LITMIR.BIZ

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perfect lips firmed. “But I am a man of duty, not desire. Which means as much as I would prefer to pretend you and whatever child you carry do not exist, I cannot.”

      She couldn’t breathe for a moment. It was almost too much. It threw her back in time to that terrible house in Iowa and the foster parents who had believed that she was nothing but their personal punching bag. Worthless and dirtied, somehow, by her own tragic history. And their contempt. For a moment she almost tipped back over into all that darkness—but then she caught his gaze again, so bright and hard at once, and it bolstered her. It lifted her.

      Because she’d survived far worse than this man and like hell would she slide back into that headspace after a few mean words.

      “Oh, no,” she murmured icily. “You might get this toxic spill all over your sheikhdom. What then?”

      “You’ll find I am not so easily led astray,” he said, his voice as low as hers had been, but layered with a kind of dark heat she could feel within her. Making her too warm in all kinds of places she didn’t understand. “And I’ve had a lifetime of preparation. You’re merely one more disaster it falls to me to handle.”

      “And then, oddly, you wonder why I don’t want to go anywhere with you.” She squared her shoulders. “I’m not afraid of you, Rihad.”

      And the strange thing was, she wasn’t. He made her anxious, yes—panicky about the future. But that wasn’t the same thing as afraid. She didn’t know what to make of that. It didn’t make any sense.

      “Go ahead,” Rihad suggested, those disturbingly bright eyes of his tearing into her, seeing far too much. “Fight me if you like. Scream loud enough to draw down the sun. Kick and scratch and hurl invective as it pleases you.” He shrugged almost lazily, and Sterling’s throat felt tight, while far to the south, parts of her she’d always largely ignored bloomed with a mad heat. “But this will still end the same way, no matter what you do. What is Omar’s belongs to Bakri. And what is Bakri’s is mine. And I will do what I must to protect what is mine, Sterling, even if it means I must kidnap you to accomplish it.”

      He straightened then, though his gaze never shifted from hers, and Sterling couldn’t tell if that lump in her throat was panic or tears or something a good deal more like fate.

      Don’t be absurd, she snapped at herself, but that sensation of foreboding snaked down her back all the same.

      “But by all means,” he said, daring her in that soft way that danced along her limbs and made her skin prickle with warning, and something much warmer, “try me.”

      Sterling opted to decline that offer with as much icy silence as she could muster. She also ignored his offered hand, but she pushed herself out of the SUV and onto the tarmac anyway, because she’d always been a realist at heart. Oh, her years with Omar had tempted her to surrender to optimism, but deep down she’d always known better. She’d always known what lurked down there beneath the happiest-seeming moments. She’d always assumed, on some level, that it would all end badly.

      So she stood on her own two feet in front of this terrible man and she made the command decision to keep playing her role. Sterling McRae, rich man’s whore. Toxic spill, no less. Coveted by many, captured by none save Omar. She’d gotten very good at it. She reached up and unclipped her strawberry blond hair, shaking her head to send it tumbling down around her shoulders. She shifted position so that her breasts were thrust out and saw the very male response in his eyes.

      All men were the same after all, even when a woman was as far along as she was. Even kings.

      “How long will you be kidnapping me for?” she asked, so very politely.

      “Ah, Sterling,” he replied in the same tone, though his look was far darker, and she had to fight back a betraying sort of flush when he shifted, the lean power of his body too obvious, too close. “Haven’t you guessed yet how this must end?”

      She eyed him with sheer dislike. “You dropping dead where you stand, if there is a God.”

      He shook his head at her. “You can always take to prayer, if you feel it will help. It won’t change what must happen, but perhaps you’ll approach it all with some measure of serenity.”

      “Is that what you call this? ‘Serenity’?”

      His fine, dark brows lifted. “I call it duty. I doubt you’d recognize it if you tripped over it.”

      “Says the man who already married a stranger on command once and thought that made him virtuous,” she snapped, the past he’d thrown in Omar’s face so often coming back to her then in a burst. “I’m more afraid of tripping over your ego than your duty.”

      “You don’t know anything about my first marriage,” Rihad told her with a lethal, vicious edge in his voice. “Not one single thing.”

      “I know that expecting Omar to make the same sacrifice was hideous,” she said crisply, as if she wasn’t the least bit shaken. Though still…not afraid of him, somehow. “And you can tell yourself any stories you want about me and my past and whatever else, but I had nothing to do with it. I was the only thing in his life he liked.”

      “Sterling.”

      His face was closed down then, granite and bone. Utterly forbidding.

      “If this is where you bore me with self-serving lies about your idyllic arranged first marriage, I think I’ll pass.” She eyed him. “I’m not as big a fan of stories as you seem to be.”

      “It is my second marriage that should concern you, not my first.”

      She stared back at him. Then she understood, in a terrible rush that felt like a tide coming in, crashing over her and rolling her into the undertow, then sweeping her far out to sea. All in that instant.

      “Do I know the lucky bride?” Sterling asked, her voice as sharp as the razor-edged smile she aimed at him. “I’d like to convey my condolences.”

      “An heir to my kingdom cannot be born out of wedlock,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if that note in his voice was fury or satisfaction. Perhaps it was both. It thudded in her all the same. “You must realize this.”

      She jerked up her chin, belligerently. “I’m not marrying you. I’m not getting on that plane, I’m not letting you near my baby, and I’m definitely not marrying you. Your heirs are your own damned problem.”

      And the sheikh only smiled.

      “I didn’t ask you to marry me,” he said softly. “I told you what was going to happen. Resign yourself to it or do not, it won’t make any difference. It will happen all the same.”

      “You can’t tell me to do anything,” Sterling fired back at him, and she couldn’t control the way she trembled then, as if he’d already clapped her in chains and carted her away to his far-off dungeon. “And you certainly can’t make me marry you!”

      “Pay attention, Sterling.” Rihad’s gaze was hotter than the summer sun, and far more destructive. And his will was an iron thing, as if he didn’t require chains. She could feel it wrapped around her already, pressing against her skin like metal. “I am the King of Bakri. I don’t require your consent. I can do whatever the hell I want, whenever I want. And I will.”

       CHAPTER FOUR

      STERLING MARRIED SHEIKH RIHAD AL BAKRI, King of Bakri, at his royal palace on a lovely terrace overlooking the gleaming Bakrian Sea a mere two weeks later, surrounded by his assorted loyal subjects and entirely against her will.

      Not that anyone appeared to care if the bride was willing. Least of all the groom.

      “I don’t want to marry this man,” she told the assembled throng when Rihad walked her through the

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