LITMIR.BIZ

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the weeks since Rihad had forcibly removed Leyla from her arms and insisted Sterling take care of herself. Well. It was more that Rihad had decreed that they would take their meals here, whenever it was possible with his schedule, and Sterling hadn’t had it in her to object.

      You didn’t want to object, a voice deep inside of her whispered. Or you would have.

      “It seems I must keep an eye on you,” he’d said when he’d informed her of this new schedule. She’d been fresh from her first full night of sleep since Leyla’s birth and had felt drunk with it. Like a different person.

      And he had looked at her in a way that had made her breath catch, as if he’d truly wanted nothing more than to take care of her. As if he really was some kind of guardian angel—though she knew better. She did.

      Life had shifted all around her in these strange months since Leyla’s birth, then settled into a new form altogether. Sterling slept well at last. She spent her days with the baby and the fleet of cheerful, efficient nurses Rihad had acquired and who made Sterling feel like twice the mother she suspected she was. She took long walks around the palace and the surrounding grounds and gardens, sometimes pushing Leyla’s buggy and sometimes on her own, enjoying how much more like herself she felt by the day.

      How oddly content she felt, here in her forced marriage to a man she’d vowed years ago to hate forever, no matter if Omar had or not. She’d been happy to carry that torch. She’d meant it on their wedding day when she’d told Rihad she hated him.

       And then you kissed him.

      But she didn’t want to think about that.

      The presence of the nurses meant she had time to read again, to exchange emails with her friends in New York, to reacquaint herself with the life she’d put on hold when Omar had died. She started to imagine what might come next for her. She got back in touch with the foundation she’d worked with to aid foster children once they aged out of the system and found in the various responses to her marriage that things were very different now.

      Omar’s friends, perhaps predictably, felt betrayed.

      I understand why you’d feel that way, she emailed one after the next, trying hard to hold on to her patience—because where had they all been when she’d tried to run from Rihad? They’d texted, yes. Called. But not one of them had actually shown up that morning to help a heavily pregnant woman escape her fate.

      Her entire plan had been to disappear somewhere and hope for the best. That had worked out well enough when she’d been fifteen and on her own—or in any case, she’d survived—but would it have been fair to Leyla? Sterling might have been married against her will, but a little bit of distance and a whole lot more sleep had made her think that having Leyla’s future assured was what mattered. That it was the only thing that mattered—and no matter that it was Omar’s infamously judgmental brother who’d made that possible.

      But give me some credit, she’d chided Omar’s old friends—her old friends, too, not that anyone seemed to remember that while busy picking sides. Leyla is a princess and Bakri is a part of her birthright she can only access if legitimate. That’s all this marriage is: legitimacy for Leyla.

      The charities and foundations she’d worked with who’d known her as Omar’s lover, by contrast, were ecstatic at the notion of working with the Queen of Bakri—a title Sterling hadn’t fully realized was hers to claim now.

      Maybe a little bit too ecstatically, she’d thought only that morning, when yet another solicitation had hit her inbox.

      It was only then that she realized that Rihad was staring at her across the table, and that she had no idea how much time had passed since she’d last spoken.

      “Why are you looking at me like that?”

      “You told me you wished to apologize and then lapsed into silence,” he replied, mildly enough—though once again, there was a gleam in the dark gold of his gaze that reminded her what a dangerous man he was. That suggested he was waiting for something as he watched her. “I thought perhaps you were rendered mute by the enormity of your sins.”

      “My sins have been widely overexaggerated, I think.” It had been two months since that kiss she found herself thinking about much more than she should. It was something about his mouth, crooked slightly in that sardonic way of his that thudded through her. “I wanted to apologize for falling apart the way I did in the first place. It’s taken me weeks to realize just how out of it I was.”

      Rihad shifted in his seat, his strong fingers toying with the steaming cup of rich coffee before him on the table. And though the baby slept happily in her little buggy beside Sterling’s chair, Sterling had the sudden, crazy desire to wake her up—so there would be something else to concentrate on, something other than the way this lethal man was looking at her. A distraction from all of this intensity that swirled between them like the desert heat itself.

      “And here I thought your apology would be for telling all your American friends that our marriage was a fake.”

      She blinked. “What?”

      A deeper, darker crook of that mouth. “I think you heard me.”

      “Yes, but…” Had he been reading her email? But even if he had been, and she wasn’t sure she’d put it past him, she’d never said that. Never quite that. “I never said that. Not to anyone.”

      “Were you misquoted, then?” He slid his tablet computer across the table to her. “Show me where, and I will notify my attorneys at once.”

      Sterling swiped her finger across the screen and stared down at the page that opened before her, from a famously snide tabloid paper.

      Queen of the Rebound screamed the headline. Then beneath it:

      Sexy Sterling uses famous wiles to bewitch Omar’s grieving brother, the King of Bakri, but tells pals back home: “This marriage is for Baby Leyla. It’s all for show.”

      The worst part, Sterling thought as she glared down at the offensive article and felt her stomach drop to her feet, was that she had no idea which of the people she’d thought were her friends had betrayed her.

      “You understand that this is problematic, do you not?” he asked, still in that mild tone—though she was starting to see that there were other truths in that hard gleam in his eyes, in the tense way he held that mouthwatering body of his as he sat there in one of those dark suits of his that some artist of a tailor had crafted to perfectly flatter every hard plane, every ripple of muscle. Every inch of sensual male threat that emanated from him, made worse because of the luxurious trappings.

      “It’s a tabloid,” she said dismissively, because she might note that threat in him but for some reason, it didn’t frighten her. Quite the opposite. “It’s their job to be problematic. It’s our job to ignore them.”

      “I would ordinarily agree with you,” Rihad said, so reasonably that she almost nodded along, almost lulled by his tone despite the way her pulse leaped in her veins. “But this is a delicate situation.”

      She deliberately misunderstood him, sliding the tablet back toward him and returning her attention to the selection of fruit and thick yogurt, flaky pastries and strong coffee, as if that was the most important thing she could possibly concentrate on just then: her breakfast. And so what if she wasn’t hungry?

      “This is tabloid nonsense, nothing more,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Nothing delicate about it, I’m afraid. They like to smash at things until they break, then claim they were broken all along. Surely you know this.”

      He didn’t speak for a moment and she tried to pretend that didn’t get to her—but eventually she couldn’t help herself and glanced up again, to find Rihad watching her too closely with a narrow sort of gaze, as if he was trying to puzzle her out.

      She swallowed hard, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she wanted to keep her secrets hidden from him,

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