Protecting the Desert Heir

He was needling her, of course, and he couldn’t have said why. What could he possibly gain from it? A glance in the rearview mirror showed him her profile, however, not that cool frown he found he very nearly enjoyed. She’d turned her head as if to stare back at the building as he pulled the car into traffic. As if leaving it—this place she’d lived with his brother, or off his brother if he was more precise—was difficult for her.

Rihad supposed it must have been. It would be much harder to find a patron now, no doubt. She was older, for one thing. Well-known—infamous, even—for her role as another man’s prize possession, across whole years. Soon to be a mother to another man’s child, which the sort of men who regularly trafficked in mistresses would be unlikely to find appealing.

Because you find her so unappealing even now, when she is huge with your brother’s child, a derisive voice inside chided him. Liar.

Rihad ignored that, too. He could not find himself attracted to his brother’s infamous leftovers. He would not allow it.

“The father of my child is dead,” Sterling said, her voice so frozen that if he hadn’t stolen that glance at her, he’d have believed she really was utterly devoid of emotion.

“And you loved him so much you wish to follow him into that great night?” He couldn’t quite keep the sardonic inflection from his own voice, and her head swung back toward him, her lovely brow creasing again. “That seems a rather desperate form of tribute, don’t you think? The province of the cowed and the cowardly, in my opinion. Living is harder. That’s the point of it.”

“Am I having an auditory hallucination?”

That was obviously a rhetorical question. Still, Rihad shrugged as he turned onto the narrow highway that clung to the east side of the city and led out of town, and replied, “I cannot answer that for you.”

“Or are you quizzing me—in a snide manner—about the death of someone I loved? You’re a driver.”

And her tone was withering, but there was something about it that spoke of repressed emotions, hidden fears. Or perhaps he was the one hearing things then.

“I don’t care what you think about my life or my choices or my feelings, in case that’s not clear. I want you to drive the damned car upstate, no more and no less. Is that all right with you? Or do you have more unsolicited opinions to share?”

Rihad smiled as he merged onto a different highway and headed toward the top of the island and the stately bridge that would lead to the airfield where his jet should be waiting, refueled and ready, upon his arrival. Or heads would roll.

“Where are you going?” he asked her with deceptive casualness. “Upstate New York is lovely in the summer, but it is not possible to outrun anything in your condition. Surely you must realize this.”

“My condition.” She repeated the words as if, until she sounded them out, she couldn’t believe she’d heard them correctly. “I beg your pardon?”

“You look as if you’re used to being kept well,” Rihad continued. Mildly. “That will be hard to replicate.”

She swiped those huge, concealing sunglasses off her face, and Rihad wished she hadn’t. She was nothing less than perfection, even in a quick glance in the rearview mirror of a moving vehicle, and he felt as if he’d been kicked by a horse. Her eyes were far bluer than the sky outside and she was more delicate, somehow, than she appeared in photographs. More vulnerable, he might have thought, had she not looked so outraged.

“Does it make you feel good to insult people you don’t know?” she demanded, also in a tone he’d never heard directed at him before. This woman seemed to be full of such tones. “Is that the kind of man you are?”

“What kind of man I am or am not is hardly something you will be capable of ascertaining from the backseat of this vehicle.”

“Yet you feel perfectly comfortable shredding my character from the front, of course. What a shock.”

Rihad didn’t like the tightness in his chest then. “Were you not kept well? Please accept my condolences. Perhaps you should have found a better patron before you permitted such a shoddy one to impregnate you.”

He didn’t know what he expected. Floods of tears? But Sterling sat straighter in her seat, managing to look both regal and dignified, which only made that constriction around his chest pull tighter.

“Let me guess,” she said after a hard pause, her tone so scathing she was clearly nowhere near tears of any kind. “This is some kind of game to you. You intrude upon people’s lives, insult them, and then what? Is causing pain its own reward—or are you hoping they’ll do something crazy to get away from you, like demand you leave them by the side of the road? Exactly what do you get out of being this nasty?”