a wild card, a loose woman, a problem to be solved. He accepted all of that.
“But first,” he said, “it’s time to talk about Omar.”
STERLING GAPED AT HIM, her head spinning madly at the sudden shift in conversation and her stomach in a new, hard knot.
“You look at me as if you expect me to transform into a monster where I stand,” Rihad pointed out with a certain gruffness, almost as if that wounded him. She told herself she was imagining it. “All fangs and claws and evil intent.”
“I’m not sure you haven’t already done so.”
That mouth of his crooked into something not quite a smile. He reached over and tucked a stray tendril of her copper-blond hair behind one ear, and neither one of them moved for a long, shattering instant.
Then he straightened to his full height, but she could still see that steely glint in his dark gold eyes, the potency of his gaze undiminished.
“I am not going to go on a honeymoon, whether real or for show, with a woman whose head is filled with another man, Sterling. It’s time you told me about my brother and your relationship with him.”
He didn’t object when she pushed back the chair and surged to her feet, hurriedly stepping away from him. He only watched her as she went, and that shattering thing between them seemed to expand into a taut, terrible grip around her heart. But she made herself stand straighter.
“I don’t think you really want to have that conversation,” she told him as evenly as she could. “You’re unlikely to hear anything you like.”
Sterling wasn’t sure she wanted to have it, either. She felt too guilty, too ashamed. No matter what she might have told their friends or herself, this wasn’t what Omar would have wanted. He’d left Bakri for a reason. This—all of this, everything that had happened since the accident—was a stark betrayal of the best friend she’d ever had. The only family she’d ever known.
And that fire inside of her, that terrible flame when she looked at Rihad that she didn’t know what to do with, was worse.
“This is not the first time you have insinuated that I harmed my brother in some way,” Rihad said darkly. “Why? What is your evidence for this?”
She shook her head, as if she could shake him away that easily, and all his questions, too. “Don’t act the innocent, Rihad. It isn’t a good fit.”
“You mistake innocence for intent, I think. It’s time to stop talking in circles, Sterling. If you wish to accuse me of something, do it to my face.”
He smiled again then, lethally, and she felt it everywhere.
And she’d forgotten this, hadn’t she? She’d been lulled into a false sense of security because there’d been nothing in her head but Leyla and he’d been so encouraging, so supportive, since the day she’d been born. They’d eaten their meals together these past months and talked about a thousand things, like any other civilized strangers who happened to be married to each other. Books, art. The cities they’d seen, the places they’d visited, from Cannes to the Seychelles to Patagonia.
She’d learned that he had been a solemn child and an even more serious young man, studious and focused in all things. She’d discovered that he had played a great deal of soccer and the occasional game of rugby all the way through university, but only for sport, as he’d always known his future. His place.
“That must have been nice,” she’d said once. Perhaps too wistfully. “To have no doubt what direction you were headed in, no matter what.”
He’d eyed her across their dinner and the candles that had lined the table and she’d shivered, though she hadn’t been cold.
“Who can say if it was nice or not?” he’d replied after a moment, as if he’d never thought about it before that instant. “It was all I knew.”
She’d started to think of this man as something like pleasant. She’d started to imagine that this forced-marriage thing might not be quite so terrible after all. But she’d been kidding herself. This was Rihad al Bakri. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever encountered.
How had she allowed herself to forget that?
“Fine,” she said staunchly now, telling herself this had always been inevitable. That they had always been heading straight here. “Let’s talk about Omar.”
Sterling crossed her arms, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to dress each time she knew she would see him, including the airy sundress she wore now that felt a bit unequal to the conversation. She told herself fashion and beauty were armor, the way they had been when she’d been a model and the point was to look at the clothes, not the woman in them. And they were—but that wasn’t the only reason she did it these days.
The depressing truth was that back then she’d liked to hide in the glare of any spotlight that might have been focused on her. But here in this far-off palace that sometimes felt like a dream over these past months, she liked it when he saw her. When he got that gleam in his dark gold eyes that told her he appreciated what he saw. Even now.
She had so many reasons to hate herself that Sterling couldn’t understand why she hadn’t started overflowing where she stood. Like a backed-up sewer. That was precisely how she felt, clogged and wrong.
“Wonderful.” His gaze was so dark. So intense. “Let’s begin with why Omar persisted in his relationship with you across all these years. He defied his family and his country, abandoned his duties and broke our father’s heart into a thousand pieces. That was unaccountable enough. Yet he never married you, never claimed you in the eyes of the world. Never stood up for you in any way when he knew perfectly well his affair with you was scandalous. Not even when you fell pregnant.”
“You’re relentless.” But she said that as if it was only to be expected, without any particular heat. “Omar was the best man I ever knew. The kindest and the bravest. He stood up for me in ways you can’t imagine.”
“My imagination is remarkably vivid.” His voice was cool. “Why don’t you try me?”
“Maybe Omar and I didn’t want to get married, Rihad.” She sighed when he only gazed at her in arrogant disbelief. “Maybe not everyone is as traditional as you are. In some places, it’s the twenty-first century.”
“I have no doubt that you and Omar lived a delightfully modern and unconventional life in every possible way, cavorting about New York City in all that marvelous limelight for so many years.” He eyed her in a way she didn’t much like then. “But your pregnancy should have snapped him back to the reality that, like it or not, he was a Bakrian royal who owed legitimacy to his own child. Why didn’t it?”
“Perhaps he assumed you would swoop in like the Angel of Death and sort it all out to suit yourself,” she said coolly. Then threw a smile, sharp and icy, back at him. “And look at that. You did.”
“Do you think these little games you seem determined to keep playing will distract me from getting your answer, Sterling? They won’t, I promise you. Why didn’t he marry you?”
His whole bearing had gotten colder and more regal as he stood there, his gaze a demanding thing that beat at her, and she believed him. She believed that he would keep asking that same question, again and again, until she finally answered it. That he would stand here an eternity if that was what it took. That he was like the great desert that surrounded his country on three sides, monolithic and impassable, and deeply treacherous besides.
“He wanted to marry me,” Sterling said after a moment. Then she raised her gaze to meet his again and forced herself not to show him any of the emotion that swirled around inside of her. “I refused.”
Rihad