LITMIR.BIZ

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there with her, holding her hand, reminding her she wasn’t alone, sharing his strength so hers would seem that much more boundless. Not an intruder into these first moments between mother and child, but a part of it. That was all insane, of course. He’d tried to shake it off as he’d approached her, stiff and formal.

      She’d glanced up at him, and that look on her face had altered. That wasn’t a surprise, but still, Rihad had felt it like a blow. Her mouth had flattened when she’d seen him. She’d hidden that naked joy in her gaze.

      He’d hated it.

      “Her name is Leyla,” Sterling had told him after a moment, as if she’d needed a breath or two to pull herself together before she could speak.

      There had been nurses bustling in and out of the birthing suite behind him, doctors being paged incessantly from the intercom out in the corridor, but Sterling had been still. Rihad had had the notion that she’d been waiting for some kind of strike. From him.

      As well she should, he’d thought.

      It had made that sensation of inexplicable loss yawn open even wider within him. The baby had made tiny noises, more a creaking sound than actual crying, and Sterling had finally relented, her mouth curving into a sweet little smile as she looked down to soothe the little girl that almost undid him. When she’d looked up again, it had almost killed him. He’d never seen that expression on her face before, not even in those happy tabloid pictures of her and Omar. Open. Loving. Soft.

      Something like pure.

      Even then, at such a tender moment that had nothing at all to do with him, Rihad had wondered what it would be like if that look had been meant for him—and then he’d wondered if he’d utterly lost his mind.

      Not if so much as when, he’d told himself then.

      “It was Omar’s favorite name for a girl,” she’d continued after a moment, a faint line appearing between her brows. “That’s not… I mean, is there some royal naming tradition I should know about?”

      “No.” He’d sounded so stiff. So altered. “Leyla is a lovely name.”

      “She’s wonderful,” Sterling had whispered then, bending her face back down to the infant, fierce and maternal—and he’d had to leave. Because he hadn’t known what to do with that roaring, howling thing inside of him, so threaded through with emotions he didn’t know how to process.

      Emotions he hardly recognized. What had emotions ever had to do with his life before now? His was a cool world, rational and logical and coldly reasoned. It was his weapon, his strength. The bedrock of his ability to rule his country. He didn’t know what the hell to do with all these feelings. He didn’t know what it made him, that he felt anything at all for this woman or her child. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do with any of it.

      He’d waited until night fell before he returned, and he slipped in only after his security detail assured him she slept at last. He told himself a thousand different reasons why that was the proper, even respectful, thing to do for a woman he hardly knew who’d just given birth—but the truth was, he was completely off balance and he knew it. He wasn’t sure he knew himself, was the thing—as if he’d been a stranger to himself since Sterling had walked up to him outside that building half a world away. And that alone was enough to give him pause.

      Enough to keep him standing there in the shadows.

      The child moved in her swaddling then, making that tiny noise again. Part alien, he thought, and part feline, and still it tugged at him. Rihad moved over to the bassinet before he knew he meant to leave his post across the room, seating himself in the chair beside it.

      “Hush, little one,” he murmured, stroking his fingers down the whisper-soft plushness of one newborn cheek, marveling at it as he did. “Let your mother sleep.”

      Then he covered the baby’s soft little body with his hand, letting the warmth of his palm seep into the rounded swell of her tiny belly, and sure enough, she quieted. Just as he’d done for his half sister Amaya when she’d been an infant. Just as he remembered watching his mother do to baby Omar when Rihad had been a small boy.

      Rihad stayed where he was, gazing down at her sweet face, all those dark curls and the eyes that he’d seen earlier were a liquid black that reminded him of his brother, and tried to make sense of the wild tumult within him.

      Like an earthquake, when he knew he wasn’t moving and neither was the ground beneath him. It tore him apart even so, even while he felt little Leyla’s sweet new breaths beneath his hand.

      Or perhaps it was because of her.

      And he’d been furious for such a long time now. He’d been in a dark, black, consuming rage since he’d gotten that call from the Parisian police. Since he’d had to bury his younger brother so many years before his time. He’d understood it was grief, mixed up somewhere in that terrible rage inside of him, but understanding such a thing hadn’t done much to soothe him or stop the fury. His anger—that Omar had been lost so tragically, at this woman who had twisted him into unrecognizable pieces, at the marriage he’d felt he had no choice but to insist upon no matter how little he might have wished it—had been a living flame, hotter by the day, and he’d stopped wondering when or if it might go out.

      It had been so easy to focus it all on Sterling. His brother’s whore, Rihad’s new wife—

      But here, now, it was gone. Extinguished completely.

      That was what he felt, Rihad realized then. That internal earthquake ripped away his fury and left him with no one to blame. There was only the darkness of fate, the sheer, spinning horror that was his brother’s pointless, untimely death.

      And this tiny, perfect child was all that remained of Omar on this earth. This little scrap of life, so new she still bore the wrinkles from the womb, was all that was left of the brother Rihad had only ever wished to protect, from his own debauchery as from anything else.

      “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

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