rose and walked past him toward the deepest of the three pools that shimmered there only a few steps from where they’d had their dinner. All the pools were hung with their own lanterns, each casting a dancing, mellow light over the dark waters. It made the water seem something more than simply inviting. Mysterious. Seductive. She stepped onto the mat that had been laid out there beneath the lightly rustling palm trees and kicked off her slides, then dropped her pashmina.
“You realize you are not fooling me, I hope,” Rihad said almost conversationally, still lounging there beneath the canopy behind her. “I know exactly what you are doing.”
“Swimming?” she asked over her shoulder. “You are correct, Your Royal Majesty. Your powers of observation are truly magnificent.”
Then she pulled the floor-length, flowing dress she wore up and over her head, leaving herself in nothing at all but a very tiny, very provocative string bikini in a metallic, shiny gold.
She could feel his sudden stillness from behind her, predatory and vast, like an epic, nuclear implosion of the same hunger she knew beat in her, but she didn’t turn back toward him. She didn’t need to. This was the point. The tease. The distraction.
Getting him back a little bit. Making him pay.
And she’d spent enough time as a model to have rendered her nothing but practical, more or less, about her body. She might have given birth only a few months back. She might have a different shape now, and new marks like claws on a belly she doubted would ever be concave again. But she was well aware of the power of her curves. And she knew that standing there in a flirty gold bikini would make it as hard for Rihad to sleep at night as it had been for her since that morning in the palace gardens.
Sterling was very good at this after all. She’d made a living out of using her body like this, once upon a time.
But she didn’t want to think about the past. She wanted to keep it behind her, as long as she could. Tonight, she only wanted to make Rihad ache the way that she ached.
She didn’t look back at him, she looked at the inky black surface of the pool, lit with dancing gold from the lanterns, and it was like looking straight into Rihad’s mesmerizing gaze.
She dived right in.
THE WATER WAS COOL, CLEAR.
It was like a silken caress over her skin, long and luxurious at once, and if she could have, Sterling would have stayed beneath the surface of that pool forever. She let herself sink, then float beneath the surface, and pretended she could remain there. But eventually her lungs began to ache a little bit and she kicked back up into the night air.
To find Rihad much closer, squatting there at the edge of the water, his dark gaze fierce on hers. It made her heart leap inside her chest, so hard and so high she was surprised it didn’t make the water ripple in reaction.
“Do you think you are safe in the water?” he asked her, and there were stark lines stamped on his face as he gazed at her. As if need was carving into him, the way she could feel it in her, too.
Whittling away at her until she didn’t know what was left, or who she’d be when it was done.
“I think that safety is relative where you’re concerned,” she said now, perhaps a shade too flippantly. She was more enthusiastic about swimming than she was skilled at it, so she moved closer to the side of the pool, reaching out a hand to hold on to the edge. “Kings are not exactly known for putting the needs of their wives before their own.”
“You know a great many kings, do you?”
She slicked her hair back, as aware of the way his dark gold eyes tracked the movement as if he’d used his own hands. And his attention was like a live wire, ferocious and total.
“I’m aware of the entire history of the planet, if that’s what you mean.”
Rihad studied her in that focused, too-incisive way of his that made her want to do things to escape it. Before he could see every last corner of her dirty little soul.
“I have a modest hope that I am less bloodthirsty than many of the kings who predate me,” he was saying drily. “And I know I’m better to my wives than most of those, given I’ve yet to execute one.”
“Was that on the table here?”
“We’re talking about absolute power. It’s all on the table. Something to remember the next time you’re feeling feisty.” But his mouth was crooked into that small smile of his she was beginning to find addictive, despite that steady gaze of his that made her tremble deep within. “But I can’t imagine you really want to talk about the powers of the Bakrian monarchy, or the march of kings throughout time, do you?”
“I don’t want to talk to you at all. I wanted to swim.”
He indicated the pool behind her with a jerk of his fine chin. “Then by all means, Sterling. Swim.”
But she didn’t move.
They could have stayed frozen there for a decade. She’d never have known the difference. Only that she couldn’t look away from him.
This man who had far more power than the others she’d known, who’d taken theirs out on her because they’d considered her so beneath them. Rihad was autocratic. He certainly used his power. But never like that. Never so viciously.
Eventually, he reached down and traced a lazy, sensual pattern from one shoulder, across the very top of her chest, all the way to the other. Then back.
And she still didn’t understand why his was the only touch that made her feel like this, wrapped up in a blaze of need and outside her own skin. She didn’t understand why she wanted him, wanted more, wanted, when she’d never wanted any other man in her life.
When she’d never wanted any touch in her life.
She didn’t understand any of this, only that when he touched her she wanted to sob out, and not because it hurt her. And when he didn’t touch her, it was worse.
He’d made her into a woman she didn’t understand at all. Maybe it was that she felt like a woman after all. Not a punching bag. Not a clothes hanger. Not an ornament. Not a mother. A woman, for the first time.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
Just as she had at their wedding.
But this time, Rihad smiled, and it was as if that, too, burst into her and pried her wide-open however little she wanted to let him in.
“I am so sorry, little one,” he murmured, his dark gold eyes on hers, and that look of his slid straight through her, too soft and too slick. It made her shake and this time, not only inside. “It’s not so easy to make me the monster you wanted me to be, is it?”
“Maybe not,” she whispered up at him, filled with that same wild urge to do anything to keep him from seeing the truth about her. Before it was too late. “But this is very easy, actually.”
And Sterling reached up, grabbed hold of the arm he had propped on his knee as she braced her feet on the side of the pool, and she yanked him off balance.
Then she hauled the King of Bakri straight into the pool.
He sank like a stone, in a cascade of bubbles while a great wave slapped at her, and she was breathing so fast it hurt while the adrenaline—at her temerity, at the fact she’d actually done it—spiked inside of her. She’d made the split-second decision to get the hell out of that pool right now when he surfaced beside her, and Sterling realized that she was frozen in place. Paralyzed, more like.
Why on earth had she done that?
But Rihad laughed.
He tipped