LITMIR.BIZ

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as if she expected him to beat her, all because she’d told him the truth.

      He thought that perhaps he had no business being a king, if he was such a remarkably bad one.

      “I wish I could do that, Amaya,” he said after a long moment. “More than you know.”

      She stared at him as if she couldn’t believe he’d said that. He wasn’t sure he could, either.

      He shrugged. “These are precarious times. The only possible way we will maintain our sovereignty is to unite with Daar Talaas. But you know this.”

      “There must be another way.”

      “If there was, don’t you think I would have found it?” He sat back in his chair, his eyes on the screen and on his sister. “It does not give me any particular pleasure to insist you do something you are so opposed to that you’ve been on the run all this time.”

      “But…?” she prompted, though he noticed that defiant way she held herself had softened.

      “But Kavian is a man who follows the ancient ways, and there is only one kind of alliance he holds sacred. Blood.” He studied Amaya then, saw the expression that moved over her face, that hint of something like heat in her gaze. “And I think you know this all too well, don’t you? Because while you were not exactly thrilled at the idea, you didn’t run away until after you met him at your engagement reception. Did he do something to you?”

      Alliance or not, Rihad would kill him. But Amaya only flushed then, though she tried to cover it with a frown.

      “The reality of the situation merely impressed itself upon me, that’s all. I realized that I’m not a Stone Age kind of a girl.”

      He didn’t believe her, but that was hardly his business.

      “I sympathize,” he said instead, and the thing of it was, he did. He truly did.

      “And I’m skeptical.”

      “Amaya, no one knows more about marrying for the sake of the kingdom than I do. I’m on my second such marriage.”

      “That doesn’t exactly recommend the ordeal.” Amaya’s frown deepened. Her eyes searched his for perhaps a moment too long. “You’re not the happiest man I’ve ever met.”

      And yet in comparison to Kavian, the desert warrior renowned for his ability to wage war like an ancient warlord, Rihad was a nonstop comedy show. Neither one of them pointed that out and yet it hung there between them anyway.

      For a moment they only gazed at each other, separated by their years, the screen, her continued refusal to surrender to the inevitable.

      “Don’t believe everything you read,” he advised her. “My marriage is not an ordeal.” He felt a sharp pang of disloyalty then, because he’d forgotten about Tasnim entirely. It was as if he really was a stranger, inhabiting the same body but utterly changed, all because of one lush woman and her artlessly addictive mouth. “And my first marriage might not have been a love match, but it was good. We were content.”

      Amaya’s hand crept up to her neck and she cupped her hand there, then looked away.

      “Kavian is not the kind of man who is ever going to be content,” she said, so softly he almost didn’t hear her. The old version of himself would have pretended he hadn’t.

      “I wish I could call it off,” he told her quietly, and saw her swallow hard. Was he that harsh? That she had no idea that he wanted to protect her—that he would have if he could? “But you signed all the papers. You made your initial vows. By the laws of Daar Talaas, you are already his.”

      She shuddered, and when she looked at him again, he felt that great loosening inside him again, as if he’d lost this, too. This relationship with the only sibling he had left. This sister who clearly had no idea that he loved her, too.

      He felt an unknown and unpleasant sensation swamp him then and realized he’d felt it before. When Sterling had stood there before him with her eyes closed and her head bowed, visibly forcing herself to relax, the better to take a hit he hadn’t been planning to deliver.

       Helplessness.

      He loathed it.

      “Amaya.” Her head jerked around and her eyes met his, and he saw confusion there. And something else, something a little more like haunted. “You are not a mere pawn. I care what happens to you. But I can’t fix this.”

      “So I am doomed.” And her voice cracked on that last word. “There is no hope.”

      “You can appeal to Kavian himself—”

      “I’d have better luck appealing to a sandstorm in the desert!”

      “Amaya.” But he didn’t know what to say. He was a goddamned king and what was the point? He couldn’t save anyone. “I’m sorry.”

      “So am I.” She shook her head, as if she was shaking something off. “I don’t want war, Rihad. I don’t want Bakri to fall. But I don’t want to be Kavian’s…possession, either. I won’t.”

      And her screen went dark.

      Leaving Rihad alone with his thoughts and his regrets, which were darker still.

       CHAPTER NINE

      THE SOUND OF the helicopter’s rotor blades faded off into the distance, taking with it Sterling’s halfhearted hopes that they might be called back to the palace to tend to some kind of governmental issue that simply couldn’t wait.

      And then the only sound—in and around and between the brightly colored tents tucked there between the towering desert sand dunes and arrayed around the series of tree-lined pools that shouldn’t have existed in so arid a place at all—was the wind. It danced over the tops of the tents, making the hard canvas bend and stretch beneath the high sun far above, and then clattered its way through the palm trees.

      Sterling was glad, because otherwise she was certain the only noise around for the miles and miles of uninhabited Bakrian desert they’d covered to get here would be the crazy pounding of her heart.

      Rihad, of course, didn’t appear to hear any of it. He was conducting a conversation in rapid-fire Arabic into the satellite phone at his ear, striding toward one of the larger tents nearer the water as if he expected her to follow along obediently in his wake.

      Instead, Sterling stayed where she was. She tilted her head back and let the desert sun play over her face. She liked the lick of heat, the tease of the dry wind against her skin and in the ends of the hair she’d scraped into a low ponytail beneath a wide-brimmed hat. She liked the murmur of the water from the nearby pools, the suggestion of cool, inviting shade beneath the trees and inside the tents. She would have been enchanted by the whole desert oasis thing altogether were it not for the fact he’d insisted she leave Leyla behind with the nurses, which was making her anxious.

      And for what she suspected Rihad meant to accomplish here, which made her…something a lot more complicated than simply anxious.

      “Maybe we can go in a month or two,” she’d said when he’d brought up their perception-altering honeymoon again at another one of their dinners. This one had been more intimate, set up in his private dining suite with the wraparound balcony that opened up over the whole of Bakri City, where all she could seem to think about was his hands on her body, his hardness clenched tight between her legs. “When Leyla is a little bigger and will be better about me going away for a night.”

      Rihad had appeared focused on the food on his plate that night, not on her, though she should have known better than to believe that.

      “It was not an invitation, as I think you know,” he’d said after a moment. “It was an order. A royal command, even.”

      “Apparently,

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