Rihad digested that statement, and it took him longer than it should have to comprehend that the man was not talking about his sister.
But he couldn’t make sense of what he was hearing.
He was aware that he’d frozen solid where he stood. He heard what his security chief was saying, but he couldn’t seem to move. To react.
She had charmed her way into one of the palace’s fleet of armored vehicles, because she was nothing if not persuasive when she wished. And because she was his queen. Instead of heading for the royal enclosure near the sea, a perfectly reasonable place for her to go without any guards because it was manned with its own, she’d had the driver change direction once they’d left the palace grounds and she’d headed for the far reaches of Bakri City.
There was nothing there, Rihad knew. Nothing save the border.
“My daughter,” he managed to say, over the dark thud that was his heart in his chest. “Where is my daughter?”
His beautiful, perfect little Leyla, who he could not lose, and who, he realized, he’d never called his daughter before. Not out loud. He would not lose Leyla, no matter who her biological father was. She was his.
She and her treacherous mother were entirely his.
His security chief was muttering into his earpiece. Rihad was unnaturally still.
“The princess remains in the palace, Your Majesty. She is with her nurses even now.”
“Excellent,” Rihad bit out, and he started moving then, belting out orders as he went.
If Sterling had left the baby behind that meant he wouldn’t have to temper his reaction when he found her—though he was sure he would have to think about that, at some point. That she’d taken off without her daughter, which was so unlike her as to be something like laughable.
He might have imagined, once, that Sterling was nothing more than a calculating, callous sort of creature. The kind of woman who would have a child for the sole purpose of tying herself to a man and, more to the point, his fortune.
That he didn’t think that of her now, not even for a moment, told him things he was too furious to analyze just then. There was something seismic inside of him, bigger and bolder than anything he’d ever felt before. It was as massive as the desert, expanding in all directions, and he was not entirely certain he would be the same man when he survived it.
If he survived it.
But he had every intention of sharing the effects of it with his wife while he waited to see. Because he wasn’t letting her go.
Not ever.
* * *
The helicopter landed with military precision on the dusty desert road, forcing Sterling’s driver to slam on his brakes to a fishtailing stop—and putting an end to her escape fantasies that easily.
Sterling sat in the backseat and stared at the gleaming metal thing with its powerful rotors as if, were she to concentrate hard enough, she could make it go away again.
But it didn’t. Of course it didn’t.
For a long, shuddering moment, nothing happened.
The helicopter sat there in the middle of the otherwise empty road. Sterling’s driver, having lapsed into what sounded like frantic prayers as it had landed, was now muttering to himself. And that meant she had a lifetime or two to contemplate the leaping somersault her heart kept performing in her chest, no matter how sternly she told herself that hope was inappropriate.
She wasn’t running away this time. She wasn’t desperate or scared. She wasn’t a fifteen-year-old kid and she was no longer afraid of her best friend’s big, bad wolf.
This time, she was doing the right thing.
The helicopter’s back door opened and Rihad climbed out, his movements precise and furious, and yet still infused with that lethal, masculine grace that made her mouth water. Maybe it always would.
But if so, it would happen from afar. In magazines or on the news.
She was no good for him. She was even worse for her precious daughter. Nothing else mattered
“Stay here,” she told her driver, not that he’d offered to leap to her defense—the man clearly recognized the royal insignia on the helicopter’s sides if not his king himself.
Sterling slammed her way out of the car into the hot desert sun. Memories assaulted her as the hot wind poured over her. Of facing Rihad much like this on a Manhattan street, in what seemed like a different lifetime. Of the dark look he’d worn then and the far darker and grimmer look he wore now.
Sterling didn’t wait for him to reach her.
“What are you doing?” she threw at him across the hard-packed stretch of sandy road that separated them. “Let me go!”