The Royal Collection. Rebecca Winters

pretending to be a driver. She was the mistress who had ruined his dead brother’s life. And he felt more alive trading insults with her than he had in years.

      In fact, he couldn’t recall when he’d ever felt quite like this, for any reason.

      He’d obviously gone mad with guilt and grief.

      “I want us both to be very clear about who you are,” Sterling said then, leaning forward in her seat, and her scent teased at him, honey and sugar with the faintest hint of a tropical bloom beneath. It made his hands clench into fists against the steering wheel. It made him hard and needy.

      It made him feel like a stranger to himself. Like the hungry, selfish man he’d never been.

      Rihad couldn’t bring himself to analyze it. He concentrated on the road instead.

      “I am perfectly clear about who I am,” he told her.

      Or perhaps he was telling himself—because he had been. When he’d exited his private jet mere hours before. When he’d arrived at Omar’s apartment building, dismissed the driver who waited there and sent his team inside to secure this woman so he could have the pleasure of evicting her himself. He’d known exactly who he was.

      And nothing has changed since then, he told himself harshly.

      Or would.

      “You are a man who thinks it’s appropriate to mock and insult a woman, first of all,” Sterling said in that precise way of hers that he really shouldn’t find so fascinating. It was only that no one had ever dared use a tone like that in his presence before, he assured himself. He was intrigued intellectually, nothing more. “Congratulations. Your mother must be proud.”

      He laughed again, with significantly less mirth than before. “My mother died when I was twelve years old.”

      “A great blessing, I think we can agree, so that she might be spared the knowledge of who you’ve become in her absence,” Sterling said, so matter-of-factly it took Rihad a moment to realize how deeply she’d insulted him. And then she kept going, unaware that no one spoke to him like that without consequences. No one would dare. “You are also a man who finds it amusing to speculate about the lives of strangers. Openly and repulsively.”

      “Are you not a kept woman?” he asked, making no attempt to soften his tone. “My mistake. What is it you do, then, to support yourself?”

      “You are ill-mannered and rude, and that was evident at a glance, long before you opened your mouth.” She laughed then, an abrasive sound that made his hackles rise. “I’ve met more honorable pigs.”

      “Be very careful,” Rihad warned her. Because he had limits—even if, he was well aware, anyone who’d ever met him might have thought he’d crossed them a long while back. “A man does not react well to the questioning of his honor.”

      “Then a man should act as if he has some,” she snapped.

      “Yes, of course,” Rihad snorted. “And how would I prove that I am an honorable man to one such as you, do you imagine? Will you be the judge? A woman who—”

      “Is pregnant?” Her voice was icy then, so cold he almost overlooked the fact that she’d interrupted him. Something no one had done since his father had died, and no woman had ever done, as far as he could recall. “So scandalous, I know. It’s almost as if every single person walking this earth came about their presence here some other way.”

      “I must have mistaken you for someone else,” Rihad murmured as he made the final turn that would lead them to the airfield, which was just as well, because he thought his temper might flip the damned SUV over if he didn’t put some distance between the two of them, and soon. “I thought you were the mistress of Omar al Bakri.”

      “If I were you—” and her voice was very soft, very furious then “—I’d be very, very careful what you say next.”

      “Why?” Rihad realized he was taking out his aggression on the gas pedal and slowed as he arrived at the gate to find his men already there, which was lucky for everyone involved. They waved him through and he was glad, he told himself, that this little farce was almost finished. He wasn’t one for subterfuge, no matter how necessary. It felt too much like lies. “He is dead, as you say. You remain. Is that child his?”

      “Ah, yes. Of course.” She sounded bored then, though he could still hear the fury beneath it, giving it a certain huskiness that he felt in all the wrong places. “I must be a whore. That’s the point of these questions, isn’t it? Are you trying to determine whether or not I’m a terrible, no-good, very bad harlot or have you already rendered your judgment?”

      “Are you?”

      She laughed. “What if I am? What is it to you?”

      But Rihad glanced at her in the mirror and saw the truth of things in the way her hands clasped on the shelf of her belly, her knuckles white, as if she was not as blasé as she was pretending.

      It would be easier if she was. Easier, but it wouldn’t do much for that thing that still held him in its grip, that he refused to examine any closer.

      “I’m only using the proper terminology to describe your role,” he said mildly as he pulled up beside his plane out on the tarmac. “I apologize if you find that insulting.”

      “You decided I was a whore the moment you saw me,” she said dismissively. Or he assumed that was what that particular tone meant, having never heard it before. “But virgins and whores are indistinguishable, I hate to tell you.”

      “It’s a bit late to claim virginity, I think.”

      “Whores don’t have identifying marks to set them apart.” If she’d heard him, she was ignoring him—another new sensation for Rihad. He was beginning to feel each of them like blows. “Purity isn’t a scent or a tattoo. Neither is promiscuity, which is lucky, or most men like you who love to cast stones would reek of it.”

      “I am aware of only one case of a virgin birth,” he pointed out as he put the SUV into Park. “Everyone else, I am fairly certain, has gone about it the old-fashioned way. Unless you are on your way to notify the world’s religious leaders of the second coming of Mary? That would explain your hurry.”

      “How many people have you slept with?” she asked, sounding unperturbed.

      He laughed as much to cover his astonishment at her temerity as anything else. “Are you petitioning to be the next?”

      “If you’ve slept with anyone at all and you’re unmarried, you’re a hypocrite.”

      “I am widowed.”

      A typical female might have apologized for his loss, but this was Sterling McRae, and she was not, he was already far too aware in a variety of increasingly uncomfortable ways, the least bit typical.

      “And you’ve never touched a single woman in your whole life save your late wife?”

      He should not have brought Tasnim into this. He was furious with himself. And Sterling, of course, correctly interpreted his silence.

      “Oh, dear,” she murmured. “It appears you are, in fact, a hypocrite. Perhaps you should judge others a bit less. Or perhaps you’re no more than one of those charming throwbacks who think chastity only matters when it’s a woman’s.”

      “The world has turned on its ear, clearly,” Rihad said in a kind of wonder, as much to the tarmac as to her, and he told himself that what surged in him then was relief that this was over. This strange interlude as a man people addressed with such stunning disrespect. “I am being lectured to by a blonde American parasite who has lived off of weak and foolish men her entire adult life. Thank God we have arrived.”

      He turned in his seat, so he saw the way she jolted then, as if she hadn’t noticed the SUV had come to a stop. She looked around in confusion, then those blue eyes of hers slammed back to his.

      “What