Protecting the Desert Heir

It would be easier if she was. Easier, but it wouldn’t do much for that thing that still held him in its grip, that he refused to examine any closer.

“I’m only using the proper terminology to describe your role,” he said mildly as he pulled up beside his plane out on the tarmac. “I apologize if you find that insulting.”

“You decided I was a whore the moment you saw me,” she said dismissively. Or he assumed that was what that particular tone meant, having never heard it before. “But virgins and whores are indistinguishable, I hate to tell you.”

“It’s a bit late to claim virginity, I think.”

“Whores don’t have identifying marks to set them apart.” If she’d heard him, she was ignoring him—another new sensation for Rihad. He was beginning to feel each of them like blows. “Purity isn’t a scent or a tattoo. Neither is promiscuity, which is lucky, or most men like you who love to cast stones would reek of it.”

“I am aware of only one case of a virgin birth,” he pointed out as he put the SUV into Park. “Everyone else, I am fairly certain, has gone about it the old-fashioned way. Unless you are on your way to notify the world’s religious leaders of the second coming of Mary? That would explain your hurry.”

“How many people have you slept with?” she asked, sounding unperturbed.

He laughed as much to cover his astonishment at her temerity as anything else. “Are you petitioning to be the next?”

“If you’ve slept with anyone at all and you’re unmarried, you’re a hypocrite.”

“I am widowed.”

A typical female might have apologized for his loss, but this was Sterling McRae, and she was not, he was already far too aware in a variety of increasingly uncomfortable ways, the least bit typical.

“And you’ve never touched a single woman in your whole life save your late wife?”

He should not have brought Tasnim into this. He was furious with himself. And Sterling, of course, correctly interpreted his silence.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured. “It appears you are, in fact, a hypocrite. Perhaps you should judge others a bit less. Or perhaps you’re no more than one of those charming throwbacks who think chastity only matters when it’s a woman’s.”

“The world has turned on its ear, clearly,” Rihad said in a kind of wonder, as much to the tarmac as to her, and he told himself that what surged in him then was relief that this was over. This strange interlude as a man people addressed with such stunning disrespect. “I am being lectured to by a blonde American parasite who has lived off of weak and foolish men her entire adult life. Thank God we have arrived.”

He turned in his seat, so he saw the way she jolted then, as if she hadn’t noticed the SUV had come to a stop. She looked around in confusion, then those blue eyes of hers slammed back to his.

“What is this? Where are we?”

“This is an airport,” Rihad told her, in that same patronizing, lecturing way she’d ordered him not to use his mobile as they’d driven out of Manhattan. “And that is a plane. My plane.”

She went so white he thought she might topple over where she sat. Her hands moved over the round swell of her belly, as if she was trying to protect the child within from him, and he hated that there was some part of him that admired her for so futile a gesture.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

He suspected she knew. But he took immense satisfaction in angling closer, so he could see every faint tremor on those sinful lips. Every shiver that moved across her skin. Every dawning moment of horrified recognition in her deep blue gaze.

“I am Rihad al Bakri,” he told her, and felt a harsh surge of victory as her gaze went dark. “If that is truly my brother’s child you carry, it is my heir. And I’m afraid that means it—and you—are now my problem to solve.”

CHAPTER THREE (#u29777196-8057-5d26-908e-fffe18eaa948)

THE SUV SEEMED to close in around her, her heart was a rapid throb in her throat and it was only another well-timed kick from the baby that broke through the panic. Sterling rubbed a hand over her belly and tried to calm herself.

He won’t hurt you. He can’t. If this is the heir to his kingdom, you’ve never been safer in all your life.

The man she should have realized wasn’t the slightest bit subservient to anyone threw open the driver’s door and climbed out of the SUV, then slammed it shut behind him. She could hear the sound of that voice of his outside on the tarmac, the spate of Arabic words like some kind of rough incantation, some terrible spell that he was casting over the whole of the private airfield. His men. Her.

And she couldn’t seem to do anything but sit there, frozen in place, obeying him by default. She stared at the back of the seat he’d vacated and tried to convince herself that despite the panic stampeding through her veins, she really was safe.

She had to be safe, because this baby had to be safe.

But the truth was, there was more than a small part of her that was still holding out hope that this was all a terrible nightmare from which she’d bolt awake at any minute. That Omar would be there, alive and well, with that wry smile of his at the ready and exactly the right words to tease away any lingering darkness. He’d tell her none of this could possibly have happened. That it never would.

And this would be a convoluted, nonsensical story she’d tell him over a long, lazy breakfast out on their wraparound terrace with views of New York City stretching in all directions as if it really was the center of the world, until they both laughed so hard they made themselves nearly sick.

God, what she would do to wake up and find out this was all a bad dream, that Omar had never gotten in that car in France, that it had never spun out of control on its way back into Paris—

But the door beside her opened abruptly then and Rihad stood there before her.

Because, of course, it was him. Rihad. The sheikh. The king. The more-feared-than-respected ruler of his fiercely contested little country on the Persian Gulf. The older brother who had consistently made Omar feel as if he was a failure, despite how much Omar had looked up to him. As if he was less than Rihad somehow. As if the deepest truths of who he’d been had to be hidden away, lied about, concealed where no one could see them—especially not the brother who should have loved him unconditionally.

Omar had loved him, despite everything. Sterling had not been similarly handicapped.

“There has been no mention of this pregnancy in any of the papers,” Rihad said in his dark, authoritative way. “No hint.”

“Guess why?” she suggested, hoping all the pain she’d like to inflict on him was evident in her voice. “Guess who we didn’t want to know?”

“You were both fools.”

Sterling glared at Rihad as the light wrapped around him and made him look something like celestial. How had she managed to convince herself this man was merely a driver? He fairly oozed power from every pore. He was the physical embodiment of ruthlessness no matter how the summer sunlight loved him and licked over the planes and valleys of his fascinating face. He exuded ruthless masculinity and total authority in equal measure, and she’d thrown herself directly into his hands.

He stared down at her, that mouth of his in a sardonic curl, his dark gold gaze bright and hot and infinitely disturbing, until Sterling thought she might not be able to breathe normally again. Ever.

“I believe this is the part where a good driver helps a fine, upstanding lady such as yourself from the vehicle,” he said in that smooth way of his, like silk and yet with all that steely harshness beneath it. “Without any commentary involving terms she might or might not like.”

“I think you mean insults, not terms.”

“I think it’s time to get out of the car.”

Then he held out his hand and there was no pretending it was anything but a royal command.

“I’m not getting on that plane,” Sterling told him.

Very carefully and precisely, as if perfect diction might save her here. Save her from him. As if anything could.

“It was not a request.”

She could see then how much he’d been acting the part of the supposed servant before, because he wasn’t bothering with that any longer. He was a stern column of inimitable power, his will like a living thing coiled tight around both of them and the whole damned airfield besides, and she couldn’t understand why he’d played that game with her in the first place. This was not a man who pretended anything, ever, she understood at a glance. Because he didn’t need to pretend. This was a man who took what he wanted as he wanted it, the end.

But she was not going to let him take her. Not without a fight.

“Perhaps you’re misunderstanding me, Rihad,” she said, deliberately using his first name to underscore how little she respected him.

She felt the ripple of that impertinence move through him and then beyond him, through the line of his men, where they stood in a loose ring around him and the SUV, protection and defense. The disapproval washed back over her from all sides, but the gleam in Rihad’s dark gold gaze merely edged over into something more shrewd as he considered her.