Protecting the Desert Heir

Tasnim might not have been a flashy model type, with masses of shining copper-blond hair and a sinful mouth like the woman Omar had holed up with all these years. But she’d been as committed to their marriage as Rihad had been. They’d worked their way to something like affection in the three short years before she’d been diagnosed with cancer at a routine doctor’s appointment. When she’d died five years ago this past summer, Rihad had lost a friend.

Maybe that was what moved in him then, on the side of a New York City street as his brother’s worst and most public embarrassment sat waiting for him to drive her away from the comeuppance Rihad had planned to deliver upon her, in spades. Fury that Tasnim, who had kept all her promises, was gone. The same old mix of fury and bafflement that Omar had broken all the rules, as usual, and gotten this plaything of his big with child anyway—and then abandoned a Bakrian royal child to fate, its mother unmarried and unprotected.

That or the fact her hand in his, her skin sliding against his in even so simple and impersonal a touch, had made him burn. He could feel it now. Still.

Unacceptable.

If he’d been anyone else, he thought, he might have been shaken by that astonishing burst of heat. Altered, somehow, by that fire that roared through him, making him feel bright and needy, and suggesting all manner of possibilities he didn’t wish to face.

But Rihad was not anyone else. He did not acknowledge weakness. He rose above it.

He pulled out his mobile, made a call and snapped out his instructions as he climbed into the driver’s seat, his decision made in an instant. Because it was the most expedient way to handle the crisis, he assured himself, not because he could still feel her touch as if she’d branded him. He could see Sterling in the back via his mirror—such a fanciful, ridiculous name—and the frown she aimed at him. It had nothing to do with the things that coursed through him at the sight of her, none of which he’d expected. He was a man of duty, never of need.

“You can’t talk on your phone while you drive,” she told him. Scolded him, more like. “You know that, don’t you?”

As if he was extraordinarily dim. It occurred to Rihad then that no one he was not related to by blood, in all his years on this earth, had dared address him with anything but the utmost respect—if not fawning deference.

Ever.

For a moment he was stunned.

He should have been outraged. He couldn’t understand why instead there was a part of him that wanted only to laugh.

“Can I not?” he asked mildly, after a moment, his tone an uneasy balance between the two. “I appreciate the warning.”

“Aside from the fact it’s against the law, it’s not safe,” she replied in that same irritated way he’d never in his life had directed at him before, her voice tight. Annoyed, even. He saw her shift against the leather seat and put her hands over her swollen belly, in a way that suggested she was not quite the soulless, avaricious harlot he’d painted her in his head. He ignored that suggestion.

“I don’t think I’d care if you ran this car into the side of a building if it was only me, but it’s not.”

“Indeed it is not.” Rihad slid his phone into the interior pocket of his jacket and then started the vehicle. “Yet your husband would miss you, surely?”

He was needling her, of course, and he couldn’t have said why. What could he possibly gain from it? A glance in the rearview mirror showed him her profile, however, not that cool frown he found he very nearly enjoyed. She’d turned her head as if to stare back at the building as he pulled the car into traffic. As if leaving it—this place she’d lived with his brother, or off his brother if he was more precise—was difficult for her.

Rihad supposed it must have been. It would be much harder to find a patron now, no doubt. She was older, for one thing. Well-known—infamous, even—for her role as another man’s prize possession, across whole years. Soon to be a mother to another man’s child, which the sort of men who regularly trafficked in mistresses would be unlikely to find appealing.

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.

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

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.

As if she was an animal in a trap, she thought, and he was deciding how best to put her out of her misery. That was not a restful notion.

Sterling pushed on. “I would rather die than go anywhere with you.”

He leaned toward her in the open wedge between the door and the body of the SUV and every single nerve inside of her went wild. Sharp and hot and alert—something so much like pain it very nearly toppled her before she realized it wasn’t really pain at all. Merely an exquisite reaction—pure sensation, storming all over her—that she didn’t recognize and didn’t know what to do with.

It was almost impossible to keep herself from reacting, from throwing herself backward across the wide backseat and scrambling for safety—not that there was any available to her, she understood in a shattering instant. Not really. This man might not hurt her, physically, not as long as she was pregnant with the heir to his kingdom—but then, there were worse things.