Книга - Undone by the Sultan’s Touch

Undone by the Sultan's Touch
CAITLIN CREWS


UNDONE BY THE SULTAN’S TOUCH‘Kiss me, if you are so daring.’Cleo Churchill is instantly transfixed by the commanding presence of Khaled bin Aziz. But what would the Sultan of Jhurat want with an ordinary girl like her?Cleo seems to be exactly what Khaled needs: a convenient, beautiful bride to unite his warring country. Yet as their marriage plays out in the darkness of night, the passions unearthed threaten to consume them both!







Khaled would take her from the palace and Cleo would finally,finallybe his in every possible way.

That same fire she’d tasted that night three months ago simmered in her at the thought, making her cheeks heat, making her stomach clench in delicious anticipation, making her feel hungry and wild despite all the eyes trained on her.

Almost as if he’d left them both unfulfilled deliberately.

“Where are we going?” she asked when Khaled finally took her by the hand and led her from the banquet to the sound of many cheers, though the truth was she didn’t care at all as long as he was with her.

“You will see when we get there,” Khaled told her, and then he smiled down at her in a way that made her quiver deep inside, all that dark intent on his fierce face, all of his focus on her at last. At last. “Though I must warn you, wife, that I doubt you will see much at all outside my bed.”


CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouth-watering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her lifelong love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.


Undone by the

Sultan’s Touch

Caitlin Crews






www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Contents

Cover (#u23d1714b-4931-50c7-a58c-a52226cb1cdc)

Introduction (#u0733052a-d842-5970-98fc-367e948290fb)

About the Author (#u594be0c3-5559-54f2-9daf-97c8e5426978)

Title Page (#u5f266d88-45c4-56fa-b433-2911e98ac7e1)

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Extract

Endpages (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


CHAPTER ONE (#u654f73a1-c8be-560a-aa14-b52429e26797)

THE GIRL CAME out of nowhere.

Cleo Churchill stamped on the brakes in her tiny rental car, gasping as the car swerved before coming to a jolting halt in the narrow little alley of a road somewhere deep in the twisting, ancient heart of the capital city of Jhurat.

For one panicked heartbeat, then another, she thought she’d been seeing things. The blazing desert sun was only then beginning to drop behind the ornate historic buildings, making the shadows lengthen and stretch. She’d lost her way in the tangle of old streets and one city looked very much like another after six months of traveling all around Europe and into the Middle East. And more to the point, there was absolutely no reason a girl should dive in front of her car—

But there she was, young and wide-eyed and startlingly pretty behind her flowing scarves, right there at the passenger window—seemingly unharmed.

I didn’t hit her, thank God.

“Please!” The girl spoke through the car’s open window, desperate and direct. “Help me!”

Cleo didn’t think. The adrenaline of the near miss hummed through her with an almost sickening electricity, but she motioned toward the door, aware as she did it that her hands were shaking.

“Are you all right?” she asked as the girl wrenched open the door and threw herself inside. “Are you hurt? Do you need—?”

“Drive!” the girl cried as if pursued by demons. “Please! Before—”

Cleo didn’t wait to find out before what. She’d escaped her own demons, hadn’t she? She knew how it was done. She stepped on the gas pedal, scowling as she concentrated fiercely on the narrow road in front of her, which she dearly hoped led back out of this maze of ancient narrow streets that wound erratically around Jhurat’s central palace, home to its governing sultan. Beside her, the girl breathed heavily and high-pitched, as if she’d been running.

“You’re okay,” Cleo said, trying to soothe her—or even herself. “We’re okay now.”

And then a man stalked out of the shadows, directly into the car’s path, as if daring Cleo to run straight into him. She heard herself gasp out a curse, but her eyes were fixed on him as surely as if he’d demanded it.

He was tall and fierce, forbidding and uncompromising in the loose robes that marked him a local—a wealthy local—and did nothing at all to conceal his markedly powerful form. The sun was behind him and hid his face, but Cleo could still feel the weight of his stare. Like an impossible knot in her own chest.

He stood there in the center of the road, imperious and bold. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and waited—and it wasn’t until she realized he wasn’t moving that she also realized she wasn’t, either. That she’d stopped the car directly in front of him as if he’d held up his hands like a police officer and commanded it.

When all he’d done was stare.

Despite herself, Cleo shivered. Foreboding. Fear.

And something else, maybe, beneath it, that she’d never felt before.

He bit out something ferocious in Arabic that made the girl beside her jerk in her seat as if he’d slapped her, and Cleo’s stomach twisted.

This is not good, she thought.

“Get out of the car,” he said then, his voice deep and autocratic, and it took a long, shuddering moment for Cleo to realize that this time, he was speaking directly to her. Issuing an implacable order in a language she could understand, right through the glass. “Now.”

“Who is that?” she whispered, still unable to pull her gaze away from him. He was simply too mesmerizing. Too powerful.

The girl beside her let out a sound that was something like a sob, but far angrier. When Cleo finally managed to yank her attention away from the dark and dangerous man taking over the road before them, the girl’s jaw was set in a stubborn line, and her mouth trembled. Making her look even younger than Cleo had originally thought she was.

“That,” the girl said bitterly, staring out the front window at the man who still stood there, not moving an inch, as if he expected it to be nothing but a matter of moments before he was obeyed, “is His Excellency, the Sultan of Jhurat.”

This was, Cleo realized dimly then, a great deal worse than not good.

“What?” she asked weakly, that thudding panic hitting harder, sending out shock waves. He didn’t look like a sultan. He looked like some kind of warrior angel, sent down to smite and awe. She felt both smitten and awed, the sensations too hot and almost painful inside of her. “Why would a sultan—the sultan—chase you down an alley?”

“Because he is a demon from hell.” The girl’s mouth twisted. “He is also my brother.”

Cleo swallowed, hard.

He stood there, waiting. And now she understood what that proud ruthlessness meant. What that thing was that emanated from him like a force field, rendering the whole city small and inconsequential beside him.

Cleo’s mind raced, and for some reason, she thought of Brian then. Weak, lying Brian. Brian, who had humiliated her. Brian, who had said he loved her but couldn’t possibly have meant it, could he? Brian, who she’d believed so completely when he’d never had even a shred of the intensity or authority the man before her simply...oozed.

The sultan jerked his head in a silent yet remarkably eloquent command to exit the vehicle.

Immediately.

And Cleo forgot about stupid, cheating Brian and the girlfriend he’d kept on the side for almost the entirety of their doomed engagement.

This was exactly the kind of thing she’d promised her parents back in Ohio would never happen to her, because she’d imagined she was too smart, or too cynical, to fall prey to scenarios like this. This was exactly what her mother and her hysterical aunts had predicted would happen if she did something so radical as explore the world by herself. She could practically hear the doom-and-gloom predictions they’d all shared with her whether she’d wanted them to or not, like a going-away present, as if they were whispering it in her ear from across the planet.

They’d begged her not to do this. They’d told her running away from her problems was only running straight into new ones. And now look what had happened.

The sultan waited. Less patient by the moment.

“Just drive over him,” the girl beside her demanded. “Mow him down where he stands.”

“I can’t,” Cleo said, except she found she was whispering. “I can’t do that.”

And everything seemed to slow down, as though the air was made of syrup and there was nothing but him. That man. The sultan. She shifted the car into Park. Beside her, the girl let out a frustrated noise, but Cleo’s attention was riveted on the man at the end of her bumper.

Still. Watchful. Ferocious.

Her neck prickled with a deep foreboding. With anxiety. With the sense of immensity, as if what she was about to do was already sealed in stone, as ancient and unmoving and inevitable as the venerable city around her, as the old streets beneath her.

As the man before her. The sultan of all he surveyed.

Who couldn’t be weak, she knew somehow, if he tried.

Cleo turned off the rental car’s ignition with a decisive click and then opened her door, ignoring the girl in the passenger seat as she got out and stood there.

The sultan moved then. He nodded at someone behind her and men in military uniforms appeared as if from thin air, surrounding the rental car, all wearing machine guns that dwarfed their bodies.

Cleo didn’t understand a single word of the rapid-fire Arabic, all shouted back and forth in so many harsh and loud male voices, and yet somehow she couldn’t bring herself to look away from the sultan as he continued to stand there staring back at her.

One of his men appeared beside her and held out his hand, making Cleo flinch. She glanced at him, then back at the sultan, aware then of how fragile she was. She felt it in ways she never had before. Fragile and exposed and frighteningly vulnerable.

And it was still better than how Brian had made her feel, two weeks before their wedding, when she’d come home early from work and found him on the living room floor of his condo with that woman.

The sultan said something, and she realized it wasn’t the first time.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” she said, and she hardly sounded like herself.

He paused, and she wished she had something more than this shadowy impression of his face. That the sun would hide behind the buildings at last so she could look at him without her eyes watering. So she could convince herself that he was neither as cruel nor as inhuman as he appeared while backlit like a god.

So she could tell herself that the twisting heat that knotted her belly, low and hot, was based on something more than the intuition she’d learned better than to trust.

But his voice, when it came, was as calm as it was deep, despite the tension she could hear beneath it, and for no reason at all, it eased her. Even as it set her on fire.

“Do you know who I am?”

“Yes.”

A faint nod. “Give my man your keys.”

An implacable order delivered in perfect English, with a crisp British accent to boot. Cleo knew she should ask questions. Demand to know what was happening to her, what he planned to do next. Instead, she simply obeyed.

She opened her hand and the man beside her took the keys from her palm, and the whole time she was lost in the will of the powerful man whose face was still in shadows before her.

Why couldn’t she seem to breathe? Why did it feel as if the earth were buckling beneath her feet when she could see—because no one else was reacting to it, no one else was moving, the car was solid and unmoving beside her—that it was only happening inside of her?

Everything seemed to stretch out, slow and taut, but then the car engine turned over beside her, the men and the car and the angry girl disappeared after a brief consultation, and Cleo was standing alone in an alleyway in a foreign country with a man so great and powerful he held a title she’d half believed only existed in books.

He moved then, and she wished he hadn’t. He was like liquid, a threat wrapped in poetry, athletic and menacing at once. The knot inside her pulled taut, red and hot. Cleo stood still as he walked in a slow circle around her. He held something in his hands and she realized it was the wallet she’d left sitting in one of the cup holders in the car. One of his men must have—

“Eyes on me,” he ordered her, his voice a silken command.

And when she jerked her attention back up from her wallet to his face, she could see it, finally. Could see him.

Beautiful, something whispered inside her, though he wasn’t.

He was much too fierce. He reminded her of those remote villages she’d found in her travels, clinging to the sides of rugged mountains long days from anywhere, proud and breathtaking and unimaginably tough. He had thick dark hair and a poet’s face made shockingly masculine by a warrior’s cool, light gaze and the sort of tough jaw Cleo associated with soldiers and martial artists—and thugs. A blade of a nose. Faint lines around his eyes suggested he must have smiled at some point in his life, but she couldn’t imagine it. He seemed carved entirely from stone.

He looked so masculine and so inarguably fierce it was almost as if he and soft, round-faced, nice-looking Brian were of a different species. She told herself that was why her heart beat so fast. Because he was the not Brian.

And because he really was beautiful.

“You are American.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

His gaze moved over her and she had to fight not to squirm. She was wearing dark trousers and scuffed boots beneath a loose-fitting T-shirt, and a dark jacket as much to cover herself in this conservative part of the world as to block the faint chill in the air, hinting at the coming fall night. She’d twisted her long hair back, but the long day had coaxed some of it down again, strands falling forward messily and making her feel much younger than her twenty-five years.

Cleo didn’t want to ask herself why, exactly, she wished there was something more in his dark gaze then. Something to match that heat inside her.

He flipped open her wallet and looked inside. “You are a very long way from Ohio.”

“I’m traveling,” she said, and her voice sounded strange. Huskier than usual. Raw, somehow. “Backpacking.”

“Alone?”

She didn’t want to admit that, for some reason. For a hundred reasons. But he lifted his gaze from her wallet and the license he was presumably studying, and she felt hot. Caught.

“Yes,” she said, fighting to sound normal. “It’s been six months. I fly home in two weeks.”

And the truth was, she didn’t want to go back. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

“Unless, of course, you find yourself detained,” he said, as if he could read her mind.

She frowned. “Why would I find myself detained?”

“A prison sentence would be considered a lenient penalty in this country for a foreign national caught in the act of kidnapping a member of the sultan’s family,” he said, almost casually.

It was undoubtedly suicidal to scowl at this man. But Cleo only thought about that after she did it.

“I didn’t kidnap anyone. Your sister ran in front of my car. Should I have flattened her beneath my tires?” She didn’t remember herself so much as see that incredulous expression on his face, and she coughed once. Delicately. “I thought I was helping. And also not committing vehicular manslaughter.”

The sultan stared at her for a moment, that incredulous expression shifting to something else. Something far more dangerous.

“What do you imagine my sister was running from?” he asked, and it occurred to her that his easy, casual tone was in truth neither of those things.

“Maybe you’re marrying her off? To some ally or other?”

But that notion came from novels she’d read, not any particular knowledge about this place or him, and he seemed to know that. Even to expect it, she thought, when his slate-gray eyes darkened.

His magnificent mouth, already close to cruel in its beauty, thinned. He watched her for a moment, his cool gaze like a fire inside her, turning her inside out.

That had to be panic, she told herself, but she knew better.

“What a vivid imagination you have, Miss Churchill.”

She didn’t want him to know her name. She didn’t want him to look at her like that, or at all. She wanted to run.

Except she really didn’t. She’d been running for six months. This was the first time she’d wanted to stand still instead. Cleo couldn’t let herself think too much about that. It made the heat in her burn hotter.

“Your sister didn’t tell me what she was running from,” she said, somehow sounding far cooler than she felt. And not because she couldn’t seem to do anything but obey him, no matter if the order he gave her was silent, conveyed by those smoky gray eyes that she found as unnerving as she did mesmerizing. “She jumped in the car, that’s all. And then you appeared before us like every horror-movie villain in the history of mankind. Only without an ax. Happily.”

Again, that arrested look. That slow blink, as if he couldn’t believe she’d said that. Neither could she.

“My sister is sixteen.” His voice was low. Measured. “She doesn’t wish to return to her boarding school. What you interrupted was a tantrum.”

“She asked for my help,” Cleo said staunchly, and found herself lifting up her chin in a defiance that had to mean she had some kind of death wish. “And I’m not going to apologize for helping her, no matter how ferocious you become.”

He studied her, cold and fierce and impassive. He is a sultan, her brain kept reminding her. This is deeply, deeply foolish. He could do as he liked with her, and they both knew it. Mouthing off to a man like this had to be right up there in the top two dumbest things she’d ever done, right next to trust Brian.

“You are fortunate, I think, that I don’t require your apologies,” he told her, and yet the way he said it made her feel anything but fortunate, despite that glowing knot of heat low in her belly. “But I’m afraid you must come with me anyway.”

* * *

Khaled bin Aziz, Sultan of Jhurat for the moment—assuming he could keep clinging to his country by his damned fingernails—stood outside the small private foyer in the old palace where his guards had sequestered the American girl, and considered his next move.

His sister had been taken to her rooms—where she would remain until morning, when his guards would personally transport her to her boarding school in the countryside and make sure her teachers there were prepared to monitor her movements more closely. He knew it wasn’t Amira’s fault that she acted this way, so heedless and irresponsible, kicking up the kind of trouble she couldn’t possibly understand had far-reaching consequences.

Khaled could remember being sixteen and angry at everything himself, but, of course, he hadn’t had the luxury of indulging either his youth or his temper. He’d been too busy bearing the brunt of his responsibilities as their father’s heir.

You do not matter, his father had told him when he was barely eight and then with great regularity thereafter. Only Jhurat matters. Accept this truth.

Nor could Khaled indulge his own temper now. There was too much at stake. Trade negotiations with Western powers who took such pleasure in believing him a barbarian for the kind of commerce that Jhurat very much needed to secure if it was going to escape the curse of endless poverty that had afflicted so many of its neighbors, and had nearly crippled it, too, beneath the weight of his father’s paranoia and attempts to alleviate his own guilt.

Open the borders and you open Pandora’s box, his father had predicted balefully in one of his coherent moments, but it wasn’t until now that Khaled had fully understood what he’d meant.

He didn’t blame Amira, but he could kill her all the same for throwing him neck-deep into problems he wished someone else could solve. But that was what happened upon inheriting a country far earlier than expected after its ruler, his father, had collapsed and had been declared incompetent: there was no one else. These problems were Khaled’s alone.

“She is no one of importance,” his head of security, Nasser, said quietly from beside him, his gaze on the sleek computer tablet in his hands. “Her family is unremarkable. Her father is an electrician and her mother works in a doctor’s office in a small town on the outskirts of what appears to be a very small city in the middle of the country. She has two sisters, one married to a mechanic and the other to a teacher. No ties to anyone with any sort of influence at all.”

“Ah,” Khaled said, more to himself than Nasser, “but that only means she is one of their ‘every women.’ I learned at Harvard that Americans love nothing more than to tell themselves fairy stories in which little brown mice become great and powerful through their own inner strength, or some such nonsense. It is part of their cultural DNA.”

Inside the room, his own little brown mouse sat on one of the settees, bent over at the waist, elbows on her knees and her forehead cradled in her hands. He thought she was simply breathing deeply, not weeping. Not this one, with her talk of villains and axes and her foolish courage. He’d seen the hint of fear in her eyes when he’d ordered her back to the palace. He’d scared her, he knew, and if he regretted that—if he regretted the necessity of squelching that spark of defiant fire that had transformed her from a mouse into something far more interesting out in that alley, if he regretted the man he’d become that he could do these things so cavalierly—he ignored it.

There was no place for regret. There never was. There was only Jhurat.

“She has been traveling, as she said,” Nasser continued after a moment, diplomatically opting not to comment on either fairy stories or mice, which was only one of the reasons he’d been Khaled’s right hand and best friend since they’d been boys. “She flew to Scotland six months ago and has been wandering since, following what appears to be a largely whimsical itinerary south and east. One of those gap-year journeys, it seems, though she finished her university studies some years back. Perhaps she is ‘finding herself’?”

Khaled snorted at his aide’s dry tone. “And instead she found me. Poor little mouse.”

“There is no need for you to deal with this situation any further if you don’t wish it,” the other man said then. “We can handle a girl. Especially one who cannot possibly cause a single ripple, no matter what becomes of her.”

“And can you handle our enemies, too? Who even now work to have me removed from the palace because of my tainted blood?” What they whispered was that Khaled’s line was weak, that the son would inherit his father’s dementia before his time. And who was to say they were wrong? He shoved that aside. “I am certain they have already leaked the fact that I have a young female American in custody to the papers. It is inevitable.”

“The papers can be dealt with.”

“Our papers, perhaps.” But that was how his father had done things, and look what it had wrought: this mess Khaled had to clean up, though he often doubted he could. He doubted anyone could, but it was his duty—his fate—to try anyway, no matter what happened. “But what happens when they take it to the international stage? Which they are certain to do.” Because it was what he would do, and Khaled had the peculiar pleasure of knowing his enemies well. “How will we look to the world when I am painted as some kind of monster who abducts fresh-faced young American girls from the streets?”

He already knew what it would do to the contracts they needed to lock down to bring commerce to the country. To say nothing of the much-needed influx of international wealth, which, with the increase in tourism since he’d opened the borders again, might tip the scales in Khaled’s favor. In Jhurat’s favor, at long last.

He couldn’t afford any backsliding. Not now.

“The people do not want to revert to the Stone Age,” Nasser said darkly. “They want their movies and their technology right along with their paychecks from all the new jobs. No matter what that fool may tell himself.”

“That fool” was Talaat, the leader of the resistance movement that opposed Khaled’s claim to the sultanate with the assertion that Khaled’s blood was tainted with the same infirmity of mind that had taken his father down. Can we risk the country? Talaat liked to ask on the news and all over the papers, so reasonably.

Talaat was also Khaled’s cousin on his mother’s side. They’d played together as small boys. It made a kind of poetic sense that his own cousin should have become the greatest thorn in his side, Khaled thought, since he couldn’t remember a single instance in which his blood had done anything but make his life harder, including Amira’s stunt today.

“Talaat does not care what the people want,” Khaled said shortly. “He cares about power.”

Nasser didn’t respond, because this was an unfortunate truth that might not matter in the least should Talaat’s seditious behavior gain footholds in the proper places, and Khaled’s mouth twisted in a wry sort of smile. It wouldn’t do to become the next internet sensation at a time like this. It would take very little to tip public sentiment against him, and Americans, with their Kickstarter campaigns and their internet apps that could make civil unrest in far-off places into one more video game they could play from their couches, loved nothing more than to cry out against countries like Jhurat at the slightest provocation.

Or no provocation at all.

But that meant he had to think very carefully about what to do about the photogenic American girl who should never have crossed paths with Amira. What stories would she tell if he set her free? Who would listen to her when she told them? How would his enemies spin this story if they got their hands on her—and they would. He knew they would. They always did.

Inside the parlor, the girl shifted in her seat, then sat up, and Khaled studied her, bracing himself for what he knew he had to do. Had known since he’d pulled her out of that car, and if he was honest, was more interested in doing now that she’d shown him that surprising—if misguided—strength of hers.

She was a gift. And he would take all the gifts he could get.

As gifts went, he had to admit, she was an excellent one. She was delicate, with her large eyes and remarkably fine features, her hair a collection of reds, browns and caramels twisted inexpertly and pinned to the back of her head.

Pretty, something inside him noted, in a way that made him shift on his feet, then frown. Too pretty.

Elegant and unforgettable, in fact, with that face of hers and the coltish lines of her figure—yet she was dressed like a tomboy. Her clothes were deliberately mannish and casual in that Western style he’d never really understood during his studies abroad in England and the States, and which he most certainly did not appreciate in a woman.

Khaled was a traditional man. He had always preferred women who understood their own uniquely feminine appeal. Who boasted womanly hips and generous breasts to cushion a man in softness, instead of a boyish figure and too many bones besides. Women who offered him shy gazes to make him feel strong and musical voices to soothe him when he felt anything but. Demure and modest women, traditional women.

Not Western girls like this one in her androgynous clothes, flat-chested and skinny-thighed, who had stared back at him directly in the street, dared to scowl at him, and hadn’t had the sense to beg for his mercy.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d found defiance anything but irritating.

And yet her eyes were extraordinary. More than extraordinary. They’d been filled with the setting sun out in that tiny little alleyway, and yet even when they weren’t they were a kind of bright, gleaming gold, like ancient treasure, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t get them out of his head.

Why it felt as if she haunted him, as if she had already worked her odd, scowling way into the heart of him when he should hardly have noticed her at all beyond her potential value to him. To his country.

Khaled told himself it was nothing more than strategy that made him walk inside that room then, whether he wanted to do it or not. Politics and power and the fate of his country besides.

Because it couldn’t be anything else. He knew better.

“I apologize,” he said, summoning up that charm of his that felt rusty from disuse, as though his smile was made from cut glass.

“And as it happens, I do require an apology,” she said drily. “I accept.”

But she stopped when her eyes met his, as if the sound of her own voice in the elegant room was alarming, somehow. Or he was.

“That regrettable scene in the street must have alarmed you, Miss Churchill.”

She stared up at him in that same bright, golden way she had before, direct and clever at once, and Khaled couldn’t name the thing that moved in him then, powerful and dark.

But he could use it. And he would. He would do anything for his country. Even this. Especially this, a rebellious little voice murmured deep inside him. Maybe she is your gift.

Khaled smiled wider and settled himself in the chair at an angle to the settee where she sat, looking delicate and amusingly put out against the bright cushions scattered around her—

Looking like the small, frightened mouse she is, he corrected himself. Caught between much larger and sharper claws than she could imagine. He leaned in closer, aware of the way her eyes widened slightly, the way her breath caught, and he knew it wasn’t fear.

She was aware of him as a man. Good.

He’d use that, too.

Something unexpectedly hot wound through him when she licked her lips, her eyes still fixed on him. And then she frowned at him, and he liked it. Far more than he should.

“I hope you’ll allow an overprotective brother to make it up to you as best he can,” Khaled said, his smile even brighter.

He was going to enjoy this.


CHAPTER TWO (#u654f73a1-c8be-560a-aa14-b52429e26797)

THE MAN WHO walked into that parlor as if it, too, should cower before him as he moved was fearful and breathtaking, but he wasn’t quite the same one who had confronted Cleo in the street—and not only because he’d changed his clothes, she thought.

This version of the Sultan of Jhurat smiled as he sat down with her, something that altered that fierce face of his and made him nothing short of stunning.

Her heart pounded hard, like a fist against her ribs.

“Please,” he said in a pleasant tone of voice, lounging there in a sleek buttoned black shirt over a pair of loose black trousers, neither of which made him look any less dangerous than he had in that alley. It was as if he’d traded in a scimitar for a polished knife, but the sharp edge was still the same. She’d never in her life met anyone so male. “You must call me Khaled.”

As if they were friends. As if it was possible that one could be friends with a man like this. Cleo doubted it. He was far too intense, far too...colossal.

“Uh, okay. Khaled.”

He looked as if he could eat a thousand Brians for breakfast and still be hungry.

She looked at the room instead of at him, hoping that might ease the clench of that bright heat inside her. But it didn’t, no matter how many lovely silk pillows decorated the delicately pretty couches, or how much gold was on the ceiling and dripping down the walls into the exuberant sconces. No matter that smile on the sultan’s darkly ferocious face as he looked at her now.

“Does this mean you’re not planning to arrest me any longer?” she asked. Politely. And only then realized she was frowning.

He threw his head back and laughed. It was heart-stopping. Cleo felt as if she’d fallen down hard and knocked the breath straight out of her lungs.

“I’ll confess to overreacting,” he said, that astonishing laughter still rich in his dark voice. “It is an older brother’s prerogative, surely.”

He nodded at some unseen servant—and this was the sort of over-the-top place, preening with dramatic chandeliers draped in crystals and entire gleaming ballrooms lined with complicated tapestries depicting epic historical events she couldn’t identify, that must have whole battalions of unseen servants, Cleo imagined—and sure enough, a tray appeared before them. Hot, fragrant tea and an array of treats, sweet and savory alike, as if he was trying to tempt her.

Or charm her.

And then the Sultan of Jhurat waved his servants away and poured tea for her, as if nothing in the world could be more normal than to serve her himself.

Her. Cleo Churchill from outside Columbus, Ohio, to whom absolutely nothing interesting had ever happened. Embarrassing and humiliating, sure. But a cheating fiancé wasn’t interesting. It was boring, run-of-the-mill, exactly as she’d concluded she must have been if a safe and supposedly good man like Brian had been driven to betray her so completely.

She was dreaming, clearly. She’d thought so repeatedly over the past few hours, and her thigh ached from all the times she’d pinched it. She thought she’d have a bruise by morning, and still she found herself lost in the way he moved, all of that leashed strength and easy power obvious even in his handling of a delicate china teacup.

Cleo swallowed, hard, as though that might clear the buzzing in her ears. Or wake her up.

“Tea?” he asked smoothly, as if it were the most natural thing imaginable for a man like him to wait on her, in any capacity, when she could see it wasn’t.

She could see the way he wore his command, so matter-of-factly. That it was a part of him. That the fierceness, the dark ruthlessness she’d seen in him before, was the truth of him. Not this creature, whoever he was, who smiled at her and made her blood heat.

Almost as if he meant to charm her... But that was absurd. She was far too practical to yearn for something so out of her reach. Wasn’t she?

She ignored that insane voice inside her that whispered that after suffering through Brian, she deserved something this impossible. This wild and beautiful.

“I don’t want to keep you,” she said, but she took the cup and saucer he offered her anyway, as if her hands wanted things she wouldn’t let herself wish for. Maybe that was why her voice came out so crisp when she spoke again, as though she was chastising him. “I’m sure you have any number of official duties to perform.”

“None so pressing I can’t take the time to correct a grave error,” he said, settling back against his seat and training that intense gaze of his on her, gleaming with what she didn’t think she dared call amusement. “I apologize for my sister, Miss Churchill. She dragged you into a family matter and put you in a terrible position. It’s unforgivable.”

“Cleo. If I’m to call you Khaled—” and there was something about his name that felt different against her tongue then, like a square of dark, almost-bitter chocolate, and a light flared briefly in his slate-gray gaze as though he tasted it, too “—you should certainly call me Cleo.”

“Is that short for Cleopatra?” he asked almost lazily, making her wish it was. Making her wish with a sudden deep fervor that she could transform herself into whatever might please him—and she didn’t know where that thought came from. Only that she felt it like her own too-warm blood, pounding through her, changing her where she sat.

But then, she’d been there, done that, with a man who could never dream of being Khaled’s equal. She wouldn’t do it again.

“No.” She set down the tea without tasting it, afraid she’d drop the whole of it on the undoubtedly priceless rug beneath her dusty feet. “My mother liked it.”

He studied her for a moment, until she realized she was holding her breath.

“I like it, too,” he said, and she didn’t understand the heat that blasted through her, confusing her even as it made her ache.

“You were talking about your sister,” she reminded him, somehow ignoring that thing that wound ever tighter deep inside her.

“Amira is my responsibility,” he said after a moment, that hard voice of his a shade warmer, though not at all soft. “Our mother died when she was quite small and I suppose I feel as much a parent to her as an older brother. And I regret I’ve not been there for her as I should have. My father’s health has declined quite seriously in the past year and my attention has been on the country. That is not an excuse and not something I could have changed, but it is a factor, I think, in her acting out.”

“I don’t know that it’s possible to really be there for a teenage girl,” she said after a moment, when she was reasonably certain her voice would come out even. “No matter who she is. Feeling abandoned and mistreated is par for the course, as I remember it, whether that’s true or not.”

“I can’t help thinking that she would do better with a female’s guidance. Someone to look up to who is not the autocratic brother who now makes all the decisions about her life that she doesn’t much like. I suspect she finds me as baffling as I find her.”

It took Cleo a moment to look up, because she’d been too busy staring at the frayed cuffs of the dark trousers she’d worn in too many countries to count and wondering with only the faintest little hint of despair why she was dressed like a teenage girl when she wasn’t one. Sitting here in this place—in this palace—she’d never been more aware of how far short she fell of any kind of womanly ideal.

She was a little bit of a mess, if she was honest. Ragged cuffs, torn-off fingernails, worn and battered clothes that she’d been wearing for six months straight and washing out in a hundred hostel sinks. Backpacker chic didn’t translate in a palace, she understood, especially when she was sitting in the presence of a man who made even what she assumed were his casual clothes look impossibly splendid.

You let yourself go, Cleo, Brian had said, as if that were a reasonable explanation for lying and cheating. And we’re not even married yet. I wanted someone who would never do that.

And I wanted someone who wouldn’t sleep with other people, Brian, so I guess my ratty jeans are my business, she’d snapped back at him.

And then what Khaled had said penetrated and she lifted her gaze to find him watching her much too intently, a thousand things she didn’t understand in those slate-gray eyes of his. It made her shiver. It made her wonder.

It made her understand her own insecurities.

Brian was a spoiled child but Khaled was very plainly a man—and a man used to the best of everything, surrounded by beauty on every side. Even his tea set shouted out its delicate, resolute prettiness. Was it insane that she wished she was as pretty, as lovely, as all these things he was used to having around him?

That he might look at her and find her beautiful, too?

Of course it’s insane, she scolded herself. If Brian thought you dressed as though you let yourself go, what must the Sultan of Jhurat think?

“The best cure for teenage girls is the passage of time,” Cleo said, curling her lamentable fingernails into her palms and out of sight. Time was also the best cure for embarrassment, she’d found, though there were new humiliations all the time, apparently. “I speak as someone who used to be one. The only way out is through, I promise you.”

She had Brian in her head again, and she hated it. He didn’t deserve to take up any space inside her. How had she ever believed otherwise?

“And is this why you have traveled so long and so far?” Khaled asked after a moment. “To give yourself this time?”

“I haven’t been a teenage girl in quite a while.” It was almost as if she wanted to make sure he knew she was a grown woman, and Cleo refused to analyze why on earth she should want that. She shifted in her seat, trying to ease that clenched, knotted thing inside her. “This was more to prove that I could.”

“Why was that something that required proof?” asked a man who, she imagined, wouldn’t have to prove himself. Ever.

No one would cheat on this man. No one would dare.

“I had a decent job in a nice office doing human resources. Family and friends and a perfectly good routine. I was doing everything I was supposed to do,” she said, and it sounded mechanical. Or tasted that way in her mouth. She shrugged. “But in the end, I wanted more.”

“More?” he asked.

More than what waited for her in the wake of a broken engagement in a town full of pity and averted gazes. More than the weak man she had nearly tied herself to, so stupidly. More than Brian.

“It sounds silly,” she said.

There was no way that she could tell him the real reason she’d walked out of Brian’s condo and straight into a travel agency the next morning. There was no way she could admit how blind and foolish she’d been. Not to this man, who was looking at her as though she was neither of those things.

She never wanted to look at a man like this and see pity. She thought it might kill her.

Khaled smiled, and there was nothing like pity on his hard face. “I cannot tell if it does or does not, if you do not say it.”

“My entire life was laid out in front of me.” Brian hadn’t wanted to break up, after all. That had been all Cleo’s doing. And Brian hadn’t been the only one who’d thought her reaction to what he’d deemed his “minor indiscretion” was more than a little overdramatic. Life isn’t a fairy tale, her sister Marnie had said with a sniff. You might as well learn that now. Cleo forced a smile. “It’s a very nice life. I could probably have been content with it. Lots of people are. And I have deep roots in the place I came from, which means something.”

“Yet you were not happy.” He studied her for a moment, and she had to fight the urge to look away from that level stare lest he see all the things she didn’t want him to know. “You perhaps wanted wings instead of roots.”

It was such a simple flash of light, like joy, to be understood so matter-of-factly by a man like this, who was himself so far beyond her experience. But Cleo didn’t know what to do with it, so she pushed on.

“I decided I needed to do something big.” She’d wanted to disappear, in fact, and this was the next best thing. She lifted her hands, then remembered that she was hiding them and dropped them back in her lap. “And it’s a big world.”

“So we are told.”

Cleo almost thought he was laughing. She didn’t want to examine how very much she wished he was.

“I wanted more,” she said again, and there was that fierce note in her voice that she knew was as much bitterness as it was the bone-deep stubbornness that had had her on a plane out of Ohio barely forty-eight hours after walking in on Brian and his girlfriend. “Unfortunately, when you say something like that, the people who are content think that you’re saying their lives are small in comparison.”

“Most lives are small,” he said, this sultan, and Cleo forgot herself.

She laughed. “How would you know?”

Their eyes caught then, his gaze startled, and she didn’t know which one of them was more surprised.

But she refused to let herself apologize, the way some part of her wanted to do.

“You can laugh at yourself, you know,” she said without meaning to open her mouth again. “It won’t kill you.”

His dark gray eyes gleamed. Something Cleo couldn’t quite identify moved over his face, making her pulse and shiver low in her belly. “Are you quite certain?”

And somehow, she was wordless.

“In any event,” he said after a moment, still in that dry, amused tone she could scarcely believe, “you are not wrong. My life has been many things, but not, as you say, small.”

He waved a negligent hand, sultanlike if she’d had to define it, beckoning her to continue. And Cleo did, because at this point, what was there to lose? She had already taken that dive. Might as well swim.

“When I bought my plane tickets, things got a bit tense.” That was as true as the rest, if not quite the full story. But she wasn’t going to tell this man about the accusations she’d fielded. That she was harsh and cold and unrealistic, that she was frigid besides, that she was the problem—because six months later she still didn’t know if any of it was true. And what if Khaled agreed with Brian’s assessment of her? She found she was scowling at him again, but she didn’t care. “But I don’t believe that anyone should have to settle for someone. Or something. Or anything. I think that’s what people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about choices they can’t take back. And I don’t want to settle. I won’t.”

Khaled was definitely smiling then, an indulgent curve to those warrior’s lips, and it made her stomach flip over. Then again. As if she’d been spouting poetry instead of ranting a bit too intensely.

“You are not an ordinary girl,” he said, and Cleo should have found that patronizing. She should have been insulted. Instead she felt molten and consumed, somehow, by that intent gleam in his dark gaze. Or the fact that she thought she’d do anything to keep him looking at her like that. As if he thought she might be marvelous. “In fact, I think you are quite a fascinating woman, aren’t you, Cleo?”

And she wanted him to think so. She wanted that more than she wanted to admit, even to herself. She could have sworn he knew that, too. That it was obvious to him, and reflected in that crook of his hard mouth.

“You’re very kind,” she said.

“You told me before that you have only two weeks left in this trip of yours.” She was stunned that he remembered anything about her and found herself nodding, her eyes fixed on him, burned and breathless at once. “I have a suggestion, Cleo, and I hope you’ll consider it.”

“Of course.” She told herself her voice wasn’t gauzy, insubstantial. That she was simply speaking softly for a change.

“Stay here for your last two weeks,” he urged her.

He leaned forward then and her heart nearly somersaulted from her chest when he reached over and took her hand in his, enveloping her in a wallop of heat. All of that heat and strength and power from his simple touch like a drug inside her, making her heavy and giddy. Dizzy and drunk.

Captured more surely than if he’d locked her up in a cell after all.

His gaze met hers, and she might have been crazy but she could have sworn that all the things she was feeling, all that wildness and fire, he felt, too.

For a moment, there was nothing at all but the two of them.

“Stay with me,” he said softly, and it didn’t occur to her to do anything at all but agree.

* * *

Cleo’s battered blue backpack waited for her in the rooms she’d been told were hers for the rest of her stay, a little touch of reality in the midst of what felt like fantasy on top of fantasy. Because what Khaled had casually referred to as her rooms were in fact part of a luxurious, palatial bedroom suite straight out of those fairy tales her sister sniffed at.

Rich reds decked the high walls, the vast, deep bed was piled deep with pillows in various jewel shades, and the whole of it was shaded by a gloriously sheer canopy that floated above like a dream. Sumptuous rugs were thrown across every inch of the floor in riots of complicated patterns and colors that should have clashed or felt loud and garish, yet didn’t. Intricate lattice-worked shutters in dark woods graced the many windows and led out to a long balcony, stunning works of art hung on the walls, and complex mosaics were inlaid in the high ceilings and arches. All of that and a sitting room, a dressing room and a closet that rivaled the size of most apartments back home, and a gloriously decadent bath that Cleo could have swum laps in, had she wanted.

There was even a smiling, deferential maid named Karima who fluttered around Cleo as if she were some kind of princess, urging her into the bath that first night and then into a dress she’d never seen before when she got out.

“This isn’t mine,” Cleo protested, her fingers rough against the astonishing smoothness of the deep blue material, the prettiest thing she thought she’d ever felt, slippery and fine against her woefully neglected hands. “I can’t...”

“The sultan insists,” Karima replied, as if that ended the conversation.

As if that was the conversation.

If she was staying here, Cleo had decided during her long, luxurious soak, then she would have to make certain that Khaled realized it was her choice to do so, not his command.

But when she was led into the small private dining room later that evening, Cleo felt as if she’d been transformed into a dream version of herself, and it was hard to remember why there was something wrong about that.

The dress the sultan insisted she wear was long and more elegant than anything she’d ever worn in her life, bare about the shoulders and then swishing over her legs as she walked to make her feel almost shivery, while her feet felt naked in the sandals she’d been given. Her hair had been brushed out and left to swirl around her shoulders in a shining mass that flowed when she moved, and Karima had even slicked a gloss over her lips. It was all overwhelmingly sensual, somehow.

The sultan waited for her in the small dining room arranged around a gurgling fountain with windows that opened over a lush and fragrant interior courtyard, as if they weren’t in a desert at all. He was still dressed all in black, with a jacket over the shirt he’d worn earlier, which made him look as elegant as a hard man could.

And when he turned to greet her, Cleo froze. One of the benefits of never having tried to be the kind of sleek, elegant woman Brian had wanted was that she’d always imagined that if she’d wanted to, she could have transformed herself.

But this was as transformed as she’d ever be, and she knew it. And she felt more naked before this man than she ever had without her clothes.

His dark, cool gaze moved over her, taking in everything from the spill of blue fabric to the silver of the sandals she wore. This was torment, she thought. This was beyond embarrassing—

His gaze lifted to hers at last, and Cleo’s breath left her in a rush at the approval she saw gleaming there. The heat that roared in her in response. Relief and pleasure mixed into one, because if he believed in this version of her she thought she could, too.

Khaled wasn’t Brian. The notion was laughable. Khaled looked at her as though she was as beautiful as he was, not as if he were doing her a favor. How could she find that anything but intoxicating?

“Thank you for indulging me,” he said, as if he could see her uncertainty. As if he knew all that odd terror and tumult, pleasure and need, inside her. “I fear I am more traditional than is fashionable these days, but I find nothing so beautiful as a pretty woman in a lovely dress.”

Cleo smiled. How could she do anything but smile?

And when he held out his hand, a certain satisfaction in his cool gaze that she knew should probably have worried her, she ignored that little prickle of doubt—and took it.

* * *

“You can’t keep giving me things,” Cleo told him very seriously a few mornings into her stay, with another fierce and wholly inappropriate frown he found uncomfortably adorable.

Khaled had taken to having long, leisurely breakfasts with her, an indulgence he had no time for but allowed anyway. He liked to lounge there in the small nook he never normally used, strewn with pillows and streaming with sunlight, and watch her as she chased the sleep from those golden-hued eyes of hers with each sip of the strong coffee she liked.

Every day, he was more familiar with her. He touched her hand, her arm, her leg. He was intrigued by every caught breath, every shiver, that she worked so hard to hide from him. Today he reached over and tugged gently at the end of the ponytail she wore, until her honey gaze swung to his, all of that awareness simmering there, the way he wanted it.

He wanted a great deal more than he’d expected he would. He told himself that was no more than the lure of the chase, the excitement of this game. But that low, hard heat he couldn’t seem to dispel whispered otherwise.

“I prefer your hair down,” he said, his voice a low rumble, and he liked the flush that warmed her skin at the sound. Why was it so hard to maintain his control around this woman? He knew what the boundaries were. He knew he had to tempt her to fall, not push her over the edge. He knew what he was doing. “I like to see the light in it.”

“Khaled.” She had to struggle to keep her voice even, he could hear. It was more of a struggle every day, and he liked that, too. Her hands moved to her hair, then dropped to her lap. “You can’t.”

“This is Jhurat, is it not?” He was teasing her, and he liked the way she melted into it, as though she wanted to resist him, yet couldn’t.

“You know perfectly well it is.”

“And am I not the Sultan of Jhurat?”

“That’s the rumor,” she said drily, making him laugh. He hadn’t expected that she’d amuse him—and, he reminded himself, it didn’t matter if she did. It was beside the point.

Though it makes this that much sweeter, a traitorous little voice whispered, as if he was like other men. As if he had choices.

As if she did.

“Then I believe I can do as I like.” He shrugged. “It pleases me to give you things, Cleo.” This time when he reached out to her, he traced a gentle pattern from her temple to her cheek, something hot moving in him when she trembled. “Don’t you want to please me?” He didn’t wait for her answer, even though he knew what she’d say. It was too soon. “Be careful how you answer that. There are laws.”

She laughed, as he’d intended, and he liked that, too.

The American was his. As planned.

* * *

“You realize you will break her heart,” Nasser said one evening after being forced to interrupt one of the increasingly intimate dinners Khaled had insisted Cleo share with him.

Khaled shot him a cool look as they walked through the palace’s wide, ornate halls toward an impromptu meeting of his security council to focus on yet another one of Talaat’s attempts to stir up trouble in the provinces.

“I will note your concern for her,” he said as they went, his voice more clipped than it should have been. As if he cared, when he knew he couldn’t. “In the meantime you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that I know precisely how far I need to push her. And where I must stop.”

“I only wonder if it is necessary to go quite so far,” Nasser said in that same calm way of his. “Perhaps there is a kinder way to achieve your ends.”

“There is no power on this earth more motivating than falling in love,” Khaled said grimly, and told himself that he felt nothing. “It can make the most practical among us do precisely what we know we shouldn’t. And then, soon enough, it disappears when reality sets in. That is the time for kindness.”

You feel nothing, he barked at himself. No twist of regret, no sorrow for what might have been. No yearning for all the ways he could have lost himself in the glory of her instant, artless response to him, were he a different man.

Because the moment Cleo had let Amira into her car, she’d thrust herself into the middle of a chess game Khaled had no choice but to play—and play to win. And he would.

“The only greater power is that of love scorned,” was his friend’s reply. “As I think you know all too well.”

“Cleo is not my mother.” Khaled rubbed his hands over his face, annoyed that this was even a topic of conversation when the country hung in the balance, when he was only doing what he must in the most expedient manner possible. “My little mouse is not going to rise up one day and surprise us with her claws, then expedite her own destruction. That’s not who she is.”

Nasser inclined his head and moved to open the door to the briefing room.

“And more importantly, I am not my father,” Khaled found himself saying, dark and furious. Unbearably defensive. “I know what I’m doing.”

“As you say, Your Excellency,” Nasser murmured deferentially.

Which was, Khaled knew, no response at all.

But he had no choice.

And even if he’d had a choice, he knew he’d do this the exact same way. That was the thing that stuck in him, making Nasser’s words echo too loudly inside him, making him feel hollow. Because he was a selfish man, when all was said and done. Exactly as his father had been. When he was alone, when no one could see him or try to read the expressions on his face, he accepted that.

But it didn’t change a thing.

At least his father hadn’t meant to do what he’d done. Khaled would have no such excuse. He would protect Cleo from the worst of it, from his own mother’s fate—but he couldn’t bring himself to save her from himself.

Khaled knew what that made him. A monster of his own design.

Some nights later they strolled together through the moonlit courtyard. Cleo looked like quicksilver in the moonlight, very nearly ethereal, and when she smiled at him over her shoulder as she argued with him about some foolish book he’d told her was pointless, it clutched at him.

He’d made her inarguably beautiful with only a different wardrobe and two weeks. It was high time he made her his, no matter what kind of monster that made him.

She hadn’t put her hair up since the day he’d told her he liked it down. She’d stopped fighting the clothes he gave her, the trinkets he left for her to wear. And he found that the more he watched her and the more she bloomed from an awkward, androgynous Westerner into a woman possessed of the studied elegance he preferred, this delicate creature who frowned at him and talked back to him, the more he thought she was the perfect choice. The world would consider her a great beauty, he knew, with her natural slenderness and innate grace, and it would make them sigh over this romance he was shaping in precisely the way he wanted.

And he would always remember this. Here. Now. When she was half in love with him already. When she was lost in him and greedy for his touch. When she didn’t have the slightest idea what their future would look like.

It surprised him how very deep and powerful that pleasure ran, so atavistic, so rudimentary, it was almost indistinguishable from need. From the kind of hunger that he couldn’t indulge—the kind that would wreck not only the both of them, but all his carefully crafted plans besides.

He needed her to teeter on the edge, he reminded himself sternly. Not to fall.

“You aren’t listening to me,” she said then, rolling her eyes in a deeply disrespectful manner that should have offended him, yet didn’t. “That’s considered rude in both our cultures, I think you’ll find.”

You will break her heart, Nasser had warned him. But then, Khaled had never claimed to be a good man. Only a determined one.

And, oh, such a selfish one.

“Have you become so brave, then?” he asked into the silvery moonlight, lazy and flirtatious, ignoring the darkness beneath that he didn’t care to acknowledge. “That you would dare to scold a sultan?”

He reached over and took her hands in his, and that heat in him deepened, caught fire. He hadn’t expected to want her, particularly not with that jagged edge too much like raw need, but Khaled told himself that he could control it.

Because he had to control it. Because he was not his father.

“I dare,” she said, but her voice was little more than a shimmer in the dark, and he smiled.

“Come here,” he said, and tugged her to him.

She came easily, as he’d expected. Her breath came short and hard, as though she was running flat-out, and the moon made her eyes gleam, wide and filled with longing—and it wasn’t in him to resist her.

He didn’t try.

“Kiss me,” he said, a silken order against the night. “If you are so daring.”

He could feel her tremble against him, and he liked it. She tilted her head back, and he liked the fire in her golden gaze, and the hunger that very nearly matched his. He wanted to taste her, suddenly, as if he’d never wanted anything else.

As if he wasn’t as in control as he wanted to believe he was.

Cleo shifted up onto her toes, bracing herself against his chest, and he liked that too much to worry about control. She was feminine, elegant and sweet in the dresses she wore for him, her hair a tempting fall all around her simply because he liked it. She smelled like jasmine, sweet and soft and his. His.

First he would taste her. Then he’d control this—her—the way he knew he should have done all along.

Cleo shifted closer. He held her there, waiting, drawing it out, until he didn’t know which one of them was more needy. Just one taste, he told himself.

He let her lean into him, against him, pressing into his chest. And that dark, stalking thing inside him roared, predatory and hungry—

And then Cleo went up on her toes, put her sweet mouth to his, and everything simply exploded.


CHAPTER THREE (#u654f73a1-c8be-560a-aa14-b52429e26797)

DESIRE ROCKETED THROUGH Khaled like a searing comet, sudden and fierce and stunning. It was an ambush. It burned him alive, nearly taking him out at the knees, nearly dropping him to the stones below.

He’d never felt anything like this. It was a bone-deep, all-encompassing madness. It changed everything. It made his heart slam against his chest, made his blood a sweet, unbearable fire in his veins, made him hard and desperate, greedy for more.

More of her lips, her scent, her softness. The wonder of her slender body pressed against him like a live wire. More of that humming awareness that tipped over into pounding, dizzying need. More of the shocked, excited noises she made in her throat, the lushness of her lips, the slick drag of her mouth over his.

Her kiss was a revelation and a curse, and he stopped thinking, stopped plotting. He forgot who he was, why he was doing this. He stopped playing his games, stopped teasing her, stopped worrying about strategy.

He felt primitive. Alive. Desperate. One hand rose to tangle in her hair, holding her head where he wanted it. The other slid to her hip and pulled her close, tighter.

And then he simply took her.

He feasted on her mouth, losing himself in the slide of her tongue against his, the perfection of that mouth of hers he hadn’t understood was so tempting, so blatantly erotic. She tasted like honey and made him long to taste her everywhere.

Made him long to simply lift her against him, part her delicate thighs and take her where they stood. The need in his blood was like a song, a velvet command.

The kiss was carnal and hot. Khaled felt like a glutton and a god, and she was his. His. Yielding to him and testing him, tasting him and arousing him in turn, and he couldn’t seem to get enough.

Never enough, something hissed inside him, dazed and deliriously intrigued. Never enough of this. Of her.

This was no lazy dance toward sensuality, as he’d intended. This was a great deal more than a taste. This was fire. Need. A dark, disastrous blaze of hunger that Khaled couldn’t control, and while he lost himself in the exquisite feel of her, the addictive taste, he didn’t care the way he knew he should.

The way some part of him imagined he would—but he shoved that aside.

He didn’t know when they moved, when he did, but he took her with him as he sat on one of the stone benches. He pulled her across his lap, her knees on either side of him, the soft heat of her pressed tight against the hardest part of him.

Cleo sighed, and the yearning in the sound only made him hungrier. Moonlight bathed her in silver, making shadows of her lovely eyes, but not hiding that heat. That need. The starkness of the shocking desire that he could no more deny in either of them than he could rise up and fly away.

He tugged her mouth back to his and it was the same hot punch. The same wildfire, pulling tight inside him, demanding he take her. Right now. Right here. Again and again, until the spell she cast was broken. Or until she cried out his name and her need in that voice of hers gone husky with passion. Or until this madness killed them both, and he didn’t think he’d mind the dying.

He used his mouth to follow the line of her jaw, then tasted the delicate skin she bared when she tipped her head back, allowing him access. He tasted her collarbone, then moved lower, until he reached the bodice of her dress.

Khaled didn’t hesitate. He’d always preferred larger breasts on his women and yet when he peeled the fabric away, the sight of hers, small and plump at once, delicate curves and taut nipples, almost undid him.

“Khaled,” she whispered, a broken sound, honeyed and rough, like gas thrown on open flame.

He slid his hand over her left breast, abrading the tight peak with his palm, watching her expressive face as her eyes drifted shut and she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth.

She was a wonder. She was his. He increased the pressure and her hips bucked against him, a rocking, rolling ecstasy that shot fire into every part of him and made her breath catch audibly. A rosy sort of flush stole over her, almost as if...

He couldn’t resist.

Khaled bent his head to her other breast and licked over her nipple, then pulled the proud crest into his mouth. Hard.

And Cleo broke apart in his arms, shuddering and sighing, flushed red and wild, and he understood that he was in deep trouble with this woman, after all.

* * *

When Cleo came back to herself, she felt weak and boneless—and ashamed, slumped as she was in Khaled’s arms. He’d shifted her, holding her in his arms rather than astride him, and she could sense the difference and the distance in him at once.

What must he think of her? That she was a wanton slut, to start. That she was so oversexed she came apart at a lick against the completely wrong part of her body. She shuddered, appalled at herself—and mourning this glorious dream he’d allowed her to live over the past two weeks that she’d no doubt tarnished with her horrendous lack of restraint.

And then, as swiftly, she was furious. Almost blindingly so.

“I’m sorry,” she bit out into the night, because she didn’t dare look at his face. “Is there a ‘no touching the sultan’ rule I didn’t know about? You should have said so.”

“Do not ever apologize for your responsiveness,” he said, his voice cool but dry, too, as if he was amused by her outburst. “Or for falling apart in my arms. These are gifts.”

Cleo struggled to sit up and he let her, but embarrassment pumped through her as she pulled away from him, making her feel obvious and strange. She could still feel the magic of his touch spinning around inside her, making her skin too tight and her head fuzzy, but she concentrated on straightening her dress as if, once she was appropriately covered, it would erase the whole thing. Make everything right and wonderful again.

Make her something other than humiliated.

But her body had other ideas. Her nipples were like white-hot lights, blasting her with leftover sensation, and between her legs, she ached. She ached.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen,” she said. Stiff and cold.

He shifted on the stone bench beside her and the moon high above them made him gleam like poured metal, as though he was a statue of himself. All of that power, that corded strength, and she’d finally felt it beneath her hands. Her palms itched with the memory, the imprint. She thought of his demanding mouth on hers and something within her melted and then ran hot.

“How many lovers have you had?” he asked, and she jolted as if he’d doused her with ice water.

“What?” But she thought only of Brian, who she’d rather die than claim as a lover. Especially now.

“How many?”

“I don’t want to answer that,” she said, slowly but distinctly. “Or think it’s any of your business. Why would you ask?”

Khaled only looked at her, for such a long time that she began to feel too aware of the cool air against her still-flushed skin again. So long that she crossed her arms over her chest and told herself the cold she felt came from the temperature of the night air, not from him.

And then, as her temper ebbed, she found herself answering him anyway.

“There’s no answer I can give to that question that will make this moment anything but awkward. More awkward, I mean,” she said, and his lips twitched, the way they did when she made him laugh.

“Luckily, awkwardness has yet to claim a single death, as far as I know.”

“How many lovers have you had?” she asked instead of answering him.

“I’ve had my share,” he replied, that strange intensity in his cool gaze. “But I’m afraid I cannot accept that answer from you, Cleo.”

“That sounds suspiciously like a nasty double standard,” she said, striving for a light tone. And failing.

He shrugged in that way of his that reminded her how powerful he was. “It is. But I have never claimed to be particularly liberated and I still wish to know.”

He said it as if knowing such personal details about her life were his right. And there was something about that air of authority, that tone of command in his cool voice, that made her long to do as he asked. Despite the huge part of her that didn’t want to do it.

“One,” Cleo said, grudgingly. “We met in college. We were supposed to get married.” She scowled at him. “We didn’t.”

“When?”

Cleo told herself she only imagined that tightness in his voice, that stillness in the way he sat there, watching her. Waiting for her answer.

She didn’t want to say another word. But it seemed that her mouth obeyed him all on its own.

“Six months ago.”

His dark eyes were hooded then, impossible to read. He reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear, and she had to fight off the urge to lean into his touch.

“Ah,” he said. “You wanted more than him.”

She was furious again, and she wasn’t sure why. “That, and I walked in on him with his girlfriend two weeks before our wedding.”

His brows rose in surprise and she was so furious it was dizzying. And ashamed. And something about that particular toxic combination made her pulse clatter through her, jittery and wild.

“In case you’re wondering why, don’t.” She wanted to get this over with, she realized suddenly. Make him pity her so she could stop pretending there was any other end to this magical interlude in her life. “He was quite clear that I’m frigid.”

Khaled’s expression shifted into something sad and dangerous at once, and he reached over and traced his fingertips down her cheek, slowly. She didn’t know why she imagined it was some kind of apology. Then he took her chin in his hand, holding her immobile before him.

“You are many things,” he said softly. Starkly. “But you are not, as we have demonstrated, even remotely frigid.”

She should pull away, she knew. She should do something—but the air between them was so taut, so tense, and she couldn’t read him. His gaze was too dark, his mouth too cruel, and she was dressed in clothes he’d given her, her body still trembling and tingling from his mouth, and the truth was that she didn’t want to pull away from him.

Cleo wanted him. And yet Brian loomed between them, soft and deceitful and ruinous.

“They told me to marry him anyway,” she told Khaled fiercely, as if it were a weapon. “That I was naive and silly to expect fidelity. That such romantic notions were unrealistic. The stuff of fantasy.”

“Don’t worry.” It occurred to her that his tone of voice was lethal, but he was still holding her chin and the heat of that felt like a drug, making her feel heavy and weightless at once. Trapped with no desire whatsoever to set herself free. “I prize that particular fantasy above all others. And I am the ruler here. If I deem something realistic, that’s what it is.”

Her mind was a riot of shoulds, and she heeded none of them. There was something harsh in his face, his gaze, something too close to broken, when he’d said similar things in the past with a laugh.

“But do you mean your fidelity or mine?” she whispered. “They’re not the same thing and some men, I’ve discovered, apply their double standards there more than anywhere else.”

Khaled muttered something that sounded like a curse but which she imagined was a little prayer instead. He let her go.

She wished he was touching her again immediately. She was a lunatic. But she could feel the imprint of his fingers on her chin as if he’d stamped her with his heat. And she throbbed everywhere else.

“You will be the death of me, little mouse,” he told her, so low and quiet she thought for a minute she’d heard him wrong.

“I’m not a mouse.” Something kicked in her. “The next time someone cheats on me, I’m drawing blood. Just so you know.”

For a moment he looked almost proud, as if he approved of her bloodthirstiness, but then another shadow claimed his face, and she couldn’t read him. Khaled stood then, and she felt as though the world was spinning all around him. He looked troubled, tortured. Like the stranger her heart no longer considered him.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice too rough. Too many emotions racking her within.

“Nothing at all,” he said, and she knew, somehow, that he lied. “Come.”

He offered her his arm and she rose to take it, incapable of defying him in that moment though there was that part of her that thought she should. That wanted her to fight, damn it—though she didn’t know what for. He led her back into the palace, then down the polished, gleaming halls toward her suite, and it took him a long time to look at her again.

Cleo felt the lack of his attention like a kind of grief. Harsh and heavy.

“This is ridiculous,” she said when they reached her door, her voice a prickle. A tight scratch against the heaviness between them. “You shouldn’t have asked the question if you didn’t want to hear the answer.”

“The only answer I really needed was the way you came under my tongue,” he said, but there was a distance in the way he said it. Something granite and unyielding beneath those words. “The rest was merely curiosity.”

Cleo faced him then, her back to her door, and tried to read his dark, fierce face.

“Then you really shouldn’t look so sad, should you?”

He laughed then, abruptly, and it wasn’t the laughter she’d heard from him at other times that had warmed her deep within. This was hollow. Dark. This hurt both of them, she thought, and she didn’t know why.

“Sadness is for men with choices,” he told her, very distinctly, as if it was critical she understand this. Him. “I have only duty. It governs everything I do. It always has and it always will.” His voice lowered. Roughened. “Remember that, Cleo. If nothing else.”

“That sounds remarkably dire.” And then, not knowing how she managed it, when he looked so grim and she simply hurt, she grinned at him. “It was only a kiss, Khaled. I think we’ll survive.”

He let out another one of those laughs that cut at her, even deeper this time.

“You don’t know your own doom when it stares you in the face.” He shook his head, and she didn’t understand why he sounded so agonized. “How can I protect you when you won’t protect yourself?”

Cleo didn’t know what madness moved in her then, but she reached over and slid her hand against his lean jaw, as though that might comfort him. As though she could soothe him.

As though he was hers.

“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered, though she didn’t even know what was wrong. “I promise.”

Khaled froze, his gray eyes like a thunder that rolled in her, too, a warning she knew she should heed, but that same electricity leaped between them again, searing her straight through as though it was brand-new.

He muttered something beneath his breath, and then he leaned in close and took her mouth with all the passion and ruthless command he’d shown in the courtyard, and she was lost.





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