IS VERY annoying, yes,” Rihad told his furious daughter out in the private family garden that morning, and took care to hide his laughter from her. “But if you drown your brother in that pool, Leyla, there will be no party on Saturday and you may, in fact, spend your birthday in the dungeons.”
“There aren’t any dungeons in the palace,” his ten-year-old replied, hotly. “Mama said you made that up.”
He only smiled when she scowled at him. “There are dungeons if I say there are. I make the rules.”
“Brothers are stupid,” Leyla told him with a hint of imperiousness he thought she’d gotten directly from her mother.
Rihad thought of his own brother, lost so long now.
“I cannot forgive myself,” he’d told Sterling on Omar’s last birthday. As they did every year, they’d visited his grave on the palace grounds, together. “I doubt I ever will.”
She had been wrapped in his arms, her back tucked against his front, his chin resting on her head.
“He’d already forgiven you,” she’d said. She’d shifted when he tensed. “He loved you, Rihad. He always loved you.” She’d smiled up at him. “I was the one who hated you, for the both of us.”
“Brothers might be stupid,” he told Leyla now, “but you must love them anyway.”
“Love sounds stupid, too,” Leyla retorted, but she helped six-year-old Aarib continue to jump up and down on the wide lip of the pool near the waterfall anyway.
Though not without a very deep, long-suffering sort of sigh that did not bode well for her upcoming adolescence. Rihad repressed a shudder at that unhappy thought, given how stunning a child she already was, God help him. He returned his attention to the matters of state that awaited him on his tablet, a far more appealing prospect than his little girl growing up.
The papers hadn’t always left them alone, but it was nothing as it had been. Rihad had seen to the dismissal of the particular reporters who dared hound his wife so relentlessly—just as he’d seen to the immediate exile of some of his courtiers when he’d finally seen the way they’d treated her.
The Queen of Bakri, by definition, was a woman without peer, spotless of reputation and widely beloved by all.
Ten years on, Rihad had the distinct pleasure of knowing that wasn’t merely a decree he’d made, but the simple truth.
He knew the moment Sterling walked outside to join them in the garden. He always knew. She changed the air, he’d often told her, simply by breathing it, sharing it.
Those vicious, repulsive people she’d left behind in Iowa hadn’t ruined her. She wasn’t ruined. He thought that these days, she believed that without question at last.
His beautiful Sterling. His perfect wife.
He took a moment to marvel at her as she walked toward him across the stones while the world stilled all around him the way it always had. The way he thought it always would. She still dressed like the model she’d been, too elegant and so easily, offhandedly chic. That copper-blond hair of hers that still fascinated him beyond measure. Those long, long legs that had only this morning been draped over his shoulders as he’d driven them both to a hard, wild finish in the murky dark before dawn.
Ten years later and he was still hard at the thought of her.
“Are the monsters asleep?” he asked as she drew near.
“More or less.” She smiled as she looked at Leyla and Aarib, as if she truly enjoyed the particular music of their young voices, scraping holes in the sky. He knew she did. Despite himself, so did he.
“God bless the morning nap.”
Rihad thought of their younger boys, four-year-old Jamil and two-year-old Raza. Little hellions in every possible way, far louder than the older two combined, and they both demanded their mother’s personal attention as only younger children could. “Indeed.”
She moved as if to sit in her own seat but he pulled her down into his lap instead, nuzzling her neck until her breath caught. He pressed himself against the seam of her bottom, and she laughed.
“You’re insatiable.” But she sounded proud.
Content, he thought. They were content, and it was nothing like settling. It was like flying. Soaring through ten years and headed for ten more. Headed straight for forever.
“Only for you, my little one,” he murmured against her ear. “Always for you.”
They had not always had it easy, these past ten years. They had failed each other, hurt each other. The world was not always gentle and it was easy to lose each other in the whirl of children and responsibilities, even in a palace with fleets of nurses and around-the-clock staff.
But they had always had love. And love brought them back to each other, over and over again.
Rihad had learned to treat her less as a subject and more like a partner. Or he tried. She, in turn, had learned how to trust him.
This was intimacy, in all its complicated glory, of the soul and of the flesh. Lovers become parents, a king and his queen, a man and his woman. This was the magnificently double-edged sword of truly being known by another, across whole years.
In truth, he loved every bit of it.
And he still liked to show her how much.
“They’re kissing.” It was Aarib’s disgusted little-boy voice, more piercing than usual, or perhaps Rihad wanted to be interrupted less in that moment.
“They do that a lot,” replied Leyla, in her world-weary older-sister voice. “A lot.”
“Why did we have more children?” Sterling asked him, laughing. “Whose terrible idea was that?”
But then she kissed him once more, and he saw moisture glistening in her lovely blue eyes. He ran his hand over her cheek.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much, Rihad.”
“For what?” he asked quietly.
“For everything,” Sterling said, fiercely. “For giving me our family. For being my family.”
She rose to go to the children then, and he let her leave, fully aware that she had no reason to thank him. She was the heart of this wondrous little tangle of theirs, love and trust and wonder, tears and scrapes and sudden furies.
Their heart. His heart.
His, Rihad thought. Forever.
And he was the king. His will was law.
Dani Collins
