The Royal Collection. Rebecca Winters

sexual acts. “And that would be a tragedy, would it not?”

      Sterling couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe—and she was terribly afraid that the edgy feeling swamping her just then wasn’t panic at all. She knew panic. This was deeper. Richer.

      Life-altering, she thought in a kind of awe.

      But the only thing she could let herself think about right now was her baby, so she shoved all the confusing sensations away as best she could—and tried to get into the car and get away from him before her legs simply gave out beneath her.

      Or before she did something she’d truly regret, like moving closer to this strange man instead of away.

      * * *

      There were a number of things Rihad al Bakri—reigning sheikh, Grand Ruler and King of the Bakrian Empire—did not understand.

      First, how his late brother had neglected to mention that he had impregnated his mistress and quite some time ago, if her current condition was any guide. Or how this one delicate American woman had managed to elude his entire security force and was now sashaying out into the city as if she was still on the sort of catwalks she’d frequented when she’d been, by all accounts, a feral teen. Finally, he was arrogant enough to wonder how on earth she could possibly have mistaken him—him—for a livery driver, of all things.

      And that was not even getting into his unending grief that his brother was gone. That after wasting so many years of his life gallivanting about with this unsuitable woman, Omar could have disappeared so senselessly in the space of a single evening.

      Rihad could not come to terms with it. He doubted he ever would.

      Yet all of that faded when Rihad took her hand, meaning only to help her into the SUV as any decent servant might. He had enough of them. He should know.

      The loud, brash, concrete city all around them seemed to skip its groove like an old-fashioned record, and go still.

      So still it was like a quiet agony, reverberating inside of him.

      Her hand was delicate and strong at once, and Rihad didn’t like that. Nor did he like the way her mouth firmed as she looked at him, as if she was pressing her lips together to disguise the way they trembled, because he had the wild, nearly ungovernable desire to taste that theory.

       Surely not.

      Her strawberry blond hair should have appeared messy, twisted back in a riot of smooth gold and copper strands, but instead made her look fresh. She wore a stretchy sort of tunic dress over skinny jeans and absurdly high heels, quite as if she wasn’t so heavily pregnant that it looked as if she’d shoved a giant ball underneath her clothes. Worst of all, she was remarkably graceful, moving easily from the sidewalk into the vehicle, making him wonder exactly how she might move when not pregnant.

      Or better yet, beneath him.

      Rihad did not want to wonder about this woman in any capacity at all and much less that one. He’d wanted nothing more than to eradicate the stain of her from the memory of his brother’s life, erase her taint from the Bakrian royal family once and for all. That was why he’d come here himself, straight from Omar’s funeral, when he could easily have sent agents to eject her from this property.

      Enough scandal. Enough selfish, heedless behavior. Rihad had spent his life cleaning up his father’s messes, Omar’s messes, even his half sister Amaya’s messes. Sterling McRae was the emblem of his family’s licentiousness and Rihad wanted her—and all the remnants of his brother’s lifetime of poor decisions—gone.

      So naturally she was pregnant.

      Hugely, incontestably, irrevocably pregnant.

       Of course.

       CHAPTER TWO

      “YOU ARE WITH CHILD,” Rihad said grimly as his brother’s mistress settled herself in the SUV, pulling her hand from his as she sat—and perhaps, he thought, with a certain alacrity that suggested that simple touch had affected her, too.

      He opted not to consider that too closely.

      “You are very observant.” Was that...sarcasm? Directed at him? Rihad blinked. But she continued, her voice now coolly imperious. “And now if you’ll close the door and drive?”

      She was giving him orders. She expected him—him—to obey these orders. To obey her.

      That was such an astonishing development that Rihad merely stepped back and shut the door while he processed the situation. And thought about how to proceed.

      All Rihad could hope for was that the child this woman carried was not Omar’s—but he was not optimistic. His brother’s obsession with his regrettable mistress had spanned the better part of a decade. Omar had famously scooped her up when she’d been a mere seventeen. He’d installed her in his apartment within the week, not caring in the least that she was little more than an ignorant guttersnipe with a made-up name who wasn’t even of legal age at the time.

      The paparazzi had all but turned gleeful cartwheels in the streets.

      “Omar will tire of her,” their late father had said after scanning one such breathless and insulting article, back in the Bakrian palace.

      The old sheikh had been a connoisseur of flagrantly inappropriate women. He’d stopped marrying them after the mercenary Ukrainian dancer—the mother of the deeply disobedient Amaya, who was chief among Rihad’s many problems these days while she evaded her responsibilities and the fiancé she’d decided she didn’t want on the eve of her engagement party—had taken off and proceeded to live off the telling of her “my life in the evil sheikh’s harem” story for decades. The old man had gone off matrimony after that, but not women. If anyone knew how men treated their mistresses, it would be his father.

      “Perhaps a refresher course in your expectations of Omar might not go amiss,” Rihad had suggested drily. “His time in New York City appears to have affected his memory, particularly where his duties to this country are concerned.”

      His father had only sighed, as Rihad had known he would. Because while Rihad was his father’s heir, he had never been his father’s favorite. And no wonder. Omar and the old sheikh were peas in a deeply selfish pod, stirring up scandals left and right as they did exactly as they pleased no matter the consequences, while Rihad was left to quietly clean it all up in their wake.

      Because somebody had to be responsible, or the country would fall to its enemies. That somebody had been Rihad for as long as he could remember.

      “No man is without his weaknesses, Rihad,” his father had said, frowning at him. “It is only regrettable that Omar is making his so public.”

      Rihad had no idea if he had weaknesses or not, as he’d never been given any leave to indulge them. He’d never kept mistresses, inappropriate or otherwise. He’d known full well that as his father’s successor he’d been promised in a political marriage since birth. And he’d dutifully married the woman picked out for him when he’d finished his studies in England, in fulfillment of that promise.

      Tasnim might not have been a flashy model type, with masses of shining copper-blond hair and a sinful mouth like the woman Omar had holed up with all these years. But she’d been as committed to their marriage as Rihad had been. They’d worked their way to something like affection in the three short years before she’d been diagnosed with cancer at a routine doctor’s appointment. When she’d died five years ago this past summer, Rihad had lost a friend.

      Maybe that was what moved in him then, on the side of a New York City street as his brother’s worst and most public embarrassment sat waiting for him to drive her away from the comeuppance Rihad had planned to deliver upon her, in spades. Fury that Tasnim, who had kept all her promises, was gone. The same old mix of fury and bafflement that Omar had broken all the rules, as usual,