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She thought he would throw something back at her, but he only continued to study her with that small smile in the corner of his mouth. Sterling took that as acquiescence—or whatever it was when powerful men gave in, without seeming to give at all.
Sterling rose and walked past him toward the deepest of the three pools that shimmered there only a few steps from where they’d had their dinner. All the pools were hung with their own lanterns, each casting a dancing, mellow light over the dark waters. It made the water seem something more than simply inviting. Mysterious. Seductive. She stepped onto the mat that had been laid out there beneath the lightly rustling palm trees and kicked off her slides, then dropped her pashmina.
“You realize you are not fooling me, I hope,” Rihad said almost conversationally, still lounging there beneath the canopy behind her. “I know exactly what you are doing.”
“Swimming?” she asked over her shoulder. “You are correct, Your Royal Majesty. Your powers of observation are truly magnificent.”
Then she pulled the floor-length, flowing dress she wore up and over her head, leaving herself in nothing at all but a very tiny, very provocative string bikini in a metallic, shiny gold.
She could feel his sudden stillness from behind her, predatory and vast, like an epic, nuclear implosion of the same hunger she knew beat in her, but she didn’t turn back toward him. She didn’t need to. This was the point. The tease. The distraction.
Getting him back a little bit. Making him pay.
And she’d spent enough time as a model to have rendered her nothing but practical, more or less, about her body. She might have given birth only a few months back. She might have a different shape now, and new marks like claws on a belly she doubted would ever be concave again. But she was well aware of the power of her curves. And she knew that standing there in a flirty gold bikini would make it as hard for Rihad to sleep at night as it had been for her since that morning in the palace gardens.
Sterling was very good at this after all. She’d made a living out of using her body like this, once upon a time.
But she didn’t want to think about the past. She wanted to keep it behind her, as long as she could. Tonight, she only wanted to make Rihad ache the way that she ached.
She didn’t look back at him, she looked at the inky black surface of the pool, lit with dancing gold from the lanterns, and it was like looking straight into Rihad’s mesmerizing gaze.
She dived right in.
CHAPTER TEN
THE WATER WAS COOL, CLEAR.
It was like a silken caress over her skin, long and luxurious at once, and if she could have, Sterling would have stayed beneath the surface of that pool forever. She let herself sink, then float beneath the surface, and pretended she could remain there. But eventually her lungs began to ache a little bit and she kicked back up into the night air.
To find Rihad much closer, squatting there at the edge of the water, his dark gaze fierce on hers. It made her heart leap inside her chest, so hard and so high she was surprised it didn’t make the water ripple in reaction.
“Do you think you are safe in the water?” he asked her, and there were stark lines stamped on his face as he gazed at her. As if need was carving into him, the way she could feel it in her, too.
Whittling away at her until she didn’t know what was left, or who she’d be when it was done.
“I think that safety is relative where you’re concerned,” she said now, perhaps a shade too flippantly. She was more enthusiastic about swimming than she was skilled at it, so she moved closer to the side of the pool, reaching out a hand to hold on to the edge. “Kings are not exactly known for putting the needs of their wives before their own.”
“You know a great many kings, do you?”
She slicked her hair back, as aware of the way his dark gold eyes tracked the movement as if he’d used his own hands. And his attention was like a live wire, ferocious and total.
“I’m aware of the entire history of the planet, if that’s what you mean.”
Rihad studied her in that focused, too-incisive way of his that made her want to do things to escape it. Before he could see every last corner of her dirty little soul.
“I have a modest hope that I am less bloodthirsty than many of the kings who predate me,” he was saying drily. “And I know I’m better to my wives than most of those, given I’ve yet to execute one.”
“Was that on the table here?”
