He didn’t move a muscle. She knew that because she was watching him so closely that she could see it when he breathed. He didn’t even tense. And yet he seemed to explode outward, becoming twice his size and a thousand times more dangerous, like some kind of mystical being let loose from its cage at last.
And every single cell in Sterling’s body shivered to red alert.
She was flushed with the heat of it. Her skin seemed to ache for his touch. Her breasts felt too heavy and the taut peaks pulled tight. Inside of her, there was a low, hot humming that coiled between her legs and pulsed. Hard and wet. Ready.
It was the most carnal experience of her entire life.
It was the only carnal experience she’d ever had, save that last kiss.
And they weren’t even touching.
* * *
That he did not turn over the table between them and taste her again right now was, Rihad thought, the only evidence remaining that he had once been a civilized man.
He thought too much about his enemies as it was. He did not want to think about Sterling’s pants. He did not want to think about that body of hers that had redefined grace while heavily pregnant and now... She was difficult to look away from.
He found he rarely did.
Rihad did not want to think about the way he fought himself to keep from touching her, because he was determined to make this marriage work in some fashion or another, the way it had with his first wife. He and Tasnim had been friends, after a fashion. They’d eased into the physical aspects of their marriage and had worked on their friendship first. He’d decided at some point during the first days of gorgeous little Leyla’s life that he owed her mother no less, no matter how they’d come to find themselves married.
But that did not explain why he took himself in hand each morning in his shower to slake his growing need. And it certainly did not explain the tempting array of images he tortured himself with as he did so.
His voice was quiet when he finally answered her, and it cost him. “Can’t I be preoccupied with both the perception of our marriage and ‘getting in your pants,’ as you so charmingly put it?”
“Unlikely. Men are more often focused on the one thing above all else.”
“That shows how little you know me. I am not merely a man. I am a king.”
“I know you enough, Your Majesty.”
Her blue eyes rivaled the summer sun above them, and yet even when she looked straight at him he was certain he could see the walls she kept up, high and bolstered. He loathed them more and more each day. He wanted them knocked down. And he was entirely too aware that the urge was not exactly friendly.
“And besides,” she continued, her voice light, “you don’t really want into these pants anyway.” She let out a self-deprecating laugh and waved her free hand in the general direction of her midsection. “Everything’s gone a little crazy after giving birth.”
He snorted. “Self-deprecation does not suit you, Sterling.”
She frowned at him, and he saw her ball her hands into fists, then drop them in her lap. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you were gifted with the sort of genetics that make most women green with envy, as I suspect you are aware.” He shifted in his chair and let his gaze move all over her, which was not exactly an improvement for that wild hunger battering at him from within. Because she had been so beautiful when they’d met that she’d made Manhattan disappear so he could better admire her. And she grew more beautiful by the day. And the fact that she was no longer big with her pregnancy was the least part of that. “You gained a minimal amount of weight while carrying Leyla, lost most of it while giving birth to her and are probably healthier now than when you got pregnant in the first place. If the fashionably gaunt pictures I’ve seen of you back then are any guide.”
He saw emotions he couldn’t name flit across her face, one after the next, and he hated that he couldn’t read them. Or her. That she defied him even now, without a single word, by simple virtue of remaining opaque.
Rihad couldn’t have said when he’d begun to find that intolerable.
“I’ll thank you to keep your comments on my body to yourself.”
He smiled, and then wider when he saw the spray of goose bumps rise along her bare arms. “Unfortunately for you, Sterling, you are mine. And I take a keen interest in the welfare of the things that belong to me, whether that means trade prospects in my cities or my wife’s form.”
She was flushed, he noted, and he was sure that if he mentioned it she would claim it was disgust. Distress. But he didn’t believe that.