found Leyla right there beside her, more beautiful each time she kissed her sweet cheeks or held her surprisingly hot little body against her own skin.
Those first days were a blurry sort of cartwheel through time, when all she could see or hear or focus on at all was this perfect little creature she’d somehow been chosen to bring into the world, and the astonishingly steep learning curve required to take care of her as she deserved—even in the Bakrian palace, where she had all the help she needed. That didn’t alter the weight of the responsibility she felt to this creature she found she loved bigger and wider and better than she’d imagined it was possible to love anything.
Her world shrank down to Leyla, only Leyla, and through her a connection to Omar again, who felt a little bit less lost to her when she held the daughter they’d made in her arms.
Beyond that, there was nothing save the dark, surprisingly quiet man who kept watch over her in his own way, moving in and out of the periphery of all that wasn’t Leyla until Sterling was as close to used to him as she imagined anyone could be around a man as intense and nerve-racking as Rihad.
She’d even dreamed she’d seen him in her room while she slept, watching over her like some guardian angel. She knew 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
