Protecting the Desert Heir

“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.”