it was absurd. She’d given up believing in guardian angels a long time ago, and Rihad was more warrior than angel anyway, but the notion was warming all the same. It made her feel something like safe—and perhaps a woman who hadn’t so recently given birth might have questioned that. Investigated her own feelings, looked for reasons why a man like Rihad felt like safety when she knew perfectly well he was anything but.
As it was, Sterling merely accepted it, forgot about it, and kept her attention on Leyla.
Who, despite that unfurling of love and hope that had swamped Sterling from the moment she’d first seen her, was not gaining the weight she should have in those crucial first days. And for the first three weeks of her life, it was nothing but panic and worry and a terrible battle, no sleep and too many tears, as Sterling tried to breastfeed her and failed.
Again and again, she failed.
All she’d ever wanted was a family of her own, a child she would treat far better than she’d ever been treated herself, and now that Leyla was here she couldn’t even manage to feed her.
When Rihad found her in the chair next to her bed in her suite in the palace, finally bottle-feeding Leyla on the express and stern orders of the palace’s physician, Sterling had finally given up. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a shower, or felt like anything but a great, gristled knot of pain and failure.
Everything hurt. Everywhere. Inside and out. Her battered body and her beat-up heart alike.
But her baby girl, who hadn’t managed to get anything from Sterling’s own breast, was finally feeding hungrily. Almost gleefully. It should have made her feel better, to see that Leyla was obviously going to be fine now that she was able to eat her fill. It did, in a very deep and fundamental way that told her things about how limited her own parents had been.
Yet that had nothing to do with why Sterling was sobbing. Broken into a thousand pieces. Shaking as she held the bottle to Leyla’s busy mouth.
“Why are you crying?” Rihad asked, but in a very nearly gentle tone, unlike anything she’d ever heard from him—which might have set off an alarm or two somewhere inside of her, had she had room to process such things. “Has something happened?”
“Are you here to gloat?” she hurled back at him, tears streaming down her face unchecked because her arms were full of baby and bottle, self-recrimination and regret. “Call me more names? Comment on what a mess I am? How toxic a spill I am now, as you predicted?”
And then she was shocked almost out of her skin when the high and mighty King of Bakri simply reached over and took the baby from her with a matter-of-fact confidence that suggested he’d done exactly that a whole lot more often than Sterling ever had. He held Leyla in the crook of his arm and the bottle in his other hand as competently as any of the nurses who’d been in and out these past weeks. He leaned back against the side of the high bed, held the bottle to the baby’s sweet mouth and fixed his arrogant stare on Sterling once Leyla started suckling enthusiastically once again.
“What names do you imagine I should call you?” he asked mildly. “Do you have new ones in mind or will the old ones do? You seem to recall them so clearly.”
Sterling pulled her legs up beneath her, hugged her knees to her chest in the shapeless, ugly pajamas she’d been wearing for a long time and felt split wide-open with guilt and grief and intense self-loathing.
“Selfish, vain, I don’t know.” Nothing he could call her was worse than what she was calling herself just then. “If I was any kind of real woman, real mother, I would be able to do the most natural thing in the world, wouldn’t I?”
“Give birth?” He sounded completely unemotional, which was maybe why she was able to talk about this at all. The doctor had been so sympathetic it had made Sterling want to scream, then collapse to the floor in a puddle. She didn’t want sympathy. She wanted to know why. She wanted to know exactly how much she was to blame and precisely how correct her foster parents had been when they’d assured her she wasn’t worthy of a real family. “I believe you already did that, and quite well, if this child is any indication.”
Sterling rubbed her palms over her face, somewhat surprised to find herself shaking. “That was the easy part.”
“I’ve never done it myself, I grant you.” His voice was so arid then that it made her tears dry up in response. “But I think it’s a commonly held truth that while labor is undoubtedly many things, easy is not one of them.”
“There was an entire hospital wing’s worth of doctors and nurses right there, advising me and guiding me. I could have been knocked out and they would have done the whole thing without my input or participation.” She knew she was being ridiculous, could tell from the way she felt almost seasick where she sat when she knew she wasn’t moving—but that didn’t change the way she felt. What she knew. She’d told Omar she couldn’t do this, much less without him, and here was the proof. “This is what I needed to do, all by myself. This is what I’m supposed to do and I can’t do it.”
He didn’t respond, that fierce, brooding attention of his on the baby in his arms again—the baby who looked as if she could be his, she realized with a distant sort of jolt. That same rich brown skin, those same fathomless eyes. Because of course a baby of Omar’s would look as if she belonged to Rihad, as well. Why hadn’t she expected the family resemblance? Another kind of jolt hit her that she couldn’t entirely define, so wrapped up was it in all the rest of that storm inside of her.
“At the very least,” she made herself say, because if she didn’t she would break into sobs, “I’m exactly the useless, selfish bitch you already think I am.”
“What I think,” Rihad said after it seemed her words had crowded out all the air in the room and simply hung there like suffocating proclamations of inescapable truths, “is that it would be profoundly selfish indeed to continue to try to do something that isn’t working, against all medical advice, when surely the only goal here is to feed the child. No matter how you manage it.”
“But everybody knows—” she began, almost angrily, because she wanted to believe him more than she could remember wanting anything else, and yet she couldn’t let herself off the hook. She simply couldn’t.
They’d told her all those years ago that she was worthless. Useless. She’d always suspected they were right—
“I was exclusively bottle-fed, as was Omar,” Rihad said then, smooth and inexorable, his dark brows edging high in a kind of regal challenge. “Our mother never intended to breast-feed either one of us. She never did. And no one ever dared suggest that the Queen of Bakri was anything less than a woman, I assure you. Moreover, I seem to have turned out just fine.” His voice was still so dry, and when she only stared back at him, and her tears became salt against her cheeks, he laughed. “You preferred Omar, I understand. But he, too, was a product of the bottle, Sterling.”
Sterling let out a long, slow breath and felt it shudder all the way out, as if he’d picked up a great deal more than simply the baby when he strode in here, and stood there holding all of it off her for the first time in weeks. Maybe that was why she didn’t police herself the way she should have. That and the unwieldy mess of guilt and fear and worry that there was something bent and twisted, something rotten that would ruin her child, too, careening around inside of her.
“I want to be a good mother,” she whispered desperately, as if this man was her priest. As if he really was as safe as he felt just now. “I have to be a good mother to her.”
Because of Omar, yes. Because she owed him that. But it was more than that now. It was also because her own mother had been so useless, so remarkably unequal to the task of having a child. Because Sterling had once been a baby called Rosanna whom everyone had discarded.
And because everything had changed.
She’d been forced across the planet and into a marriage with the last man on earth she’d ever wanted to meet, much less marry. But then she’d given birth