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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.
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