Читать книгу Royal Families Vs. Historicals - Annie West, Rebecca Winters - Страница 68

STERLING GAPED AT HIM, her head spinning madly at the sudden shift in conversation and her stomach in a new, hard knot.

“You look at me as if you expect me to transform into a monster where I stand,” Rihad pointed out with a certain gruffness, almost as if that wounded him. She told herself she was imagining it. “All fangs and claws and evil intent.”

“I’m not sure you haven’t already done so.”

That mouth of his crooked into something not quite a smile. He reached over and tucked a stray tendril of her copper-blond hair behind one ear, and neither one of them moved for a long, shattering instant.

Then he straightened to his full height, but she could still see that steely glint in his dark gold eyes, the potency of his gaze undiminished.

“I am not going to go on a honeymoon, whether real or for show, with a woman whose head is filled with another man, Sterling. It’s time you told me about my brother and your relationship with him.”

He didn’t object when she pushed back the chair and surged to her feet, hurriedly stepping away from him. He only watched her as she went, and that shattering thing between them seemed to expand into a taut, terrible grip around her heart. But she made herself stand straighter.

“I don’t think you really want to have that conversation,” she told him as evenly as she could. “You’re unlikely to hear anything you like.”

Sterling wasn’t sure she wanted to have it, either. She felt too guilty, too ashamed. No matter what she might have told their friends or herself, this wasn’t what Omar would have wanted. He’d left Bakri for a reason. This—all of this, everything that had happened since the accident—was a stark betrayal of the best friend she’d ever had. The only family she’d ever known.

And that fire inside of her, that terrible flame when she looked at Rihad that she didn’t know what to do with, was worse.

“This is not the first time you have insinuated that I harmed my brother in some way,” Rihad said darkly. “Why? What is your evidence for this?”

She shook her head, as if she could shake him away that easily, and all his questions, too. “Don’t act the innocent, Rihad. It isn’t a good fit.”

“You mistake innocence for intent, I think. It’s time to stop talking in circles, Sterling. If you wish to accuse me of something, do it to my face.”

He smiled again then, lethally, and she felt it everywhere.

And she’d forgotten this, hadn’t she? She’d been lulled into a false sense of security because there’d been nothing in her head but Leyla and he’d been so encouraging, so supportive, since the day she’d been born. They’d eaten their meals together these past months and talked about a thousand things, like any other civilized strangers who happened to be married to each other. Books, art. The cities they’d seen, the places they’d visited, from Cannes to the Seychelles to Patagonia.

She’d learned that he had been a solemn child and an even more serious young man, studious and focused in all things. She’d discovered that he had played a great deal of soccer and the occasional game of rugby all the way through university, but only for sport, as he’d always known his future. His place.

“That must have been nice,” she’d said once. Perhaps too wistfully. “To have no doubt what direction you were headed in, no matter what.”

He’d eyed her across their dinner and the candles that had lined the table and she’d shivered, though she hadn’t been cold.

“Who can say if it was nice or not?” he’d replied after a moment, as if he’d never thought about it before that instant. “It was all I knew.”

She’d started to think of this man as something like pleasant. She’d started to imagine that this forced-marriage thing might not be quite so terrible after all. But she’d been kidding herself. This was Rihad al Bakri. He was the most dangerous man she’d ever encountered.

How had she allowed herself to forget that?

“Fine,” she said staunchly now, telling herself this had always been inevitable. That they had always been heading straight here. “Let’s talk about Omar.”

Sterling crossed her arms, wishing she didn’t feel so compelled to dress each time she knew she would see him, including the airy sundress she wore now that felt a bit unequal to the conversation. She told herself fashion and beauty were armor, the way they had been when she’d been a model and the point was to look at the clothes, not the woman in them. And they were—but that wasn’t the only reason she did it these days.

The depressing truth was that back then she’d liked to hide in the glare of any spotlight that might have been focused on her. But here in this far-off palace that sometimes felt like a dream over these past months, she liked it when he saw her. When he got that gleam in his dark gold eyes that told her he appreciated what he saw. Even now.

She had so many reasons to hate herself that Sterling couldn’t understand why she hadn’t started overflowing where she stood. Like a backed-up sewer. That was precisely how she felt, clogged and wrong.

“Wonderful.” His gaze was so dark. So intense. “Let’s begin with why Omar persisted in his relationship with you across all these years. He defied his family and his country, abandoned his duties and broke our father’s heart into a thousand pieces. That was unaccountable enough. Yet he never married you, never claimed you in the eyes of the world. Never stood up for you in any way when he knew perfectly well his affair with you was scandalous. Not even when you fell pregnant.”

“You’re relentless.” But she said that as if it was only to be expected, without any particular heat. “Omar was the best man I ever knew. The kindest and the bravest. He stood up for me in ways you can’t imagine.”

“My imagination is remarkably vivid.” His voice was cool. “Why don’t you try me?”

“Maybe Omar and I didn’t want to get married, Rihad.” She sighed when he only gazed at her in arrogant disbelief. “Maybe not everyone is as traditional as you are. In some places, it’s the twenty-first century.”

“I have no doubt that you and Omar lived a delightfully modern and unconventional life in every possible way, cavorting about New York City in all that marvelous limelight for so many years.” He eyed her in a way she didn’t much like then. “But your pregnancy should have snapped him back to the reality that, like it or not, he was a Bakrian royal who owed legitimacy to his own child. Why didn’t it?”

“Perhaps he assumed you would swoop in like the Angel of Death and sort it all out to suit yourself,” she said coolly. Then threw a smile, sharp and icy, back at him. “And look at that. You did.”

“Do you think these little games you seem determined to keep playing will distract me from getting your answer, Sterling? They won’t, I promise you. Why didn’t he marry you?”

His whole bearing had gotten colder and more regal as he stood there, his gaze a demanding thing that beat at her, and she believed him. She believed that he would keep asking that same question, again and again, until she finally answered it. That he would stand here an eternity if that was what it took. That he was like the great desert that surrounded his country on three sides, monolithic and impassable, and deeply treacherous besides.

“He wanted to marry me,” Sterling said after a moment. Then she raised her gaze to meet his again and forced herself not to show him any of the emotion that swirled around inside of her. “I refused.”

Rihad laughed. Not at all nicely. It set her teeth on edge, as she imagined it had been meant to do, and she had to order herself to unclench her jaw before she broke something.

“Of course you did.” His tone then was so dark, so sardonic, it felt like another one of his disturbingly sensual touches inside of her. “He begged you, I imagine, and you nobly rebuffed him, in the vein of all gold diggers and materialistic mistresses across the ages.”

He didn’t quite roll his eyes. His derisive tone meant he didn’t have to. But Sterling felt sharpened all the same then. Honed into some kind of blade by that dismissive tone of his.

“I know it’s hard for you to believe, Rihad. I know it flies directly in the face of all the fantasies you have about social-climbing sluts like me. But that doesn’t make it any less true. Omar would have married me in a heartbeat. I was the one with reservations.”

“The prospect of becoming a Bakrian princess was too onerous for you? It seemed too much of a thankless chore?” There was that lash in his voice then that should have made her crumble, but she only tilted up her chin and glared back at him. “You were already living off him. Why not make it legal and continue to do so forever?”

“You’re such a small man, for a king,” she said softly, and had the satisfaction of watching his eyes blaze at the insult. This was the man she’d met in New York. This was the man who had sparred with her in that SUV. It was absurd that some part of her thrilled to see him again, as if she’d missed him. “Or maybe all kings are the same. What do I know? Obsessed with all these tiny details, territories and tabloids, that make them what they are. Life is a great deal richer and more complicated than that.”

He studied her for a moment, and Sterling stared right back at him. There was something about the way he was looking at her, about the particular quality of that dark temper she could see inhabiting his gorgeous face just then. If he’d been any other man—if she’d been any other woman—she’d have thought it was some kind of jealousy.

But that made absolutely no sense.

“Give me one good reason you wouldn’t marry my brother,” Rihad growled after a moment or two inched by and still they stood there, faced off like enemy combatants. “You are a woman with no family. No support.”

Did he know that was a sore spot for her? Or had he scored a lucky hit? Sterling sucked in a breath and hoped against hope he hadn’t noticed.

But his dark eyes gleamed. He noticed everything.

“A marriage to Omar would have changed all that. Even were you to eventually divorce, and even if you’d signed away everything ahead of time as our attorneys would have made certain you did, you would always have remained a part of the kingdom. Your child would always be a member of the royal family. Why would a woman like you turn down that kind of security?”

A woman like you. That phrase rolled around and around inside of her, picking up all the mud and grime of all the other people in her life who had said something like that to her. No one could want a child like you, her foster parents had told her. Girls like you are only good for one thing, her first, sleazy modeling contact had told her. I should have known a bird like you would land on her feet, a British photographer friend of Omar’s had sneered in an email only yesterday.

Omar had been the only person she’d ever met who had never, ever, put her in that kind of box. Sterling told herself she had to focus. This was about him, not her. This was about his life—the one he’d wanted to live, not the one his overbearing brother thought he should have lived.

Maybe there wasn’t much a woman like her could do to a king, but she could certainly defend her best friend.

“You don’t know anything about your brother, do you? You never did.”

“I’m growing impatient,” Rihad growled. “If you want to continue to talk in circles, that’s your prerogative. But I will make no promises about my reaction to that. What I can promise you is that you are unlikely to like it very much.”

Sterling took a deep breath.

And then she told him Omar’s secret. At last.

“Omar was gay.”

* * *

If Sterling had reached beneath that maddeningly flowy dress she wore and pulled out a gun, then shot it directly into his heart, Rihad could not have been more shocked.

And for a long, tense moment, it felt as if she’d done exactly that.

The report from her statement echoed so loudly it drowned out the world. It made the breezes still, the far-off noise of the palace and the city beyond fade. Even the water in the fountains seemed to run dry for what seemed like a very long time.

Then she laughed, but it was a bitter, accusing sort of sound. It made him feel worse. Like a monster.

“Is that not what you were looking for, Rihad? I’m so sorry. Not everyone lives according to your narrow standards of behavior.”

“Explain this to me.” He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded like some gruff, autocratic mockery of the person he’d thought he was instead. He knew it. He could hear it. But he didn’t care. Not at that moment.

She glared at him. “Sometimes, Rihad, when little princes grow up and want to play with others, they don’t want to play with the little princesses as much as the—”

“Explain your relationship with him,” he snapped.

“This is ridiculous.” She rocked back on her heels and scowled at him. “You didn’t grow up beneath a rock. I don’t have to explain the world to you. You might choose to act as if it hasn’t moved on from the Stone Age here, but you know perfectly well that’s a choice you’re making, not the truth.”

“I don’t require that you explain the world to me. Only my brother.”

He shook his head, frowning, as every conversation he’d ever had with Omar raced through his head, one after the next. Every time Rihad had brought up Sterling, Omar had shrugged it off.

“She is necessary, brother,” he’d said. He’d never explained that assertion any further—and Rihad had thought him besotted. Bewitched. Led about by his most sensitive parts by a scandalous woman. It was a tale as old as time. As old as their own father, certainly.

It had never crossed his mind that this notorious woman, this walking sexual fantasy who had been the torment of thousands the world over in those coyly sensual perfume advertisements that had made her name, could possibly have been Omar’s beard.

Yet he believed her, and that meant she’d been exactly that, and he’d fallen for it. To the detriment of his own relationship with his brother.

“I think that if you could see the look on your face right now, you would understand why he felt this was necessary,” Sterling said coolly. “Omar didn’t dare tell you. He hid in plain sight and used one of the oldest tricks in the book.” She raised one hand and made the kind of imperious gesture in his direction that made him all but see red. “That exact expression.”

“I have no idea what you think you see on my face,” he gritted out. “But let me tell you what’s behind it. Shock.”

She scowled. “There is absolutely nothing wrong—”

“That he didn’t tell me,” Rihad threw at her. “That he felt he needed to sever his relationship with his own family. That he felt he needed to keep this secret all these years.”

“How could he possibly tell you?” she demanded, and he could see how much she’d cared for Omar in that fiercely defensive light in her blue eyes then, and everything inside him tilted. Slid. Because Rihad had only ever wanted to be that kind of support for his brother, and he’d failed him. “The only thing you ever talked to him about was what a disappointment he was. How he had let you down by not racing off to get married and have babies the way you thought he should. Having Leyla was his attempt to pacify you and I wouldn’t marry him because I thought he deserved more from his life. I thought he could do better than living a lie.”

“But this is what I do not understand.” Rihad raked his hands through his hair and had the odd notion that he was a stranger to himself. If his brother had been an entirely different man than the one he pretended he was, what else could be a lie dressed up like the truth? He felt cut off at his knees. Adrift in the middle of his own palace, where he had always known exactly what and who he was. “Why go to such lengths to live this lie?”

“I haven’t gotten the impression that Bakri is renowned for its open-mindedness,” Sterling said in that sharp way of hers that he enjoyed a bit less than usual then. “Much less its king. And I’ve only been here a few months.”

“I can understand why he would not wish to tell our father,” Rihad said, as if he was talking to himself. In part, he was. “The old man was harsh, despite his own weaknesses. He was of another time.”

“Whereas you are the embodiment of the modern age?” Sterling sniffed. “What with the kidnapping and the ranting about legitimacy and your obsession with al Bakri blood. Very progressive.”

“He should have come to me.”

“It’s not up to you to decide how he should have lived his life,” she threw at him, that scowl that twisted her face making her more pretty instead of less, somehow. “What he wanted was to live as he pleased. What he wanted was not to be nailed down into the things you thought he should do. He didn’t need your permission to be who he was.”

“Perhaps not,” Rihad said, and he heard a note he didn’t quite recognize in his own voice. Profound sadness, perhaps, that he doubted would ever leave him now. It cracked in him like temper. “But perhaps he could have used my support.”

Her lips parted then, her expression confused, as if he’d spoken that last part in Arabic.

“Your support?” she echoed. “What do you mean?”

Rihad was furious. And something that felt a great deal like lost, besides. He had always known precisely what he had to do and how to do it. He had always known his path and how to walk it. He didn’t know this. He didn’t know how to navigate it—because it was too late.

Omar was dead, and Rihad had loved him—yet never truly known him.

The grief he’d understood would always be with him seemed to triple inside of him with every passing moment. Became darker. Thicker. And woven in with it was guilt. That he hadn’t seen. That he hadn’t looked. That he’d accepted his own brother at face value, even when doing so had meant thinking the worst of him.

He hated this. He hated himself. He hated all those wasted years.

“None of this explains you,” Rihad bit out at Sterling, because she was there. Because she’d participated in this deception. Because she’d known his brother in a way he never would, and he was small enough to resent that, just then. “If he wanted a beard, why did he not marry years ago and cement it? And if he was going to be in a fake relationship with a woman, why did he not choose a woman who would raise no objections? Why you?”

“That seems to be the sticking point,” she pointed out, her lovely eyes flashing with something heavier than temper. Darker. He felt another stab of guilt, and hated that, too. “Not so much why he did it, but that he did it with a woman like me.”

“Because it’s impractical.” He wanted to punch something. He wanted to rage. He settled for seething at her instead. “You are a lightning rod of controversy. Why not choose a woman who would have flown beneath the radar?”

“Why don’t we conduct a séance?” Sterling suggested in that same sarcastic tone, her pretty eyes narrow and dark on his. “You can lecture him just like this. I’m sure it will have the same effect now as it clearly did when he was still alive.”

He didn’t know when he’d drifted closer to her, as if she was some kind of magnet. Only that they were much too close then, and he wanted to touch her too much, and that was only one of the reasons he was furious.

It was the easiest reason.

“Don’t.” Sterling’s eyes were glittering yet her mouth was vulnerable and Rihad wanted her. God, how he wanted her.

“Don’t what?” he asked. “You were never my brother’s lover.”

“That doesn’t mean I have any desire to be yours.”

Yet he could see the faint tremor beneath her skin. He could see the flush across her cheeks. He knew her desire as well as he knew his own.

“Liar.” But he said it as if it was very nearly a compliment.

She didn’t contradict him, and the world was still so far away. There was only her. Here. And there had already been too many lies. There had been too much hidden and for too long, and Omar was lost.

His brother had never trusted him. Neither did Sterling. And he couldn’t have said why he felt both so keenly. So harshly. As if they were the same thing. As if he could no longer trust himself.

“Help me solve the puzzle you present,” he urged her in a rough whisper. “Why did he have a child with you? What did he hope to gain?”

She looked confused and slightly bereft. “He imagined that if he had a child, that would show you that he wasn’t as irresponsible as you thought he was, even without you knowing the truth.”

“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.