course you did.” His tone then was so dark, so sardonic, it felt like another one of his disturbingly sensual touches inside of her. “He begged you, I imagine, and you nobly rebuffed him, in the vein of all gold diggers and materialistic mistresses across the ages.”
He didn’t quite roll his eyes. His derisive tone meant he didn’t have to. But Sterling felt sharpened all the same then. Honed into some kind of blade by that dismissive tone of his.
“I know it’s hard for you to believe, Rihad. I know it flies directly in the face of all the fantasies you have about social-climbing sluts like me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Omar would have married me in a heartbeat. I was the one with reservations.”
“The prospect of becoming a Bakrian princess was too onerous for you? It seemed too much of a thankless chore?” There was that lash in his voice then that should have made her crumble, but she only tilted up her chin and glared back at him. “You were already living off him. Why not make it legal and continue to do so forever?”
“You’re such a small man, for a king,” she said softly, and had the satisfaction of watching his eyes blaze at the insult. This was the man she’d met in New York. This was the man who had sparred with her in that SUV. It was absurd that some part of her thrilled to see him again, as if she’d missed him. “Or maybe all kings are the same. What do I know? Obsessed with all these tiny details, territories and tabloids, that make them what they are. Life is a great deal richer and more complicated than that.”
He studied her for a moment, and Sterling stared right back at him. There was something about the way he was looking at her, about the particular quality of that dark temper she could see inhabiting his gorgeous face just then. If he’d been any other man—if she’d been any other woman—she’d have thought it was some kind of jealousy.
But that made absolutely no sense.
“Give me one good reason you wouldn’t marry my brother,” Rihad growled after a moment or two inched by and still they stood there, faced off like enemy combatants. “You are a woman with no family. No support.”
Did he know that was a sore spot for her? Or had he scored a lucky hit? Sterling sucked in a breath and hoped against hope he hadn’t noticed.
But his dark eyes gleamed. He noticed everything.
“A marriage to Omar would have changed all that. Even were you to eventually divorce, and even if you’d signed away everything ahead of time as our attorneys would have made certain you did, you would always have remained a part of the kingdom. Your child would always be a member of the royal family. Why would a woman like you turn down that kind of security?”
A woman like you. That phrase rolled around and around inside of her, picking up all the mud and grime of all the other people in her life who had said something like that to her. No one could want a child like you, her foster parents had told her. Girls like you are only good for one thing, her first, sleazy modeling contact had told her. I should have known a bird like you would land on her feet, a British photographer friend of Omar’s had sneered in an email only yesterday.
Omar had been the only person she’d ever met who had never, ever, put her in that kind of box. Sterling told herself she had to focus. This was about him, not her. This was about his life—the one he’d wanted to live, not the one his overbearing brother thought he should have lived.
Maybe there wasn’t much a woman like her could do to a king, but she could certainly defend her best friend.
“You don’t know anything about your brother, do you? You never did.”
“I’m growing impatient,” Rihad growled. “If you want to continue to talk in circles, that’s your prerogative. But I will make no promises about my reaction to that. What I can promise you is that you are unlikely to like it very much.”
Sterling took a deep breath.
And then she told him Omar’s secret. At last.
“Omar was gay.”
* * *
If Sterling had reached beneath that maddeningly flowy dress she wore and pulled out a gun, then shot it directly into his heart, Rihad could not have been more shocked.
And for a long, tense moment, it felt as if she’d done exactly that.
The report from her statement echoed so loudly it drowned out the world. It made the breezes still, the far-off noise of the palace and the city beyond fade. Even the water in the fountains seemed to run dry for what seemed like a very long time.
Then she laughed, but it was a bitter, accusing sort of sound. It made him feel worse. Like a monster.
“Is that not what you were looking for, Rihad? I’m so sorry. Not everyone lives according to your narrow standards of behavior.”
“Explain this to me.” He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like some gruff, autocratic mockery of the person he’d thought he was instead. He knew it. He could hear it. But he didn’t care. Not at that moment.
She glared at him. “Sometimes, Rihad, when little princes grow up and want to play with others, they don’t want to play with the little princesses as much as the—”
“Explain your relationship with him,” he snapped.
“This is ridiculous.” She rocked back on her heels and scowled at him. “You didn’t grow up beneath a rock. I don’t have to explain the world to you. You might choose to act as if it hasn’t moved on from the Stone Age here, but you know perfectly well that’s a choice you’re making, not the truth.”
“I don’t require that you explain the world to me. Only my brother.”
He shook his head, frowning, as every conversation he’d ever had with Omar raced through his head, one after the next. Every time Rihad had brought up Sterling, Omar had shrugged it off.
“She is necessary, brother,” he’d said. He’d never explained that assertion any further—and Rihad had thought him besotted. Bewitched. Led about by his most sensitive parts by a scandalous woman. It was a tale as old as time. As old as their own father, certainly.
It had never crossed his mind that this notorious woman, this walking sexual fantasy who had been the torment of thousands the world over in those coyly sensual perfume advertisements that had made her name, could possibly have been Omar’s beard.
Yet he believed her, and that meant she’d been exactly that, and he’d fallen for it. To the detriment of his own relationship with his brother.
“I think that if you could see the look on your face right now, you would understand why he felt this was necessary,” Sterling said coolly. “Omar didn’t dare tell you. He hid in plain sight and used one of the oldest tricks in the book.” She raised one hand and made the kind of imperious gesture in his direction that made him all but see red. “That exact expression.”
“I have no idea what you think you see on my face,” he gritted out. “But let me tell you what’s behind it. Shock.”
She scowled. “There is absolutely nothing wrong—”
“That he didn’t tell me,” Rihad threw at her. “That he felt he needed to sever his relationship with his own family. That he felt he needed to keep this secret all these years.”
“How could he possibly tell you?” she demanded, and he could see how much she’d cared for Omar in that fiercely defensive light in her blue eyes then, and everything inside him tilted. Slid. Because Rihad had only ever wanted to be that kind of support for his brother, and he’d failed him. “The only thing you ever talked to him about was what a disappointment he was. How he had let you down by not racing off to get married and have babies the way you thought he should. Having Leyla was his attempt to pacify you and I wouldn’t marry him because I thought he deserved more from his life. I thought he could do better than living a lie.”