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“Because it has worked out so terribly for you thus far?” he asked, a hard edge in his voice, like a lash, and she had to force herself not to react to it. Not to show him how it had landed and how it hurt. “My condolences, Sterling. When you came apart beneath my mouth in the shower this morning, twice, I had the strangest impression that you’d resigned yourself to the horrors of this marriage. Somehow.”
She crossed her arms beneath her breasts and made herself glare at him as if she still hated him—as if she’d ever really hated him—her heart pounding at her as if she was running. She wished she was.
Then again, this was how it had started.
“That’s sex,” she said dismissively, and she felt something sharp-edged scrape inside her as she said it. As if she wanted to hurt him. As if she wanted to remind him that this had never been meant to happen between them. As if he was to blame for the fact she’d lost herself in sex and happy fantasies of happy lives she could never have. As if loving him was something he’d done to her. A punishment for daring to imagine she could love anyone without repercussions, when she’d been taught otherwise a very long time ago. “I’ve never had it before, as you know. It turns out, it’s a lot of fun.”
“Fun,” he repeated softly, in a way that should have terrified her.
She told herself it didn’t. Or that it didn’t matter either way.
“And I appreciate you introducing me to this whole new world,” she said, never shifting her gaze from his. “I do.”
“Introducing you?” he echoed, and that time, a chill sneaked down her back. Her heart already ached. Her stomach twisted. But if she loved him, if she loved her daughter—and God help her, but she did, so much more than she’d known she was capable of loving anything—she had to fix this.
And there was only one way to do that.
Maybe she’d always known it would come to this. Maybe that was why she’d never touched a man in her life. Because no matter who he was, it would always end up right here. Face-to-face with the worst of her truths and no way to escape it.
There is no other man, a small voice inside intoned, like words chiseled into stone. Deep into her heart. Not for you.
She knew that was true, too. It didn’t change anything.
“But you’re not the only man alive, Rihad, regardless of how you act,” she told him then, before she could talk herself out of it. Before she could give in to all the things she wanted. “You were merely my first.”
* * *
For a moment Rihad held himself so still he thought he might have turned to stone himself, into one of the pillars that held up this palace of his, smooth and hard and cold all the way through.
Which would have been safer for Sterling by far.
Because what shook in him, rolling and buckling, seismic and intense, was so vast he was surprised the whole cursed palace didn’t crumble down around them where they stood. There was a clutching sensation in his chest, a pounding in his head and a murderous streak lighting him up like a bloody lantern.
“I am your first, yes,” he said, in the voice of the civilized man that he’d always thought he was, before her—a king, for his sins, not this wild, fanged creature within that wanted only to howl. Then stake its claim. “And your last, Sterling. Let us make sure that part is clear.”
“That’s not up to you,” she said, tilting her chin up as if she was expecting a wrestling match to break out.
Rihad could think of few things he’d like more than to put his hands on her, but he wouldn’t do it just then. Not while he was still battling his temper, which was all the more unpredictable because he was so unused to it.
He’d never understood desire. Need. This kind of exquisite weakness. Now he was made of nothing else.
He tried to remain calm. Or at least sound calm. “I think you’ll find it is.”
“There’s no need to get so emotional,” she chided, and he was as astonished as that day back in New York when she’d started issuing orders. She stood, smoothing her hands down the front of the long dress she wore over her bare feet, a combination he found maddeningly erotic. Or was that another emotion? He seemed to be full of them where she was concerned. “I don’t know why you’re not seeing this clearly. The sooner we divorce, the easier it will be to rehabilitate your image.”
“My image is fine.”
Sterling inclined her head toward the table and his tablet and all those snide tabloid articles. “Evidently not.”
