Protecting the Desert Heir

He lifted a shoulder, then dropped it in that way of his—the royal sheikh untouched by and uninterested in such lowly concerns.

“Life is filled with sacrifices, Sterling.” His voice scraped over her, so harsh she expected it had left marks. “There were always going to be consequences for your relationship with my brother, whether he told you so or not. This is but one of them.”

She shook her head, as much to clear it as to negate him. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me go.”

He considered her for a moment, and there was no reason at all Sterling should flush while he did.

“You cannot imagine I would release a member of my blood into your tender care, can you?” He sounded amazed. And that was so insulting it would have hurt, had not everything else hurt that much more already. “The child stays here. And if you have a shred of maternal feeling in you, which I doubt, so will you. A child needs its mother, I am reliably informed. Even if that mother is you.”

“Wonderful,” she managed to say then, her voice bitter and thick. “That sounds like quite a life sentence. How lucky I am to have been snatched off the street and forced into such an advantageous marriage with the most benevolent and thoughtful dictator around.”

“If you weren’t so appallingly self-centered, you’d see that you truly are lucky,” he retorted, a flash of something dark in those eyes of his. “Far luckier than you deserve. But then, thinking of others is hardly your strong suit, is it? Or you’d have left my brother alone years ago.”

“And a happy wedding day to you, too, Rihad,” she threw back at him, and it was easier to simply hate him. Cleaner. Less complicated. It felt like a relief, and she didn’t question why she felt so free to do it. “You’re a terrible man and will no doubt be a worse husband, in much the same way I’m sure you’re an awful king. Oh, joy.”

Temper cracked over his face then, dark and alarming, and she braced herself for whatever awful thing he might say next—whore whore whore, wash and repeat, whore whore whore, she thought with a mental roll of her eyes that suggested an insouciance she didn’t quite feel—but instead, he went still. Then frowned.

Not at her, exactly. More at the floor beneath her.

Sterling looked down to find a puddle around her, soaking the hem of her wedding dress and then spreading out across the inlaid mosaic tiles at her feet, and froze in horror. Had she actually humiliated herself to such a degree that she’d—

But then she understood.

The puddle announced what she should have guessed from her mounting discomfort throughout this conversation, but had been too furious and too emotional to face—that her water had broken.

Her baby was coming a few weeks early, whether she was ready or not.

CHAPTER FIVE

SOME THIRTY-SIX HOURS after he’d kissed the new wife he hadn’t wanted in an act of dark foolishness that had haunted him ever since, Rihad stood in the shadows of Sterling’s state-of-the-art hospital suite in the center of Bakri City and watched her sleep at last.

He didn’t know why he was there, lurking about like a spurned lover instead of the king, when they had both been forced into this marriage, him by circumstance and her by his own hand. Instead, he couldn’t seem to look away from Sterling, the woman he’d called a toxic spill.

He should not regret that. It was the truth, he knew, at least in terms of his brother’s life this past decade. But it was hard to remember that at the moment.

There were the faintest smudges beneath her impossibly long lashes, the only indication he could see on her lovely face of how she’d spent the past day and a half. And she was so beautiful, so very nearly angelic in repose, that it made him realize he’d never seen her like this before—so vulnerable, so soft. Not fighting him, poking at him, insulting him or challenging him. Not plastered across tabloid magazines with her breasts falling out of her neckline and Omar’s arm wrapped tightly around her.

Not toxic by any measure.

His chest felt too tight for his own ribs.

And there beside her, lying in a bassinet wrapped up in a swaddling blanket so that only the wisps of jet-black curls on her head poked out above her wrinkled little brown face, was a miracle.

It had been among the hardest things Rihad had ever done, to step aside and let a woman he barely trusted walk across a room to do this work that only she could do. After that scene in the palace, she’d been rushed to the hospital, where the finest doctors in the kingdom had assured them that while the baby was coming a bit early, that didn’t mean anything was wrong with either it or Rihad’s new bride. And sure enough, when Sterling’s exquisitely formed little daughter entered the world at last, she was perfect in every respect. Tiny, perhaps, but utterly, undeniably perfect.