Royal Families Vs. Historicals

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 to this squalling, angry-faced, tiny demon thing with alien eyes and that fragile little head covered in all those dark curls, and everything had simply…shifted.

She felt twice as big on the inside than she could ever be on the outside, ripped open and wholly altered by a kind of glorious light she hadn’t known could exist. Love, maybe. Hope. Both.

As if windows she hadn’t known were inside of her had been tossed wide-open, and nothing but sunshine streamed in.

And she’d known the instant she’d held her baby against her own skin that she absolutely had to be a good mother to this little girl. To her daughter. No matter what that meant. No matter what it took.

Her eyes met Rihad’s then, over Leyla’s dark little head and soft brown cheeks. This man who detested her, who had never thought she was anything but the worst kind of whore, and had said so. And Rihad’s dark brows edged up that fine, fierce forehead of his even farther, as if he was astonished that she was in any doubt following his stated opinion on the matter.

It occurred to her that there was something the matter with her, that she should find that so comforting.

“You are a good mother,” he replied.

It sounded like one of his royal decrees. And Sterling wanted to believe that, too. Oh, how she wanted to believe it.

“You can’t know that,” she argued, her palm moving to rub against that ache in her chest she didn’t understand, in the very place where Leyla’s hot head had first rested. She scowled at him instead, because it was easier. “And the fact I can’t nurse my own child certainly suggests otherwise.”

“This is the great beauty of living in a monarchy, Sterling.” His lips twitched, which on anyone else she might have called the beginnings of a smile, or even laughter—but this was Rihad. “The only opinion on the subject—on any subject, in fact—that matters at all is mine. Are you not relieved? If I say you are an excellent mother, that is not merely a social nicety I am extending to my brand-new wife on a trying afternoon for her. It is an edict, halfway to a law.”

“But—”

“Go,” he ordered her. He lifted his chin in that commanding way of his when she only blinked back at him as if he’d lapsed into Arabic. “Take a shower. A bath. A walk outside. Sleep as much as possible and let others worry about this one. She will be fine, even if you let her out of your sight. This I promise.”

Leyla hadn’t been out of Sterling’s reach since her birth. Not even once. “But I can’t—”

“This is the royal palace,” he reminded her gently. Yet still with that implacable steel beneath his words. “I am perfectly capable of watching an infant but I don’t have to do that, either, because we have an extensive and very well-paid nursing staff here to tend to her every possible need. Which you might have noticed over the past three weeks had you not been so determined to drive yourself into the ground.”

“But—”

“Martyrdom is actually a far less endearing trait than many people seem to imagine, Sterling. And it always ends the same unpleasant and painful way.” His voice was all steel again then, and dark command besides. “Let the nurses do their jobs.”

“I don’t need them,” she argued, though she was so tired she thought she might fall off into sleep right where she sat, if she let herself. As if sleep was a cliff and she’d been balancing on the edge of it for weeks now, unsteadily. “Leyla is my daughter.”

“Leyla is also a royal princess of the House of Bakri,” Rihad said, with all that innate power of his she hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but had certainly stopped noting in the past few weeks. There was no noting anything else then, not when he sounded like that—as if he truly was issuing edicts he expected her to follow. “There is nothing, no accommodation or luxury or whim, that is not available to her at a moment’s notice.”

His dark gold gaze moved over hers, seeing things Sterling feared she was too tired to hide the way she should. And she was definitely suffering from sleep deprivation, she told herself, because there was no way Rihad would actually look at her the way he seemed to be then, with an expression that veered far too close to tenderness.

But that was impossible. She was delirious.

“You do not have to do this by yourself, Sterling,” he said quietly. “Especially not here in the royal palace. I don’t know what you think you have to prove.”

She knew exactly what she felt she had to prove, but she couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell anyone, but she especially couldn’t tell Rihad—and not only, she assured herself, because this was the nicest, warmest interaction she’d had with the man since she’d met him. But also because he wasn’t her confidante. He was her husband, yes, but only in the broadest sense of the term. There was no relationship, no trust. There wasn’t even affection, despite that odd light she’d imagined in his gaze just then. There was no intimacy.

Only that one kiss, she thought, the memory prickling over and into her, like gooseflesh rising along her arms. She’d almost forgotten it.

Perhaps she’d wanted to forget it, as there was no making sense of it.

She shoved it away again now, as his too-incisive gaze rested on hers as if he was also reliving those strange, wild moments with his mouth hard on hers. She needed sleep, that was all. Especially before she started thinking about things that made no sense—things she’d been so certain were purely hormonal and would disappear when she was no longer pregnant.

Maybe that kiss was still something she needed to sleep on, she thought then, as a different sort of shiver moved through her. Maybe it was something she needed at least a long shower and a good night’s rest to consider. Or maybe it was better by far—safer, certainly—to pretend it had never happened.

But either way Sterling stopped arguing and did as he’d told her.

Carrying that image, of the ruthless and terrible Rihad al Bakri cradling her tiny infant daughter in his strong arms, from the long, hot shower and straight on into her dreams.

CHAPTER SIX

“I OWE YOU an apology, Rihad,” Sterling said, her voice crisp and matter-of-fact.

She’d worked hard to make it that way. To sound businesslike, which suited this strange marital arrangement of theirs instead of actually apologetic, which did not. Apologetic was far too emotional.

They sat out in the fantastical garden that was the king’s private retreat in the center of the palace. Lush plants tangled with brightly colored flowers around three separate fountains, while gentle canopies covered the different seating areas tucked into this little bit of wilderness hidden away inside the palace complex. It was possibly the most beautiful thing Sterling had ever seen.

Then again, so was Rihad—not that it was at all smart to let herself think along those lines.

It’s like admiring the tapestries in my suite, she told herself today, sitting across from him at the graceful iron table where their breakfast had been laid out for them, the way it was every summer morning. That he’s beautiful is a fact, not an emotional thing at all, and certainly doesn’t take away from how terrible he always was to Omar.

But when he glanced up from the tablet computer where he’d been scrolling through something the way he often did, she felt too hot and looked away, and only partially because his dark gold gaze seemed harsher than usual today. She looked toward the nearest fountain that had been made to resemble a tropical waterfall, gurgling down over slick, shiny rocks to form a small, inviting pool Rihad had once told her she was welcome to make use of whenever she wished.

Yet somehow, despite the fact this man had seen her at her worst, dirty and crazy and sobbing and wild, the idea of him seeing her in anything like a bathing suit—splashing around in front of him or, worse, with him—made her heart thud too hard inside her chest. She chose to ignore that, the way she always did.

She ignored more and more by the day, she knew. And it was only getting worse.

They had taken to having their meals together here in the weeks since Rihad had forcibly removed Leyla from her arms and insisted Sterling take care of herself. Well. It was more that Rihad had decreed that they would take their meals here, whenever it was possible with his schedule, and Sterling hadn’t had it in her to object.

You didn’t want to object, a voice deep inside of her whispered. Or you would have.

“It seems I must keep an eye on you,” he’d said when he’d informed her of this new schedule. She’d been fresh from her first full night of sleep since Leyla’s birth and had felt drunk with it. Like a different person.

And he had looked at her in a way that had made her breath catch, as if he’d truly wanted nothing more than to take care of her. As if he really was some kind of guardian angel—though she knew better. She did.

Life had shifted all around her in these strange months since Leyla’s birth, then settled into a new form altogether. Sterling slept well at last. She spent her days with the baby and the fleet of cheerful, efficient nurses Rihad had acquired and who made Sterling feel like twice the mother she suspected she was. She took long walks around the palace and the surrounding grounds and gardens, sometimes pushing Leyla’s buggy and sometimes on her own, enjoying how much more like herself she felt by the day.

How oddly content she felt, here in her forced marriage to a man she’d vowed years ago to hate forever, no matter if Omar had or not. She’d been happy to carry that torch. She’d meant it on their wedding day when she’d told Rihad she hated him.

And then you kissed him.

But she didn’t want to think about that.

The presence of the nurses meant she had time to read again, to exchange emails with her friends in New York, to reacquaint herself with the life she’d put on hold when Omar had died. She started to imagine what might come next for her. She got back in touch with the foundation she’d worked with to aid foster children once they aged out of the system and found in the various responses to her marriage that things were very different now.

Omar’s friends, perhaps predictably, felt betrayed.

I understand why you’d feel that way, she emailed one after the next, trying hard to hold on to her patience—because where had they all been when she’d tried to run from Rihad? They’d texted, yes. Called. But not one of them had actually shown up that morning to help a heavily pregnant woman escape her fate.

Her entire plan had been to disappear somewhere and hope for the best. That had worked out well enough when she’d been fifteen and on her own—or in any case, she’d survived—but would it have been fair to Leyla? Sterling might have been married against her will, but a little bit of distance and a whole lot more sleep had made her think that having Leyla’s future assured was what mattered. That it was the only thing that mattered—and no matter that it was Omar’s infamously judgmental brother who’d made that possible.

But give me some credit, she’d chided Omar’s old friends—her old friends, too, not that anyone seemed to remember that while busy picking sides. Leyla is a princess and Bakri is a part of her birthright she can only access if legitimate. That’s all this marriage is: legitimacy for Leyla.

The charities and foundations she’d worked with who’d known her as Omar’s lover, by contrast, were ecstatic at the notion of working with the Queen of Bakri—a title Sterling hadn’t fully realized was hers to claim now.

Maybe a little bit too ecstatically, she’d thought only that morning, when yet another solicitation had hit her inbox.

It was only then that she realized that Rihad was staring at her across the table, and that she had no idea how much time had passed since she’d last spoken.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You told me you wished to apologize and then lapsed into silence,” he replied, mildly enough—though once again, there was a gleam in the dark gold of his gaze that reminded her what a dangerous man he was. That suggested he was waiting for something as he watched her. “I thought perhaps you were rendered mute by the enormity of your sins.”

“My sins have been widely overexaggerated, I think.” It had been two months since that kiss she found herself thinking about much more than she should. It was something about his mouth, crooked slightly in that sardonic way of his that thudded through her. “I wanted to apologize for falling apart the way I did in the first place. It’s taken me weeks to realize just how out of it I was.”

Rihad shifted in his seat, his strong fingers toying with the steaming cup of rich coffee before him on the table. And though the baby slept happily in her little buggy beside Sterling’s chair, Sterling had the sudden, crazy desire to wake her up—so there would be something else to concentrate on, something other than the way this lethal man was looking at her. A distraction from all of this intensity that swirled between them like the desert heat itself.

“And here I thought your apology would be for telling all your American friends that our marriage was a fake.”

She blinked. “What?”

A deeper, darker crook of that mouth. “I think you heard me.”

“Yes, but…” Had he been reading her email? But even if he had been, and she wasn’t sure she’d put it past him, she’d never said that. Never quite that. “I never said that. Not to anyone.”

“Were you misquoted, then?” He slid his tablet computer across the table to her. “Show me where, and I will notify my attorneys at once.”

Sterling swiped her finger across the screen and stared down at the page that opened before her, from a famously snide tabloid paper.

Queen of the Rebound screamed the headline. Then beneath it:

Sexy Sterling uses famous wiles to bewitch Omar’s grieving brother, the King of Bakri, but tells pals back home: “This marriage is for Baby Leyla. It’s all for show.”

The worst part, Sterling thought as she glared down at the offensive article and felt her stomach drop to her feet, was that she had no idea which of the people she’d thought were her friends had betrayed her.

“You understand that this is problematic, do you not?” he asked, still in that mild tone—though she was starting to see that there were other truths in that hard gleam in his eyes, in the tense way he held that mouthwatering body of his as he sat there in one of those dark suits of his that some artist of a tailor had crafted to perfectly flatter every hard plane, every ripple of muscle. Every inch of sensual male threat that emanated from him, made worse because of the luxurious trappings.

“It’s a tabloid,” she said dismissively, because she might note that threat in him but for some reason, it didn’t frighten her. Quite the opposite. “It’s their job to be problematic. It’s our job to ignore them.”

“I would ordinarily agree with you,” Rihad said, so reasonably that she almost nodded along, almost lulled by his tone despite the way her pulse leaped in her veins. “But this is a delicate situation.”

She deliberately misunderstood him, sliding the tablet back toward him and returning her attention to the selection of fruit and thick yogurt, flaky pastries and strong coffee, as if that was the most important thing she could possibly concentrate on just then: her breakfast. And so what if she wasn’t hungry?

“This is tabloid nonsense, nothing more,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Nothing delicate about it, I’m afraid. They like to smash at things until they break, then claim they were broken all along. Surely you know this.”

He didn’t speak for a moment and she tried to pretend that didn’t get to her—but eventually she couldn’t help herself and glanced up again, to find Rihad watching her too closely with a narrow sort of gaze, as if he was trying to puzzle her out.

She swallowed hard, and she couldn’t tell if it was because she wanted to keep her secrets hidden from him, or if she wanted to lay them all out before him in a gesture so suicidal it should have traumatized her even to imagine it. Yet somehow, it didn’t.

“The whole world knows that Leyla is Omar’s daughter, not mine, no matter that my name is on her birth certificate,” he said, after a moment, when she was beginning to imagine she might simply crack open.