I know you expect nothing but pain and misery when you dare to hope.” He moved, rubbing his palms along her arms as if he was trying to warm her. Soothe her. Love her. “But I am a man of honor. My word is law. And no one will ever hit you again as long as you live. Especially not me.”
She shook her head, hard, though shivers chased through her, one after the next as if she really was being torn apart. She could feel the tearing, deep inside of her.
“I’m your duty, nothing more,” she said fiercely. “But your duty is to Bakri, not to me. And they deserve better. You deserve better.”
“And you deserve to believe that you do, too.”
She couldn’t breathe past those words. She whispered his name again then, but she couldn’t seem to stop crying. And then he let go of her, which was worse than a hit. Worse than a kick or two. She reached out a hand despite her intention to make him let her go, but then froze, because he wasn’t walking away from her.
Rihad al Bakri, reigning sheikh, Grand Ruler and King of the Bakrian Empire, sank to his knees on the sand before her, never shifting that proud, stern gaze of his from hers.
He reached over, but he didn’t take her hands. He took her hips in his powerful grip instead, as if he could lift her up if he wished. As if he could carry her forever, if she would only let him.
“I ordered you marry me once,” he said in that low, dark, powerful voice of his. “Now I am asking you to stay with me. To live with me, love me, and who cares what the papers say. There are men watching us right now. Does it look as if that bothers me?”
“Rihad. You can’t.” But she didn’t know what she meant to say and he wasn’t listening to her anyway. His hands gripped her hips.
“I want to make more babies with you and this time, I want to hold them in my own hands as they enter this world. I want to make love to you forever. You are worth a thousand kingdoms, and mine is nothing but a pile of sand without you.” His gaze was part of her, inside of her. “Be my wife in every possible way, Sterling. Not because it is my duty, but because it is my deepest wish. You are my heart. My love. I want you to be mine.”
And she understood that vast, unconquerable thing that slammed down on her then. It wasn’t fear—it was so much bigger. It was love. Real love, without conditions or qualifiers. Without lies. Love that might incorporate pain and darkness, as all life must in its time, but wasn’t made of it.
She’d expected him to hurt her because that was all she knew. She’d assumed she would ruin him the way she ruined everything, because that was what the people who’d hurt her had told her to justify their actions.
Terrible people, he’d called them.
But that was the past.
This man, here and now, on his knees before her in a way she imagined he’d never been before and never would be again, was the future.
She had to give herself over to the only thing she’d ever encountered that could beat back the darkness.
Love.
And within that, wrapped up so tightly it was nearly indistinguishable, hope.
“I’m already yours, Rihad,” she whispered, fierce and hopeful at once. “I’ve been yours all along.”
He wrapped his arms around her hips, resting his head against her stomach. She felt the press of his perfect mouth against her flesh and the deep shudder that went with it, as if she was accepting him into her bones.
“I love you,” he told her, dark and imperious against the belly where she would bear his children. She knew she would, and not only because he’d decreed it. “Never doubt that.”
“I love you, too,” she said, her tears falling freely, but this time, they were made of joy. This time, she recognized it for what it was. This time, she believed it really would last forever. That they would, together. “I always will. And always is a very long time, I’m told.”
“It had better be,” he muttered, every inch of him the king.
And then she sank down beside him, and he took her in his arms, and for the first time in her life, Sterling let herself believe in forever.
Ten years later…
“HE IS VERY annoying, yes,” Rihad told his furious daughter out in the private family garden that morning, and took care to hide his laughter from her. “But if you drown your brother in that pool, Leyla, there will be no party on Saturday and you may, in fact, spend your birthday in the dungeons.”
“There aren’t any dungeons in the palace,” his ten-year-old replied, hotly. “Mama said you made that up.”
He only smiled when she scowled at him. “There are dungeons if I say there are. I make the rules.”
“Brothers are stupid,” Leyla told him with a hint of imperiousness he thought she’d gotten directly from her mother.
Rihad thought of his own brother, lost so long now.
“I cannot forgive myself,” he’d told Sterling on Omar’s last birthday. As they did every year, they’d visited his grave on the palace grounds, together. “I doubt I ever will.”
She had been wrapped in his arms, her back tucked against his front, his chin resting on her head.
“He’d already forgiven you,” she’d said. She’d shifted when he tensed. “He loved you, Rihad. He always loved you.” She’d smiled up at him. “I was the one who hated you, for the both of us.”
“Brothers might be stupid,” he told Leyla now, “but you must love them anyway.”
“Love sounds stupid, too,” Leyla retorted, but she helped six-year-old Aarib continue to jump up and down on the wide lip of the pool near the waterfall anyway.
Though not without a very deep, long-suffering sort of sigh that did not bode well for her upcoming adolescence. Rihad repressed a shudder at that unhappy thought, given how stunning a child she already was, God help him. He returned his attention to the matters of state that awaited him on his tablet, a far more appealing prospect than his little girl growing up.
The papers hadn’t always left them alone, but it was nothing as it had been. Rihad had seen to the dismissal of the particular reporters who dared hound his wife so relentlessly—just as he’d seen to the immediate exile of some of his courtiers when he’d finally seen the way they’d treated her.
The Queen of Bakri, by definition, was a woman without peer, spotless of reputation and widely beloved by all.
Ten years on, Rihad had the distinct pleasure of knowing that wasn’t merely a decree he’d made, but the simple truth.
He knew the moment Sterling walked outside to join them in the garden. He always knew. She changed the air, he’d often told her, simply by breathing it, sharing it.
Those vicious, repulsive people she’d left behind in Iowa hadn’t ruined her. She wasn’t ruined. He thought that these days, she believed that without question at last.
His beautiful Sterling. His perfect wife.
He took a moment to marvel at her as she walked toward him across the stones while the world stilled all around him the way it always had. The way he thought it always would. She still dressed like the model she’d been, too elegant and so easily, offhandedly chic. That copper-blond hair of hers that still fascinated him beyond measure. Those long, long legs that had only this morning been draped over his shoulders as he’d driven them both to a hard, wild finish in the murky dark before dawn.
Ten years later and he was still hard at the thought of her.