LITMIR.BIZ

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was a different person than the woman who had said that to him. And this incarnation of herself didn’t want to let the tarnish of that one seep into what they’d built between them in the past month. She thought it might break her apart.

      “It’s only going to get worse.” Sterling folded her hands in her lap and tried to remain calm, or at least to look it. “It always gets worse. They already call me the Queen Whore.”

      “Not out loud or in print, they don’t.” There was no softness on his starkly beautiful face then. No hint of a curve to his lush mouth. Only that dangerous light in his dark gold eyes. “Not unless they wish to explain themselves to me personally. Let me assure you, no one does.”

      “You can’t threaten everyone on the planet, Rihad. You can’t decree that people forget my past.”

      “Your imagined past.”

      “What does that matter? When it comes to perception, all that matters is what people believe.” She shook her head at him. “Isn’t that why we went on our honeymoon in the first place?”

      “It was one among many reasons,” he said, and his dark gold eyes moved over her the way his hands did so freely, these days. And she was still so astonished that she liked it. That she more than liked it. “The least important, I think.”

      He looked dark and forbidding in the gleaming robes he’d worn today for his meetings with some of the local tribes later on, but he didn’t intimidate her any longer. Not the way he once had. Now all that power, all that dark authority he wore so easily, made her shiver for entirely different reasons. His dark gold eyes fixed on hers and everything inside her stilled in glorious anticipation, the way it always did now. Goose bumps moved sinuously over her arms and shoulders, and she wished she could continue to lose herself in it. In him.

      But she knew what he didn’t.

      That her past was a living thing that stalked her. It always would. It always did, because it lived inside of her. No matter what she did, or how, the world thought the worst of her. That wouldn’t change. It had never changed. She’d told herself she was immune to it for all those years with Omar, because that kind of notoriety had been exactly what he’d wanted and they’d courted it together.

      But Rihad was different. Rihad wasn’t hiding. The last thing Rihad needed was notoriety.

      Rihad deserved a whole lot better than a secondhand queen he’d married only for the baby’s sake, no matter how they fit together in bed. Sex might have been new to Sterling, but it wasn’t to him. He could get it anywhere, she reminded herself brusquely and ignored the deep pang inside her at the thought. He was the King of Bakri. There would be women lining the streets of Bakri City should he indicate he was looking.

      Sterling was the one who couldn’t imagine anyone but him touching her. She was the broken one, all the way through.

      “You married yourself off to stop a scandal,” she reminded him lightly, though nothing inside of her felt anything like light. It was as if the moment she’d acknowledged the darkness, it had seeped into everything. Every part of her. “Not to perpetuate one every time you step outside the palace walls.”

      He considered her for a moment, his dark gaze unreadable. He was still standing there in the arched doorway that led into his rooms, where she’d spent the bulk of her time since they’d returned from the desert. They hadn’t even discussed it—he’d simply moved her things into his suite. Sterling had been so spellbound by this man it hadn’t occurred to her to maintain any distance.

      For his sake, not hers.

      And it was then, frowning up at him, angry at herself and worried about his future, that Sterling understood that she’d fallen in love with Rihad al Bakri.

      It stunned her. It was a hit as brutal as that tabloid headline, swift and to her gut, with the force of a hard kick. She didn’t know how she managed to keep from doubling over. How she managed to keep looking at him as if her entire life hadn’t run aground right then and there, decisively and disastrously.

      Love wasn’t something Sterling could do. Ever.

      How had she managed to fool herself all this time? A baby. A husband. No one will ever love you, little girl, they’d told her. This is what you deserve. Deep down, you know it.

      She did know it. And she never should have let all of this get so complicated.

      “What can possibly be going through your head?” Rihad asked quietly, jolting Sterling’s attention back to him. “To put such a look on your face?”

      “I was only thinking about how soon we should divorce,” Sterling said, in a surprisingly even tone of voice. There were too many things rolling inside of her, making her feel unsteady on her own feet, as if she was a storm about to break. “That’s obviously the easiest and best way to solve this problem. You remain the dutiful, heroic king who married me only to secure Leyla’s position and when they discuss the scandal that is me, it won’t affect you at all.”

      He’d gone so still. His dark gold eyes burned.

      “Do I appear affected now?” It was a dangerous question, asked in that lethal tone of voice.

      “It will make me seem particularly heartless and horrible if I were to leave before Leyla is a year old,” Sterling continued matter-of-factly, not answering him. “That might be best, then. I trust that once everything’s died down, once you marry someone far more appropriate, we can work out a quiet way for me to stay in her life.”

      “Sterling.” He waited until she met his hard gaze, and she could admit that it was difficult. That it cost her. “What the hell are you talking about?”

      “Our divorce,” she said, struggling to keep her voice light. To gaze back at him as if there was something more inside her than a great weight and a terrible sob breaking her ribs apart. “Leyla is now legitimate. A princess of Bakri, as you planned. There’s no reason to drag this out if my presence here is causing you trouble. That’s silly.”

      “Because it has worked out so terribly for you thus far?” he asked, a hard edge in his voice, like a lash, and she had to force herself not to react to it. Not to show him how it had landed and how it hurt. “My condolences, Sterling. When you came apart beneath my mouth in the shower this morning, twice, I had the strangest impression that you’d resigned yourself to the horrors of this marriage. Somehow.”

      She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and made herself glare at him as if she still hated him—as if she’d ever really hated him—her heart pounding at her as if she was running. She wished she was.

      Then again, this was how it had started.

      “That’s sex,” she said dismissively, and she felt something sharp-edged scrape inside her as she said it. As if she wanted to hurt him. As if she wanted to remind him that this had never been meant to happen between them. As if he was to blame for the fact she’d lost herself in sex and happy fantasies of happy lives she could never have. As if loving him was something he’d done to her. A punishment for daring to imagine she could love anyone without repercussions, when she’d been taught otherwise a very long time ago. “I’ve never had it before, as you know. It turns out, it’s a lot of fun.”

      “Fun,” he repeated softly, in a way that should have terrified her.

      She told herself it didn’t. Or that it didn’t matter either way.

      “And I appreciate you introducing me to this whole new world,” she said, never shifting her gaze from his. “I do.”

      “Introducing you?” he echoed, and that time, a chill sneaked down her back. Her heart already ached. Her stomach twisted. But if she loved him, if she loved her daughter—and God help her, but she did, so much more than she’d known she was capable of loving anything—she had to fix this.

      And there was only one way to do that.

      Maybe she’d always

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