Protecting the Desert Heir

by Caitlin Crews

  “I will not fail with you, little one,” he vowed then. “No matter what.”

  And it was only when he spoke that he felt the dampness of water on his face. He made no move to wipe it away. Not here in this dark place where no one could see him. Where he could not see himself. Where there was nothing but his grief and this brand-new life he held in his hands.

  He felt stretched out taut between the two, the dark and the light. Perhaps he always would.

  “I will not fail you again, brother,” he whispered into the night. To Omar, wherever he was now. To the little baby that was all that remained of his brother. To the woman his brother had held above his own family, however little Rihad might understand that. None of that mattered any longer. “I will not fail the family you left behind. This I swear.”

  * * *

  Sterling woke that first night again and again, jolted awake by some internal panic that had her jackknifing up in her bed in alarm each time. But she 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 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.