

“Is pregnant?” Her voice was icy then, so cold he almost overlooked the fact that she’d interrupted him. Something no one had done since his father had died, and no woman had ever done, as far as he could recall. “So scandalous, I know. It’s almost as if every single person walking this earth came about their presence here some other way.”

“I must have mistaken you for someone else,” Rihad murmured as he made the final turn that would lead them to the airfield, which was just as well, because he thought his temper might flip the damned SUV over if he didn’t put some distance between the two of them, and soon. “I thought you were the mistress of Omar al Bakri.”

“If I were you—” and her voice was very soft, very furious then “—I’d be very, very careful what you say next.”

“Why?” Rihad realized he was taking out his aggression on the gas pedal and slowed as he arrived at the gate to find his men already there, which was lucky for everyone involved. They waved him through and he was glad, he told himself, that this little farce was almost finished. He wasn’t one for subterfuge, no matter how necessary. It felt too much like lies. “He is dead, as you say. You remain. Is that child his?”

“Ah, yes. Of course.” She sounded bored then, though he could still hear the fury beneath it, giving it a certain huskiness that he felt in all the wrong places. “I must be a whore. That’s the point of these questions, isn’t it? Are you trying to determine whether or not I’m a terrible, no-good, very bad harlot or have you already rendered your judgment?”

“Are you?”

She laughed. “What if I am? What is it to you?”

But Rihad glanced at her in the mirror and saw the truth of things in the way her hands clasped on the shelf of her belly, her knuckles white, as if she was not as blasé as she was pretending.