Protecting the Desert Heir

“That is a fine sentiment, Sterling, but all the reasons I married you held true for him, too.”

“I doubt very much it was his intention to die,” she threw back at him. “If he hadn’t, maybe we would have married. Had he told me the reasons why that would help Leyla, I would have relented. But we’ll never know what might have happened, will we?”

“I know that if he’d come to me, if he’d told me, I would not have turned my back on him. That’s what I know.” Rihad let out a long breath. “I will never understand why he did not.”

Sterling made a frustrated noise. “That might have a bit more weight if you hadn’t spent all these years acting as if he was a communicable disease.”

He made a sound of protest, but she wasn’t listening to him. Instead, she thrust one of her fists at him as if she wanted to hit him, but held herself back at the last moment.

“All you did was talk about how you had to clean up after him, as if he was garbage.” And her voice was so bitter then. Her blue eyes the darkest he’d ever seen them. “Maybe if he’d thought he could trust you, if you cared about anything besides the damned country, he might have risked coming out to you.”

“I loved him.”

Again that fist, not quite making contact with his chest.

“Actions speak louder than words, Rihad. Don’t blame Omar for your failure to treat him like a person. That’s on you. That’s entirely on you.”

And whatever was left inside of him shattered at that. Leaving him nothing but a howling emptiness, and the uncomfortable ring of a truth within it that he’d have given anything not to face.

“Damn you,” he whispered, his tone harsh and broken, and he didn’t try to hide it.

Then he reached for her, because he knew, somehow, that Sterling was the only person alive who could soothe that shattered thing in him—

But she flinched away from him and threw up her arms, as if she’d expected him to haul off and hit her.

As if, he understood as everything inside of him screeched to a halt and then turned cold, someone had done so before.

CHAPTER EIGHT

STERLING FLINCHED, WHEN SHE knew better than that. But she couldn’t seem to help herself.

She’d finally pushed him too far. She’d felt safe with him all this time, safer than she’d ever felt with another man, but that was before. She’d gone over the edge at last and she’d seen that broken look on his face.

She knew what it meant. She remembered too well.

She expected the hit. It had been a long, long time, but she thought she could take it. There was no warding off a blow from a man as strong as he was or as close, but if she could take the inevitable fall well, it wouldn’t immobilize her. The trick was not to tense up too much in anticipation, and then to curl into a tight ball against the kick—

“Sterling,” Rihad said then, in that low, dark way of his that rippled through her, making her want to cry. Making her want him, too, which she thought was evidence that she was deeply sick in the head. Twisted all the way through, the way they’d always told her she was. “What do you think is happening here?”

“Please,” she whispered, trying to stand tall, to square her shoulders despite the fact she couldn’t stop shaking. “Just don’t wake the baby. I don’t want her to see.”

And she closed her eyes, tried not to brace herself too much and waited for him to hit her.

The way her foster parents always had.

She heard nothing. For one lifetime, then another.

Then, finally, Rihad’s voice, but he wasn’t speaking to her. He spoke in Arabic, and she didn’t have to understand the words he used to know he was issuing orders again in that matter-of-fact, deeply autocratic way of his that was as much a part of him as breathing.

Then again, the quiet.

The breeze above and the water all around, and she kept her eyes shut tight because the quiet was the trick. It was always a trick. The false sense of security had always, always tripped her up. The moment she’d thought it wasn’t going to happen and looked to see was the moment they’d laid her flat.

She heard footsteps, then the sound of Leyla’s buggy being wheeled away, and her stomach turned over, then plummeted. He was sending the baby off with the nurses, as she’d asked. That meant—

She flinched away from his hand on her arm, making it that much worse. Her eyes flew open and met his, burning dark, dark gold and far too close, and she nearly bit off her tongue.