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CHAPTER ONE

THE LAST TIME she’d run for her life, Sterling McRae had been a half-wild teenager with uts than sense Today it wasa run—thanks to the baby she carried and had to protect no matter what, now that Omar was dead—but the principle remained the same

Get out Get away Go somewhere you can never be found

At least this time, twelve years older and lifetimes wiser than that fifteen-year-old who’d run away from her foster home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she didn’t have to depend on the local Greyhound bus station to etaway This time, she had limitless credit cards and a very nice SUV at her disposal, complete with a driver ould take her wherever she asked to go

All of which she’d have to ditch once she got out of Manhattan, of course, but at least she’d start her second reinvention of herself with a little more style

Thank you, Oht then The heels she refused to stop wearing even this late into her pregnancy clicked against the floor of the apart where she and Omar had shared his penthouse ever since they’d rief threatened to take her feet right out frorihtly as she kept on walking

There was no ti news Rihad al Bakri, Omar’s fearsome older brother and now the ruler of the tiny little port country on the Persian Gulf that Ohteen, had arrived in New York City

Sterling had no doubt whatsoever that he would be co for her

There was every chance she was already being watched, she cautioned herself as she hurried from the elevator bank—that the sheikh had sent soh the news had broadcast his arrival barely a half hour ago That unpleasant if realistic thought forced her to slon, despite the ha but calh the lobby, the way sheOmar if she let herself—and more important, her baby—fall into the clutches of the very people he’d worked so hard to escape And she knew a little bit about the way predators reacted when they saw prey act like prey

Theknew that firsthand

So instead, she walked She sauntered

Sterling walked like the model she’d been before she’d taken her position at Oo Like the notorious, effortlessly sensual mistress of the international playboy Omar had been in the eyes of the world She strolled out into the New York City reat sprawl of the city she’d always loved so oodbyes Not if she wanted to keep her baby—Omar’s baby—safe

And she ht have lost Omar, but God help her, she would not lose this baby, too

Sterling was glad the su her an excuse to hide her thick grief and her buzzing anxiety and the too-hot tears she refused to let fall behind a pair of oversize sunglasses It took her longer than it should have to realize that while that was indeed O black SUV pulled up to the curb on the busy Upper East Side street, that was not O beside it

Thisfor all the world as if it was so His attention was on the cell phone in his hand, and so about the way he scrolled down his screen struck Sterling as insolent Or maybe it was the way he shifted and then looked up, his powerfully disapproving dark gaze sla into hers with the force of a blow

Sterling had to stop walking or fall over—and this ti to do with it

Because that look felt like a touch, inti had put into her ie as a woman ed neck-deep in the pleasures of the flesh, the truth was she did not like to be touched Ever

Not even like this, when she kneasn’t real

It felt real

This driver was too much Too tall, too solid Too damned real himself He was dressed in a dark suit, which only served to erous body seem lethal He had thick black hair, cut short as if to hide its natural curl, rich brown skin and thehad ever seen on a rily beautiful, soed form of his Instead, it was as if he was a steel-tely bejeweled hilt