LITMIR.BIZ

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her, the wedding went ahead. Sterling felt it all from a great distance, as if she was watching a movie of that enormously pregnant woman in the billowing dress stand next to that darkly beautiful man with the smug expression on his face that indicated he’d had no doubt at all that she would do exactly as he pleased. Exactly what he wanted, as, apparently, everyone did eventually. It didn’t seem to matter that she didn’t participate in her own wedding ceremony, didn’t speak a single word either way. No one asked her to do anything but stand there. The man marrying them merely waved his hands in her direction, Rihad answered him in impenetrable Arabic and that was that.

      The crowd cheered when it was done, as if this was a happy occasion. Or, she supposed, as if it was a real wedding.

      “I hate you,” she told him, and bared her teeth at him. She didn’t pretend it was any kind of smile. They stood there in all that distractingly cheerful sunshine, as if there really was some call for celebration in the midst of this disaster. When instead she was married to a man she loathed, trapped here in his world, his palace, his very hands. She told herself that was fury she felt, that low, shivering thing inside her, or the fact she couldn’t seem to take in a full breath. Because she refused to let it be anything else. “I will always hate you.”

      “Always is a very long time, Sterling.” Rihad sounded darkly amused. “I find most people lack the attention span for sustained emotion of any kind. Hate, love.” He shrugged. “Passion is always brightest when temporary.”

      “You are an expert, of course.”

      “My expertise fades next to yours, of course, and all your fabled conquests,” he replied, his tone ripe with bland insult.

      “You have yet to marry a woman who actually wants to marry you,” Sterling couldn’t keep herself from railing at him, almost as if his insults got to her. Which she refused to allow. “I doubt you have the slightest idea what passion is.”

      Rihad’s smile edged into something lethal, and while he didn’t hurt her in any way when he took her arm, she couldn’t pull out of his firm grasp, either. His smile deepened when she tried.

      “You forget that I did not exactly choose you, either,” he said, darkly and too hot and directly into her ear, making her shudder in reaction—and she was all too aware he could feel her do it. That made it worse, like some kind of betrayal. “I executed my duty to this country the first time I was married. Can you truly imagine I wanted to do it again?”

      “Then you should have left me in New York.”

      “No.” His voice was firm. Matter-of-fact. She saw the harsh intent in his golden gaze, stamped deep into the lines of his dark, gorgeous face. “That child cannot be born out of wedlock and also be recognized as a part of the royal bloodline. It isn’t done.”

      “Omar said it would be fine,” Sterling threw back at him as Rihad’s aides corralled the well-heeled courtiers and herded them from their seats, directing them farther down the terrace. “He said it was the only child he planned to present to you and if you wanted it, or him, you could change the law. After all, you’re the king.”

      “Of course,” Rihad growled.

      A muscle worked in his lean jaw and she felt his fingers press the slightest bit harder into the flesh of her upper arm where he still held her fast, though, still, it didn’t hurt. Quite the opposite—she was astonished at the fact her usual revulsion at the faintest physical contact hadn’t kicked in yet. It was her hatred of him, she told herself resolutely. It was shorting out her usual reactions.

      “How typical of my brother,” Rihad was saying. “Rather than adhere to a tradition dating back centuries, why not demand that the tradition itself be altered to suit him instead? I don’t know why I’m at all surprised.”

      Sterling opened her mouth to argue, to defend Omar, but the dark look Rihad threw at her stopped her. She shut her mouth with an audible snap. And then he began to move, sweeping her along with him whether she wanted to go or not.

      He led her back through the glorious royal palace to the suite of rooms she’d been installed in when she’d arrived, and Sterling was glad he did it in that fulminating, edgy silence of his. She felt utterly off balance. Shaken down deep. She couldn’t tell if it was because the wedding had actually happened precisely as he’d warned her it would. Or because he kept touching her in a thousand little impersonal ways that were nonetheless like licks of fire all over her body and none of it because of fear.

      Or because when he leaned down and spoke so close to her ear she’d felt it everywhere. Everywhere. Like the most intimate of caresses.

      She still felt it. And she hadn’t the slightest notion what to do about it.

      It wasn’t until they reached her door that Sterling realized she had no idea what was going to happen next. That she’d resolutely refused to believe this was happening at all, this mockery of a wedding, and had thus not thought about...the rest of it.

      Did he expect...? Would he...? Her mind shied away from it, even as her body burst into a humiliating flash of delirious heat that she was terrified he could see, it felt so bright and scarlet and obvious. She clutched at her belly, as much to remind herself that she was hugely pregnant as to assuage her sudden spike in anxiety.

      But Rihad merely deposited her inside the lovely, spacious suite that was the prettiest prison cell she’d ever seen, then turned as if to leave her there without another word—standing in the middle of the suite’s grand foyer in an indisputably gorgeous dress her attendants had insisted she wear today, that had made Sterling feel pretty despite herself. Despite him.

      “That’s it?” she blurted out.

      She wished she hadn’t said anything when he turned back to her. Slowly. He was particularly beautiful then, in his ceremonial robes with that remote, inscrutable expression on his lean face. Beautiful and terrible, and she had no idea what to make of either.

      But she didn’t think it was fear that made her pulse pick up.

      “What were you expecting?” he asked, mildly enough, though there was a dark gleam in those gold eyes of his that made her breath catch. “A formal wedding reception, perhaps, so you could insult my guests and my people with your surly Western attitude? Berate our culture and our traditions as you are so fond of doing? Shame this family—and me—even more than you already have?”

      “You’re not going to make me feel guilty about a situation all your own doing,” she told him, ignoring the hint of shame that flared inside of her anyway, as if he had a point.

      He does not have a point. He hurt Omar, kidnapped you—but she could still feel it inside of her. As if her own body took his side over her own.

      “Or perhaps you thought we should address the subject of marital rights. Did you imagine I would insist?” Rihad moved closer and Sterling held her breath, but he only stopped there a breath away from her, his gaze burnished gold on hers, and still too much like a caress. “I hate to disappoint you. But I have far better things to do than force myself on my brother’s—”

      Sterling couldn’t hear him call her a whore on the day she’d married him. He’d come close enough out on the terrace. She couldn’t hear him say it explicitly, and she didn’t want to consider why that was. What that could mean.

      “Don’t let me keep you, then,” she said quickly before he could say it. “I’ll be right here. Hating you. Married to you. Trapped with you. Doesn’t that sound pleasant?”

      “That sounds like normal life led by married couples the world over,” he retorted, and then he laughed. It seemed to roll through her and a smart woman, Sterling knew, would have backed away from him then. Found safer ground no matter if it looked like retreat. But she, of course, stood tall. “And yet there is nothing normal

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