Protecting the Desert Heir by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews [Crews, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2015-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

STERLING FLINCHED, WHEN SHE knew better than that. But she couldn’t seem to help herself.

She’d finally pushed him too far. She’d felt safe with him all this time, safer than she’d ever felt with another man, but that was before. She’d gone over the edge at last and she’d seen that broken look on his face.

She knew what it meant. She remembered too well.

She expected the hit. It had been a long, long time, but she thought she could take it. There was no warding off a blow from a man as strong as he was or as close, but if she could take the inevitable fall well, it wouldn’t immobilize her. The trick was not to tense up too much in anticipation, and then to curl into a tight ball against the kick—

“Sterling,” Rihad said then, in that low, dark way of his that rippled through her, making her want to cry. Making her want him, too, which she thought was evidence that she was deeply sick in the head. Twisted all the way through, the way they’d always told her she was. “What do you think is happening here?”

“Please,” she whispered, trying to stand tall, to square her shoulders despite the fact she couldn’t stop shaking. “Just don’t wake the baby. I don’t want her to see.”

And she closed her eyes, tried not to brace herself too much and waited for him to hit her.

The way her foster parents always had.

She heard nothing. For one lifetime, then another.

Then, finally, Rihad’s voice, but he wasn’t speaking to her. He spoke in Arabic, and she didn’t have to understand the words he used to know he was issuing orders again in that matter-of-fact, deeply autocratic way of his that was as much a part of him as breathing.

Then again, the quiet.

The breeze above and the water all around, and she kept her eyes shut tight because the quiet was the trick. It was always a trick. The false sense of security had always, always tripped her up. The moment she’d thought it wasn’t going to happen and looked to see was the moment they’d laid her flat.

She heard footsteps, then the sound of Leyla’s buggy being wheeled away, and her stomach turned over, then plummeted. He was sending the baby off with the nurses, as she’d asked. That meant—

She flinched away from his hand on her arm, making it that much worse. Her eyes flew open and met his, burning dark, dark gold and far too close, and she nearly bit off her tongue.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hurriedly, in a panic she couldn’t control, even when he let go of her and stepped back. “I didn’t mean to flinch.”

He studied her for a long, long time.

“Sterling,” he said, very quietly, but somehow with more power behind it than she’d ever heard him use before. “Who hit you?”

And everything inside of Sterling ground to a lurching, nauseating halt. She couldn’t risk this. She should never have flinched. Open up that old can of worms and he would see.

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